In 1859 Tolstoy started a school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana, the old Volkonsky estate that had passed down to him on his mother's side. The estate had a special meaning for Tolstoy. He had been born in the manor house - on a dark green leather sofa which he kept throughout his life in the study where he wrote his great novels. He spent his childhood on the estate, until the age of nine, when he moved to Moscow with his father. More than an estate, Yasnaya Polyana was his ancestral nest, the place where his childhood memories were kept, and the little patch of Russia where he felt he most belonged. 'I wouldn't sell the house for anything,' Tolstoy told his brother in 1852. 'It's the last thing I'd be prepared to part with.'171 Yasnaya Polyana had been purchased by Tolstoy's great-grandmother, Maria Volkonsky, in 1763. His grandfather, Nikolai Volkonsky, had developed it as a cultural space, building the splendid manor house, with its large collection of European books, the landscaped park and lakes, the spinning factory, and the famous white stone entrance gates that served as a post station on the road from Tula to Moscow. As a boy, Tolstoy idolized his grandfather. He fantasized that he was just like him.172 This ancestor cult, which was at the emotional core of Tolstoy's conservatism, was expressed in Eugene, the hero of his story 'The Devil' (1889):
It is generally supposed that Conservatives are old people, and that those in favour of change are the young. That is not quite correct. Usually Conservatives are young people: those who want to live but who do not think about how to live, and have not time to think, and therefore take as a model for themselves a way of life that they have seen. Thus it was with Eugene. Having settled in the village, his aim and ideal was to restore the form of life that had existed, not in his father's time… but in his grandfather's.173
Nikolai Volkonsky was brought back to life as Andrei's father Nikolai Bolkonsky in
writer researched into the Decembrists, the more he realized that their intellectual roots lay in the war of 1812. In the novel's early form
Falsehood. This is the sickness of the Russian state. Falsehood and its sisters, hypocrisy and cynicism. Russia could not exist without them. Yet surely the point is not just to exist but to exist with dignity. And if we want to be honest with ourselves, then we must recognize that if Russia cannot exist otherwise than she existed in the past, then she does not deserve to exist.174
To live in truth, or, more importantly, to live in truth in Russia - these were the questions of Tolstoy's life and work, and the main concerns of
Volkonsky's release from exile was one of the first acts of the new Tsar. Of the 121 Decembrists who had been sent into exile in 1826, only nineteen lived to return to Russia in 1856. Sergei himself was a broken man, and his health never really recovered from the hardships of Siberia. Forbidden to settle in the two main cities, he was none the less a frequent guest in the Moscow houses of the Slavophiles, who saw his gentle nature, his patient suffering, his simple 'peasant' lifestyle and his closeness to the land as quintessential 'Russian' qualities.175 Moscow's students idolized Volkonsky. With his long white beard and hair, his sad, expressive face, 'pale and tender like the moon', he was regarded as a 'sort of Christ who had emerged from the Russian wilderness'.176 A symbol of the democratic cause that had been interrupted by the oppressive regime of Nicholas I, Volkonsky was a living connection between the Decembrists and the Populists, who emerged as the people's champions in the 1860s and 1870s. Volkonsky himself remained true to the ideals of 1812. He continued to reject the values of the bureaucratic state and the aristocracy and, in the spirit of the Decembrists, he continued to uphold the civic obligation to live an honest life in the service of the people, who embodied the nation. 'You
