Reminiscences of Tolstoy
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6 This etext was created by Judith Boss, Omaha, Nebraska.
Reminiscences of Tolstoy
by His Son, Count Ilya Tolstoy
REMINISCENCES OF TOLSTOY
BY HIS SON, COUNT ILYÁ TOLSTOY
TRANSLATED BY GEORGE CALDERON
IN one of his letters to his great-aunt, Alexándra
Andréyevna Tolstoy, my father gives the following
description of his children:
The eldest [Sergéi] is fair-haired and good-looking;
there is something weak and patient in his expression, and very
gentle. His laugh is not infectious; but when he cries, I can
hardly refrain from crying, too. Every one says he is like my
eldest brother.
I am afraid to believe it. It is too good to be true. My
brother's chief characteristic was neither egotism nor self-
renunciation, but a strict mean between the two. He never
sacrificed himself for any one else; but not only always avoided
injuring others, but also interfering with them. He kept his
happiness and his sufferings entirely to himself.
Ilyá, the third, has never been ill in his life;
broad-boned, white and pink, radiant, bad at lessons. Is always
thinking about what he is told not to think about. Invents his
own games. Hot-tempered and violent, wants to fight at once; but
is also tender-hearted and very sensitive. Sensuous; fond of
eating and lying still doing nothing.
Tánya [Tatyána] is eight years old. Every one
says that she is like Sonya, and I believe them, although I am
pleased about that, too; I believe it only because it is obvious.
If she had been Adam's eldest daughter and he had had no other
children afterward, she would have passed a wretched childhood.
The greatest pleasure that she has is to look after children.
The fourth is Lyoff. Handsome, dexterous, good memory,
graceful. Any clothes fit him as if they had been made for him.
Everything that others do, he does very skilfully and well. Does
not understand much yet.
The fifth, Masha [Mary] is two years old, the one whose
birth nearly cost Sonya her life. A weak and sickly child. Body
white as milk, curly white hair; big, queer blue eyes, queer by
reason of their deep, serious expression. Very intelligent and
ugly. She will be one of the riddles; she will suffer, she will
seek and find nothing, will always be seeking what is least
attainable.
The sixth, Peter, is a giant, a huge, delightful baby in a
mob-cap, turns out his elbows, strives eagerly after something.
My wife falls into an ecstasy of agitation and emotion when she
holds him in her arms; but I am completely at a loss to
understand. I know that he has a great store of physical energy,
but whether there is any purpose for which the store is wanted I
do not know. That is why I do not care for children under two or
three; I don't understand.
This letter was written in 1872, when I was six years old.
My recollections date from about that time. I can remember a few
things before.
FAMILY LIFE IN THE COUNTRY
FROM my earliest childhood until the family moved into Moscow--
that was in
1881--all my life was spent, almost without a
break, at Yásnaya Polyána.
This is how we live. The chief personage in the house is my
mother. She settles everything. She interviews Nikolái,
the cook, and orders dinner; she sends us out for walks, makes
our shirts, is always nursing some baby at the breast; all day
long she is bustling about the house with hurried steps. One can
be naughty with her, though she is sometimes angry and punishes
us.
She knows more about everything than anybody else. She
knows that one must wash every day, that one must eat soup at
dinner, that one must talk French, learn not to crawl about on
all fours, not to put one's elbows on the table; and if she says
that one is not to go out walking because it is just going to
rain, she is sure to be right, and one must do as she says.
Papa is the cleverest man in the world. He always knows
everything. There is no being naughty with him. When he
is up in his study "working," one is not allowed to make a noise,
and nobody may go into his room. What he does when he is at
"work," none of us know. Later on, when I had learned to read, I
was told that papa was a "writer."
This was how I learned. I was very pleased with some lines
of poetry one day, and asked my mother who wrote them. She told
me they were written by Pushkin, and Pushkin was a great writer.
I was vexed at my father not being one, too. Then my mother said
that my father was also a well-known writer, and I was very glad
indeed.
At the dinner-table papa sits opposite mama and has his own
round silver spoon. When old Natália Petróvna, who
lives on the floor below with great-aunt Tatyána
Alexándrovna, pours herself out a glass of kvass, he picks
it up and drinks it right off, then says, "Oh, I'm so sorry,
Natália Petróvna; I made a mistake!" We all laugh
delightedly, and it seems odd that papa is not in the least
afraid of Natália Petróvna. When there is jelly
for pudding, papa says it is good for gluing paper boxes; we run
off to get some paper, and papa makes it into boxes. Mama is
angry, but he is not afraid of her either. We have the gayest
times imaginable with him now and then. He can ride a horse
better and run faster than anybody else, and there is no one in
the world so strong as he is.
He hardly ever punishes us, but when he looks me in the eyes
he knows everything that I think, and I am frightened. You can
tell stories to mama, but not to papa, because he will see
through you at once. So nobody ever tries.
Besides papa and mama, there was also Aunt Tatyána
Alexándrovna Yergolsky. In her room she had a big eikon
with a silver mount. We were very much afraid of this eikon,
because it was very old and black.
When I was six, I remember my father teaching the village
children. They had their lessons in "the other house,"¹
where Alexey Stepánytch, the bailiff, lived, and sometimes
on the ground floor of the house we lived in.
There were a great number of village children who used to
come. When they came, the front hall smelled of sheepskin
jackets; they were taught by papa and Seryózha and
Tánya and Uncle Kóstya all at once. Lesson-time
was very gay and lively.
The children did exactly as they pleased, sat where they
liked, ran about from place to place, and answered questions not
one by one, but all together, interrupting one another, and
helping one another to recall what they had read. If one left
out a bit, up jumped another and then another, and the story or
sum was reconstructed by the united efforts of the whole class.
What pleased my father most about his pupils was the
picturesqueness and originality of their language. He never
wanted a literal repetition of bookish expressions, and
particularly encouraged every one to speak "out of his own head."
I remember how once he stopped a boy who was running into the
next room.
"Where are you off to?" he asked.
"To uncle, to bite off a piece of chalk."²
"Cut along, cut along! It's not for us to teach them, but
for them to teach
¹ The name we gave to the stone annex.
² The instinct for lime, necessary to feed their bones,
drives Russian children to nibble pieces of chalk or the
whitewash off the wall. In this case the boy was running to one
of the grown-ups in the house, and whom he called uncle, as
Russian children call everybody uncle or aunt, to get a piece of
the chalk that he had for writing on the blackboard.
us," he said to some one when the boy was gone. Which of us
would have expressed himself like that? You see, he did not say
to "get" or to "break off," but to "bite off," which was right,
because they did literally "bite" off the chalk from the lump
with their teeth, and not break it off.
THE SERVANTS IN THE HOUSE
WHEN my father married and brought home his young and
inexperienced bride, Sófya Andréyevna, to
Yásnaya Polyána, Nikolái
Mikháilovitch Rumyántsef was already established as
cook. Before my father's marriage he had a salary of five rubles
a month; but when my mother arrived, she raised him to six, at
which rate he continued the rest of his days; that is, till
somewhere about the end of the eighties. He was succeeded in the
kitchen by his son, Semyon Nikoláyevitch, my mother's
godson, and this worthy and beloved man, companion of my childish
games, still lives with us to this day. Under my mother's
supervision he prepared my father's vegetarian diet with
affectionate zeal, and without him my father would very likely
never have lived to the ripe old age he did.
Agáfya Mikháilovna was an old woman who lived
at first in the kitchen of "the other house" and afterward on the
home farm. Tall and thin, with big, thoroughbred eyes, and long,
straight hair, like a witch, turning gray, she was rather
terrifying, but more than anything else she was queer.
Once upon a time long ago she had been housemaid to my
great-grandmother, Countess Pelagéya Nikoláyevna
Tolstoy, my father's grandmother, née Princess
Gortchakóva. She was fond of telling about her young
days. She would say:
I was very handsome. When there were gentlefolks visiting
at the big house, the countess would call me, 'Gachette
[Agáfya], femme de chambre, apportez-moi un mouchoir!'
Then I would say, 'Toute suite, Madame la Comtesse!' And
every one would be staring at me, and couldn't take their eyes
off. When I crossed over to the annex, there they were watching
to catch me on the way. Many a time have I tricked them--ran
round the other way and jumped over the ditch. I never liked
that sort of thing any time. A maid I was, a maid I am.
After my grandmother's death, Agáfya
Mikháilovna was sent on to the home farm for some reason
or other, and minded the sheep. She got so fond of sheep that
all her days after she never would touch mutton.
After the sheep, she had an affection for dogs, and that is
the only period of her life that I remember her in.
There was nothing in the world she cared about but dogs.
She lived with them in horrible dirt and smells, and gave up her
whole mind and soul to them. We always had setters, harriers,
and borzois, and the whole kennel, often very numerous,
was under Agáfya Mikháilovna's management, with
some boy or other to help her, usually one as clumsy and stupid
as could be found.
There are many interesting recollections bound up with the
memory of this intelligent and original woman. Most of them are
associated in my mind with my father's stories about her. He
could always catch and unravel any interesting psychological
trait, and these traits, which he would mention incidentally,
stuck firmly in my mind. He used to tell, for instance, how
Agáfya Mikháilovna complained to him of
sleeplessness.
"Ever since I can remember her, she has suffered from 'a
birch-tree growing inside me from my belly up; it presses against
my chest, and prevents my breathing.'
"She complains of her sleeplessness and the birch-tree and
says: 'There I lay all alone and all quiet, only the clock
ticking on the wall: "Who are you? What are you? Who are you?
What are you?" And I began to think: "Who am I? What am I?" and
so I spent the whole night thinking about it.'
"Why, imagine this is Socrates! 'Know thyself,'" said my
father, telling the story with great enthusiasm.
In the summer-time my mother's brother, Styópa
(Stephen Behrs), who was studying at the time in the school of
jurisprudence, used to come and stay with us. In the autumn he
used to go wolf-hunting with my father and us, with the
borzois, and Agáfya Mikháilovna loved him
for that.
Styópa's examination was in the spring.
Agáfya Mikháilovna knew about it and anxiously
waited for the news of whether he had got through.
Once she put up a candle before the eikon and prayed that
Styópa might pass. But at that moment she remembered that
her borzois had got out and had not come back to the
kennels again.
"Saints in heaven! they'll get into some place and worry the
cattle and do a mischief!" she cried. "'Lord, let my candle burn
for the dogs to come back quick, and I'll buy another for Stepan
Andréyevitch.' No sooner had I said this to myself than I
heard the dogs in the porch rattling their collars. Thank God!
they were back. That's what prayer can do."
Another favorite of Agáfya Mikháilovna was a
young man, Mísha Stakhóvitch, who often stayed with
us.
"See what you have been and done to me, little Countess!"
she said reproachfully to my sister Tánya: "you've
introduced me to Mikhail Alexandrovitch, and I've fallen in love
with him in my old age, like a wicked woman!"
On the fifth of February, her name-day, Agáfya
Mikháilovna received a telegram of congratulation from
Stakhóvitch.
When my father heard of it, he said jokingly to
Agáfya Mikháilovna:
"Aren't you ashamed that a man had to trudge two miles
through the frost at night all for the sake of your telegram?"
"Trudge, trudge? Angels bore him on their wings. Trudge,
indeed! You get three telegrams from an outlandish Jew woman,"
she growled, "and telegrams every day about your Golokhvotika.
Never a trudge then; but I get name-day greetings, and it's
trudge!"
And one could not but acknowledge that she was right. This
telegram, the only one in the whole year that was addressed to
the kennels, by the pleasure it gave Agáfya
Mikháilovna was far more important of course than this
news or the about a ball given in Moscow in honor of a Jewish
banker's daughter, or about Olga Andréyevna
Golokvástovy's arrival at Yásnaya.
Agáfya Mikháilovna died at the beginning of
the nineties. There were no more hounds or sporting dogs at
Yásnaya then, but till the end of her days she gave
shelter to a motley collection of mongrels, and tended and fed
them.
THE HOME OF THE TOLSTOYS
I CAN remember the house at Yásnaya Polyána in the
condition it was in the first years after my father's marriage.
It was one of the two-storied wings of the old mansion-house
of the Princes Volkónsky, which my father had sold for
pulling down when he was still a bachelor.
From what my father has told me, I know that the house in
which he was born and spent his youth was a three-storied
building with thirty-six rooms. On the spot where it stood,
between the two wings, the remains of the old stone foundation
are still visible in the form of trenches filled with rubble, and
the site is covered with big sixty-year-old trees that my father
himself planted.
When any one asked my father where he was born, he used to
point to a tall larch which grew on the site of the old
foundations.
"Up there where the top of that larch waves," he used to
say; "that's where my mother's room was, where I was born on a
leather sofa."
My father seldom spoke of his mother, but when he did, it
was delightful to hear him, because the mention of her awoke an
unusual strain of gentleness and tenderness in him. There was
such a ring of respectful affection, so much reverence for her
memory, in his words, that we all looked on her as a sort of
saint.
My father remembered his father well, because he was already
nine years old when he died. He loved him, too, and always spoke
of him reverently; but one always felt that his mother's memory,
although he had never known her, was dearer to him, and his love
for her far greater than for his father.
Even to this day I do not exactly know the story of the sale
of the old house. My father never liked talking about it, and
for that reason I could never make up my mind to ask him the
details of the transaction. I only know that the house was sold
for five thousand paper rubles¹ by one of his relatives, who
had charge of his affairs by power of attorney when he was in the
Caucasus.
¹About $3000.
It was said to have been done in order to pay off my father's
gambling debts. That was quite true.
My father himself told me that at one time he was a great
card-player, that he lost large sums of money, and that his
financial affairs were considerably embarrassed.
The only thing about which I am in doubt is whether it was
with my father's knowledge or by his directions that the house
was sold, or whether the relative in question did not exceed his
instructions and decide on the sale of his own initiative.
My father cherished his parents' memory to such an extent,
and had such a warm affection for everything relating to his own
childhood, that it is hard to believe that he would have raised
his hand against the house in which he had been born and brought
up and in which his mother had spent her whole life.
Knowing my father as I do, I think it is highly possible
that he wrote to his relative from the Caucasus, "Sell
something," not in the least expecting that he would sell the
house, and that he afterward took the blame for it on himself.
Is that not the reason why he was always so unwilling to talk
about it?
In 1871, when I was five years old, the zala¹
and study were built on the house.
The walls of the zala were hung with old portraits of
ancestors. They were rather alarming, and I was afraid of them
at first; but we got used to them after a time, and I grew fond
of one of them, of my great-grandfather, Ilyá
Andréyevitch Tolstoy, because I was told that I was like
him.
Beside him hung the portrait of another great-grandfather,
Prince Nikolái Sergéyevitch Volkónsky, my
grandmother's father, with thick, black eyebrows, a gray wig, and
a red kaftan.²
This Volkónsky built all the buildings of
Yásnaya Polyána. He was a model squire,
intelligent and proud, and enjoyed the great respect of all the
neighborhood.
On the ground floor, under the drawing-room, next to the
entrance-hall, my father built his study. He had a semi-circular
niche made in the wall, and stood a marble bust of his favorite
dead brother Nikolái in it. This bust was made abroad
from a death-mask, and my father told us that it was very like,
because it was done by a good sculptor, according to his own
directions.
He had a kind and rather plaintive face. The hair was
brushed smooth like a child's, with the parting on one side. He
had no beard or mustache, and his head was white and very, very
clean. My father's study was divided in two by a partition of
big bookshelves, containing a multitude of all sorts of books.
In order to support them, the shelves were connected by big
wooden beams, and between them was a thin birch-wood door, behind
which stood my father's writing-table and his old-fashioned
semicircular arm-chair.
There are portraits of Dickens and Schopenhauer and
Fet³ as a young man on the walls, too, and the well-known
group of writers of the Sovreménnik&sup4; circle in 1856,
with Turgénieff, Ostróvsky, Gontcharóf,
Grigoróvitch, Druzhínin, and my father, quite young
still, without a beard, and in uniform.
My father used to come out of his bedroom of a morning--it
was in a corner on the top floor--in his dressing-gown, with his
beard uncombed and tumbled together, and go down to dress.
Soon after he would issue from his study fresh and vigorous,
in a gray smock-frock, and would go up into the zala for
breakfast. That was our déjeuner.
When there was nobody staying in the house, he would not
stop long in the drawing-room, but would take his tumbler of tea
and carry it off to his study with him.
But if there were friends and guests
¹The zala is the chief room of a house,
corresponding to the English drawing-room, but on a grand scale.
The gostinaya--literally guest-room, usually translated as
drawing-room--is a place for more intimate receptions. At
Yásnaya Polyána meals were taken in the
zala, but this is not the general Russian custom, houses
being provided also with a stolóvaya, or dining-
room.
²Kaftan, a long coat of various cuts, including
military and naval frock-coat, and the long gown worn by
coachmen.
³Afanásyi Shénshin, the poet, who adopted
his mother's name, Fet, for a time, owing to official
difficulties about his birth-certificate. An intimate friend of
Tolstoy's.
&sup4;The "Sovreménnik," or "Contemporary Review,"
edited by the poet Mekrasof, was the rallying-place for the "men
of the forties," the new school of realists. Ostróvsky is
the dramatist; Gontcharóf the novelist, author of
"Oblómof"; Grigoróvitch wrote tales about peasant
life, and was the discoverer of Tchékhof's talent as a
serious writer.
with us, he would get into conversation, become interested, and
could not tear himself away.
At last he would go off to his work, and we would disperse,
in winter to the different school-rooms, in summer to the
croquet-lawn or somewhere about the garden. My mother would
settle down in the drawing-room to make some garment for the
babies, or to copy out something she had not finished overnight;
and till three or four in the afternoon silence would reign in
the house.
Then my father would come out of his study and go off for
his afternoon's exercise. Sometimes he would take a dog and a
gun, sometimes ride, and sometimes merely go for a walk to the
imperial wood.
At five the big bell that hung on the broken bough of an old
elm-tree in front of the house would ring and we would all run to
wash our hands and collect for dinner.
He was very hungry, and ate voraciously of whatever turned
up. My mother would try to stop him, would tell him not to waste
all his appetite on kasha, because there were chops and
vegetables to follow. "You'll have a bad liver again," she would
say; but he would pay no attention to her, and would ask for more
and more, until his hunger was completely satisfied. Then he
would tell us all about his walk, where he put up a covey of
black game, what new paths he discovered in the imperial wood
beyond Kudeyarof Well, or, if he rode, how the young horse he was
breaking in began to understand the reins and the pressure of the
leg. All this he would relate in the most vivid and entertaining
way, so that the time passed gaily and animatedly.
After dinner he would go back to his room to read, and at
eight we had tea, and the best hours of the day began--the
evening hours, when everybody gathered in the zala. The
grown-ups talked or read aloud or played the piano, and we either
listened to them or had some jolly game of our own, and in
anxious fear awaited the moment when the English
grandfather-clock on the landing would give a click and a buzz,
and slowly and clearly ring out ten.
Perhaps mama would not notice? She was in the sitting-room,
making a copy.
"Come, children, bedtime! Say good night," she would call.
"In a minute, Mama; just five minutes."
"Run along; it's high time; or there will be no getting you
up in the morning to do your lessons."
We would say a lingering good night, on the lookout for any
chance for delay, and at last would go down-stairs through the
arches, annoyed at the thought that we were children still and
had to go to bed while the grown-ups could stay up as long as
ever they liked.
A JOURNEY TO THE STEPPES
WHEN I was still a child and had not yet read "War and Peace," I
was told that Natásha Rostóf was Aunt
Tánya. When my father was asked whether that was true,
and whether Dmitry Rostóf was such and such a
person and Levin such and such another, he never gave a
definite answer, and one could not but feel that he disliked such
questions and was rather offended by them.
In those remote days about which I am talking, my father was
very keen about the management of his estate, and devoted a lot
of energy to it. I can remember his planting the huge apple
orchard at Yásnaya and several hundred acres of birch and
pine forest, and at the beginning of the seventies, for a number
of years, he was interested in buying up land cheap in the
province of Samara, and breeding droves of steppe horses and
flocks of sheep.
I still have pretty clear, though rather fragmentary and
inconsequent, recollections of our three summer excursions to the
steppes of Samara.
My father had already been there before his marriage in
1862, and afterward by the advice of Dr. Zakháryin, who
attended him. He took the kumiss-cure in 1871 and 1872, and at
last, in 1873, the whole family went there.
At that time my father had bought several hundred acres of
cheap Bashkir lands in the district of Buzulúk, and we
went to stay on our new property at a khutor, or farm.
In Samara we lived on the farm in a tumble-down wooden
house, and beside us, in the steppe, were erected two felt
kibitkas, or Tatar frame tents, in which [illustration
omitted] [page intentionally blank]
our Bashkir, Muhammed
Shah Romanytch, lived with his wives.
Morning and evening they used to tie the mares up outside
the kibitkas, where they were milked by veiled women, who
then hid themselves from the sight of the men behind a brilliant
chintz curtain, and made the kumiss.
The kumiss was bitter and very nasty, but my father and my
uncle Stephen Behrs were very fond of it, and drank it in large
quantities.
When we boys began to get big, we had at first a German
tutor for two or three years, Fyódor Fyódorovitch
Kaufmann.
I cannot say that we were particularly fond of him. He was
rather rough, and even we children were struck by his German
stupidity. His redeeming feature was that he was a devoted
sportsman. Every morning he used to jerk the blankets off us and
shout, "Auf, Kinder! auf!" and during the daytime plagued us with
German calligraphy.
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