This chapter traces the history of the Tolstoy family, dating Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s ancestry back to the fourteenth century. It begins with a brief explanation of the Tolstoy family’s complicated genealogy, distinguishing between the titled branch and the untitled Tver and Kutuzov branches. Next there is a brief overview of the Tolstoy family’s most famous scions, ranging from prominent statesmen to flamboyant individuals whose colorful lives consolidated the family reputation for eccentricity. There is also a brief discussion of the distinguished and troubled history of the Volkonsky family, Tolstoy’s maternal ancestors. The chapter then focuses on Tolstoy’s immediate family – his parents, brothers, sister, aunts and, of course, his wife Sofia Andreevna and their children. There is commentary on what they meant to him, both personally and creatively, and on how he drew on them, as well as his more distant forebears, to breathe flesh and blood into the iconic characters of his two great novels.

The estate at Yasnaya Polyana was both a blessing and a curse to Tolstoy and his wife Sofia. It became the beloved familial, historical stage where the Tolstoys proudly lived and raised their ten children, and Tolstoy wrote his work. It had belonged to his mother, whose great-grandfather Major General Prince Sergei Volkonsky had purchased it in 1763. Tolstoy inherited the property of 330 serfs in 1847, and in 1860, inherited another 300 serfs when his eldest brother died. He had sold half his land and the main house to pay gambling debts by the time he married in 1862. In the next two decades, he managed to re-establish the Tolstoy fortune, investing money earned from the novels in land nearby and in Samara province. By 1880, Tolstoy believed that property ownership was evil. His self-censure reflected his ambitions to acquire property. He had quintupled the value of his holdings to 500,000 rubles by 1891, when the land was divided among his wife and children. After his death, they gave much of Yasnaya Polyana to the peasants, as Tolstoy requested, using the sale of his works to buy out their shares. Tolstoy’s family, literature, and property were everywhere intertwined.