After becoming tsar in 1825, Nicholas moved the cathedral’s location from the Sparrow Hills, the highest point in Moscow, to a site by the river nearer to the Kremlin. He also exchanged the original neoclassical blueprint for a new Russian-Byzantine design modelled on Justinian’s Cathedral of St Sophia in Constantinople, which was much more in keeping with his tastes, not to mention his vision of the Russian Empire. Nicholas I’s arrival in Moscow to lay the new cornerstone of the cathedral in September 1839 was a national event, and the Tolstoys were there to witness it. As friends of Alexey Milyutin, who headed the Commission for the Construction of the Cathedral, they were able to watch the ceremony from the windows of his house, which looked out right on to the site. They thus had a thrilling bird’s-eye view not only of the Tsar, but of the elite Preobrazhensky Guards in their formal dress uniforms, who had travelled specially from St Petersburg along with Nicholas I to take part in the military parades.24 After a special liturgy in the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin, the Tsar led a procession on foot to the building site, followed by veterans of 1812, church dignitaries, twenty infantry battalions and six cavalry troops, accompanied by constant cannon fire and the ringing of the bells in all of Moscow’s churches. Thus was the great victory over Napoleon celebrated again.25
A quarter of a century later, the construction of the enormous cathedral’s exterior would be complete, and Tolstoy would be hard at work writing the vast novel which would commemorate the events of 1812, his patriotic feelings still intact. But he had no desire to be anywhere near the cathedral when it was finally consecrated amidst great pomp in May 1883, after the completion of its sumptuous interior decoration. Indeed, he was hundreds of miles away drinking fermented mare’s milk (koumiss) on his farm in the steppe, having by this time renounced his Orthodox faith, his fiction and any lingering patriotic feelings. He had, however, been casting his mind back to that visit to Moscow in 1839 at that time, for he was eleven years old when he consciously began to question his faith. On the first page of his
Other memories from this period of Tolstoy’s childhood are few and far between, but the isolated incidents recalled in his memoirs for that reason resonate all the more. It was only after his father’s death, for example, that the young Tolstoy was brought face to face with the corporal punishment that was occasionally practised at Yasnaya Polyana, where the regime was generally far more humane than on other noble estates. One day, as they returned with their tutor from a walk and were walking past the threshing barn, the children encountered Andrey Ilyin, the overweight steward of the estate, followed by the family’s assistant coachman Kuzma, whose mournful expression astonished them. Upon enquiring where they were going, Andrey calmly replied that he was taking Kuzma to the threshing barn to flog him. ‘I cannot describe the terrible feeling these words and the sight of the kind and dejected Kuzma produced in me,’ Tolstoy wrote in his memoirs, pointing out that Kuzma by this time was a married man, and no longer young. When that evening he told Aunt Toinette about it, she reproached the children angrily for not stopping Andrey, although they clearly did not realise they had the power to intervene. Toinette loathed corporal punishment, and she not only would not countenance the Tolstoy children receiving it, but she did her best to prevent it being meted out to the serfs whenever she could.27 Tolstoy would later also recall this incident in an incendiary article he wrote in 1895 entitled ‘Shameful’, in which he railed about peasants having to submit to humiliating corporal punishment for any small misdemeanour.28
