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 | Reminiscences of Tolstoy |  |
Reminiscences of Tolstoy
By his son, Count Ilyá Tolstoy
Translated by George Calderon
In the summer, when both families were together at Yásnaya, our own and the Kuzmínsky's, when both the house and the annex were full of the family and their guests, we used our letter-box.
It originated long before, when I was still small and had only just learned to write, and it continued with intervals till the middle of the eighties.
It hung on the landing at the top of the stairs beside the grandfather's clock; and every one dropped his compositions into it, the verses, articles, or stories that he had written on topical subjects in the course of the week.
On Sundays we would all collect at the round table in the zala, the box would be solemnly opened, and one of the grown-ups, often my father himself, would read the contents aloud.
All the papers were unsigned, and it was a point of honor not to peep at the handwriting; but, despite this, we almost always guessed the author, either by the style, by his self-consciousness, or else by the strained indifference of his expression.
When I was a boy, and for the first time wrote a set of French verses for the letter-box, I was so shy when they were read that I hid under the table, and sat there the whole evening until I was pulled out by force.
For a long time after, I wrote no more, and was always fonder of hearing other people's compositions read than my own.
All the events of our life at Yásnaya Polyána found their echo in one way or another in the letter-box, and no one was spared, not even the grown-ups.
All our secrets, all our love-affairs, all the incidents of our complicated life were revealed in the letter-box, and both household and visitors were good-humoredly made fun of.
Unfortunately, much of the correspondence has been lost, but bits of it have been preserved by some of us in copies or in memory. I cannot recall everything interesting that there was in it, but here are a few of the more interesting things from the period of the eighties.
The Letter Box
My Aunt Tánya, when she was in a bad temper because the coffee-pot had been spilt or because she had been beaten at croquet, was in the habit of sending every one to the devil. My father wrote the following story, "Susóitchik," about it.
Sergéi Nikoláyevitch Tolstoy
I can remember my Uncle Seryózha (Sergéi) from my earliest childhood. He lived at Pirogóvo, twenty miles from Yásnaya, and visited us often.
As a young man he was very handsome. He had the same features as my father, but he was slenderer and more aristocratic-looking. He had the same oval face, the same nose, the same intelligent gray eyes, and the same thick, overhanging eyebrows. The only difference between his face and my father's was defined by the fact that in those distant days, when my father cared for his personal appearance, he was always worrying about his ugliness, while Uncle Seryózha was considered, and really was, a very handsome man.
This is what my father says about Uncle Seryózha in his fragmentary reminiscences:
Uncle Seryózha never treated children affectionately; on the contrary, he seemed to put up with us rather than to like us. But we always treated him with particular reverence. The result, as I can see now, partly of his aristocratic appearance, but chiefly because of the fact that he called my father "Lyovótchka" and treated him just as my father treated us.
He was not only not in the least afraid of him, but was always teasing him, and argued with him like an elder person with a younger. We were quite alive to this.
Of course every one knew that there were no faster dogs in the world than our black-and-white Darling and her daughter Wizard. Not a hare could get away from them. But Uncle Seryózha said that the gray hares about us were sluggish creatures, not at all the same thing as steppe hares, and neither Darling nor Wizard would get near a steppe hare.
We listened with open mouths, and did not know which to believe, papa or Uncle Seryózha.
Uncle Seryózha went out coursing with us one day. A number of gray hares were run down, not one, getting away; Uncle Seryózha expressed no surprise, but still maintained that the only reason was because they were a poor lot of hares. We could not tell whether he was right or wrong.
Perhaps, after all, he was right, for he was more of a sportsman than papa and had run down ever so many wolves, while we had never known papa run any wolves down.
Afterward papa kept dogs only because there was Agáfya Mikháilovna to be thought of, and Uncle Seryózha gave up sport because it was impossible to keep dogs.
"Since the emancipation of the peasants," he said, "sport is out of the question; there are no huntsmen to be had, and the peasants turn out with sticks and drive the sportsmen off the fields. What is there left to do nowadays? Country life has become impossible."
With all his good breeding and sincerity, Uncle Seryózha never concealed any characteristic but one; with the utmost shyness he concealed the tenderness of his affections, and if it ever forced itself into the light, it was only in exceptional circumstances and that against his will.
He displayed with peculiar clearness a family characteristic which was partly shared by my father, namely, an extraordinary restraint in the expression of affection, which was often concealed under the mask of indifference and sometimes even of unexpected harshness. In the matter of wit and sarcasm, on the other hand, he was strikingly original.
At one period he spent several winters in succession with his family in Moscow. One time, after a historic concert given by Anton Rubinstein, at which Uncle Seryózha and his daughter had been, he came to take tea with us in Weavers' Row.[3]
My father asked him how he had liked the concert.
"Do you remember Himbut, Lyovótchka? Lieutenant Himbut, who was forester near Yásnaya? I once asked him what was the happiest moment of his life. Do you know what he answered?
"'When I was in the cadet corps,' he said, 'they used to take down my breeches now and again and lay me across a bench and flog me. They flogged and they
He did not always spare my father.
Once when I was out shooting with a setter near Pirogóvo, I drove in to Uncle Seryózha's to stop the night.
I do not remember apropos of what, but Uncle Seryózha averred that Lyovótchka was proud. He said:
"He is always preaching humility and non-resistance, but he is proud himself.
"Náshenka's[4] sister had a footman called Forna. When he got drunk, he used to get under the staircase, tuck in his legs, and lie down. One day they came and told him that the countess was calling him. 'She can come and find me if she wants me,' he answered.
"Lyovótchka is just the same. When Dolgóruky sent his chief secretary Istómin to ask him to come and have a talk with him about Syntáyef, the sectarian, do you know what he answered?
"'Let him come here, if he wants me.' Isn't that just the same as Forna?
"No, Lyovótchka is very proud. Nothing would induce him to go, and he was quite right; but it's no good talking of humility."
During the last years of Sergéi Nikoláyevitch's life my father was particularly friendly and affectionate with him, and delighted in sharing his thoughts with him.
A. A. Fet in his reminiscences describes the character of all the three Tolstoy brothers with extraordinary perspicacity:
In the winter of 1901-02 my father was ill in the Crimea, and for a long time lay between life and death. Uncle Seryózha, who felt himself getting weaker, could not bring himself to leave Pirogóvo, and in his own home followed anxiously the course of my father's illness by the letters which several members of our family wrote him, and by the bulletins in the newspapers.
When my father began to improve, I went back home, and on the way from the Crimea went to Pirogóvo, in order to tell Uncle Seryózha personally about the course of the illness and about the present condition of my father's health. I remember how joyfully and gratefully he welcomed me.
"How glad I am that you came! Now tell me all about it. Who is with him? All of them? And who nurses him most? Do you go on duty in turn? And at night, too? He can't get out of bed. Ah, that's the worst thing of all!
"It will be my turn to die soon; a year sooner or later, what does it matter? But to lie helpless, a burden to every one, to have others doing everything for you, lifting you and helping you to sit up, that's what's so awful.
"And how does he endure it? Got used to it, you say? No; I cannot imagine having Vera to change my linen and wash me. Of course she would say that it's nothing to her, but for me it would be awful.
"And tell me, is he afraid to die? Does he say not? Very likely; he's a strong man, he may be able to conquer the fear of it. Yes, yes, perhaps he's not afraid; but still—
"You say he struggles with the feeling? Why, of course; what else can one do?
"I wanted to go and be with him; but I thought, how can I? I shall crack up myself, and then there will be two invalids instead of one.
"Yes, you have told me a great deal; every detail is interesting. It is not death that's so terrible, it's illness, helplessness
Uncle Seryózha died in 1904 of cancer in the face. This is what my aunt, María Nikoláyevna,[5] the nun, told me about his death. Almost to the last day he was on his legs, and would not let any one nurse him. He was in full possession of his faculties and consciously prepared for death.
Besides his own family, the aged María Mikháilovna and her daughters, his sister, María Nikoláyevna, who told me the story, was with him, too, and from hour to hour they expected the arrival of my father, for whom they had sent a messenger to Yásnaya. They were all troubled with the difficult question whether the dying man would want to receive the holy communion before he died.
Knowing Sergéi Nikoláyevitch's disbelief in the religion of the church, no one dared to mention the subject to him, and the unhappy María Mikháilovna hovered round his room, wringing her hands and praying.
They awaited my father's arrival impatiently, but were secretly afraid of his influence on his brother, and hoped against hope that Sergéi Nikoláyevitch would send for the priest before his arrival.
"Imagine our surprise and delight," said María Tolstoy, "when Lyovótchka came out of his room and told María Mikháilovna that Seryózha wanted a priest sent for. I do not know what they had been talking about, but when Seryózha said that he wished to take the communion, Lyovótchka answered that he was quite right, and at once came and told us what he wanted."
My father stayed about a week at Pirogóvo, and left two days before my uncle died.
When he received a telegram to say he was worse, he drove over again, but arrived too late; he was no longer living. He carried his body out from the house with his own hands, and himself bore it to the churchyard.
When he got back to Yásnaya he spoke with touching affection of his parting with this "inscrutable and beloved" brother, who was so strange and remote from him, but at the same time so near and so akin.
That is to say, his eyes went always on the straightest road to attain satisfaction for himself.
Tolstoy's sister. She became a nun after her husband's death and the marriage of her three daughters.
Fet, Strakhof, Gay
"What's this saber doing here?" asked a young guardsman, Lieutenant Afanásyi Afanásyevitch Fet, of the footman one day as he entered the hall of Iván Sergéyevitch Turgénieff's flat in St. Petersburg in the middle of the fifties.
"It is Count Tolstoy's saber; he is asleep in the drawing-room. And Iván Sergéyevitch is in his study having breakfast," replied Zalchar.
"During the hour I spent with Turgénieff," says Fet, in his reminiscences, "we talked in low voices, for fear of waking the count, who was asleep on the other side of the door."
"He's like that all the time," said Turgénieff, smiling; "ever since he got back from his battery at Sebastopol,[6] and came to stay here, he has been going the pace. Orgies, Gipsies, and gambling all night long, and then sleeps like a dead man till two o'clock in the afternoon. I did my best to stop him, but have given it up as a bad job.
"It was in this visit to St. Petersburg that I and Tolstoy became acquainted, but the acquaintance was of a purely formal character, as I had not yet seen a line of his writings, and had never heard of his name in literature, except that Turgénieff mentioned his 'Stories of Childhood.'"
Soon after this my father came to know Fet intimately, and they struck up a firm and lasting friendship, and established a correspondence which lasted almost till Fet's death.
It was only during the last years of Fet's life, when my father was entirely absorbed in his new ideas, which were so at variance with Afanásyi Afanásyevitch's whole philosophy of life, that they became estranged and met more rarely.
It was at Fet's, at Stepánovka, that my father and Turgénieff quarreled.
Before the railway was made, when people still had to drive, Fet, on his way into Moscow, always used to turn in at Yásnaya Polyána to see my father, and these visits became an established custom. Afterward, when the railway was made and my father was already married, Afanásyi Afanásyevitch still never passed our house without coming in, and if he did,
Some of my father's letters of the sixties are curious in this respect.
For instance, in 1860, he wrote a long dissertation on Turgénieff's novel "On the Eve," which had just come out, and at the end added a postscript:
In another letter there is a postscript:
But it was not only community of interests that brought my father and Afanásyi Afanásyevitch together. The reason of their intimacy lay in the fact that, as my father expressed it, they "thought alike with their heart's mind."
I also remember Nikolái Nikoláyevitch Strakhof's visits. He was a remarkably quiet and modest man. He appeared at Yásnaya Polyána in the beginning of the seventies, and from that time on came and stayed with us almost every summer till he died.
He had big, gray eyes, wide open, as if in astonishment; a long beard with a touch of gray in it; and when he spoke, at the end of every sentence he gave a shy laugh.
When he addressed my father, he always said "Lef Nikoláyevitch" instead of Lyoff Nikolaievich, like other people.
He always stayed down-stairs in my father's study, and spent his whole day there reading or writing, with a thick cigarette, which he rolled himself, in his mouth.
Strakhof and my father came together originally on a purely business footing. When the first part of my father's "Alphabet and Reading-Book" was printed, Strakhof had charge of the proof-reading. This led to a correspondence between him and my father, of a business character at first, later developing into a philosophical and friendly one. While he was writing "Anna Karénina," my father set great store by his opinion and valued his critical instinct very highly.
In 1876, apropos of "Anna Karénina" this time, my father wrote:
But it was not only his critical work that drew my father to Strakhof. He disliked critics on the whole and used to say that the only people who took to criticism were those who had no creative faculty of their own. "The stupid ones judge the clever ones," he said of professional critics. What he valued most in Strakhof was the profound and penetrating thinker. He was a "real friend" of my father's,—my father himself so described him,—and I recall his memory with deep affection and respect.
At last I have come to the memory of the man who was nearer in spirit to my father than any other human being, namely, Nikolái Nikoláyevitch Gay. Grandfather Gay, as we called him, made my father's acquaintance in 1882. While living on his farm in the Province of Tchernigoff, he chanced to read my father's pamphlet "On the Census," and finding a solution in it of the very questions which were troubling him at the time, without delay he started out and hurried into Moscow. I remember his first arrival, and I have always retained the impression that from the first words they exchanged he and my father understood each other, and found themselves speaking the same language.
Just like my father, Gay was at this time passing through a great spiritual crisis; and traveling almost the same road as my father in his search after truth, he had arrived at the study of the Gospel
Turgénieff
I do not mean to recount all the misunderstandings which existed between my father and Turgénieff, which ended in a complete breach between them in 1861. The actual external facts of that story are common property, and there is no need to repeat them.[7] According to general opinion, the quarrel between the two greatest writers of the day arose out of their literary rivalry.
It is my intention to show cause against this generally received opinion, and before I come to Turgénieff's visits to Yásnaya Polyána, I want to make as clear as I can the real reason of the perpetual discords between these two good-hearted people, who had a cordial affection for each other— discords which led in the end to an out-and-out quarrel and the exchange of mutual defiance.
As far as I know, my father never had any serious difference with any other human being during the whole course of his existence. And Turgénieff, in a letter to my father in 1865, wrote, "You are the only man with whom I have ever had misunderstandings."
Whenever my father related his quarrel with Iván Sergéyevitch, he took all the blame on himself. Turgénieff, immediately after the quarrel, wrote a letter apologizing to my father, and never sought to justify his own part in it.
Why was it that, as Turgénieff himself put it, his "constellation" and my father's "moved in the ether with unquestioned enmity"?
This is what my sister Tatyána wrote on the subject in her article "Turgénieff," published in the supplement to the "Novoye Vrémya," February 2, 1908:
"When this young wine has done fermenting," he wrote to Druzhénin in 1856, "the result will be a liquor worthy of the gods." In 1857 he wrote to Polónsky, "This man will go far, and leave deep traces behind him."
Nevertheless, somehow these two men never could "hit it off" together. When one reads Turgénieff's letters to my father, one sees that from the very beginning of their acquaintance misunderstandings were always arising, which they perpetually endeavored to smooth down or to forget, but which arose again after a time, sometimes in another form, necessitating new explanations and reconciliations.
In 1856 Turgénieff wrote to my father:
The following year he wrote a letter to my father which, it seems to me, is a key to the understanding of Turgénieff's attitude toward him:
It seems to me that Turgénieff, as an artist, saw nothing in my father beyond his great literary talent, and was unwilling to allow him the right to be anything besides an artist and a writer. Any other line of activity on my father's part offended Turgénieff, as it were, and he was angry with my father because he did not follow his advice. He was much older than my father,[8] he did not hesitate to rank his own talent lower than my father's, and demanded only one thing of him, that he should devote all the energies of his life to his literary work. And, lo and behold! my father would have nothing to do with his magnanimity and humility, would not listen to his advice, but insisted on going the road which his own tastes and nature pointed out to him. Turgénieff's tastes and character were diametrically opposed to my father's. While opposition always inspired my father and lent him strength, it had just the opposite effect on Turgénieff.
Being wholly in agreement with my sister's views, I will merely supplement them with the words uttered by his brother, Nikolái Nikoláyevitch, who said that "Turgénieff cannot reconcile himself to the idea that Lyovótchka is growing up and freeing himself from his tutelage."
As a matter of fact, when Turgénieff was already a famous writer, no one had ever heard of Tolstoy, and, as Fet expressed it, there was only "something said about his stories from 'Childhood.'"
I can imagine with what secret veneration a young writer, just beginning, must have regarded Turgénieff at that time, and all the more because Iván Sergéyevitch was a great friend of my father's elder and beloved brother Nikolái.
I do not like to assert it positively, but it seems to me that just as Turgénieff was unwilling to confine himself to "merely
Turgénieff himself said that when they first came to know each other my father dogged his heels "like a woman in love," and at one time he used to avoid him, because he was afraid of his spirit of opposition.
My father was perhaps irritated by the slightly patronizing tone which Turgénieff adopted from the very outset of their acquaintance; and Turgénieff was irritated by my father's "crankiness," which distracted him from "his proper métier, literature."
In 1870, before the date of the quarrel, Turgénieff wrote to Fet:
Turgénieff was just the same about my father's "Confession," which he read not long before his death. Having promised to read it,
In a letter to D. V. Grigórevitch he called the book, which was based, in his opinion, on false premises,
It is evident that even then Turgénieff did not understand what a mastery my father's new philosophy of life had obtained over him, and he was inclined to attribute his enthusiasm along with the rest to the same perpetual "crankinesses" and "somersaults" to which he had formerly attributed his interest in school-teaching, agriculture, the publication of a paper, and so forth.
IVÁN SERGÉYEVITCH three times visited Yásnaya Polyána within my memory, in: August and September, 1878, and the third and last time at the beginning of May, 1880. I can remember all these visits, although it is quite possible that some details have escaped me.
I remember that when we expected Turgénieff on his first visit, it was a great occasion, and the most anxious and excited of all the household about it was my mother. She told us that my father had quarreled with Turgénieff and had once challenged him to a duel, and that he was now coming at my father's invitation to effect a reconciliation.
Turgénieff spent all the time sitting with my father, who during his visit put aside even his work, and once in the middle of the day my mother collected us all at a quite unusual hour in the drawing-room, where Iván Sergéyevitch read us his story of "The Dog."
I can remember his tall, stalwart figure, his gray, silky, yellowish hair, his soft tread, rather waddling walk, and his piping voice, quite out of keeping with his majestic exterior. He had a chuckling kind of laugh, like a child's, and when he laughed his voice was more piping than ever.
In the evening, after dinner, we all gathered in the zala. At that time Uncle Seryózha, Prince Leoníd Dmítryevitch Urúsof, Vice-Governor of the Province of Tula; Uncle Sasha Behrs and his young wife, the handsome Georgian Patty; and the whole family of the Kuzmínskys, were staying at Yásnaya.
Aunt Tánya was asked to sing. We listened with beating hearts, and waited to hear what Turgénieff, the famous connoisseur, would say about her singing. Of course he praised it, sincerely, I think. After the singing a quadrille was got up. All of a sudden, in the middle of the quadrille, Iván Sergéyevitch, who was sitting at one side looking on, got up and took one of the ladies by the hand, and, putting his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, danced a cancan according to the latest rules of Parisian art. Every
After tea the "grown-ups" started some conversation, and a warm dispute arose among them. It was Prince Urúsof who disputed most warmly, and "went for" Turgénieff.
Of Turgénieff's third visit I remember the woodcock shooting. This was on the second or third of May, 1880.
We all went out together beyond the Voronka, my father, my mother and all the children. My father gave Turgénieff the best place and posted himself one hundred and fifty paces away at the other end of the same glade.
My mother stood by Turgénieff, and we children lighted a bonfire not far off.
My father fired several shots and brought down two birds; Iván Sergéyevitch had no luck, and was envying my father's good fortune all the time. At last, when it was beginning to get dark, a woodcock flew over Turgénieff, and he shot it.
"Killed it?" called out my father.
"Fell like a stone; send your dog to pick him up," answered Iván Sergéyevitch.
My father sent us with the dog, Turgénieff showed us where to look for the bird; but search as we might, and the dog, too, there was no woodcock to be found. At last Turgénieff came to help, and my father came; there was no woodcock there.
"Perhaps you only winged it; it may have got away along the ground," said my father, puzzled. "It is impossible that the dog shouldn't find it; he couldn't miss a bird that was killed."
"I tell you I saw it with my own eyes, Lyoff Nikolaievich; it fell like a stone. I didn't wound it; I killed it outright. I can tell the difference."
"Then why can't the dog find it? It's impossible; there's something wrong."
"I don't know anything about that," insisted Turgénieff. "You may take it from me I'm not lying; it fell like a stone where I tell you."
There was no finding the woodcock, and the incident left an unpleasant flavor, as if one or the other of them was in the wrong. Either Turgénieff was bragging when he said that he shot it dead, or my father, in maintaining that the dog could not fail to find a bird that had been killed.
And this must needs happen just when they were both so anxious to avoid every sort of misunderstanding! That was the very reason why they had carefully fought shy of all serious conversation, and spent all their time merely amusing themselves.
When my father said good night to us that night, he whispered to us that we were to get up early and go back to the place to have a good hunt for the bird.
And what was the result? The woodcock, in falling, had caught in the fork of a branch, right at the top of an aspen-tree, and it was all we could do to knock it out from there.
When we brought it home in triumph, it was something of an "occasion," and my father and Turgénieff were far more delighted than we were. It turned out that they were both in the right, and everything ended to their mutual satisfaction.
Iván Sergéyevitch slept down-stairs in my father's study. When the party broke up for the night, I used to see him to his room, and while he was undressing I sat on his bed and talked sport with him.
He asked me if I could shoot. I said yes, but that I didn't care to go out shooting because I had nothing but a rotten old one-barreled gun.
"I'll give you a gun," he said. "I've got two in Paris, and I have no earthly need for both. It's not an expensive gun, but it's a good one. Next time I come to Russia I'll bring it with me."
I was quite taken aback and thanked him heartily. I was tremendously delighted at the idea that I was to have a real central-fire gun.
Unfortunately, Turgénieff never came to Russia again. I tried afterward to buy the gun he had spoken of from his legatees not in the quality of a central-fire gun, but as Turgénieff's gun; but I did not succeed.
That is all that I can remember about this delightful, naïvely cordial man, with the childlike eyes and the childlike laugh, and in the picture my mind preserves of him the memory of his grandeur melts into the charm of his good nature and simplicity.
In 1883 my father received from Iván Sergéyevitch his last farewell letter, written in pencil on his death-bed, and I remember with what emotion he read it.
Apropos of this letter of Turgénieff's, I should like to say that my father was sincerely annoyed, when he heard applied to himself the epithet "great writer of the land of Russia," which was taken from this letter.
He always hated clichés, and he regarded this one as quite absurd.
"Why not 'writer of the land'? I never heard before that a man could be the writer of a land. People get attached to some nonsensical expression, and go on repeating it in season and out of season."
I have given extracts above from Turgénieff's letters, which show the invariable consistency with which he lauded my father's literary talents. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same of my father's attitude toward Turgénieff.
In this, too, the want of dispassionateness in his nature revealed itself. Personal relations prevented him from being objective.
In 1867, apropos of Turgénieff's "Smoke," which had just appeared, he wrote to Fet:
In 1865, before the final breach with Turgénieff, he wrote, again to Fet:
In the autumn of 1883, after Turgénieff's death, when the family had gone into Moscow for the winter, my father stayed at Yásnaya Polyána alone, with Agáfya Mikháilovna, and set earnestly about reading through all Turgénieff's works.
This is what he wrote to my mother at the time:
Unfortunately, my father's intended lecture on Turgénieff never came off. The Government forbade him to pay this last tribute to his dead friend, with whom he had quarreled all his life only because he could not be indifferent to him.
| Reminiscences of Tolstoy | |