When casting his mind back to his years in Kazan, Tolstoy readily acknowledged that he and his siblings were far too ‘obtuse’ to appreciate the unusual moral purity of their brother as adolescents. Like their fashionable friends in Kazan, they instead ‘continually subjected him to ridicule’, as Tolstoy recounts in Confession, even nicknaming him Noah.10 Dmitry’s remarkable altruism was perhaps best observed in his relationship with Lyubov Sergeyevna, the illegitimate child taken in at some point by the Tolstoy family out of pity. In Kazan, Lyubov Sergeyevna was taken in by Aunt Polina, and Tolstoy’s memories of her date from this time. They were not very affectionate memories. Lyubov Sergeyevna was a ‘strange and pathetic creature’, he later recorded, who suffered from some ailment which made her face puff up as if stung by bees. During the summer months she was insensitive to the numerous flies that settled on her face, which made her even more unpleasant to look at. In Tolstoy’s recollection she had only a few strands of black hair and no eyebrows, and found it physically difficult to speak, probably as a result of a tumour. He also recalled that she also always smelled bad, and lived in a suffocating and equally malodorous room whose windows were never opened. When Tolstoy became aware of Lyubov Sergeyevna she was ‘not only pitiful but repellent’, and most of the family did little to conceal their feelings of revulsion. Dmitry, however, went out of his way to listen and talk to her, and become her friend, not giving the slightest sign that he regarded what he was doing as philanthropy. Impervious to his family’s opinion of him, he just did what he thought right. Nor was his selfless behaviour a fad. He remained close to Lyubov Sergeyevna until her death in August 1844, when he completed his first year at university.11
Like their father, Dmitry was artistically gifted. When playing games many years earlier, Nikolay had promised his younger brothers that their wishes would be fulfilled if they carried out all the conditions he imposed on them. It was characteristic that Sergey declared his desire to mould horses and chickens out of wax, while Dmitry wanted to draw big pictures like an artist: the Tolstoy museum in Moscow stores in its archive many pencil drawings he executed of rural landscapes which are impressive for a ten-year-old.12 (Lev, meanwhile, could think of nothing he wanted back then except the ability to draw small pictures.)
There are no biographical events at all listed for 1842 and 1843 in the official chronicle of Tolstoy’s life and works. Careful sleuthing, however, has established that after Tolstoy turned fourteen in August 1842 his brothers Nikolay and Sergey took him for the first time to a brothel. Many, many years later, his wife castigated him for writing a seduction scene in his last novel Resurrection, believing that as an old man (he was then seventy) he ought to be ashamed of writing such ‘filth’. This unpleasant altercation induced Tolstoy to confess to a friend that after committing the ‘act’ for the first time that fateful day in Kazan, he had stood by the woman’s bed and wept. And he was deeply shaken when an acquaintance later told him that he had once been a novice at the Monastery of the Cyzicus Martyrs, located on the outskirts of Kazan. Tolstoy responded quietly that it had been in that part of town that he had had his ‘first fall’.13 Perhaps his feeling of guilt was heightened by his awareness that his grandfather was buried in the monastery’s cemetery along with other dignitaries (the only grave from that period that has survived to the present day).
