The Case of the Missing Mothers, Or When Does a Beginning Begin?
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The Case of the Missing Mothers, or When Does a Beginning Begin? One of my most cherished purposes, if I am lucky enough to encounter Lev Tolstoy in the next world (whichever region thereof), is to ask him to fi ll in what has always seemed to me a disturbing lacuna in War and Peace: the two missing mothers. “Dear Lev Nikolaevich,” I shall say, “will you please tell me something about Princess Bolkonskaya, the mother of Prince Andrei and Princess Marya? What was she like, when did she die, and what had been her relations with her diffi cult and domineering husband?” My second question, even more fascinating, will evoke the mother of Pierre Bezukhov. Was she, as the name Pierre perhaps hints, a Frenchwoman, perhaps a demi-mondaine, a dancer or chanteuse, kept as mistress by the immensely wealthy grandee and jouisseur, Count Kirill Bezukhov? Or, alternatively, was she a serf girl on one of the Count’s numerous estates, a pretty lass who briefl y caught the master’s eye and received a summons to the seigneurial bed? And what was her later fate? If she was a Russian peasant, did she and Pierre live together, like Asya and her mother in Turgenev’s eponymous story,1 until by a sudden whim of his father the boy was catapulted upward to be educated as a gentleman? Or had Pierre and his French mother, like Alexander Herzen and his German one, always been an established, if irregular, part of the Count’s household? 1 A story, incidentally, which Tolstoy dismissed as “rubbish” (дрянь) [diary entry of 19 January 1858; SS 19:228] and “the weakest thing he [Turgenev] ever wrote” [Tol stoy to Nekrasov, 21 January 1858; SS 17:189. 22 TOLSTOY THE ARTIST Tolstoy’s answers to these questions, if any are vouchsafed me at all, are likely to be like Pontius Pilate’s: “What I have written I have written.” (This phrase always sounds better to me in Church Slavic, and that is probably the way Tolstoy will say it: “Еже писахъ, писахъ.”) “You are asking me,” he will say, “to write a novel different from the one I wrote, and the time for that has passed.” Here below, alas, these questions are clearly unanswerable, and it may be improper even to ask them; they lead only to idle speculations of the type indulged in above, efforts to out- Tolstoy Tolstoy by extending the limits of his novel. I will therefore try to rephrase the problem so as to render it critically more acceptable. Why, then, did Tolstoy deliberately refrain from introducing these two mothers as characters, if only to a ghostly, posthumous existence in the memories of their living relatives? For the (almost) total absence of these two ladies does seem to me to constitute a genuine puzzle, though perhaps not an insoluble one. On the one hand, it would seem that they would have provided some very apt narrative or illustrative material. There could, for example, have been an account of how Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky, though doubtless only with the benevolent intention of reshaping his wife to fi t his image of an enlightened gentlewoman, had harassed and humiliated the poor lady, as we see him doing later with his beloved daughter Marya, perhaps driving her into an early grave. And the story of Pierre’s mother would appear to be even more promising novelistic material — a piquant romance, divert ing in itself, that would also enhance our understanding of that old roué, Pierre’s father, and explain why to be his sole heir he singled out this son from among what must have been his many bastard children. (Incidentally, it has always seemed to me a bit implausible that none of Pierre’s hypothetical half-brothers or half-sisters ever comes forward to claim a share of the inheritance, even if only as a suppliant. They missed an excellent opportu- nity: the guilt-ridden Pierre would surely have come across with a handsome settlement!) More important, his mother’s story would show us some of the formative infl uences on Pierre, how he became what he was. “Dear Lev Nikolaevich, how could you pass up such golden opportunities to enhance your characterizations and add narrative spice?” Even from the point of view of “realism,” that school of which this novel is usually held up as a shining exemplar: is it “realistic” that not one of three major characters, Prince Andrei, Princess Marya, and Pierre, whose inner consciousness we visit many times, ever in the course of this vast novel has a single thought about his or her mother? During the night before the battle of Austerlitz, for example, the thought of his possible death the next day impels Prince Andrei to summon up “a whole series of THE CASE OF THE MISSING MOTHERS 23 memories, the most distant and most cherished . He remembered his last farewell with his father and his wife; he recalled the time of his fi rst love for her; he recalled her pregnancy, and he felt sorry both for her and for himself” (One.III.12). Later, lying wounded on the battlefi eld, he also thinks of his sister and of his yet unborn son (he seems to have advance notice that the child will be a son). Is it plausible that he found no place anywhere in this litany of loved ones for his dead mother? And would not Princess Marya, sometime during all the anguish of her guilt-ridden strife with her father, have wished her mother back to life, if only to serve as a buffer and intercessor? And even at the hectic time of her father’s death, when the French army was almost at the gates of their estate, would not Princess Marya have had some thought of her mother, as his body was (we assume) laid to rest near hers? Finally, would not Pierre, especially during the enforced idleness of his captivity, when his thoughts were ranging far and wide, at least once have conjured up some tender image of his mother, even if only a fantasy rather than a memory? In fact, the novel provides us with only the skimpiest of references to the missing mothers. The night before the birth of little Nikolai Bolkonsky, the imminent event evokes a conversation about births between Princess Marya and her old nurse, Savishna, in the course of which Savishna relates “for the hundredth time” the familiar tale of the Princess’s own birth, in Kishinev, delivered by a Moldavian peasant midwife (Two.I.8). One may surmise from this tale that the late Princess had accompanied her husband, then a general, on a military campaign against Turkey, presumably during the war of 1787–1792. Furthermore, one can conclude that the Princess did not die in bearing this daughter, since in the context the point of Savishna’s narrative is that a peasant midwife is as good as the fancy doctor who has been brought from Moscow to attend the little Princess Lise, a point of course confi rmed (doctors in Tolstoy are always useless if not harmful) by Lise’s death. Late in the novel we meet in Vo- ronezh Princess Marya’s maternal aunt Malvintseva, who benevolently, if a bit haughtily, chaperones Marya’s budding romance with Nikolai Ros- tov; yet these renewed contacts never stimulate either aunt or niece to any reminiscences about Princess Marya’s late mother. As for Pierre, the only evocation of his mother is found, as expected, during his captivity. Platon Karataev has inquired about Pierre’s relatives, and Pierre evidently answers that his mother is dead, for Platon especially commiserates with him for his lack of this most comforting of all relationships (Four.I.12). A hint of an explanation for the absence at least of Princess Bol- konskaya lies in the well-known à clef dimension of War and Peace: War and Peace as a family chronicle. We know that the prototype of Prince 24 TOLSTOY THE ARTIST Nikolai Bolkonsky was Tolstoy’s maternal grandfather, Prince Nikolai Volkonsky (1753–1821). Prince Volkonsky had no son to serve as Prince Andrei’s prototype, but he did have a genuine, fl esh-and-blood daughter, Princess Marya Volkonskaya, later Countess Tolstaya (1790–1830), the real “missing mother” whom Tolstoy himself, born in 1828, could not remember. Tolstoy’s mother in turn had not sprung like Athene from her father’s enlightened skull; she too had a “missing mother” whom she likewise could not remember, Princess Ekaterina Dmitrievna Volkon skaya, née Princess Trubetskaya (1749–1792).2 This Princess Volkonskaya, Tolstoy’s maternal grandmother, seems to have left almost as little trace in history (other than the exceptional, Grade A genes she perhaps bequeathed to her illustrious grandson) as on the pages of War and Peace, to which she donated only her maiden name, now bestowed — again with the change only of an initial letter — on another family in the novel, and a far from admirable one at that. Thus the fact that there had been two generations of “missing mothers” in his own family may have suggested to Tolstoy the idea of repeating the same pattern in this novel with so many family echoes. Nevertheless, Tolstoy’s limited knowledge of his grandmother need not have hindered him from developing her as a character had he chosen to do so; after all, Princess Marya herself is a creative resurrection of the unremembered “missing mother” about whom Tolstoy was still having tender fantasies even in his old age.3 The drafts to the novel do provide a little more information about the lost mothers.