The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Life of Tolstoy: First Fifty Years, by Aylmer Maude

Portrait of Tolstoy
when commencing Anna Karénina, 1873,
by Kramskóy.

THE LIFE OF TOLSTOY
FIRST FIFTY YEARS

BY
AYLMER MAUDE

'A man so various that he seemed to be

Not one, but all mankind's epitome.'

Dryden

FIFTH EDITION

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1911

PREFACE

The reason I have written this work is because so many among us are interested in Tolstoy and so few seem to understand him. It would seem therefore that an English Life of Tolstoy is needed, and having lived in Russia for twenty-three years, known Tolstoy well for several years, visited him frequently in Moscow, and stayed with him repeatedly at Yásnaya Polyána, I am perhaps as well qualified as any one to write it, especially as I have long made a careful study of his views. My wife and I have translated several of his works, have known people closely connected with him, and some ten years ago we took part in an unsuccessful 'Tolstoy' Colony; besides which I went to Canada at his wish to make arrangements for the Doukhobór migration, of which I subsequently wrote the history.

Moreover, I am impartial. That is to say, I have taken pains to understand Tolstoy's views, and to see the good there is in them; but being a Westerner, I see also certain things Tolstoy overlooks, and I know that these things knock big holes in some of his most cherished 'principles.'

The book has had the great advantage of being carefully revised by his wife, the Countess S. A. Tolstoy, who both verbally and in writing has rendered me most valuable assistance.

I owe sincere thanks also to my friend P. I. Birukóf, Tolstoy's Russian biographer. He modestly speaks of his own work as 'a collection of those materials for the biography of Leo Tolstoy which are accessible to me.' I have no hesitation in saying that his care and integrity in gathering and using those materials, entitle him to the gratitude of all who deal with the same subject.

There is one small matter of typography which needs a word of explanation. I have sought to tell as much of the story as possible in Tolstoy's own words, and have also had occasion to quote other writers. At times the Russian text quoted contains allusions or expressions which might perplex an English reader unless a word or two of explanation were added. To introduce paragraphs of explanation would interrupt the narrative, besides lengthening the book. To have recourse to frequent footnotes in cases where two or three words of explanation are all that is required is unsightly and unsatisfactory; so I have adopted the plan of using square brackets [ ] to enclose such explanations. The ordinary round parentheses ( ) I have kept for their common use, and for cases where, for clearness' sake, words are added that are not contained in the original.

Beyond indicating the varying value of sums of money mentioned, I have not troubled the reader with the fluctuations of the rouble, which went from over 38 pence before the Crimean war, to 19 pence after the Russo-Turkish war of 1878. If he wants a concise history of the Russian currency, he can find it in the preface to my edition of Sevastopol.

In that as in other matters I have tried to be accurate without being pedantic. It is Tolstoy and his views that I aim at presenting to English readers; and I have kept in the background, as far as I could, the obstacles resulting from the Tower of Babel.

AYLMER MAUDE.

Great Baddow,
Chelmsford, 20th August 1910.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION OF RUSSIAN NAMES

The spelling of Russian names in Latin letters in a work of this kind, presents great difficulties. To begin with, we have as yet (though it is much needed) no accepted method of transliteration from Russian into English; and though it is not difficult for any one to frame or select his own system of transliteration—as I have done for my translations—this does not entirely meet the case when one has to deal with the names of people, many of whom have adopted a spelling of their own.

On the one hand, a man has a right to decide how he will have his own name spelt; but on the other hand, the inclusion of a dozen different systems of transliteration in one book, is apt to create confusion.

I have had to do the best I could under the circumstances. To pronounce the names correctly, in accord with the system of transliteration I have adopted, the reader should note the following:

I. Lay stress on the syllable marked with an accent.

II. Vowel sounds are broad and open:

a as in father.

e as a in fate.

But e initial and unaccented is pronounced ye.

i as ee in meet.

o as in loch.

u as you.

In diphthongs the broad sounds are retained:

ou as oo in boot.

ya as in yard.

ye as in yes.

yo as in yore.

ay as eye.

ey as in they.

oy as in boy.

III. y with a vowel forms a diphthong; y at the end of a word, after a consonant, sounds something like ie in hygiene.

IV. Consonants:

G is hard, as in go.

Zh is like z in azure.

R is sounded strongly, as in rough, barren.

S is sharp, as in seat, pass.

Where I know of a spelling deliberately adopted by the owner of a name, I have felt bound to follow it. For instance, the name which under my system of transliteration I should have spelt 'Suhotín,' appears in the book as Soohoteén, but in such cases, on the first occasion on which the name occurs, I have given my usual transliteration in square brackets.

I hope the day is not distant when some system will be generally agreed upon in this matter. Any system would be better than the present anarchy.

CHAPTER I
ANCESTRY AND PARENTAGE

Ancestors. Count Peter. Russian titles. Tolstoy's grandfather and father. His maternal grandfather and mother. First recollections. Aunty Tatiána. Antecedents.

1353

In the annals of the Russian nobility it is recorded that a man named Idris came from 'the lands of Cæsar,' that is to say, from the Holy Roman Empire, in the year 1353 with two sons and 3000 followers, and settling at Tchernígof in Little Russia was received with favour by the reigning Grand Duke, who granted him much land. A great-grandson of this Idris, Andrew by name, migrated to Moscow, where he was well received by the reigning Grand Duke Vasíly, who conferred upon him the surname of Tolstóy.

1645

As, however, the annals of the Russian nobility were to a large extent concocted in the reign of Peter the Great, it is extremely doubtful whether this story is reliable. Be that as it may, it is certain that Peter Tolstoy, born in 1645, was a Russian who distinguished himself in the service of the State. During the struggles which preceded the acquisition of power by Peter the Great, he made the mistake of allying himself with that autocrat's ambitious half-sister, Sophia. The defeat of her Guards, the Streltsí, caused him quickly to transfer his allegiance to Peter, whose favour he eventually managed to secure. When drinking with his chosen companions in later days, the Tsar would often pat Tolstoy's head, saying, 'Little head, little head, had you been less wise, you would have come off your shoulders long ago.'

1697, 1716, 1717

This Peter Tolstoy held a commission in the Guards, and fought in the Azof campaign of 1696; but later on he went abroad to study shipbuilding when Peter the Great was seeking volunteers for that purpose. He was sent in 1701 as Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, and in the years 1710-1713, when political affairs were critical, he twice suffered severe imprisonment in the Seven Towers—the stronghold wherein the Sultan occasionally confined the ambassadors of States with whose conduct he felt dissatisfied. Returning to Russia in 1714, Tolstoy obtained the favour of Prince Ménshikof and became a Minister of State. He married; but his wife does not appear to have been of sufficient importance for any one to have said anything about her. He accompanied Peter the Great to Holland and France, and rendered him an important though discreditable service. Peter the Great's son, the refractory Alexis, who disliked his father's reforms, had escaped from Russia and was living with his mistress Euphrosyne at St. Elmo, near Naples. By threats and promises, and by the aid of this woman, Tolstoy induced the unfortunate Tsarévitch to return to Russia, and when he had got him there, took a leading part in his trial and secret execution.

30 Aug. 1725

For this service Tolstoy received large estates and was promoted to the headship of the Secret Chancellery. On the day of the coronation of Peter's second wife, Catherine, Tolstoy was made a Count. His coat of arms shows seven towers, in memory of his imprisonment by the Sultan, and is appropriately supported by two wolf-hounds rampant, looking outwards.

6 May 1727, 1729

On the death of Peter the Great, Tolstoy actively supported Ménshikof in securing the throne for Catherine the First, and he was one of the seven members of the Upper Secret Council which practically ruled Russia. On the question of choosing a successor to Catherine, he ventured however to oppose Ménshikof. The latter was too powerful for him; and forfeiting his title of Count and deprived of all offices rewards and estates, Tolstoy, at the age of eighty-two, was banished for life to the Solovétz Monastery, situated on an island in the White Sea. Here, two years later, he died. Ménshikof himself, one may remark in passing, finished his life that same year in Siberia, having been banished by an order signed by the boy he had placed on the throne. To be a Russian Minister of State in those days was almost as dangerous as it is in our times to be a revolutionary conspirator.

The title of Count was revived in the family in 1770, for the benefit of Peter Tolstoy's grandson; whose son, Count Elias Tolstoy (he figures in War and Peace as the elder Count Rostóf), was the grandfather of Leo Tolstoy, whose life this book narrates.

There is one matter which it may be as well to explain at the outset, as English readers are so often puzzled by it: I refer to the nature of Russian titles of nobility. The only really Russian title is that of Knyaz, commonly translated 'Prince.' It is borne by descendants of Rúrik, by descendants of the Lithuanian Prince Ghedimin, and by descendants of various Tartar Khans whose dominions Russia has annexed. It has also been conferred by Imperial Decree on a dozen or more other Russian families. Though Knyaz is translated 'Prince,' Velíky Knyaz, curiously enough, is not translated 'Great Prince,' but 'Grand Duke,' and this indicates how difficult it is to find suitable equivalents for these titles. Not till the time of Peter the Great were the German titles, Count (Graf) and Baron, introduced into Russia. Both of these are now common among the Russo-German landlords of the Baltic Provinces; and less so among real Russians.

It must be borne in mind that there is no law of primogeniture in Russia. Each son and daughter inherits the family title, so that there are usually several, and sometimes many, people with equal rights to use the same title. Though springing from one stock, they may be only distantly connected. There are for instance other Counts Tolstoy, contemporaries of Leo Tolstoy and distant cousins of his. One of these, the poet Count Alexis Tolstoy, was a well-known author and dramatist. Another, the reactionary Count Dmítry Tolstoy, was successively Head of the Holy Synod, Minister of Education, and Minister of the Interior.

Tolstoy's grandfather already mentioned, Count Elias Tolstoy, was an easy-going generous trustful and extravagant man, who married a wealthy Princess Gortchakóf, but ran through her money and his own, and at last to secure a means of livelihood, procured the post of Governor of Kazán. This he was able to do, thanks to his family influence. It is recorded to his credit that, contrary to the general custom of the time, he accepted no bribes (except from the Government contractor, who was considered the natural financial prop of a Provincial Governor), though his wife accepted presents without his knowledge.

Their eldest daughter married a Count Osten-Saken. She became guardian of Leo Tolstoy and of his brothers and sister, after they had lost their parents. Another daughter married V. I. Úshkof. Leo Tolstoy was under her charge when he lived in Kazán and studied at its University.

The first fact known to us about his father, Count Nicholas Tolstoy, is characteristic of the manners of his class and day. When he was only sixteen, his parents arranged a liaison between him and a peasant girl, such connections being considered necessary for the health of young men. A son was born, and Tolstoy records his 'strange feeling of consternation when (in after years) this brother of mine, fallen into destitution and bearing a greater resemblance to my father than any of us, used to beg help of us, and was thankful for the ten or fifteen roubles we used to give him.'

1812, 1814

Nicholas Tolstoy was not yet seventeen when Napoleon invaded Russia; but in spite of his parents' efforts to dissuade him, he insisted on entering the army, and thanks to his mother's family influence, quickly obtained an appointment as Adjutant to Prince Andrew Gortchakóf, a General in command. He went through the campaigns of 1813 and 1814; and in the latter year he and his orderly, while on their way to rejoin the Russian army in Germany, after taking despatches to Petersburg, were captured by the French. The orderly managed to hide his master's gold coins in his boots, and for months never risked taking them off, though his feet grew sore and he suffered extreme discomfort. Thanks to this devotion, Nicholas Tolstoy, after reaching Paris, was able to live in comfort.

Having attained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, he left the army when the war was over, and, disillusioned with military service, returned to Kazán, where his father (completely ruined by that time) was still Governor.

1820

In 1820 Count Elias died, leaving his estate so encumbered that his son declined to accept the inheritance. The young man had to face the task of providing for his old mother, who was accustomed to great luxury, as well as for his sister and a distant cousin, Tatiána Alexándrovna Érgolsky, who had been adopted into the family; and so a marriage was arranged for him with the wealthy but plain Princess Marie Volkónsky, who was no longer very young.

His father's life, Tolstoy tells us, was then

passed in attending to the estate, a business in which he was not very expert, but in which he exercised a virtue great for those days: he was not cruel, but perhaps even lacked firmness. During his lifetime I never heard of corporal punishment. If it ever was administered to the serfs, the cases were so rare and my father took so little part in them, that we children never heard them mentioned. It was after his death that I learnt, for the first time, that such punishment ever took place at home.

Like most men who served in the army in the early years of Alexander's reign, he [Count Nicholas Tolstoy] was not what is now called a Liberal, but out of self-respect he considered it impossible to serve during the latter [reactionary] part of Alexander's reign, or under Nicholas. During all my childhood and youth, our family had no intimate relations with any Government official. I, of course, understood nothing about this in childhood, but I understood that my father never humbled himself before any one, nor altered his brisk, merry, and often chaffing tone. This feeling of self-respect, which I witnessed in him, increased my love and admiration for him.

Leo Tolstoy's mother's family, the Volkónskys, were descended from Rúrik (the first ruler mentioned in Russian history) as well as from St. Michael the martyr, Prince of Tchernígof; and through them, even more than on his father's side, Tolstoy is connected with many of the leading families of the Russian aristocracy. Prince Nicholas Volkónsky, his mother's father, came into conflict with the most powerful of the favourites of Catherine the Great, for Tolstoy tells us that:

Having attained the high position of Commander-in-Chief, he lost it suddenly by refusing to marry Potémkin's niece and mistress, Varvára Engelhardt. To Potémkin's suggestion that he should do so, he replied: 'What makes him think I will marry his strumpet?'

He married instead, a Princess Catherine Troubetskóy, and after retiring from the service, settled down on his estate at Yásnaya Polyána. His wife soon died, leaving him only one surviving child, a daughter, Tolstoy's mother. Tolstoy writes of this grandfather:

He was regarded as a very exacting master, but I never heard any instance of his being cruel or inflicting the severe punishments usual in those days. I believe such cases did occur on his estate, but the enthusiastic respect for his importance and cleverness was so great among the servants and peasants whom I have often questioned about him, that though I have heard my father condemned, I have heard only praise of my grandfather's intelligence, business capacity, and interest in the welfare both of the peasants and of his enormous household.

Later, a strange chance brought Prince Volkónsky again into touch with Varvára Engelhardt, whom he had refused to marry. She married a Prince Sergius Golítsin, who consequently received promotions and decorations and rewards; and Tolstoy tells us:

With this Sergius Golítsin and his family, my grandfather formed so close a friendship that my mother from her childhood was betrothed to one of his ten sons.... This alliance, however, was not destined to be consummated, for the young man died prematurely of fever.

In a portrait of Prince N. Volkónsky which has been preserved in the family there is much that corresponds to Leo Tolstoy's own appearance. 'Both,' as his brother-in-law remarks, 'have high, open foreheads and large organs of the creative faculty, and in both the organs of musical talent are exceedingly prominent and are covered by thick, overhanging eyebrows, from beneath which small, deep-set, grey eyes literally pierce the soul of the man on whom they are turned.'

1822

Prince N. Volkónsky died in 1820, and two years later his daughter married Count Nicholas Tolstoy. Of her Tolstoy tells us:

I do not remember my mother. I was a year-and-a-half old when she died. By some strange chance no portrait of her has been preserved, so that as a real physical being I cannot picture her to myself. I am in a way 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 has come about not merely because all who spoke to me of my mother tried to say only what was good, but because there actually was much good in her.

She was well educated, spoke five languages, played the piano well, and had a wonderful gift for improvising tales in the most delightful manner. It is said that at balls her young lady friends would leave the dance and gather in a dark room to hear her tell a story, which shyness induced her to do where she could not be seen. Tolstoy remarks that 'her most valuable quality was that though hot-tempered, she was yet self-restrained. "She would get quite red in the face and even cry," her maid told me, "but would never say a rude word."' She had one quality Tolstoy values very highly—that of never condemning any one. It was a quality shared by her eldest son, Nicholas; and Leo Tolstoy says:

In the Lives of the Saints by D. Rostóvsky, there is a short story which has always touched me exceedingly, of a certain monk, who to the knowledge of all his brethren had many faults, but whom an old monk, in a dream, saw occupying a place of honour among the saints. The old man asked in astonishment, 'How could this monk, so unrestrained in many ways, deserve so great a reward?' The answer was: 'He never condemned any one.'

Tolstoy adds: 'If such rewards did exist, I think my brother and my mother would have received them.'

Another feature Tolstoy records of his mother is 'her truthfulness and the simple tone of her correspondence.' He tells us that in his imagination his mother

appeared to me a creature so elevated, pure and spiritual, that often in the middle period of my life, during my struggles with overwhelming temptations, I prayed to her soul begging her to aid me; and such prayer always helped me much.

1828

Five children were born to Nicholas and Marie Tolstoy. First came four sons, of whom Leo was the youngest. His name in Russian is Lyóf Nikoláyevitch (Leo, son-of-Nicholas) Tolstóy. Leo Tolstoy is the way he signs himself when using the Latin alphabet; and when pronouncing his name it should be remembered that the accent falls on the second syllable, and that that syllable rhymes with 'boy.' The fancy spellings Tolstoi and Tolstoï are due to the fact that some of the early translators and reviewers, not being able to read Russian, relied on French versions, and did not know how Tolstoy spells or pronounces his own name. He was born on 28th August 1828[1] at Yásnaya Polyána, with a caul—which both in Russia and in England is considered a sign of good-fortune.

A year and a half later a daughter, Marie, was born; and in giving birth to her the mother died, on 7th March 1830.

Pilgrims, monks, nuns, and various half-crazy devotees were frequent visitors at the house, and even took up their abode there. One of these was a nun, Márya Gerásimovna, who in her youth had made pilgrimages to various holy places dressed as a man. After the birth of four boys Tolstoy's mother longed for a daughter, and promised Márya Gerásimovna that she should be godmother if by prayer she enabled her to obtain her desire. The next child really was a daughter. The promise was kept, and thereafter Márya Gerásimovna, though she lived partly in the Toúla convent, was free of the Tolstoys' house and spent much of her time there.

Tolstoy gives us his earliest reminiscences in an autobiographical fragment published in 1878:

These are my first recollections. I cannot arrange them in order, for I do not know which come first or last. Of some of them I do not even know whether they happened in a dream or when I was awake. I lie bound[2] and wish to stretch out my arms, but cannot. I scream and cry, and my screams are disagreeable to myself, but I cannot stop. Some one—I do not remember who—bends over me. This all happens in semi-darkness. I only know there were two people there. My cries affect them: they are agitated by my screams, but do not untie me as I want them to, and I scream still louder. To them it seems necessary that I should be bound, but I know it is unnecessary and I wish to prove this to them, and I again burst into cries which are unpleasant to myself but are yet unrestrainable. I feel the injustice and cruelty—not of people, for they pity me, but—of fate, and I pity myself. I do not know and shall never know, what it was all about: whether I was swaddled while still a baby at the breast, and struggled to free my hands; whether they swaddled me when I was more than a year old, to prevent my scratching some sore, or whether I have gathered into this one recollection (as one does in a dream) many different impressions. The one sure thing is, that this was the first and strongest impression of my life. And what remains on my memory is not my cries nor my suffering, but the complexity and contradictoriness of the impressions. I desire freedom, it would harm no one, but I who need strength am weak, while they are strong.

The next impression is a pleasant one. I am sitting in a tub, and am surrounded by a new and not unpleasant smell of something with which they are rubbing my tiny body. Probably it was bran, put into the water of my bath; the novelty of the sensation caused by the bran aroused me, and for the first time I became aware of, and liked, my own little body with the visible ribs on my breast, and the smooth, dark, wooden tub, the bared arms of my nurse, the warm, steaming, swirling water, the noise it made, and especially the smooth feel of the wet rim of the tub as I passed my hands along it.

My next recollections belong to the time when I was five or six, and there are very few of them, and not one that relates to life outside the walls of the house. Nature, up to the age of five, did not exist for me. All that I remember, happened in bed or in our rooms. Neither grass, nor leaves, nor sky, nor sun existed for me. It cannot be that no one ever gave me flowers and leaves to play with, that I never saw any grass, that they never shaded me from the sun; but up to the time when I was five or six years old, I have no recollection of what we call Nature. Probably, to see it, one has to be separate from it, and I was Nature.

The recollection that comes next after the tub is that of Ereméyevna. 'Ereméyevna' was the name with which they used to frighten us children. Probably they had long frightened us with it, but my recollection of it is this: I am in bed and feel well and happy as usual, and I should not remember it, but that suddenly the nurse, or some one of those who made up my life, says something in a voice new to me, and then goes away; and in addition to being happy I am also frightened. And besides me there is some one else like me. (Probably my sister Mary, whose crib stood in the same room.) And I now remember a curtain near my bed; and both my sister and I are happy and frightened at the strange thing happening to us, and I hide in my pillow: hide, and glance at the door from behind which I expect something new and merry. We laugh, and hide, and wait. And then some one appears in a dress and cap quite unknown to me, but I recognise that it is the same person who is always with us (whether my nurse or aunt I do not remember), and this some one says something about bad children and about Ereméyevna in a gruff voice which I know. And I squeal with fear and pleasure, and really am frightened, and yet am glad to be frightened, and wish her who is frightening me not to know that I have recognised her. We become quiet, but presently begin whispering to one another again, on purpose that Ereméyevna may come back.

I have another recollection similar to this of Ereméyevna (but as it is clearer it probably belongs to a later date) which has always remained inexplicable to me. In this recollection the chief part is played by our German tutor, Theodore Ivánitch, but I am sure I was not yet in his charge; so the event must have taken place before I was five. It is my first recollection of Theodore Ivánitch, and it took place at so early an age that I can remember no one else: neither my brothers nor my father nor any one. If I have some notion of some one individual person, it is only of my sister, and this only because she, like me, was afraid of Ereméyevna. With this recollection is joined my first conception of the fact that our house had a top story. How I climbed there—whether I went by myself or whether any one carried me—I have quite forgotten, but I remember that many of us are there, and we all form a circle holding each other's hands; among us are some women I did not know (for some reason I remember that they were washer-women), and we all begin to go round and to jump; and Theodore Ivánitch jumps, lifting his legs too high and too loudly and noisily, and I at one and the same instant feel that this is bad and depraved, and notice him and (I believe) begin to cry—and all is over.

That is all I remember up to the age of five. Neither my nurses, aunts, brothers, sister, nor my father, nor the rooms, nor my toys, do I remember. My more distinct recollections begin from the time I was moved downstairs to Theodore Ivánitch and the elder boys.

When I was moved downstairs to Theodore Ivánitch and the boys, I experienced for the first time and therefore more strongly than ever since, the feeling which is called the sense of duty, the consciousness of the cross every man is called upon to bear. It was hard to leave what I was accustomed to from the beginning of things, and I was sad, poetically sad, not so much at parting from people: sister, nurse, and aunt, as at parting with my crib, the curtain and the pillow; and I feared the new life into which I was entering. I tried to see the jolly side of this new life awaiting me; I tried to believe the caressing words with which Theodore Ivánitch lured me to him. I tried not to see the contempt with which the boys received me, the youngest boy. I tried to think it was a shame for a big boy to live with girls, and that there was nothing good in the life upstairs with nurse; but my heart was terribly sad, I knew I was irreparably losing my innocence and happiness; and only a feeling of personal dignity and the consciousness of doing my duty upheld me. (Often in after-life I have experienced similar moments at the parting of crossroads, when entering on a fresh course.) I experienced quiet grief at the irreparableness of my loss; I was unable to believe that it would really happen. Though I had been told that I should be moved to the boys' rooms, I remember that the dressing-gown with a cord sewn to its back, which they put on me, seemed to cut me off for ever from upstairs, and I then for the first time observed—not all those with whom I had lived upstairs, but—the chief person with whom I lived, and whom I did not remember before. This was my Aunty Tatiána Alexándrovna Érgolsky. I remember her short, stout, black-haired, kindly, tender, and compassionate. It was she who put the dressing-gown on me, and embracing me and kissing me, tied it round my waist; and I saw that she felt as I did, that it was sad, terribly sad, but had to be; and for the first time I felt that life is not a game but a serious matter.

'Aunty' Tatiána Alexándrovna Érgolsky, mentioned in the above reminiscences, was a very distant relative who being left an orphan, had been brought up by Tolstoy's paternal grandparents. She was very attractive and affectionate. She loved and was loved by Count Nicholas, Leo's father, but stood aside that he might marry the rich Princess Marie Volkónsky and repair the family fortunes. Six years after his wife's death Count Nicholas asked Tatiána to marry him and be a mother to his children. Not wishing (Tolstoy tells us) to spoil her pure, poetic relations with the family, she refused the first but fulfilled the second of these requests.

The joyousness of Tolstoy's boyhood was largely due to the care and affection of this excellent woman, and in the most firmly rooted of his principles—such as his detestation of corporal punishment and his approval of complete chastity—it is easy to trace her unconscious influence.

Here for instance is one episode:

We children were returning home from a walk with our tutor, when near the barn we met the fat steward, Andrew, followed by the coachman's assistant, 'Squinting Kouzmá' as he was called, whose face was sad. He was a married man and no longer young. One of us asked Andrew where he was going, and he quietly replied that he was going to the barn, where Kouzmá had to be punished. I cannot describe the dreadful feeling which these words and the sight of the good-natured crestfallen Kouzmá produced on me. In the evening I told this to my Aunt Tatiána, who hated corporal punishment and, wherever she had influence, never allowed it for us any more than for the serfs. She was greatly revolted at what I told her, and rebuking me said, 'Why did you not stop him?' Her words grieved me still more.... I never thought that we could interfere in such things, and yet it appeared that we could. But it was too late, and the dreadful deed had been done.

To sum up what we know of Tolstoy's antecedents: he was descended on his father's side and still more on his mother's, from aristocratic families who were more or less in passive opposition to the Government, and who shared the humanitarian sympathies current in the early years of the reign of Alexander I. A cousin of Tolstoy's mother was one of the Decembrists, and on the accession of Nicholas I in 1825 took part in their abortive attempt to establish Constitutional Government. He was exiled to Eastern Siberia for thirty years, doing hard labour in irons part of the time. His wife (another Princess Marie Volkónsky) voluntarily accompanied him, as Nekrásof has told in a well-known Russian poem. Several members of the family towards the end of their lives retired into convents or monasteries.

We find strong family love uniting the homes of Tolstoy's parents and grandparents; and even after their death, Tolstoy's nature ripened in a congenial atmosphere of family affection; and many of his most pronounced sympathies and antipathies are not peculiar to himself, but were shared equally by other members of the family.

CHIEF AUTHORITIES FOR CHAPTER I

P. Birukof: Lyof Nikolayevitch Tolstoy. Biografiya: Moscow, 1906. (The Russian edition is much more readable and accurate than the English.)

Referred to hereafter as Birukof.

S. A. Behrs: Vospominaniya o Grafe L. N. Tolstom, Smolensk, 1894, is very valuable as being the work of one who spent twelve summers at Yasnaya, and knew Tolstoy intimately.

Referred to hereafter as Behrs.

There is an English edition of this book: Recollections of Count Leo Tolstoy, London, 1893, but it is incomplete, and inferior to the Russian in many ways. It gives the author's name wrongly as C. A. Behrs.

Leo Tolstoy, First Recollections, a fragment: Tolstoy's collected works, Moscow, 1892.

Supplement to Novy Mir, Graf Lyof Tolstoy: St. Petersburg, 1903.

Referred to hereafter as Novy Mir.

CHAPTER II
CHILDHOOD AND EARLY MANHOOD

Yásnaya Polyána. Aunt Tatiána. The German Tutor. The brothers: Nicholas, Sergius and Demetrius. Doúnetchka. The house-serfs. A family scene. Pilgrims and saints. Death of father and grandmother. Flying. Personal appearance. Corporal punishment. Originality. Riding lessons. The Countess Osten-Saken. Aunt P. I. Úshkof. Books. Abstract speculations. Kazán University. Imprisonment. Diary. Demetrius. Books: Dickens and Rousseau. Yásnaya again. Petersburg. Consistency. Rudolph the Musician. Women. Gambling. Gipsy girls. Money difficulties. The liberty of Russian nobles.

Yásnaya Polyána (Bright Glade), where Tolstoy was born, had been an ancestral estate of the Volkónskys and belonged to his mother, the Princess Marie. It is situated ten miles south of Toúla, in a pleasantly undulating country. The estate, which is enclosed by an old brick wall, is well wooded and has many avenues of lime-trees, a river and four lakes. In Tolstoy's grandfather's time, sentinels kept guard at the small, round, brick towers, which now stand neglected at the entrance of the main birch avenue leading to the house. Something of the great confidence in himself and readiness to despise others, which despite all his efforts to be humble, characterise Tolstoy, may be due to the fact that he was born and grew up on an estate where for generations his ancestors had been the only people of importance.

'Aunty' Tatiána Alexándrovna Érgolsky had been brought up by his grandmother on an equality with her own children. She (Tatiána) was resolute, self-sacrificing, and, says Tolstoy,

must have been very attractive with her enormous plait of crisp, black, curly hair, her jet-black eyes, and vivacious, energetic expression. When I remember her she was more than forty, and I never thought about her as pretty or not pretty. I simply loved her eyes, her smile, and her dusky broad little hand, with its energetic little cross vein.

We had two aunts and a grandmother; they all had more right to us than Tatiána Alexándrovna, whom we called Aunt only by habit (for our kinship was so distant that I could never remember what it was), but she took the first place in our upbringing by right of love to us (like Buddha in the story of the wounded swan), and we felt her right.

I had fits of passionately tender love for her.

I remember once, when I was about five, how I squeezed in behind her on the sofa in the drawing-room and she caressingly touched me with her hand. I caught it and began to kiss it, and to cry with tender love of her....

Aunty Tatiána had the greatest influence on my life. From early childhood she taught me the spiritual delight of love. She taught me this joy not by words; but by her whole being she filled me with love. I saw, I felt, how she enjoyed loving, and I understood the joy of love. This was the first thing.

Secondly, she taught me the delights of an unhurried, quiet life.

Another, though a much less important, influence was that of the tutor, Theodore Rössel (who figures as Karl Ivánovitch Mauer in Tolstoy's early sketch, Childhood). Tolstoy owes his excellent knowledge of German and French to the fact that his father, following a custom common among well-to-do Russians, engaged foreign teachers and let his children learn languages not so much from books as by conversation, while they were still quite young. Rössel's 'honest, straightforward, and loving nature' helped to develop the boy's good qualities.

Tolstoy got on well, too, with his brothers, who were five-and-a-half, two, and one year older than himself, as well as with his little sister Marie, his junior by a year-and-a-half.

He not only loved, but deeply respected, his eldest brother Nicholas (pet name, Nikólenka), whose influence lasted until, and even after, his death in 1860. Of him Tolstoy says:

He was a wonderful boy, and later a wonderful man. Tourgénef used to say of him very truly, that he only lacked certain faults to be a great writer. He lacked the chief fault needed for authorship—vanity, and was not at all interested in what people thought of him. The qualities of a writer which he possessed were, first of all, a fine artistic sense, an extremely developed sense of proportion, a good-natured gay sense of humour, an extraordinary inexhaustible imagination, and a truthful and highly moral view of life; and all this without the slightest conceit. His imagination was such that for hours together he could tell fairy-tales or ghost-stories, or amusing tales in the style of Mrs. Radcliffe, without a pause and with such vivid realisation of what he was narrating that one forgot it was all invention.... When he was not narrating or reading (he read a great deal) he used to draw. He almost invariably drew devils with horns and twisted moustaches, intertwined in the most varied attitudes and engaged in the most diverse occupations. These drawings were also full of imagination.

It was he who, when I was five and my brothers, Dmítry six and Sergéy seven, announced to us that he possessed a secret by means of which, when disclosed, all men would become happy: there would be no more disease, no trouble, no one would be angry with anybody, all would love one another, and all would become 'Ant-Brothers.'... We even organised a game of Ant-Brothers, which consisted in sitting under chairs, sheltering ourselves with boxes, screening ourselves with handkerchiefs, and cuddling against one another while thus crouching in the dark.... The Ant-Brotherhood was revealed to us, but not the chief secret: the way for all men to cease suffering any misfortune, to leave off quarrelling and being angry, and become continuously happy; this secret he said he had written on a green stick, buried by the road at the edge of a certain ravine, at which spot (since my body must be buried somewhere) I have asked to be buried in memory of Nikólenka. Besides this little stick, there was also a certain Fanfarónof Hill, up which he said he could lead us, if only we would fulfil all the appointed conditions. These were: first, to stand in a corner and not think of a white bear. I remember how I used to get into a corner and try (but could not possibly manage) not to think of a white bear. The second condition was to walk without wavering along a crack between the boards of the floor; and the third was, for a whole year not to see a hare, alive or dead or cooked; and it was necessary to swear not to reveal these secrets to any one. He who fulfilled these, and other more difficult conditions which Nikólenka would communicate later, would have one wish, whatever it might be, fulfilled.

Nikólenka, as I now conjecture, had probably read or heard of the Freemasons—of their aspirations toward the happiness of mankind, and of the mysterious initiatory rites on entering their order; he had probably also heard about the Moravian Brothers [in Russian ant is mouravéy].

Writing when he was over seventy, Tolstoy adds:

The ideal of ant-brothers lovingly clinging to one another, though not under two arm-chairs curtained by handkerchiefs, but of all mankind under the wide dome of heaven, has remained the same for me. As I then believed that there existed a little green stick whereon was written the message which could destroy all evil in men and give them universal welfare, so I now believe that such truth exists and will be revealed to men, and will give them all it promises.

It was, however, Tolstoy's second brother, Sergius (or Sergéy: pet name, Seryózha), whom Tolstoy in his young days most enthusiastically admired and wished to imitate. Sergius was handsome, proud, straightforward, and singularly sincere. Of him Leo Tolstoy says:

I loved and wished to be like him. I admired his handsome appearance, his singing (he was always singing), his drawing, his gaiety and especially (strange as it may seem to say so) the spontaneity of his egotism. I myself was always aware of myself and self-conscious; I always guessed, rightly or wrongly, what other people thought or felt about me, and this spoilt my joy in life. This probably is why in others I specially liked the opposite feature—spontaneity of egotism. And for this I specially loved Seryózha. The word loved is not correct. I loved Nikólenka; but for Seryózha I was filled with admiration as for something quite apart from and incomprehensible to me.

Of the third brother, Demetrius (or Dmítry: pet name, Mítenka), only a year older than himself, Tolstoy tells us:

I hardly remember him as a boy. I only know by hearsay that as a child he was very capricious. He was nearest to me in age and I played with him oftenest, but did not love him as much as I loved Seryózha, nor as I loved and respected Nikólenka. He and I lived together amicably. I do not recollect that we quarrelled. Probably we did, and we may even have fought.... As a child I remember nothing special about Mítenka except his childish merriment.

Tolstoy says he was 'afraid of beggars, and of one of the Volkónskys, who used to pinch me; but, I think, of no one else.'

A girl, Doúnetchka Temeshóf, was adopted as a member of the family. She was a natural daughter of a wealthy bachelor friend of Tolstoy's father.

I remember how, when I had already learnt French, I was made to teach her that alphabet. At first it went all right (we were both about five years old), but later she probably became tired, and ceased to name correctly the letters I pointed out. I insisted. She began to cry. I did the same, and when our elders came, we could say nothing owing to our hopeless tears.

In his later recollections of her he says:

She was not clever, but was a good, simple girl; and, above all, so pure that we boys never had any but brotherly relations with her.

By which he means that there was no flirtation.

The relations between the family and its servants, who were serfs (and of whom there were about thirty), were, as in many a Russian family, often really affectionate. One instance of a serf's devotion has already been quoted; and such cases were not rare. In Childhood mention is made of the old housekeeper, Praskóvya Isáyevna, who was completely devoted to the welfare of the family, and Tolstoy says: 'All that I there wrote about her was actual truth.'

Here is another example illustrating both kindly toleration of minor offences committed by a serf, and the family affection which sweetened life:

My pleasantest recollections of my father are of his sitting with grandmother on the sofa, helping her to play Patience. My father was polite and tender with every one, but to my grandmother he was always particularly tenderly submissive. They used to sit—Grandma playing Patience, and from time to time taking pinches from a gold snuff-box. My aunts sit in arm-chairs, and one of them reads aloud. We children come in to say good-night, and sometimes sit there. We always take leave of Grandma and our aunts by kissing their hands. I remember once, in the middle of a game of Patience and of the reading, my father interrupts my aunt, points to a looking-glass and whispers something. We all look in the same direction. It was the footman Tíkhon, who (knowing that my father was in the drawing-room) was going into the study to take some tobacco from a big leather folding tobacco-pouch. My father sees him in the looking-glass, and notices his figure carefully stepping on tip-toe. My aunts laugh. Grandmama for a long time does not understand, but when she does, she too smiles cheerfully. I am enchanted by my father's kindness, and on taking leave of him kiss his white muscular hand with special tenderness.

An important feature of the life in which Tolstoy grew up was furnished by the half-crazy saints who swarmed in Russia in those days, and are still occasionally to be met with. Readers of Childhood will remember Grísha, an admirable specimen of that class, about whom Tolstoy makes the following characteristic note in his memoirs:

Grísha is an invented character. We had many of these half-crazy saints at our house, and I was taught to regard them with profound respect, for which I am deeply grateful to those who brought me up. If there were some among them who were insincere, or who experienced periods of weakness and insincerity, yet the aim of their life, though practically absurd, was so lofty that I am glad I learned in childhood unconsciously to understand the height of their achievement. They accomplished what Marcus Aurelius speaks of when he says: 'There is nothing higher than to endure contempt for one's good life.' So harmful and so unavoidable is the desire for human glory which always contaminates good deeds, that one cannot but sympathise with the effort not merely to avoid praise, but even to evoke contempt. Such a character was Márya Gerásimovna, my sister's godmother, and the semi-idiot Evdokímoushka, and some others in our house.

How deeply these early impressions were engraved on Tolstoy's mind is obvious from his earliest as well as his latest writings. Take, for instance, the lines from Childhood referring to Grísha's prayer overheard by the children.

Much water has flowed away since then, many recollections of the past have lost for me their meaning and become blurred fancies; even the pilgrim Grísha himself has long since finished his last pilgrimage; but the impression he produced on me and the feeling he evoked, will never die out of my memory.

In Tolstoy's later life we shall again and again find this medieval note recurring (with whatever of truth or falsity it contains), and the assertion that it is not the usefulness or uselessness of a man's life that matters, so much as his self-abnegation and the humility of his soul.

To complete the picture of Tolstoy's early boyhood at Yásnaya Polyána, we must think of him as interested in his father's dogs and horses and hunting (in Childhood he tells the true story of how he hunted his first hare), and also in the games and masquerades with which the family and visitors, as well as the servants, amused themselves, especially at New Year.

In spite of his sensitive introspective nature, Tolstoy's childhood was a happy one; and to it he always looks back with pleasure. He speaks of 'that splendid, innocent, joyful, poetic period of childhood, up to fourteen,' and he tells us that the impressions of early childhood, preserved in one's memory, grow in some unfathomable depth of the soul, like seeds thrown on good ground, till after many years they thrust their bright, green shoots into God's world.

1837

When Tolstoy was eight years old the family moved to Moscow for his elder brothers' education. The following summer they lost their father, who, having gone to Toúla on business, fell down in the street on his way to visit his friend Temeshóf, and died of apoplexy. What money he had with him was stolen, but some unnegotiable bonds were brought back to the Tolstoys in Moscow by an unknown beggar. The funeral took place at Yásnaya Polyána; and Leo, who did not attend it, long fancied that his father was not really dead. Looking at the faces of strangers in the streets of Moscow, he felt almost certain he might at any moment meet him alive again.

This event brought the problems of life and death vividly to the boy's mind, and nine months later the impression was intensified by the death of his grandmother, who never recovered from the shock of her son's death. Hers was the first death Tolstoy witnessed, and he never forgot the horror he felt when, as she lay dying of dropsy, he was admitted to kiss her swollen white hand and saw her, dressed in white, lying motionless on a high white bed. But he says:

I remember that new jackets of black material, braided with white, were made for all of us. It was dreadful to see the undertakers' men hanging about near the house, and then bringing in the coffin, with its lid covered with glazed brocade, and my grandmother's stern face, with its Roman nose, and her white cap and the white kerchief on her neck, lying high in the coffin on the table; and it was sad to see the tears of our aunts and of Páshenka; but yet the new braided jackets and the soothing attitude adopted towards us by those around, gratified us.... I remember how pleasant it was to me to overhear during the funeral the conversation of some gossiping female guests, who said, 'Complete orphans; their father only lately dead, and now the grandmother gone too.'

Some time after this, an event occurred that is recorded on the first page of Tolstoy's Confession:

I remember how, when I was about eleven, a boy Vladímir Milútin (long since dead), a Grammar School pupil, visited us one Sunday and announced as the latest novelty a discovery made at his School. The discovery was that there is no God, and all that we are taught about Him is a mere invention. I remember how interested my elder brothers were in this news. They called me to their council and we all, I remember, became animated, and accepted the news as something very interesting and fully possible.

Various stories have been preserved relating to Tolstoy's boyhood, and some of them are sufficiently characteristic to be worth repeating.

One incident which made a strong impression on the lad, keenly sensitive as he always was to any shade of injustice, was the following:

Soon after the death of their father and grandmother, the orphan Tolstoys, then living in rather straitened circumstances (owing to the property being left in trust), were invited to a Christmas Tree at the house of an acquaintance, and the young Princes Gortchakóf, nephews of the then Minister of War, were also among the guests. All the children received presents; but whereas the Gortchakófs had expensive ones, the Tolstoys, to their annoyance, received cheap common ones.

Another occurrence that clung to his recollection through life, was the friendly welcome they received one day when they made their way uninvited into a private garden in Moscow; and the sad disappointment they experienced when, returning a few days later unaccompanied by a pretty and attractive girl who had been with them on the former occasion, they were coldly informed that it was private ground, not open to the public.

Other stories, told by Tolstoy himself or by the family, illustrate his impulsive, imaginative, strenuous and rather erratic nature at this period.

When he was about seven or eight years old he had an ardent desire to fly, and persuaded himself that it was possible to do so. It was only necessary to sit down tight on your heels, clasping your arms firmly round your knees, and the tighter you held them the higher you would fly. As Tolstoy was always ardent to put his beliefs into practice, it is not very surprising that one day, soon after the family had moved to Moscow, he stayed behind in the class-room when he should have come down to dinner, and climbing out on the window-sill, some six yards from the ground, threw himself out. He was picked up unconscious. The ill results of his fall were fortunately confined to a slight concussion of the brain; and after sleeping for eighteen hours on end he woke up again quite well.

It would be a mistake to take his story, Childhood, as strictly autobiographical; but it contains many passages which one knows from other sources to be true of his own life, and one such is the passage in which (speaking in the character of Nikólenka) he says:

I knew very well that I was plain, and therefore every reference to my appearance was painfully offensive to me.... Moments of despair frequently came over me: I imagined that there could be no happiness on earth for a man with so broad a nose, such thick lips, and such small grey eyes as mine. I asked God to perform a miracle and change me into a handsome boy, and all I then had and all I could ever possess in the future, I would have given for a handsome face.

In fact, his personal appearance caused the sensitive lad much concern, but his efforts to improve it were unsuccessful. On one occasion he clipped his eyebrows, and the unsatisfactory results of that operation occasioned him great grief.

He records in his Reminiscences the following incident, which certainly intensified his lifelong antipathy to corporal punishment:

I do not remember for what, but for something quite undeserving of punishment, St. Thomas [the resident French tutor who succeeded Rössel] first locked me into a room, and secondly threatened to flog me. I thereupon experienced a dreadful feeling of anger indignation and disgust, not only towards St. Thomas himself, but towards the violence with which I was threatened.

When quite a small boy he conceived an attachment for the nine-year-old daughter of his father's friend, Islényef, and being jealous of her for daring to talk to others, he angrily pushed her off a balcony, with the result that she limped for a long time afterwards. A quarter of a century later, when he married this lady's daughter, his mother-in-law used laughingly to remind him of the incident, and say, 'Evidently you pushed me off the balcony in my childhood that you might marry my daughter afterwards!'

His sister relates that once when they were driving in a troika (i.e. three horses abreast) to Yásnaya, Leo got down during a break in the journey and went forward on foot. When the carriage started again and began to overtake him he took to running, and when the horses went faster he also increased his speed, racing as hard as he could. He was not overtaken till he had gone about two miles and was completely tired out. He was lifted back into the carriage gasping for breath, perspiring and quite exhausted. Any one not endowed with the remarkable physical vigour that, in spite of frequent attacks of ill-health, has characterised Tolstoy through life, would probably have done themselves serious injury had they taxed their vital resources as recklessly as he often did.

All accounts agree in representing him as an original and odd little fellow, unwilling to do things like other people. He would for instance enter a drawing-room and, carefully placing his feet together and bending his head, would make his bow backwards, saluting each of the company in turn.

Two incidents are recorded relating to the love of riding which has remained a characteristic of his through life.

When his brothers were sent to a riding-school, Leo (in spite of his father's assurances and those of the riding-master that he was too small to begin and would tumble off) also obtained permission to learn to ride. At his first lesson he duly tumbled off, but begged to be replaced in the saddle; and he did not fall off again, but became an expert horseman. In one of the short stories he wrote many years later for the use of school-children, he tells how he once wished to ride the old horse Raven after his brothers had each had a turn on it; and how Raven being too tired to move from the stables, he beat it till he broke his switch on its sides. He then demanded a stouter switch from the serf in charge, but the man replied:

'Ah, master, you have no pity! Why do you beat him? He is twenty years old, and is tired out; he can hardly breathe. Why, for a horse, he is as old as Timoféyitch

I thought of Timoféyitch, and hearkened to the man. I got off the horse's back; and when I noticed how its steaming sides were working, and how heavily it breathed through its nostrils, swishing its thin tail, I understood how hard it was for it. Till then I had thought that it was as happy as I was myself. And I felt so sorry for Raven that I began to kiss his sweaty neck and to beg his pardon for having beaten him.

Since then I have grown up, but I always have pity on horses, and always remember Raven and Timoféyitch when I see horses ill-treated.

He does not appear to have been very good at his lessons, and himself somewhere mentions the dictum of a student who used to coach his brothers and himself, and said of their aptitude for learning:

'Sergéy both wishes and can, Dmítry wishes but can't' (this was not true), 'and Leo neither wishes nor can.' (This, I think, was perfectly true.)

On the other hand, St. Thomas, the French tutor already referred to (he figures in Childhood as St. Jérôme), must have noticed the lad's capacity, for he used to say, 'Ce petit a une tête: c'est un petit Molière' (This little one has a head: he is a little Molière).

1837

After the father's death the family property passed under the control of the Court of Wards, and expenses had to be cut down. It was therefore decided that, though the two elder brothers had to remain in Moscow for the sake of their education, the three younger children should return to Yásnaya Polyána, where living was cheaper, in charge of their much loved Aunty Tatiána. Their legal guardian, the Countess Alexandra ('Aline') Ilýnishna Osten-Saken, remained in Moscow with the elder boys.

This lady had made what seemed a brilliant marriage with the wealthy Count Osten-Saken, whose family was among the first in the Baltic Provinces; but her married life was a terrible one. Her husband went out of his mind and tried to kill her. While he was confined in an asylum, the Countess gave birth to a still-born child. To save her from this fresh shock, a girl born of a servant, the wife of a Court cook, was substituted for the still-born baby. This girl, Páshenka, lived with the Tolstoy family, and was already grown up when Tolstoy was quite a child. Subsequently the Countess Alexandra lived first with her parents and then with her brother, Tolstoy's father. Though she was a devotee of the Orthodox Russo-Greek Church of which Tolstoy eventually became so fierce an opponent, much in her character and conduct accords with the precepts laid down in his later writings; and it is evident that certain aspects of his understanding of the Christian character, which strike most Englishmen as peculiar, far from being invented out of his own head, are derived from a deeply-rooted Russian and family tradition. He tells us:

My aunt was a truly religious woman. Her favourite occupation was reading the Lives of the Saints, conversing with pilgrims, half-crazy devotees, monks and nuns, of whom some always lived in our house, while others only visited my aunt.... She was not merely outwardly religious, keeping the fasts, praying much, and associating with people of saintly life, but she herself lived a truly Christian life, trying not only to avoid all luxury and acceptance of service, but herself serving others as much as possible. She never had any money, for she gave away all she had to those who asked. A servant related to me how, during their life in Moscow, my aunt used carefully on tip-toe to pass her sleeping maid, when going to Matins, and used herself to perform all the duties which it was in those days customary for a maid to perform. In food and dress she was as simple and unexacting as can possibly be imagined. Unpleasant as it is to me to mention it, I remember from childhood a specific acid smell connected with my aunt, probably due to negligence in her toilet: and this was the graceful poetic Aline with beautiful blue eyes, who used to love reading and copying French verses, who played on the harp, and always had great success at the grandest balls! I remember how affectionate and kind she always was, and this equally to the most important men and women and to the nuns and pilgrims.

Tolstoy goes on to tell how pleasantly she bore the jests and teasing that her devotion to the priests brought upon her.

I remember her dear good-natured laugh, and her face shining with pleasure. The religious feeling which filled her soul was evidently so important to her, so much higher than anything else, that she could not be angry or annoyed at anything, and could not attribute to worldly matters the importance others attach to them.

1840

In the summer of 1839 the whole family assembled at Yásnaya Polyána. The next year, 1840, was a famine year. The crops were so poor that corn had to be bought to feed the serfs, and to raise funds for this purpose one of the Tolstoys' estates had to be sold. The supply of oats for the horses was stopped, and Tolstoy remembers how he and his brothers, pitying their ponies, secretly gathered oats for them in the peasants' fields, quite unconscious of the crime they were committing.

1841

In the autumn of that year the whole family moved to Moscow, returning to Yásnaya for the following summer. The next autumn their guardian, the kind good Countess Alexandra Osten-Saken, died in the Convent or 'Hermitage' founded by Óptin (a robber chief of the fourteenth century) in the Government of Kaloúga, to which she had retired.

After her death her sister, Pelagéya Ilýnishna Úshkof, became their guardian. She was the wife of a Kazán landowner. Aunty Tatiána and she were not on friendly terms; there was no open quarrel between them, but V. I. Úshkof (Pelagéya's husband) had been a suitor for Tatiána's hand in his youth, and had been refused. Pelagéya could not forgive her husband's old love for Tatiána.

The change of guardianship led to the removal of the family to Kazán, and to the children being separated from Aunty Tatiána, much to her grief.

The books which up to the age of fourteen, when he went to Kazán, had most influenced Tolstoy were, he tells us, the Story of Joseph from the Bible, the Forty Thieves and Prince Kamaralzaman from the Arabian Nights, various Russian folk-legends, Poúshkin's Tales and his poem Napoleon, and The Black Hen by Pogorélsky. The influence the story of Joseph had on him, he says, was 'immense.'

In his aptitude for abstract speculation, as in other respects, the boy was truly father to the man; and in a passage, certainly autobiographical, in Boyhood, he says:

It will hardly be believed what were the favourite and most common subjects of my reflections in my boyhood—so incompatible were they with my age and situation. But in my opinion incompatibility between a man's position and his moral activity is the surest sign of truth....

At one time the thought occurred to me that happiness does not depend on external causes, but on our relation to them; and that a man accustomed to bear suffering cannot be unhappy. To accustom myself therefore to endurance, I would hold Tatíshef's dictionaries in my outstretched hand for five minutes at a time, though it caused me terrible pain; or I would go to the lumber room and flog myself on my bare back with a cord so severely that tears started to my eyes.

At another time suddenly remembering that death awaits me every hour and every minute, I decided (wondering why people had not understood this before) that man can only be happy by enjoying the present and not thinking of the future; and for three days, under the influence of this thought, I abandoned my lessons, and did nothing but lie on my bed and enjoy myself, reading a novel and eating honey-gingerbreads, on which I spent my last coins....

But no philosophic current swayed me so much as scepticism, which at one time brought me to the verge of insanity. I imagined that except myself no one and nothing existed in the world, that objects are not objects but apparitions, appearing only when I pay attention to them and disappearing as soon as I cease to think of them. In a word, I coincided with Schelling in the conviction that what exists is not objects, but only my relation to them. There were moments in which under the influence of this fixed idea, I reached such a stage of absurdity that I glanced quickly round hoping to catch Nothingness by surprise, there where I was not.

The philosophical discoveries I made greatly flattered my vanity: I often imagined myself a great man, discovering new truths for the benefit of humanity, and I looked on other mortals with a proud consciousness of my own dignity; yet, strange to say, when I came in contact with these mortals I grew timid before each of them. The higher I stood in my own opinion the less was I able to show any consciousness of my own dignity before others, or even to avoid being ashamed of every word or movement of my own—even the simplest.

At the time of the move to Kazán, a serf lad of about his own age was presented to each of the young Tolstoys to attend on him. Alexis, the one given to Leo Tolstoy, remained in his service all his life, and died at Yásnaya a few years ago.

1841

For five and a half years, from the autumn of 1841 to the spring of 1847, the brothers lived at Kazán, returning each summer to Yásnaya for the vacation. They all entered Kazán University. The aunt who was their guardian, and with whom they lived the greater part of the time, was a kind but not particularly clever woman. Her house was the centre of much hospitality and gaiety.

1844

Leo Tolstoy prepared to enter the faculty of Oriental Languages, in which a knowledge of Arabic and Turco-Tartar was required. He worked hard, and matriculated in May 1844 before he was sixteen, passing in French (for which he received the mark 5+; 5 being in an ordinary way the highest mark, and the + indicating exceptional distinction), German, Arabic, and Turco-Tartar very well, and in English, Logic, Mathematics and Russian Literature, well; but he did indifferently in Latin, and failed completely in History and Geography, getting the lowest mark, a 1, for each of them. Of History he says, 'I knew nothing,' and of Geography 'still less'; adding, 'I was asked to name the French seaports, but I could not name a single one.' At the end of the summer vacation he was admitted for re-examination in the subjects in which he had failed, and passed successfully.

1844-1845

The winter season when Tolstoy, as a student at the University and a young man of good position, entered Kazán society, was a particularly gay one. He attended many balls, given by the Governor of the Province, by the Maréchal de la Noblesse, and by private people, as well as many masquerades, concerts, tableaux-vivants, and private theatricals. He is still remembered by old inhabitants as having been 'present at all the balls, soirées, and aristocratic parties, a welcome guest everywhere, and always dancing, but, far from being a ladies' man, he was distinguished by a strange awkwardness and shyness.' At Carnival time in 1845 he and his brother Sergius took parts in two plays given for some charitable object. His performance was a great success.

As to the nature of Kazán society and of his surroundings there, accounts are contradictory. On the one hand, we have his own statement that (imitating his brother Sergius in this as in other matters) he became 'depraved.' Birukóf, too, speaks of 'the detestable surroundings of Tolstoy's life in Kazán,' and another writer, Zagóskin, a fellow-student of Tolstoy's at the University, says that the surroundings in which the latter moved were demoralising and must have been repellent to him. On the other hand, on seeing Zagóskin's remarks, Tolstoy (in whom there is often observable a strong spirit of contradiction) replied:

I did not feel any repulsion, but was very glad to enjoy myself in Kazán society, which was then very good. I am on the contrary thankful to fate that I passed my first youth in an environment where a young man could be young without touching problems beyond his grasp, and that I lived a life which, though idle and luxurious, was yet not evil.

The explanation of these contradictions, no doubt, is that the family circle in which Tolstoy lived was an affectionate one, and that he himself not only enjoyed his life, but formed friendships and made efforts at which in later years he looked back with satisfaction. Yet there was assuredly much in his life and in the life around him which (except when others were severe on it) he recalled with grave disapproval, a disapproval he has plainly expressed in his Confession.

To come as near as we may to the truth, we must allow for the personal equation which, in Tolstoy's case, is violent and fluctuating.

With constant amusements going on around him, it is not surprising that at the end of his first University year he failed in his examinations. The failure does not however appear to have been entirely his fault, for he tells us:

Ivanóf, Professor of Russian History, prevented me from passing to the second course (though I had not missed a single lecture and knew Russian History quite well) because he had quarrelled with my family. The same Professor also gave me the lowest mark—a 'one'—for German, though I knew the language incomparably better than any student in our division.

1845

Instead of remaining for a second year in the first course of Oriental Languages, Tolstoy preferred to leave that faculty, and in August 1845 he entered the faculty of Law. During the first months of this new course he hardly studied at all, throwing himself more than ever into the gay life of Kazán society. Before midwinter however he began for the first time, as he tells us, 'to study seriously, and I even found a certain pleasure in so doing.' Comparative Jurisprudence and Criminal Law interested him, and his attention was especially arrested by a discussion on Capital Punishment. Meyer, Professor of Civil Law, set him a task which quite absorbed him; it was the comparison of Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois with Catherine the Second's Great Nakaz. The conclusion to which he came was, that in Catherine's Nakaz one finds Montesquieu's Liberal ideas mixed with the expression of Catherine's own despotism and vanity, and that the Nakaz brought more fame to Catherine than good to Russia.

1846

He passed his examinations successfully in May 1846, and was duly admitted to the second year's course of Jurisprudence. Some time previously Tolstoy and another student had disputed which of them had the better memory, and to test this, each of them learnt by heart the reply to one examination question in History. Tolstoy's task was to learn the life of Mazeppa, and as luck would have it that was just the question he happened to draw at his examination, so that he naturally obtained a 5, the highest mark.

From the autumn of 1846 the three brothers, Sergius Demetrius and Leo, ceased to live at their aunt's, and settled in a flat of their own, consisting of five rooms.

A fellow-student, Nazáryef, has given us his impression of Tolstoy as a student. He says:

I kept clear of the Count, who from our first meeting repelled me by his assumption of coldness, his bristly hair and the piercing expression of his half-closed eyes. I had never met a young man with such a strange and, to me, incomprehensible air of importance and self-satisfaction....

At first I seldom met the Count, who in spite of his awkwardness and bashfulness had joined the small group of so-called 'aristocrats.' He hardly replied to my greetings, as if wishing to intimate that even here we were far from being equals, since he drove up with a fast trotter and I came on foot....

It so happened that Nazáryef and Tolstoy were both late for a lecture on History one day, and were incarcerated together by order of the Inspector.

One gathers that Tolstoy was in those days particularly careful of his personal appearance, his clothes indicating his aristocratic pretensions. But though externally the Tolstoy of 1846 differed greatly from the Tolstoy of forty years later, his conversation ran on much the same lines as in later life, and was uttered with the intensity of conviction and the flashes of dry humour which have since made even the most didactic of his writings so readable.

Their conversation in their place of confinement having led to some mention of Lérmontof's poem, The Demon, Tolstoy took occasion to speak ironically of verse generally, and then, noticing a volume his companion had of Karamzín's History of Russia, he

attacked History as the dullest and almost the most useless of subjects. A collection of fables and useless details, sprinkled with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names.... Who wants to know that the second marriage of John the Terrible, with Temrúk's daughter, took place on 21st August 1562; and his fourth marriage, with Anna Alexéyevna Koltórsky, in 1572? Yet they expect me to grind all this, and if I don't, the examiner gives me a 'one.'

Later on, says Nazáryef, 'the, to me, irresistible force of Tolstoy's doubts fell upon the University, and on University teaching in general. The phrase, "The Temple of Science," was constantly on his lips. Remaining perfectly serious himself, he portrayed our professors in such a comical light that, in spite of all my efforts to appear indifferent, I laughed like one possessed.... "Yet," said Tolstoy, "we both had a right to expect that we should leave this temple useful men, equipped with knowledge. But what shall we really carry away from the University?... What shall we be good for, and to whom shall we be necessary?"

Nazáryef says that in spite of the feeling half of dislike, half of perplexity, that Tolstoy evoked in him, he well remembers that he was dimly conscious of something remarkable, exceptional, and at the same time inexplicable, about him.

From the educational articles Tolstoy wrote sixteen years later, we know that he disapproved of examinations, of the restricted groove of studies marked out for the students in each faculty, and of the system which made it necessary for the professors to deliver original lectures of their own, and obliged the students to listen to those lectures and to study them, however incompetent the professors might be.

1847

The fact that his brother Sergius had finished his studies and was leaving, strengthened Tolstoy's dissatisfaction with the University; and finally, without waiting for the May examinations at which he might have qualified for the third year's course, we find him, soon after Easter 1847, applying to have his name removed from the University roll 'on account of ill-health and family affairs.' He really had been in hospital in March, but the plea of ill-health was a mere excuse.

His failure to take a degree was a source of great annoyance and disappointment to him, and it must not be supposed that he left Kazán with any idea of taking life easily or neglecting further study.

From the time he was a boy he had kept a diary of every little sin he had committed, and especially of any offence against the Seventh Commandment, in order that he might repent, and if possible refrain for the future, and his diary shows how full he was at this time of strenuous resolutions. During the last year of his life at Kazán he made close friends with a student named Dyákof (the Nehlúdof of Boyhood), and under his influence had developed

an ecstatic worship of the ideal of virtue, and the conviction that it is man's destiny continually to perfect himself. To put all mankind right and to destroy all human vices and misfortunes, appeared a matter that could well be accomplished. It seemed quite easy and simple to put oneself right, to acquire all the virtues, and to be happy.

Here are some rules he set himself at that time:

1. To fulfil what I set myself, despite all obstacles.

2. To fulfil well what I do undertake.

3. Never to refer to a book for what I have forgotten, but always to try to recall it to mind myself.

4. Always to make my mind work with its utmost power.

5. Always to read and think aloud.

6. Not to be ashamed of telling people who interrupt me, that they are hindering me: letting them first feel it, but (if they do not understand) telling them, with an apology.

Deciding to settle at Yásnaya for two years, he drew up a list of studies he intended to pursue for his own mental development, and to qualify for a University degree; and this list was, as the reader will see, appalling in its scope.

1. To study the whole course of law necessary to get my degree.

2. To study practical medicine, and to some extent its theory also.

3. To study: French, Russian, German, English, Italian, and Latin.

4. To study agriculture, theoretically and practically.

5. To study History, Geography, and Statistics.

6. To study Mathematics (the High School course).

7. To write my [University] thesis.

8. To reach the highest perfection I can in music and painting.

9. To write down rules (for my conduct).

10. To acquire some knowledge of the natural sciences, and,

11. To write essays on all the subjects I study.

Such rules and resolutions abound in Tolstoy's Diary. After failing to act up to them, he again and again gathers his energies and maps out for himself plans of life and courses of study sufficient to tax the energies of an intellectual giant.

As to his religious opinions at this time, he tells us:

I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it in childhood and all through my boyhood and youth. But before I left the University, in my second year, at the age of eighteen, I no longer believed anything I had been taught. (Confession.)

His Diary nevertheless shows that he prayed frequently and earnestly; the fact no doubt being, that though intellectually he discarded the Orthodox Russo-Greek Church, in times of trouble or distress he instinctively appealed to God for help. His opinions were wavering and immature, as he himself tells us in another passage:

The religious beliefs taught me in childhood disappeared... and as from the time I was fifteen I began to read philosophic works, my rejection of those beliefs very soon became a conscious one. From the age of sixteen I ceased going to Church and fasting of my own accord. I did not believe what had been taught me from childhood, but I believed in something. What it was I believed in, I could not at all have said. I believed in a God, or rather I did not deny God; but I could not have said what sort of God. Neither did I deny Christ and his teaching, but what his teaching consisted in I could also not have said.

Looking back on that time now, I see clearly that my faith—my only real faith, that which apart from my animal instincts gave impulse to my life—was a belief in perfecting oneself. But in what this perfecting consisted and what its object was, I could not have said. I tried to perfect myself mentally—I studied everything I could: anything life threw in my way; I tried to perfect my will, I drew up rules which I tried to follow; I perfected myself physically, cultivating my strength and agility by all sorts of exercises and accustoming myself to endurance and patience by all kinds of privations. And all this I considered to be perfecting myself. The beginning of it all was, of course, moral perfecting; but that was soon replaced by perfecting in general: by the desire to be better, not in one's own eyes or those of God, but in the eyes of other people. And very soon this effort again changed into a desire to be stronger than others: to be more famous, more important and richer than others. (Confession.)

When speaking of Tolstoy's relations with women, it should be borne in mind that incontinence for young men was then considered so natural that few of them in his position would have felt any serious qualms of conscience about such visits to houses of ill-fame as he lets us know that he began to pay at this time. His brother Dmítry however led a chaste life, and alternating with gross lapses of conduct, we find Leo noting down for his own guidance such resolutions as the following:

To regard the society of women as a necessary unpleasantness of social life, and to keep away from them as much as possible. From whom indeed do we get sensuality, effeminacy, frivolity in everything, and many other vices, if not from women? Whose fault is it, if not women's, that we lose our innate qualities of boldness, resolution, reasonableness, justice, etc.? Women are more receptive than men, therefore in virtuous ages women were better than we; but in the present depraved and vicious age they are worse than we are.

During his years at the University, Tolstoy saw much of his brother Dmítry, of whom he says:

I remember also at the University that when my elder brother Dmítry, suddenly in the passionate way natural to him devoted himself to religion and began to attend all the Church services, to fast, and to lead a pure and moral life, we all, and even our elders, unceasingly held him up to ridicule and called him, for some unknown reason, 'Noah.' I remember that Moúsin-Poúshkin (then Curator of Kazán University), when inviting us to a dance at his house, ironically remonstrated with my brother, who had declined the invitation, and used the argument that even David danced before the Ark. I sympathised with these jokes my elders made, and deduced from them the conclusion that though it is necessary to learn the catechism and go to church, one must not take such things too seriously. (Confession.)

Again we read of this brother:

His peculiarities became manifest, and are impressed on my mind from the time of our life at Kazán. Formerly in Moscow I remember that he did not fall in love, as Seryózha and I did, and was not fond of dancing or of military pageants, but studied well and strenuously.... At Kazán I, who had always imitated Seryózha, began to grow depraved.... Not only at Kazán, but even earlier, I used to take pains about my appearance. I tried to be elegant, comme il faut. There was no trace of anything of this kind in Mítenka. I think he never suffered from the usual vices of youth; he was always serious thoughtful pure and resolute, though hot-tempered, and whatever he did, he did to the best of his ability.... He wrote verses with great facility. I remember how admirably he translated Schiller's Der Jüngling am Bache, but he did not devote himself to this occupation.... He grew up associating little with others, always—except in his moments of anger—quiet and serious. He was tall, rather thin, and not very strong, with long, large hands and round shoulders. I do not know how or by what he was attracted at so early an age towards a religious life, but it began in the very first year of his University career. His religious aspirations naturally directed him to Church life, and he devoted himself to this with his usual thoroughness.

In Mítenka there must have existed that valuable characteristic which I believe my mother to have had, and which I knew in Nikólenka, but of which I was altogether devoid—complete indifference to other people's opinion about oneself. Until quite lately (in old age) I have never been able to divest myself of concern about people's opinion; but Mítenka was quite free from this. I never remember on his face that restrained smile which involuntarily appears when one is being praised. I always remember his serious quiet sad, sometimes severe, almond-shaped hazel eyes. Only in our Kazán days did we begin to pay particular attention to him, and then merely because, while Seryózha and I attached great importance to what was comme il faut—to externalities—he was careless and untidy, and we condemned him for this.

We others, especially Seryózha, kept up acquaintance with our aristocratic comrades and other young men. Mítenka on the contrary selected out of all the students a piteous-looking, poor, shabbily dressed youth, Poluboyárinof [which may be translated Half-noble]—whom a humorous fellow-student of ours called Polubezobédof [Half-dinnerless]—and consorted only with him, and with him prepared for the examinations.... We brothers, and even our aunt, looked down on Mítenka with a certain contempt for his low tastes and associates; and the same attitude was adopted by our frivolous comrades.

After their University days were over, Tolstoy saw little of his brother Demetrius; so it will be convenient here to sacrifice chronological sequence and say what more there is to tell of the latter's life and death. The material is again supplied by Tolstoy's Reminiscences.

When we divided up the family property, according to custom the estate where we lived, Yásnaya Polyána, was given to me. Seryózha, as a lover of horses and according to his wish, received Pirogóvo, where there was a stud. To Mítenka and Nikólenka were given the two other estates: to Nikólenka, Nikolsky; to Mítenka, the Kursk estate, Sherbatchóvka. I have kept a note of Mítenka's, showing how he regarded the possession of serfs. The idea that it is wrong, and that serfs ought to be liberated, was quite unknown in our circle in the 'forties. The hereditary possession of serfs seemed a necessary condition of life, and all that could be done to prevent its being an evil, was to attend not only to their material but also to their moral welfare. In this sense Mítenka wrote very seriously naïvely and sincerely. Thinking he could not do otherwise, he, a lad of twenty, when he left the University took it upon himself to direct the morality of hundreds of peasant families, and to do this (as Gógol recommended in his Letters to a Landowner) by threats of punishments and by punishments.... But, besides this duty to his serfs, there was another duty which at that time it seemed impossible not to fulfil: namely, Military or Civil service. And Mítenka decided to enter the Civil Service.

Tolstoy proceeds to tell how his brother, desiring to be useful to his country, chose legislation as his speciality, and going to Petersburg astonished the Head of the Department as well as certain aristocratic acquaintances by asking where he could find a place in which he could be useful. The friend to whom he went for advice, regarded the service of the State merely as a means of satisfying ambition, and 'such a question had probably never occurred to him before.' Eventually we find Demetrius returning home discouraged, and taking up some local work. All this, to some extent, helps us to understand Leo Tolstoy's sceptical attitude towards the institution of Government, and his strong belief that men in Government service are solely actuated by selfish motives.

Tolstoy continues:

After we had both left the University, I lost sight of him. I know he lived the same severe, abstemious life, knowing neither wine tobacco nor, above all, women, till he was twenty-six, which was very rare in those days. I know also that he associated with monks and pilgrims.... I think I was already in the Caucasus when an extraordinary change took place. He suddenly took to drinking smoking wasting money and going with women. How it happened I do not know; I did not see him at the time. I only know that his seducer was a thoroughly immoral man of very attractive appearance, the youngest son of Islényef [an uncle of the lady Leo Tolstoy subsequently married].

In this life Mítenka remained the same serious religious man he was in everything. He ransomed from the brothel a prostitute named Másha, who was the first woman he knew, and took her into his house. But this life did not last long. I believe it was less the vicious and unhealthy life he led for some months in Moscow, than his mental struggle and his qualms of conscience, that suddenly destroyed his powerful organism. He became consumptive, went to the country, was doctored in the provincial town, and took to his bed in Orél, where I saw him for the last time just after the Crimean war. He was in a dreadful state of emaciation: one could even see how his enormous hand joined on to the two bones of his lower arm; his face was all eyes, and they were still the same beautiful serious eyes, with a penetrating expression of inquiry in them. He was constantly coughing and spitting, but was loth to die, and reluctant to believe he was dying. Poor pockmarked Másha, whom he had rescued, was with him and nursed him. In my presence, at his own wish, a wonder-working icon was brought. I remember the expression of his face when he prayed to it.... He died a few days later!

Students of the didactic writings of Tolstoy's later years will notice how closely his injunctions to a man to keep to the first woman, whoever she be, with whom he has had intimate relations, correspond with the line actually followed by his brother Demetrius.

When Tolstoy left the University, however, these things were still unthought of. Let us, before returning to the events of his own life at that time, notice some books which he read between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. They included:

The Sermon on the Mount from St. Matthew's Gospel,