Following the account of fifteen-year-old Ekaterina’s escape, it becomes rather clear that in this archival drama, there are no straightforward victims and absolutely no pure villains. Every single character is a fully-fledged story with a false bottom. And it is perhaps best to begin with the very person to whose house the young girl initially fled, her own aunt, the staff-captain’s wife, Tatyana Ivanovna Zakharyina.

A Genealogical Discovery: The Woman Without a Past

For a very long time, to literary historians and biographers of Leo Tolstoy, this woman remained a figure entirely without a past. She was known exclusively as the “Moscow godmother” of Tatyana Bers, but her maiden name and origins were nowhere to be found. Piecing together her family tree and tying these scattered facts into a neat little bundle proved to be quite a genuine genealogical discovery for me.

It turned out that the venerable metropolitan philanthropist Zakharyina was, in fact, born a Lyalina. She was the blood sister of that very same Second Lieutenant Pyotr Lyalin, who had so dramatically poisoned himself with rat powder. It was this precise fact that firmly linked literary Moscow to the remote estates of the Vladimir province and their rather ruthless judicial skirmishes over guardianship.

In the burial registers of the Donskoy Monastery necropolis, where the Zakharyins are laid to rest, a rather curious detail is noted: Tatyana Ivanovna was the godmother of Tatyana Andreyevna Bers-Kuzminskaya—the blood sister of Sofya Andreyevna, who was the wife of Leo Tolstoy himself.

The story of how this connection came to be reads like a ready-made plot for a novel. The little girl’s father, a Moscow physician named Andrei Yevstafyevich Bers, was treating Zakharyina during a severe illness. Hovering on the very brink between life and death, she said to the good doctor:

A baby girl was indeed born, and Zakharyina, true to her word, miraculously recovered. She baptized the little one, loved her as her very own daughter, and remained by her side for the rest of her life.

The goddaughter grew up to become a writer and memoirist, spent a great deal of time conversing with Tolstoy, and is generally believed to have served as the prototype for Natasha Rostova. In her memoirs, Zakharyina appears as a woman of about fifty, lean, upright, and wonderfully good-natured. The Zakharyin household breathed with hospitable antiquity: young wards fluttered about, the hostess’s beloved lapdogs scurried hither and thither, and an air of absolute order and patriarchal coziness reigned supreme.

Occasionally, however, this patriarchal coziness took on rather peculiar forms. For instance, on the day of her goddaughter’s tenth birthday, Zakharina fell ill; unable to attend in person, she sent a gift. The little girl, naturally, expected to receive a doll—or perhaps a puppy, but instead of a gift for the birthday girl, a maid named Fedora, sent by Zakharina, arrived with a basket of nuts and homemade fruit paste. Young Tatiana Bers was so stunned that, for quite some time, she could not utter a single word. Fedora, for her part, remained with the family for many years, becoming the goddaughter’s assistant and deeply involved in the daily life of her household.

In the affair of Ekaterina Lyalina’s escape, Zakharyina proved herself to be a rather brilliant tactician. It was she who quietly persuaded the servant to orchestrate her niece’s flight by dangling the promise of freedom. It was also she who attempted to snatch 75,000 rubles from the orphans’ inheritance using highly suspicious promissory notes from her late mother. And finally, it was she who kept her runaway niece under lock and key, wringing the necessary testimony out of her for the court.

Was there nothing but base greed behind her actions? That remains an open question. It is entirely possible that Zakharyina genuinely believed she was saving the ancestral property from total ruin. And there was certainly a grain of truth in this: while Praskovya, her rowdy hussar husband Ludwig, and the schemer Yunich were happily squandering the funds, the elder girls were receiving no proper education, and the younger children had been dumped at an inn.

As befitted a woman of her era and social circle, Tatyana Ivanovna was wonderfully domineering and unyielding. She was certain that she knew precisely “how things ought to be,” and she sought to keep absolutely everything under her firm control—from the daily routines of her beloved lapdogs to the inherited fortunes of her nieces.

The Zakharyins lived long and rather full lives. The metric records of the Moscow Central State Archive indicate that Vasily Borisovich passed away from an “exhausting fever,” while Tatyana Ivanovna outlived him by eight years, eventually dying in 1878 of “senile exhaustion of strength.”

And thus, perfectly coexisting within one single person, we find the prototype for classical memoirs and the ruthless architect of family ruin in the documentary saga of the Strahlborns.