i love fights
Leo Tolstoy, the most famous representative of the count branch of the Tolstoy family, was Fedor Ivanovich’s cousin. According to the memories of his contemporaries, already in childhood he was distinguished by good health, physical strength, endurance, confidence and tough character.
“Tolstoy was an eccentric person. That is, he had a special character that emerged from ordinary secular forms, and he loved only extremes in everything he loved. He made everything the others did ten times stronger. Then youth was in fashion, and gr. Tolstoy drove him to despair,
– recalled the writer Faddey Bulgarin.
After graduating from the Navy in December 1797, Tolstoy, with the help of influential relatives, entered the elite Preobrazhensky Regiment with the rank of lieutenant. In March 1799, for some kind of service, he was demobilized into the garrison regiment of the Peter and Paul Fortress and soon returned to the guard. On September 27 of the same year, Tolstoy was promoted to lieutenant.
According to an 1898 publication in the journal Russkiy Arkhiv, referring to the stories of a certain GV Grudev, in 1803 Colonel Yegor Drizen scolded Tolstoy for being late and spat in the commander’s face for this. After this, Tolstoy allegedly seriously injured Drizen in a duel.
“The American Count Tolstoy did not care about Colonel Drizen. There was a duel, and Tolstoy was demoted. Then he went on a world tour under the command of Kruzenshtern, ”says the magazine.
In the book “The Duel”. Weapons, Masters, Facts” in the section on the American Alexander Kulinsky stated that it is reliably known about the two killed rivals of the American Tolstoy – Chief of Staff Brunov and Lieutenant Alexander Naryshkin. Both duels took place during the Swedish War. At the same time, Maria Kamenskaya, Tolstoy’s cousin, wrote that 11 people were killed by her uncle:
“He counted eleven people killed by him in duels. He carefully wrote down the names of those killed in his synod. He had 12 children, all of whom died in infancy, except for two daughters. As the children were dying, he crossed out a name from the people he had killed from his synod and put the word “kvit” next to it. When his eleventh child, a cute, intelligent girl, died, he crossed out the last name of the boy he had killed and said, “Well, thank God, my curly-haired gypsy baby will be alive at least.”
went on a world tour
To avoid punishment for injuring Drizen, Tolstoy decided to sail around the world aboard the ship Nadezhda, whose exemplary cousin, the artist Fyodor Petrovich Tolstoy, was replaced by captain-lieutenant Ivan Krusenstern. Two sailing ships “Nadezhda” and “Nova” under the command of Ivan Kruzenshtern were equipped on the first world tour of Russian ships.
During a stopover on one of the Pacific islands, Tolstoy bought a pet orangutan, which became a favorite of the crew. When Fedor Ivanovich entered Kruzenshtern’s cabin and showed his pet how to ink the paper. When Tolstoy left the orangutan alone, he painted over Krusenstern’s precious diaries. The captain thought the inkwell was overturned by the storm, and Tolstoy himself told everyone his version of the story.
This was far from the count’s only trick on the ship – his niece Kamenskaya said that her uncle was constantly making “unallowed jokes” and arguing with all the officers and sailors.
“The old ship’s priest was weak in wine. Fyodor Ivanovich intoxicated him until the robes folded, and when the priest lay on the deck like a dead man, he sealed his beard to the ground with a seal wax, with a government seal stolen from Kruzenshtern. I sealed it and I sat on it; and the priest woke up when he wanted to stand up, Fyodor Ivanovich shouted: “Look down, don’t you dare! You see, a state seal! I had to cut my beard up to my chin, ”Kamenskaya recalled.
In the end, Kruzenshtern could not stand Tolstoy’s tricks and ordered him to be deported to Kamchatka. There is also a version that the count actually continued his independent journey from the American islands.
He became an authority among the Aleutians
After disembarking from Nadezhda, Tolstoy reached the definitively unknown island (either one of the Aleutian Islands or the island of Sitka). The count met the natives there and gained honor and respect among them. This attitude may be due to Tolstoy’s self-confidence, as well as the tattoos he made while stopping on other islands (among the peoples of the Pacific, drawings on the body were considered a sign of noble origin). According to the count himself, the native islanders offered him to be their leader.
Shortly thereafter, in Alaska, the count boarded a Russian merchant ship and sailed by land to St. He went to Petropavlovsk, where he reached St. He was named American after this trip.
participated in wars
After Tolstoy returned to St. Petersburg, he was arrested, sent to a police station and banned from entering the capital. He served in the Neishlot castle in Vyborg province until 1808 and soon became friends with Prince Mikhail Dolgorukov. During the Russo-Swedish War of 1808-1809, he became the adjutant of count Dolgorukov. In the battle of Idensalmi, the prince was killed, but Tolstoy miraculously survived.
When Tolstoy led a reconnaissance detachment as part of an operation on the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, the corps led by Mikhail Barclay de Tolly was able to enter the city of Umeå by making a lossless ice crossing through the Kvarken Strait. . Despite military successes, Tolstoy was once again discredited by his fierce temper. He quarreled with a colleague, injured him in a duel, and went into exile in Kaluga.
In 1812, Tolstoy voluntarily went to the defense of Moscow and took part in the Battle of Borodino, where he was seriously injured in the leg. The command noted the courage of the count, and at the end of the Patriotic War he returned to his ranks, became a colonel and served in St. George IV degree.
favorite gambling
Tolstoy’s third passion after travel and fights was card games. He had a reputation as a talented and always dishonest player. The Count did not hide the fact that he was sometimes cunning, explaining it this way: “Only fools play for luck, and mistakes of luck must be corrected.” According to Bulgarin, Tolstoy’s favorite games were quintich, galbe-zvelve and rollercoaster games where you can buy cards.
“After playing with one person for a while, Tolstoy guessed his character and his game, knew what suits or cards he had bought, and he himself was a mystery to everyone here, he had his physiognomy whenever he wanted,” Bulgarin recalls. “He crushed his gambling partners with games like this.”
The numbers won huge sums in the games and easily separated from them. He once even considered taking his own life on the verge of bankruptcy. He was saved by his beloved and future wife, dancer Avdotya Maksimovna Tugaeva. With his savings and expensive gifts, he helped Tolstoy pay off his debts.
Friends with authors
Settling in Moscow, Tolstoy became friends with Prince Peter Vyazemsky, Alexander Pushkin, Vasily Zhukovsky, Konstantin Batyushkov and other representatives of the literary circle. The Count was especially friendly with Vyazemsky, who spoke warmly about himself in a letter to Turgenev:
“Here I see Tolstoy the most as an interesting and inquisitive person, and I admire him in many ways.”
Vyazemsky published many anecdotes about Tolstoy in his Old Notebook, and also dedicated several poems to him.
“An American and a gypsy, / In a world of moral riddles, / Something like fire // Rebel inclinations dope // Or a simmering quarrel of passions // Always running end to end, Heaven to hell, hell to heaven ,” – Vyazemsky calls a friend in one of his poems defined.
For many characters in famous works, Tolstoy served as a prototype. Among them are Lensky’s second Zaretsky in Pushkin’s novel “Eugene Onegin”, Count Turbin, the hussar, described as “gambler, duelist, temptress” in Leo Tolstoy’s “Two Horsemen”, Dolokhov in “War and Peace” and there are others. In the comedy Woe from Wit, Griboyedov talks about the truth about Tolstoy in Repetilov’s monologue:
“But in Russia we have a head that we don’t have, // You don’t need to name it, you’ll recognize it from the portrait: // Night thief, duelist, // Exiled to Kamchatka, returned as an Aleut, // And his hand is not clean.”
Overall the count was satisfied with the features, but we were asked to clarify that we were talking about cards in the phrase “dirty in the hand”: “Otherwise they’ll think I’ve been bribed.”
engaged Pushkin
Alexei Wolf, a close friend of Pushkin, wrote in a letter to the historian Mikhail Semevsky that in 1826 Tolstoy cheated on the poet in one of his card games. Then, according to the author, the playwright Alexander Shakhovsky, who spread these rumors, wrote offensive words to Pushkin. It is not known exactly what Tolstoy said.
Meanwhile, Pushkin was going into exile in the south and said a friendly farewell to Tolstoy. Later, when the insulting response reached the poet, he dedicated sarcastic maxims to the American, calling him “serf”, “card thief” and “a starry redneck”. After a verbal conflict, Pushkin challenged the criminal to a duel that did not take place.
Gradually, thanks to the efforts of friends (especially Sergei Sobolevsky), the rivals reconciled. The reconciliation turned out to be permanent, and Tolstoy became one of Pushkin’s literary friends. In 1829, the poet instructed Tolstoy to set up Natalya Goncharova for him. It turned out that the matchmaking was not entirely successful, because at that time Goncharova and her mother did not immediately accept Pushkin’s offer (the reason was the girl’s youth).