Why would Leo Tolstoy often pray to his late mother?
Princess Maria Volkonskaya, the writer's mother, was the daughter of an influential nobleman during the reign of Catherine the Great.
She was highly educated, spoke several languages and was a talented storyteller. After the death of her stern and caustic father, she married the bankrupt Count Nikolai Tolstoy. The marriage proved to be a happy one: the couple had four sons and a daughter.
However, Maria died shortly after the birth of her youngest daughter. Leo was not yet two years old at the time. He had no memories of her and there was not a single portrait of her in the house (according to contemporaries, she was unattractive and self-conscious about it).
As a result, his image of his mother was shaped by stories of relatives and family anecdotes. This lack of concrete details allowed Tolstoy to create, in his imagination, an unattainable ideal, devoid of flaws. His mother became a symbol of absolute, unconditional love. Tolstoy himself explained it this way: "She seemed to me such a lofty, pure, spiritual being that, during the middle years of my life, as I struggled against the temptations that overwhelmed me, I would pray to her soul, asking her to help me – and this prayer always helped me."
It’s believed that his mother served as the inspiration for two of Tolstoy's most important characters: Princess Marya Bolkonskaya from ‘War and Peace’ and Maman (Mama) from the autobiographical novella ‘Childhood’.
