Leo Tolstoy: His Life and Work. Paul Birukoff
Tolstoy--indeed my father even refused to accept the heritage. I think that my mother loved my father, but more because he was her husband and especially as he was the father of her children; she was never in love with him. Of real loves she had, as I understand, experienced three or four: there was her love to her deceased betrothed; then a passionate friendship for a Frenchwoman, Mlle. Enissienne, about which I heard from my aunts and which I believe was terminated by a disillusionment. Mlle. Enissienne married a cousin of my mother's Prince Mikhail Volkonsky, the grandfather of the present-day writer of that name.
"This is what my mother writes about her friendship with this lady. She is referring to two girls who were living in her house:
"`I get on very well with both of them. I do some music, I laugh and joke with the one, and I talk sentiment and condemn the frivolous world with the other. I am passionately loved by both and am the confidante of each; I reconcile them when they have quarreled, for there never was friendship more quarrelsome and funny to witness than theirs; it is a series of sulks, tears, reconciliations, and reproaches, and then of transports of affection; in a word, I see as in a mirror the exalted and romantic friendship which had animated and troubled my life during several years. I contemplate them with an indefinable feeling; sometimes I envy them their illusion which I no longer possess, but of which I know the sweetness. Let us ask frankly whether the solid and real happiness of ripe years is worth the charming illusions of youth, when everything is embellished by the all-powerful imagination. And sometimes I smile at their childishness.'
"Her third strong feeling, perhaps the most passionate, was her love for my eldest brother Koko, the diary of whose conduct she kept in Russian--putting down in it his bad conduct--and then read to him. From this diary one can see that while she had a passionate desire to do all that was possible toward giving Koko the best education, she had a very indefinite idea as to what was necessary for this purpose. Thus, for instance, she rebukes him for being too sensitive and being moved to tears at the sight of animals suffering. A man, according to her ideas, should be firm. Another fault which she endeavors to correct in him is that he is absorbed in his thoughts, and instead of `Bon soir,' or `Bon jour,' says to his grandmother, `Je vous remercie.'
"The fourth strong feeling which did perhaps exist as my aunts told me--I earnestly hope that it did exist--was her love for me, which took the place of her love for Koko, who at the time of my birth had already detached himself from his mother and been transferred into male hands. It was a necessity for her to love what was not herself, and one love took the place of another.
"Such was the figure of my mother in my imagination. She appeared to me a creature so elevated, pure, and spiritual that often in the middle period of my life, during my struggle with overwhelming temptations, I prayed to her soul, begging her to aid me, and this prayer always helped me much.
"My mother's life in her father's family was a very good and happy one, as I may conclude from letters and stories.
"My father's household consisted of his mother, an old lady; of her daughter, my aunt Countess Aleksandra Osten-Saken, and her ward Pashenka; of another aunt, as we used to call her, although she was a very distant relative, Tatyana Yergolskaya, who had been educated in my grandfather's house and had passed all her later life in my father's; and the tutor, Feodor Ivanovich Resselier, fairly correctly described by me in Childhood. We were five children--Nikolay, Sergey, Dmitriy, myself, the youngest boy, and our younger sister Mashenka, at whose birth my mother died. My mother's very short married life--I think it lasted not more than nine years--was very full, and adorned by everyone's love to her and hers to every one who lived with her. Judging by the letters, I see that she lived at that time in great solitude. Scarcely any one visited Yasnaya Polyana except our intimate friends the Ogaryovs and some relatives who, if casually travelling along the high-road might look in upon them.
"My mother's life was passed in occupations with the children, in reading novels aloud of an evening to my grandmother, and in serious readings, such as Emile by Rousseau, and discussions about what had been read; in playing the piano, teaching Italian to one of her aunts, walks, and household work. In all families there are periods when illness and death are yet unknown, and the members live peacefully. Such a period, it seems to me, my mother was living through in her husband's family until her death. No one died, no one was seriously ill, my father's disordered affairs were improving. All were healthy, happy, and friendly. My father amused everyone with his stories and jokes. I did not witness that time. At the time with which my remembrances begin, my mother's death had already laid its seal upon the life of our family.
"All this I have described from what I have heard and from letters. Now I shall begin about what I have my self experienced and remember. I shall not speak about the vague, indistinct recollections of infancy, in which one cannot yet distinguish reality from dream-land. I will commence with what I clearly remember, with the circumstances and the persons that surrounded me from my first years. The first place among them is occupied, of course, by my father, if not owing to his influence upon me, yet from my feeling toward him.
"My father from his early years had remained his parents' only son. His younger brother, Ilenka, was injured, became a cripple, and died in childhood. In the year 1812, my father was seventeen years old, and, notwithstanding the horror and fear and pleading of his parents, he entered the military service. At that time Prince Nikolay Gorchakov, a near relative of my grandmother, Princess Gorchakov, was Minister of War, his brother Andrey was a general in command of troops in the field, and my father was attached to him as adjutant. He went through the campaigns of the years '13 and '14, and in '14, having somewhere in Germany been despatched as a courier, he was taken prisoner by the French, and was liberated only in the year '15, when our troops entered Paris. Even at the age of twenty my father was not a chaste youth, but before he entered the military service, consequently when he was sixteen years old, a connection had been arranged by his parents between him and a servant-girl, as such a union was at that time deemed necessary for health. A son was born, Mishenka, who was made a postilion, and who, during my father's life, lived well, but afterward went wrong and often applied for help to us, his half-brothers. I remember my strange feeling of consternation when this brother of mine, fallen into destitution, bearing a greater resemblance to our father than any of us, begged help of us and was thankful for ten or fifteen rubles which were given him.
"After the campaign, my father, disillusioned as to military service, as is evident from his letters, resigned and came to Kazan, where my grandfather, already completely ruined, was governor, and where also resided my father's sister who was married to Yushkov. My grandfather soon died in Kazan, and my father remained with an inheritance which was not equal to all the debts, and with an old mother accustomed to luxury, as well as a sister and a cousin, on his hands. At this time his marriage with my mother was arranged for him, and he removed to Yasnaya Polyana, where, after living nine years with my mother, he became a widower, and within my memory lived with us.
"My father was a lively man of sanguine temperament; he was of medium height, well built, with a pleasant face, and eyes of a constantly serious expression. His life was passed in attending to the estate, a business in which he, as it seems, was not very expert, but in which he exercised a virtue great for that time: he not only was not cruel, but was, perhaps, even weak. So that during his time, too, I never heard of corporal punishment. Probably it was administered, for it is difficult to imagine at that time the management of an estate without the use of such punishments, but the cases were probably so rare, and my father took so little part in them, that we children never came to hear of them. It was only after my father's death that I learned for the first time that such punishments took place at home.
"We children with our tutor were returning home from a walk, when by the barn we met the fat steward, Andrey Flyin, followed by the coachman's assistant - `Squinting Kuzma,' as he was called - with a sad face. He was a married man, no longer young. One of us asked Andrey Flyin where he was going, and he quietly answered that he was going to the barn, where Kuzma had to be punished. I cannot describe the dreadful feeling which these words and the sight of the good-natured, crestfallen Kuzma produced on me. In the evening I related this to my aunt, Tatyana Aleksandrovna, who had educated us and hated corporal punishment, never having allowed it for us any more than for the serfs, wherever she had influence. She was greatly revolted at what I told her, and rebuking