Leo Tolstoy: His Life and Work. Paul Birukoff

Tolstoy's Parents

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      In speaking of his parents, Tolstoy's Reminiscences follow a certain chronological order. First he tells us of the faintly seen features of his mother, supplementing his description by accounts furnished by surviving members of her family; after this he gives his fresher and more exact recollections of his father and of his aunts. We propose to follow his example, endeavoring to change as little as possible the order of his narrative. In giving his account of his father and mother we have omitted only what he says of his grandfather Volkonsky, which we have already quoted in the chapter dealing with the ancestors.

      "My mother I do not at all remember. I was a year and a half old when she died. Owing to some strange chance no portrait whatever of her has been preserved, so that, as a real physical being, I cannot represent her to myself. I am in a sense glad of this, for in my conception of her there is only her spiritual figure, and all that I know about her is beautiful, and I think this is so, not only because all who spoke to me of my mother tried to say only what was good, but because there was actually very much of this good in her.

      "However, not only my mother, but also all those who surrounded my infancy, from my father to the coachman, appear to me as exceptionally good people. Probably my pure loving feeling, like a bright ray, disclosed to me in people their best qualities (such always exist); when all these people seemed to me exceptionally good, I was much nearer truth than when I saw only their defects.

      "My mother was not handsome. She was very well educated for her time. Besides Russian, which, contrary to the national illiterateness then current, she wrote correctly, she knew four other languages, French, German, English, and Italian, and was probably sensitive to art. She played well on the piano, and her friends have told me that she was a great hand at narrating most attractive tales invented at the moment. But the most valuable quality in her was that she was, according to the words of the servants, although hot-tempered, yet self-restrained. `She would get quite red in the face, even cry,' her maid told me, `but would never say a rude word.' Indeed she did not know such words.

      "I have preserved several of her letters to my father and aunts, and her diary concerning the conduct of Nikolenka (my eldest brother), who was six years old when she died, and I think resembled her more than the rest of us. They both possessed a feature very dear to me, which I infer from my mother's letters, but personally witnessed in my brother: their indifference to the opinion of others, and their modesty in their endeavors to conceal those mental, educational, and moral advantages which they had in comparison with others. They were, as it were, ashamed of these advantages.

      "I well knew these qualities in my brother, about whom Turgenev very correctly remarked that he did not possess those faults which are necessary in order to become a great writer.

      "I remember once how a very silly and bad man, an adjutant of the governor, when out shooting with him, ridiculed him in my presence, and how my brother smiled good-humoredly, evidently greatly relishing the position.

      "I remark the same feature in my mother's letters. She evidently stood on a higher spiritual level than my father and his family, with the exception, perhaps, of Tatyana Yergolskaya, with whom I passed half my life, and who was a woman remarkable for her moral qualities.

      "Besides this, they both had yet another feature which I believe contributed to their indifference to the judgment of men--it was that they never condemned any one. This I know most certainly about my brother, with whom I lived half my life. The utmost extreme expression of his negative relation to a man consisted with my brother in good-natured humor and a similar smile. I observe the same in my mother's letters, and have heard of it from those who knew her.

      "In the Lives of the Saints, by Dmitriy Rostovskiy, there is a short narrative which has always exceedingly touched me, of the life of a certain monk who had, to the knowledge of all his brethren, many faults, and, notwithstanding this, appeared to an old monk in a dream among the saints in a place of honor. The astonished old man asked: `How could this monk, so unrestrained in many respects, deserve such a reward?' The answer was: `He never condemned any one.'

      "If such rewards did exist, I think that my brother and my mother would have received them.

      "A third feature which distinguishes my mother among her circle was her truthfulness and the simple tone of her letters. At that time the expression of exaggerated feelings was especially cultivated in letters: `Incomparable, divine, the joy of my life, unutterably precious,' etc., were the most usual epithets between friends, and the more inflated the less sincere.

      "This feature, although not in a strong degree, is noticeable in my father's letters. He writes: `Ma bien douce amie, je ne pense qu'au bonheur d'etre aupres de toi.' Whereas she addresses her letters invariably in the same way, `Mon bon ami,' and in one of her letters she frankly says, `Le temps me parait long sans toi, quoiqu'a dire vrai, nous ne jouissons pas beaucoup de ta societe quand tu es ici,' and she always subscribes herself in the same way: `Ta devouee Marie.'

      "My mother passed her childhood partly in Moscow, partly in the country with a clever and talented, though proud man, my grandfather Volkonsky. I have been told that my mother loved me very much, and called me `Mon petit Benjamin.'

      "I think that her love for her deceased betrothed, precisely because it was terminated by death, was that poetic love which girls feel only once. Her marriage with my father was arranged by her relatives and my father's. She was a rich orphan, no longer young, whereas my father was a merry, brilliant young man with name and connections, but the family fortune was much impaired by my grandfather