Winter nights crackled with frost. The blizzard covered all traces and hid the stars. To prevent the belated traveler from going astray and freezing at night, the church bell rang protractedly, and it could be heard far beyond the village. In those early years there were no asphalt roads, only country roads. Time passed, my brother and I grew up. It's time to send me to school. There was no school where my father worked. That's why they weren't in a hurry to send me to school (let me get smart enough). A decree of the Soviet government was issued on compulsory education of children in schools starting from the age of seven. I was 9 years old then. And I wasn’t the only one who was overgrown, the majority were like that. I was enrolled in first grade in the village of Mingrelskaya, and I lived with my aunt, the sister of my second mother. She didn’t have any children of her own, and so my aunt agreed to take me in with her. So my new life began again. When I went to first grade, there was no trace of my beloved church. There was an empty space where the church stood. It was blown up, dismantled, the hole was filled with earth, and the whole place was plowed up. Over time, a garden was planted and a summer cinema was installed. The church began to be considered a dope for the people. Church holidays were prohibited, especially for children. I did not communicate with the relatives of my deceased mother. They separated from me, and they had large families of their own. But on Christmas Day, January 6, in the late afternoon, a supper was served to close relatives, friends, and neighbors. The supper consisted of boiled rice, decorated with candy, and a gift. A plate of rice was placed on a brand new white scarf, and a gift was placed on top. The ends of the scarf were tied crosswise, and a convenient knot was obtained. My deceased mother left behind an old father, my grandmother died earlier, and my grandfather lived with his daughter and son-in-law. My new mother bought a gift, gathered the whole evening into a bundle and sent me to my grandfather Yakov Bezugloy. I went on my own without anyone accompanying me to the other side of the village. By the time I got there, I was pretty frozen. When you enter a room (hut), you must say: “Dad and Mom sent you a supper.” Grandfather Yasha got out of bed, his head was shaking, he was very old. Grandfather hugged me, then rubbed and kissed my frozen hands, while his tears wet them. Now I’m old myself, but it seems to me that these burning tears on my hands have never dried up. Life was difficult, and time flew quickly. It's time for my brother to go to school. He was sent to school for seven years. So we lived with our aunt, studied at school, grew up, helped our aunt with the housework, and imperceptibly grew up and scattered in different directions. Our parents lived far away, and we studied on our own; there was no one to help us. We often suffered from colds, and malaria gave us no rest. I really wanted mommy to be nearby, but God needed her. What could someone else's aunt do? Never mind. Doctors did not go home. Malaria begins to shake, a high temperature rises, you can’t think of anything. And my aunt says: “Go to school, don’t succumb to all sorts of illnesses and don’t go to bed, otherwise you’ll completely fall asleep!” You come to school and you don’t understand anything because of the temperature, you lean on your desk and fall asleep. The teacher will wake you up and send you home. When we ran out of food and there was nothing to eat except lean borscht and corn porridge, then our mood deteriorated, we missed our parents and waited for them to arrive. Mom told tales about kings, princes and little animals. In one of the fairy tales there were these words: “When a cat washes itself with its paw and its paw is warm, then someone from those closest to them will definitely come.” Or in the winter you heated the stove with wood, and a spark jumped out of the stove, then also wait for a dear guest, the one you are really looking forward to will come. As I remember now: I was sitting with my brother, each minding our own business, and the cat got off the stove, sat down on the threshold and began to wash itself with its right paw, and then with its left. The brother stopped what he was doing and ran to try the cat's paw. He held the paw in his hand and shouted with joy: “The cat’s paw is warm, which means the parents will arrive soon.” The parents themselves knew that they had to go. Their arrival was a great holiday for us; they brought a lot of delicious products. There was no sugar then, my parents sowed cane and made cane honey. Mom baked baked goods using eggs, sour milk and cane honey. These cookies were very tasty. They brought fish, chopped chicken, lard, and baked milk. They found out about our studies and left again. In winter, the days were short and cold. Auntie lit a Russian stove at night for warmth. After dinner, they climbed onto the stove with a lit lamp, and the brother began to read the book out loud. Aunt was illiterate, but she loved books and helped us get them. We read a lot of different books. We read fairy tales, “Treasure Island”, “Children of Captain Grant”, “The Headless Horseman”. Aunt had a wonderful memory. She lived to a ripe old age, and remembered the characters of the books, their names and brief contents better than us. At the end of the school year, our parents took us to live with them. In high school it was difficult to study; the difficulties were due to the lack of books (textbooks), especially books on mathematics, Russian language and literature. One textbook was given for two people. If you go to your partner for a textbook, he’s not at home or he hasn’t studied yet. When additional classes appeared, things started to improve. The school had strict rules. Nowadays girls go to school with their hair done, nails painted, in fashionable clothes, high-heeled shoes, painted lips, smelling of perfume, gold watches, earrings, but in our time such a girl was considered not modest. She didn't earn a penny and had no right to wear such things and pretend to be an adult. Schoolgirls were prohibited from going to club dances in the evening. The clothes were modest and the shoes were low-heeled. I still remember the incident with a girl from the 8th grade. A relative from the city came to visit them. She was a married woman and styled her hair herself with a curling iron. This eighth-grader also wanted to know how it would work out for her. A relative styled the hair on her head as well. When this eighth-grader showed up at school, there was a big scandal. The school director, her last name was Pashkova, forced all the schoolchildren to line up. She placed this eighth-grader next to her in front of all the students and teachers, personally wet the hair (style) on the girl’s head with water and sent her home to fetch her parents. This is how we grew up and learned at that time. What did my second mother teach me? She taught her to work early, to take care of herself and her brother too. When we were at school, I washed both my clothes and my brother’s things. I am 4 years older than my brother. Therefore, taking care of him fell on me. Respect and not contradict your parents, listen to your elders, don’t hang around with your girlfriends, but help your aunt run the house. Clean the house, carry water from the river for washing, help dig the garden in the spring. This is how I grew up, I tried to please everyone, I listened to everyone, I was afraid to say superfluous word and I was still afraid that something might not happen. She pleased everyone and didn’t think about herself. When I turned 14 years old and I went to my parents for summer holidays, my mother told me: “It’s time, daughter, to earn your own bread.” I silently took the hoe in my hands and went with all the workers to work the fields. Nowadays, after school, children are sent to seaside camps to relax and gain strength. And then they believed that rest was physical labor in the open air, and the sea was a pampering activity that fostered laziness. The sea was only sixty kilometers from us. My second mother did not spoil me with outfits. They sewed a couple of flannelette dresses for school, and a cotton one for summer. Cinemas began showing daytime children's films. The ticket cost 20 kopecks. My brother was given money for movies, but I was not. Mom said: “We lived without cinema all our lives and remained alive, and you have nothing to do there. When you earn money, then you will go to the movies.” I enjoyed participating in school clubs, especially in sports, I did well, but for this you need a sports uniform - shorts, a T-shirt and slippers. There was only one answer: there is no money for inventions. I was so upset when girls and boys drove collective farm cars to competitions in the region on weekends. And I sat at home, envied the girls and helped my aunt. The time has come to join the Komsomol. The history teacher gave all candidates questionnaires to fill out. I filled it out and showed it to my mother with great joy. She looked, tore it up before my eyes and said: “There’s no point in giving your soul to the devils.” So I was left behind again. In those years, the specialty of a doctor and teacher was prestigious. I really wanted to become a teacher. Girls who started school at the age of seven managed to complete 10 grades before the war, took accelerated preparatory courses, and were sent by primary school teachers. Several girls were sent to work in the Baltic states. The 41st school year has ended, these girls, teachers, came home for the summer holidays. How happy, independent they were, they had their own money and were decently dressed. But since everything in my life was awry, and I was only in the 9th grade, I could only envy, hope and wait. At the beginning of the school year in the 9th grade, a girl I knew sent a letter from the Krasnodar Pedagogical College and reported that, according to a new government decree, one had to pay for education at the technical school. Many girls left home for lack of funds. And if the parents agree to pay, then you can come. My parents agreed and I left. I passed the exam in Russian, orally and in writing, and mathematics. I passed the exam and was enrolled in a technical school. A girl I know rented an apartment for me in the same building where she lived. The owners liked me, they kept me with them and warned me: no partying at night and not bringing anyone into the apartment. My parents sent me money to pay for food and for a return ticket to come home. The technical school paid the owner’s rent for the apartment. I studied with joy, I did well in all subjects, except German. I took additional language classes, and everything fell into place. I hoped for a better future. The technical school conducted classes in military affairs. My grade in military affairs was 5. I received the GTO badge (ready for labor and defense), the GSO badge (ready for sanitary defense) and the “Voroshilov shooter”. I completed the first year successfully and was transferred to the second year. My dreams were not destined to come true. The war has begun.
Levanova L. N. Memories// Twice first director: Memories of D. E. Vasiliev. - 2012. - P. 49-52.
MEMORIES OF L. N. LEVANOVA12
The young family was sent on a permit from the Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee to Sverdlovsk-45, which was not yet a city and consisted of barracks, which were reached knee-deep in mud. Thousands of prisoners built the plant and the future city. Liya and her husband received a room of eleven meters in a Finnish house. These houses were considered temporary housing and were without heating and without any water. Only in 1955 the family received a comfortable apartment. But in 1950, it was as if nothing had happened at all. The factory administration was located in a large two-story wooden building. It was located in the city. The plant was not yet operational; the workshops were only built by prisoners.
Liya Nikolaevna began working as a timekeeper technician in the labor and wages department, headed by V. A. Shipulin. Liya already knew the Shipulins - Viktor Alexandrovich and his wife Anastasia Stepanovna were traveling with them from Tagil in the same carriage. Fate will bring her together with Anastasia Stepanovna more than once. Leah will be happy to show Anastasia Stepanovna’s signature on documents confirming Levanova’s high professionalism.
Liya Nikolaevna worked for Shipulin for a year, was in contact with the shop managers, knew all the economic engineers, and no wonder - almost all the workers of the future plant were then concentrated in the plant management, huddled in small rooms of six and eight people. Almost all of them were specialists from Moscow, after LIPAN (Laboratory of Measuring Instruments of the Academy of Sciences).
With reports, Liya Nikolaevna went to Dmitry Efimovich Vasiliev himself, the first director of the enterprise. Perhaps all women liked him. They found him unique and very interesting, he always smelled of perfume. He was tall, charming and very courteous. When he entered, Leah was lost.
His secretary was Adele Maksimovna Zaikova. She had a higher education and never married; Later she worked at the institute and devoted her whole life to study and work. One day she told Leah, when she brought the next reports: “Liya Nikolaevna, I’m going on vacation, and you will work instead of me.” But Leah didn’t attach any importance to this.
After some time, Dmitry Efimovich himself suddenly called her. “Did I screw up in the report?..” Leah thought with horror. Vasiliev sat her down in a red leather chair, and he sat down in another, opposite:
We need to work, Leah. You can do it.
Leah was thinking about one thing: just not to cry in the office. Just recently she gave birth to a son. The infant required care and understandable concerns, and all this seemed to Leah incompatible with the responsible work of the director’s technical secretary. Leah refused: kindergartens and nurseries did not yet exist, a cold Finnish house, freezing through, aches in her hands after rinsing diapers in the ice hole in the morning, lighting the stove, the feeding regime that had to be endured - it was not customary to talk about this, everything was subordinated only to work . There were no compromises. Dmitry Efimovich understood how difficult it was for Leah now. He himself lived with his wife, Alexandra Arkadyevna, “in a Finnish village” with their adopted daughter Dolly (Dolores).
We will help you. You will use the director's car during feeding hours. Make up your mind.
But Leah could not agree. She left the office in alarm and confusion. On the same day, due to the experience, milk disappeared from the breast.
Times were merciless. The next day, Liya Nikolaevna was familiarized with the order, and she began work in her new position. An aunt came from Vologda to babysit the baby.
Leah was only 24 years old. She had a tiny son and a responsible job in which she still had to learn everything. Leah easily convened a meeting on the very first day of work; fortunately, being a timekeeper, she met all the department heads. Before the meeting began, Vasiliev pointed to the HF apparatus:
Write down everything that is there.
I urgently needed to learn to type and take shorthand. There was a Czechoslovakian Optima in the office. Leah got up at five in the morning and went to work to independently master the art of typing. A week later, Vasiliev praised her - the successes were so obvious. The further, the more the director admired the new secretary. Leah had an exceptional memory and a rare work ethic. Dmitry Efimovich, charming, intelligent, knew how, without raising his voice, to subordinate everything that surrounded him to his cause. His presence inspired me, I wanted to do everything possible and even impossible. Liya Nikolaevna, with her ebullient energy, youth and desire to work, was finally at the place where all her abilities were in demand. When A.I. Ilyin arrived from Leningrad, Liya Nikolaevna selected literature for him - 300 books on production technology. Ilyin found a selection
professional. Further joint work (and there was a time when Liya Nikolaevna was the secretary of three at once - Vasiliev, Ilyin and Academician Artsimovich) was not easy.
We worked well,” says Liya Nikolaevna. “We didn’t go out for three days, day and night, that’s how we worked.” It used to be that I would come in the morning and Ilyin would be at his desk and would be surprised: “Is it morning already?”
In 1953, Beria came to Sverdlovsk-45. Leah found out about this the day before and did not sleep all night: Lavrenty Pavlovich was a highly respected leader. Leah had his portrait hanging on the wall. Sometimes wise eyes gave strength to live - they expressed the conscience of the era, it was easier to accept with them correct solution, it was impossible to make a mistake.
Beria arrived under a false name, in the strictest secrecy. Leah knew about the planned visit from the HF-gram. There were very few initiates - they were afraid of spies.
He was met at the state district power station, where he arrived in his own carriage, surrounded by a large retinue. Liya Nikolaevna recalls: When we entered the reception room, he was so imprinted... I recognized him immediately, from his portrait. He was tall, wearing a coat with wide shoulders; the fashion for such shoulders was just emerging. The coat was brown, striped in three tones, a brown felt hat and gold pince-nez. He said hello and went into the director's office, followed by his retinue - endlessly. They go and go... After the meeting, he left and was nowhere else.
Lev Andreevich Artsimovich was short, stocky and red-haired. He had a remarkable mind, for which he was paid a salary of 25 thousand. Three adjutant colonels served him faithfully, changing duties: while one was resting, the second was preparing dinner, and the third was “giving his best” at work.
Then they changed. Lev Andreevich used to say: “This is my life, everything is under a gun, you can’t even have a mistress,” and he laughed at his own joke... After nine months of work in Sverdlovsk-45, Artsimovich left for Krasnoyarsk-26.
During this period of arrangement of the object, which people, driven by the desire to build new town, tend to evaluate it as a “hymn to labor”, not everything was rosy. One day the first department overdid it. This happened even before Beria’s arrival. Liya Nikolaevna kept a journal - on graph paper, more than a meter wide, with the secrecy stamp "Of Special Importance". Alexandra Arkadyevna, the wife of Dmitry Efimovich, brought Lia data on the central processing line, and data was received from the consoles of the first workshop, from which Lia Nikolaevna made diagrams for the RAM. She put the magazine in the safe when she left the office.
One day, two employees of the first department did not like one of the situations in the office: they arose unexpectedly and interpreted the situation in their own way:
Reviewing top secret results?!
Leah was immediately called to the first department, the doors were locked and they began to “work through it.” Leah didn’t remember how she got to the reception area. Alexandra Arkadyevna, who had just brought her the data for the magazine, gasped:
Something with her son, with her husband?.. - Leah could not speak, Alexandra Arkadyevna hugged her...
The “spymaniacs” from the first department prepared materials related to the “information leak,” prepared an order and handed everything over to the director. Dmitry Efimovich invited Liya Nikolaevna into his office, tore up the order in front of them and threw it in the trash. Then he said firmly:
If this happens again, I will fire you both. I trust Liya Nikolaevna more than you.
First control building
He managed to protect her for all subsequent years of work together. There were no more attacks on her.
Then Dmitry Efimovich went to Chelyabinsk-70, recalls Liya Nikolaevna, established production here, and then was sent there. Again - from scratch. Enormous work, inhuman. He suffered two heart attacks. Then, after great job there, during his ill health, he could not help but congratulate the women on the holiday. I got behind the wheel of my car and only two hundred meters did not reach the House of Culture - my heart gave out, my hands remained on the steering wheel. I knew about him - I talked with his secretary via HF. A delegation from our plant went to his funeral.
When Malsky appeared after Vasiliev’s transfer to Chelyabinsk-70, I didn’t know how we would work together. He arrived in military uniform, wearing a hat, and opened the door with a flourish - he was the master of the situation. After the intelligent, charming Vasiliev, he made a completely different impression, but he was a demanding and unforgiving person. We worked with him respectfully and harmoniously...
Victor Lebrun. Publicist, memoirist, one of L.N. Tolstoy's secretaries (1906). Born in 1882 in Yekaterinoslav in the family of a French engineer who worked in Russia for forty years. Fluent in Russian and French. The years of his life in Russia are covered in great detail in published memoirs. In 1926, Lebrun went to France, where he lived until his death (1979).
<Л. Н.Толстой>
Second part (continued). Start at
Tolstoy Day
The external life of the world writer was more than monotonous.
Early in the morning, when the big house is still completely quiet, you can always see Tolstoy in the yard with a jug and a large bucket, which he hardly carries down the back stairs. Having poured out the slops and filled a jug with fresh water, he goes up to his room and washes himself. According to my village habit, I got up at dawn and sat down in the corner of the small living room to do my own written work. Together with the rays of the sun, rising above the centuries-old linden trees and flooding the room, the office door usually opened - and Lev Nikolaevich, fresh and cheerful, appeared on the threshold.
God help you! - he told me, smiling affectionately and vigorously nodding his head so that I would not be distracted from my work. Stealthily, so as not to be noticed by the often early visitors, so as not to interrupt the thread of his thoughts with conversation, he made his way into the garden.
In the big pocket of his blouse there was always Notebook and, wandering through the lovely surrounding forests, he would suddenly stop and write down a new thought at the moment of its greatest brightness. An hour later, sometimes earlier, he returned, bringing the smell of fields and forests on his dress, and quickly walked into the office, tightly closing the doors behind him.
Sometimes, when we found ourselves alone in a small living room, he, looking at me with concentration, shared with me what he was thinking while walking.
I will never forget these amazing minutes.
I remember serfdom very well!.. Here, in Yasnaya Polyana... Here every peasant was engaged in cartage. (The railroad did not exist at that time.) So, then the poorest peasant family had six horses! I remember this time well. And now?! More than half of the households are horseless! What did this railway bring them?! This civilization?!
I often remember the incident at the races in Moscow, which I described in Anna Karenina. (I lowered it so as not to interrupt the story.) It was necessary to finish off the horse that had broken its back. Do you remember? So, there were a lot of officers present. The governor himself was there. But not a single soldier had a revolver with him! They asked the policeman, but he only had an empty holster. Then they asked for a saber, a sword. But all the officers had only festive weapons. All the swords and sabers were wooden!.. Finally, one officer ran home. He lived nearby and brought a revolver. Only then was it possible to finish off the horse...
To such an extent “they” felt calm and out of any danger at that time!..
And when the teacher told me this wonderful incident, so typical of the era, - an incident from the “good” old days,” - all of Russia, from edge to edge, was already shaking with the swell of the impending revolution.
Yesterday in the hall they talked about “Resurrection”*. They praised him. Aya told them: in “Resurrection” there are rhetorical passages and artistic passages. Both of them are good individually. But combining them in one work is the most terrible thing... I decided to publish this only because I had to quickly help the Doukhobors*.
One morning, passing through the small living room, he takes me by the arm and asks in an almost stern voice:
Are you praying?
Rarely, I say, not to say rudely - no.
He sits down at the desk and, leaning over the manuscript, says thoughtfully:
Whenever I think about prayer, one incident from my life comes to mind. It was a long time ago. Even before my marriage. Here in the village I knew a woman. She was a nasty woman... - And suddenly a double, interrupted sigh escaped him, almost hysterical. - I lived my life poorly... Do you know that?..
I nod my head slightly, trying to calm him down.
She arranged dates for me with such women... And then one day, in the dead of midnight, I was making my way through the village. I look into her street. This is a very steep alley that goes down to the road. You know? Everything around is quiet, empty and dark. Not a sound is heard. There is no light in any window. Only below from her window is a sheaf of light. I went to the window. Everything is quiet. There is no one in the hut. The lamp burns in front of the icons, and she stands in front of them and prays. He crosses himself, prays, kneels down, bows to the ground, gets up, prays some more and bows again. I stayed like that for a long time, in the dark, watching her. She had many sins in her soul... I knew it. But how she prayed...
I didn’t want to bother her that evening... But what could she have been praying for so passionately?.. - he finished thoughtfully and moved the manuscript towards her.
Another time he returned from a morning walk transformed, quiet, calm, radiant. He puts both hands on my shoulders and, looking into my eyes, says with enthusiasm:
How beautiful, how amazing old age is! There are no desires, no passions, no vanity!.. Yes, however, what am I telling YOU! You yourself will soon find out all this, - and his kind, attentive eyes, looking out from under his overhanging eyebrows, say: “You can never express all the significant things that a person experiences in this life, despite this web of suffering, despite the destruction of the body. I say this not for words, but truly, truly.”
In his office, Tolstoy drank coffee and read letters. I marked on the envelopes what needed to be answered or what books to send. Then he took away the tray with the dishes and sat down to write. He got up from his desk only at two or three o'clock in the afternoon, always noticeably tired. The great hall was usually empty at this time of day, and breakfast awaited the writer there. Most often oatmeal is made with water. He always praised it, saying that he had been eating it for more than twenty years, and it didn’t get boring.
After breakfast, Lev Nikolayevich went out to the visitors, without whom a rare day passed in Yasnaya Polyana, and, after talking with them, he invited those close in views to stay, and provided the rest - some with books, some with kopecks, and fire victims with neighboring villages three rubles, sometimes more, depending on the size of the misfortune that occurred.
Tolstoy received two thousand rubles a year from the imperial theaters for productions of “The Power of Darkness” and “The Fruits of Enlightenment.” He distributed this money sparingly, often expressing fear that it would not be enough for the year. He agreed to take it only after it was explained to him that if he refused, the money would be used to increase the luxury of the theater.
As far as I know, this was the entire personal income and expense of one who could have been the richest man in the world if he wanted to exploit his pen commercially.
Having finished with the visitors, which was not always easy, Tolstoy took a long walk on foot or on horseback. He often walked six kilometers to visit Marya Alexandrovna Shmit. He sometimes rode fifteen kilometers on horseback. He loved the subtle paths in the large forests with which he was surrounded. He often visited distant villages to check on the situation of a peasant family asking for help, or to help a soldier find traces of her lost husband, or to establish the extent of losses caused by a fire, or to rescue a man illegally imprisoned. On the way, he spoke affably to those he met, but always carefully drove around behind the lines of rich dachas.
Returning home, he rested for half an hour. At six o'clock he had dinner with the whole family.
In a very large room with two lights, opposite family portraits in golden frames, a long table was set. The end of the table was occupied by Sofya Andreevna. To her left sat Lev Nikolaevich. He always showed me a place near him. And since I was a vegetarian, he himself kindly poured me soup from a small soup bowl that was served to him, or served me his special vegetarian dish.
The Countess hated the vegetarian regime.
At the other end of the table, two white-gloved footmen stood waiting for the end of the ceremony.
After exchanging a few words with his family and guests, Tolstoy again retired to his office, carefully locking the door of the small living room and his own. The great hall was now full and noisy. They played the piano, laughed, and sometimes sang. At that time, the thinker was doing some light work in his office. He wrote letters, a diary, and at one time his memoirs.
Evening readings
At evening tea, with his hand in his belt, the teacher reappeared in the hall, and rarely did an evening pass without him reading aloud the passages that most struck him from the book he had just read.
His readings are extremely varied and always of the highest interest. I will never forget them or his reading style. Listening to him, I forgot everything, I saw only what was being discussed.
Tolstoy is inspired, he is completely imbued with the subject, and he passes it on to the listener. In each phrase he emphasizes only one word. What is of primary importance. He emphasizes it at the same time with extraordinary tenderness and softness, characteristic of him alone, and at the same time with some powerful penetration. Tolstoy does not read, he puts the word into the soul of the listener.
The great Edison sent Tolstoy a recording phonograph* as a gift. In this way, the inventor was able to preserve for the future several phrases of the thinker. About thirty years ago, in the Soviet Union, gramophone discs conveyed them perfectly. I remember one phrase and emphasize the words that are emphasized:
Man lives only by trials. It's good to know this. And lighten your cross by voluntarily putting your neck under it.
But then Tolstoy appears at the door of the small living room. He is holding a large book in his hand. This is a volume of the monumental “History of Russia” by S. M. Solovyov (1820-1879). With visible pleasure, he reads to us long passages from “The Life of Archpriest Avvakum” (1610-1682).
This tireless warrior against the king and the church was at the same time a brilliant writer. His Russian language is inimitable. For the last fourteen years of his life, the tsar kept him at the mouth of the Pechora in Pustozersk in an earthen prison. Two of his associates had their tongues cut out. From here the indomitable Old Believer sent his fiery messages and accusatory letters to the Tsar through his friends. Finally, the king ordered him to be burned along with his followers.
Before, long ago,” explains Tolstoy, “I read all of him.” For the tongue. Now I'm re-reading it. Solovyov gives many long excerpts from his writings. This is amazing!..
Another time these are the sayings of Lao-Tse*, a Chinese sage of the sixth century BC, who was later deified and served as the basis for Taoism, one of the three official religions of China.
Tolstoy apparently enjoys every phrase, emphasizing the main word in it.
True words are not pleasant.
Nice words are never true.
The wise are not learned.
Scientists are not wise.
Good people are not argumentative.
Disputants are never kind.
This is what you have to be: you have to be like water.
There is no obstacle - it flows.
Dam - she stops.
The dam burst - it flows again.
In a square vessel it is square.
In the round - she is round.
That's why it is needed most of all.
That's why she's the strongest.
There is nothing in the world that is softer than water,
Meanwhile, when she falls on the hard
And against the resisting, nothing can be stronger than it.
He who knows others is smart.
He who knows himself has wisdom.
He who defeats others is strong.
He who conquers himself is powerful.
Another time it's a newly published book about John Ruskin*.
“Very interesting,” says Tolstoy, “and I learned a lot about him from this book.” This chapter will need to be translated and published in Mediator. The quotes from his writings here are very good. It gets a little worse towards the end. He has this, you know, shortcoming common to all such people. The Bible amazes them so much that they adapt their good thoughts to various of its darkest places...
However, this sometimes gives a very special imprint, so overall it’s very good.
Another evening it is a new biography, Michel Angelo * or “Notes of Catherine” *, or a long dialogue by Schopenhauer * on religion, omitted by the censor and which the translator sent to the thinker in proof. This translator was a member of the court* and a passionate admirer of Schopenhauer.
One day the teacher was very excited. He held in his hands Elzbacher's Anarchism*, which he had just received from the author.
The book on anarchism begins to enter the phase in which socialism now finds itself. What did people think of socialists just a few decades ago? These were the villains dangerous people. And now socialism is considered the most ordinary thing. And so Elzbacher introduces anarchism into this very phase. But he's German. Look: there are seven of us, and he sorts us out on twelve tables. But in general he is completely honest. Here is a table that indicates in which case the author allows violence. And, look, Tolstoy is not there. There are only six of them.
Tired of reading and talking, Tolstoy sometimes sat down to play chess. Very rarely, when there was an influx of social guests, a “pint” was arranged; but at about eleven o'clock everyone left.
In relation to the teacher, I always adhered to strict tactics. Never spoke to him first. I even tried to be unnoticed so as not to interrupt his train of thoughts. But at the same time, I always stayed close. So, in the evenings I never left the hall before him. And often, noticing me somewhere in the corner, he would come up, take my arm, and on the way to his room he would tell me his latest thought.
Nothing in the world could change this order. Neither Sundays, nor family holidays, no “vacations” existed. If he very rarely decided to go to Pirogovo to visit his daughter Marya, he left after breakfast, finishing his work and carefully packing the necessary manuscripts and books into his suitcase, so that in the evening he could continue his usual circle of studies in a new place.
Manual labor
As far as I know, no detailed information about Tolstoy’s physical work has ever appeared in print. Romain Rolland, in his good, perhaps the best foreign work on Tolstoy*, kept silent about this side of the teacher’s life. It was too alien to the sophisticated European writer with his clean suit and gentle hands. dirty work, manure, dirty sweaty shirt. Like many of Tolstoy's translators, he did not want to scare off salon readers. And yet, in response to his question, Tolstoy wrote a long article* about the basic moral significance of hard work.
The need for personal participation in the hardest work is one of the cornerstones of the thinker’s worldview. And before, until he was sixty-five years old, or even longer, the great writer seriously and hard worked the most menial peasant work. And at that time everything was done by hand. There were no cars at all.
His working day began at dawn, and until late breakfast Tolstoy was at work, and after that it was business as usual. The hours that in my time were devoted to walking were at that time devoted to the most difficult work for the benefit of the poorest families in the village. He sawed aspens and oaks in the forest, transported beams and built huts for widows, and laid stoves. A special specialist in the stove business was a close friend of Lev Nikolaevich, the famous artist, professor at the Academy N. N. Ge*, who lived for a long time in Yasnaya and illustrated the Gospel. Every spring, Tolstoy and his daughters took out manure, plowed with the peasant's plow and sowed the widow's fields, harvested grain and threshed with a flail. Every summer, he and a team of local mowers mowed hay in the Yasnaya Polyana meadows, as described in Anna Karenina. He mowed on the same terms as the peasants: two haystacks for the “landowner,” that is, Sofya Andreevna and his sons, and one for himself. And he took this earned hay to the village to the most needy widows. As it is said in the Koran: “So that alms may then come out of your hand.”
Marya Alexandrovna told me more than once about working with Lev Nikolaevich in the field and in the forest, in which she took an active part.
It was especially difficult in the forest for peasants to cut large oak trees from their stumps into huts. Lev Nikolaevich was demanding in his work. Got excited. But little by little I adapted to this work...
Once, dear boy, there was such a drought, such a terrible drought, that I could not get a single crumb of hay for my cow. I was desperate. Hay was very expensive. But I didn’t have any money this fall. And I don’t like borrowing that much. It's always so hard to pay after. And then, one evening, I see two lovely carts of hay driving into my yard. I am running. This is Lev Nikolaevich, all covered in dust, his shirt wringed out of sweat. I didn’t say a word to him about the hay or my need, but he guessed my situation!..
I have repeatedly asked peasants about Lev Nikolaevich’s former work. “I could work,” “I really worked,” they always answered me. You don’t often hear such an answer from them about the work of an intellectual.
Manual labor was the only occupation that completely satisfied the thinker. Everything else, including his writing service to the enslaved people, seemed insignificant and doubtful to him.
Questions and answers
I cannot find words or images to express how close Tolstoy was to me. It was not just the simple attraction of communicating with a charming, charming, beloved storyteller from childhood that attracted me to him. I was united with Tolstoy by the complete commonality of that need for research, which constituted in me the very essence of my being. Since I can remember, this has been my only need in life. Everything else was only of service importance.<нрзб>, only Tolstoy fully possessed this need.
More than fifty years of intense inner work separated me from my teacher, but Tolstoy understood what I told him, as no one understood either before or after our ten-year communication. Tolstoy understood perfectly. Often he did not let me finish and always answered definitely and always to the essence of the question.
The first days, when I uttered a question, a charming light of playful surprise lit up in the small gray eyes with their inexpressible, somehow piercing shade of intelligence, subtlety and kindness.
It's amazing how often people don't understand the simplest things.
It seems to me like this,” the teacher answers. - They have a full vessel. Either it lies sideways, or upside down. So you can't put anything in there. In such cases, it is best to move away.
Lev Nikolaevich, what is madness? - I asked another time without any preamble. The playful expression in the eyes is stronger than usual.
I have... My own explanation... - the teacher answers. He emphasizes “is” and stops. Together with the playful enthusiasm of the piercing eyes, this means a lot. This says: “Don’t think, young man, I also noticed this contradictory phenomenon, thought about it and found an explanation.” He emphasizes “his own”, and this means - as always, I am in conflict with the generally accepted, but this is the result of my analysis. These two exclamations are a preface. The answer follows.
This is selfishness,” explains the teacher. - Focusing on yourself, and then on one such idea.
Once I risked a significant critical remark about Tolstoy’s previous works. This was at a time when, after the abolition of preliminary censorship new law about printing made it possible to print anything you wanted. Only the book had to be defended in court and lose everything and go to prison if confiscated. My favorite friends: Gorbunov, N. G. Sutkova* from Sochi, P. P. Kartushin*, a rich Don Cossack who gave away his entire fortune, and Felten* from St. Petersburg finally began to publish in Russia in a very large quantities Tolstoy's forbidden writings.
The young publishers of Obnovleniya* sent large birch bark boxes to Yasnaya full of the most combative brochures: Soldier's Memo, Officer's Memo. Ashamed! Letter to the sergeant major. Appeal to the clergy, What is my faith? A summary of the Gospel, etc., etc. Gorbunov defended book after book in court, and the other three editors successfully hid behind one another for a long time. Ultimately, Sutkova took the sin upon himself and served a year and a half in prison for this enterprise.
It’s a pity,” I once decided to remark, “that these books are now published in their previous form. They would be worth reconsidering. In some places they are completely outdated. But there are places, I must say, that are downright wrong. Tolstoy looks questioningly.
For example, in So What Should We Do?, this passage is about the factors of production. It says that you can count not three of them, but as many as you like: sunlight, warmth, humidity, etc.
Tolstoy did not let me finish:
Yes. This is all included in the term "earth". But is it really possible to redo all this now!.. This was written at different times... People will take what they need from what they have.
Tolstoy's God
I had the hardest time with Tolstoy's God.
I grew up in the most conscious atheism. As for Arago*, God for me was “a hypothesis to which I never had the slightest need to resort”! What did this word mean for Leo Tolstoy?
Just a few weeks after my first visit I had to live near Yasnaya. One day, after evening tea, Lev Nikolaevich, who was feeling unwell, called me to his place. He was then located downstairs, in the same room “under the arches”* in which he spoke to me for the first time.
What is occupying you now? What are you thinking about? - he spoke, lying down on the oilcloth sofa and with his hand slipped under his belt, pressing his sore stomach.
About God, I say. - I'm trying to understand this concept.
In such cases, I always remember Matthew Arnold's definition*. Don't you remember him? God is the eternal, existing outside of us, leading us, demanding righteousness from us.” He studied the Old Testament books and, for that time, this was enough. But after Christ, we must also add that at the same time God is love.
Yes, however, everyone has their own idea about God. For materialists, God is matter, although this is completely wrong; for Kant it’s one thing, for a village woman it’s another,” the teacher continued, seeing that I was only perplexed at his words.
But what kind of concept is this that differs from person to person? - I ask. - After all, everyone has the same other concepts?
From what? There are many subjects about which different people have completely different ideas.
For example? - I ask in surprise.
Yes, there are as many of them as you like... Well, for example... Well, at least air: for a child it does not exist; an adult knows him - well, how can I say this? - by touch or something, he inhales it, but for a chemist this is completely different. “He spoke with the calm persuasiveness with which children answer the simplest questions.
But, if ideas about an object can be different, then why use the word “God” to indicate it? - I ask. - The peasant woman, using it, wants to say something completely different than you?
Our ideas are different, but we have something in common. For all people, this word evokes in its essence a concept common to all of them, and therefore it cannot be replaced by anything.
I didn't continue the conversation anymore. Having been exclusively occupied with studying Tolstoy’s writings for more than a year, it was only here that I first felt what he was talking about when he used the word “God.”
The words “For materialists, God is matter” were a revelation to this understanding. These words finally showed me exactly the place that the concept of “God” occupies in Tolstoy’s worldview.
Much time later, I managed to return to this topic again. This was shortly after Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church by the Holy Synod*. Tolstoy had just published his wonderful “Response to the Synod”*.
The Thinker was recovering from his illness, but he was very weak, so I did not dare talk to him for a long time. One day, approaching the house, I found him lying on a couch in the garden in front of the veranda. Only Marya Lvovna was with him. The large table in the garden was set for dinner, and the men were already crowding around the small table with snacks. But I wanted to take a moment to talk.
What, Lev Nikolaevich, can you philosophize a little, won’t it tire you?
It’s okay, it’s possible, it’s possible! - the teacher answers cheerfully and affably.
I've been thinking about God lately. And yesterday I thought that it is impossible to define God by positive definitions: all positive definitions are human concepts, and only negative concepts with “not” will be accurate.
Absolutely right,” the teacher answers seriously.
So it’s inaccurate, you can’t say that God is love and reason: love and reason are human properties.
Yes Yes. Absolutely right. Love and reason only connect us with God. And this, you know, when you write such things as a response to the Synod, you involuntarily fall into such a tone that is understandable to everyone, commonly used.
After this confession, there was not the slightest doubt left for me about the complete absence of absurd mysticism in Tolstoy’s views.
It is not for nothing that at the end of his article “On Religion and Morality”* he said: “Religion is the establishment of a relationship with God or the world.”
Tolstoy's God was nothing more than the world, the universe, considered in its essence, incomprehensible to our cognitive ability, in its incomprehensible infinity.
Only for Tolstoy the universe stood above our understanding, and we had only responsibilities towards it, while for scientists the universe appears as the play of some blind forces in some dead matter. And we do not have any responsibilities towards her, but on the contrary, we have the right to demand from her as much pleasure as possible.
And, as almost always, Tolstoy was right.
In fact, for human understanding of the universe there can be only two points of view: the EGO-centric view - everything exists FOR a person. (Just as in astronomy there has been a geocentric view for thousands of years.) Or a COSMO-centric view. We exist FOR the universe, for the fulfillment in it of our destiny in it. creative work, guided in this work by our highest needs: understanding and mutual assistance.
Is it necessary to prove that the first view is devoid of the slightest reasonable basis?
What could be more absurd than to assume that the vast universe exists to satisfy our desires!
We have two needs: one is to explore and understand, and the other is to help and serve each other. And we have the highest duty, guided by them, to serve the human race in the most useful way available to us.
This was the first revelation indicated to me by Tolstoy.
There was no place for stupid mysticism here.
But I explore this basic problem of the conscious life of the individual in a separate chapter of the second part of this book.
The third part
Chapter five. WHITE BRIDE
Pioneer in the Caucasus
While I was thus absorbed in studying closely the way of thinking and life of Leo Tolstoy, chance gave my life a more definite direction.
My mother, a tireless lover of great travel, ended with railways the waste of that insignificant inheritance that her father* left her after his forty years of service as an engineer on the Russian railways.
At one of the transfer points, she met an elderly friend, whom she had long lost sight of. The latter ended up with a small plot of land on the Black Sea coast. Having learned about my desire to settle in the village, she immediately offered it to me for use so that she could live with us forever and so that I could grow vegetables there for the whole family. And I accepted this offer.
The country where I decided to settle was interesting in many ways.
Just over half a century before our arrival, it was still inhabited by a warlike tribe of mountaineers, who were conquered and expelled by the cruel Nicholas the First. These were the Circassians, those same daring and poetic Circassians who found their Homer in the author of “Cossacks” and “Hadji Murat”.
The northern coast of the Black Sea is almost entirely high and steep. In only one place in its western part it forms a large round protected bay. This bay has attracted people since ancient times. During excavations on its banks, we found glasses with Phoenician inscriptions.
In this region, under the Circassians, there was such an abundance of fruit trees in the forests and gardens that every spring seemed to cover the area with a white veil. Sensitive to beauty native nature The Circassians christened their settlement, nestled in this hospitable part of the coast, with the charming name “White Bride”, in Circassian - Gelendzhik *. Now this blooming corner gave shelter to me too.
The Black Sea region, a narrow strip stretching between the sea and the western part of the Caucasus Range, was at that time the gates of the Caucasus. The Caucasus is wild, unknown, still relatively free and alluring. Whole sections of the population then flocked to this newly annexed region. Rich people were attracted here by the wild grandeur of nature. The poor were attracted by the warmth and availability of free or cheap land for settlement. In the summer, summer residents from the capitals and even from Siberia flocked to the coast in large numbers. Every year, from large industrial centers, a whole army of wandering proletarians, “tramps,” came here on foot to spend the winter. In his first stories, Maxim Gorky masterfully described their life. Revolutionaries and political figures persecuted by the police, sectarians persecuted for their faith, and almost all “ideological intellectuals” seeking to “sit down on the ground” and thirsting for a new life also flocked here.
As always, I entered this new and most significant period of my life with a very definite plan. By working independently on the land, I wanted to develop my means of subsistence and sufficient leisure for mental work. I wanted to extract from the earth the opportunity to study, research and write, completely independent of people and institutions. No study in tsarist universities, no service in institutions could give me this freedom. This was the first reason that attracted me to farming.
Another powerful force that connected me with the earth was the deeply rooted instinct of the farmer, inherited from my ancestors. My father's parents were good farmers in Champagne*. I loved the earth with all my being. The mystery of the earth that feeds humanity, the mystery of this powerful, incalculable force of productivity of the plant and animal world, the mystery of the wise symbiosis of man with these worlds deeply worried me.
The plot of land that was supposed to feed me, according to the stupid and criminal custom of all bourgeois governments, was granted to some general for military merits. The latter, like most such owners, kept it uncultivated in anticipation of the settlement of the country and a rise in land prices. The general's heirs continued the same tactics, and when I wanted to buy from them two hectares of arable and two hectares of inconvenient land, they demanded from me an amount equal to the cost of a good residential building! I had to agree to go into debt to pay the general's heirs.
My land was located in a lovely valley in the lower reaches of a mountain river and a fifteen-minute walk from a wonderful sandy sea beach. At one end the site abutted the river, at the other it went up a hill. In its low-lying, flat and extremely fertile part, it was overgrown with dense and very tall forests.
My farming began with uprooting. A mud house with a cellar and a barn was built from the harvested timber. And then, gradually clearing the forest inch by inch and selling firewood, I paid off the debt and began to grow on the virgin black soil such watermelons that the gods of Olympus would envy them, shoulder-length winter wheat, all kinds of vegetables and fodder grasses.
Nature is like a woman of the highest dignity. To fully understand and appreciate her, you need to live with her in very long and complete proximity. Every corner of an arable land, garden or vegetable garden has its own inexplicable charm for those who know how to see it. Well, skillfully managed agriculture pays better than service in enterprises. My connection with the earth is even more intimate here than in Kikety. The land is very fertile. Thanks to the influx of summer residents, sales of vegetables, milk, and honey are ensured. I could now easily expand my farm, save money and buy field after field and house after house. But I'm interested in something else. I earn myself only the bare minimum subsistence level and devote all my leisure time to mental work. I study and read continuously, and write to Tolstoy often and at length. I’m also trying to collaborate with the book publishing house “Posrednik”, founded by Tolstoy. But here the tsarist censorship invariably blocks the way. One of my works that died from censorship was the study “A. I. Herzen and the revolution"*. While in Yasnaya, I made for her very large extracts from the complete Geneva edition of Herzen’s forbidden works. Tolstoy sometimes mentions this article in his letters, as he thought about editing it.
So, gradually I achieved what I was striving for. By the sweat of my brow I eat the bread of my field. I have absolutely no other income, and I live somewhat below the average Russian peasant. I earn about five hundred working days a year as an unskilled rural worker. In this regard, I have moved further than a teacher. I finally achieved those external forms for which he yearned so much. But, as it could not be otherwise, reality turns out to be significantly lower than the dream.
I have too little leisure for mental work, and it is completely irregular. The economy suddenly cruelly and for a long time breaks the thread of what it started. It was very painful. But according to dogma, this was a personal and selfish matter, and I stoically endured this deprivation.
However, something even worse began to emerge, not of a personal, but of a general and fundamental nature. The dogma of “non-participation in the evils of the world,” one of the cornerstones of the teaching that I intended to implement, remained almost entirely unfulfilled. I sell vegetables, milk, honey to rich idle summer residents and live on this money. Where is the non-participation here? Evil in the world triumphs and will continue to triumph. And I'm participating in it. Is this aspiration really vanity? “Vanity of vanities and vexation of spirit”*?..
I have chosen the best form of life imaginable, and my outer life is normal and pleasant. It provides complete physiological and aesthetic satisfaction. But it does not provide moral satisfaction. This note of melancholy and dissatisfaction is noticeable in my letters to Tolstoy. He answers me.
Thank you, dear Lebrun, for writing this too good letter. I always think of you with love. I sympathize with your two sorrows. It would be better without them, but you can live with them. What corrects everything, you know what, is love, real, everlasting, in the present and not for a select few, but for that which is one in all.
Bow to mother. Our people remember and love you. And I.
Thank you, dear Lebrun, for informing me about yourself from time to time. You must feel that I love you more than my neighbor, and that is why you do amo. And good. Don't be discouraged, dear friend, don't change your life. If only life is not the kind you are ashamed of (like mine), then there is nothing to desire or seek except strengthening and revitalizing your inner work. She also saves in a life like mine. There is rather a danger of becoming arrogant. But you are not capable of this.
I am healthy, as can an old man who has lived a bad life be healthy. Busy with Reading Circle for children and lessons with them.
I kiss you and Kartushin* brotherly, if he is with you.
Hello to your mother. We all remember and love you.
L. Tolstoy
A small town that could teach great things
The semi-agricultural, semi-dacha town in which we live is of absolutely exceptional interest. In some respects, he was the only one of his kind in all of Russia at that time. Without exaggeration I can say that if the unfortunate rulers of nations had been able to see and learn, this little town could have taught them the techniques of municipal organization that are of fundamental importance.
Long before me, several intelligent followers of Tolstoy* settled near Gelendzhik: a veterinarian, a paramedic, a home teacher. They were joined by several leading sectarian peasants and farm laborers. These people tried to organize an agricultural colony* on the inaccessible, but fabulously fertile neighboring mountains. They were attracted to these inaccessible peaks by the land, which could be rented from the treasury for next to nothing. On the other hand, the remoteness and inaccessibility of the area saved them from persecution by the police and clergy. After a few years, only a few individuals, born farmers, remained from the community. But the moral educational influence on the population of these selfless people was very great.
These followers of Tolstoy were at the same time Georgists*. They understood the full social significance of that unearned income, which in science was called ground rent*. Therefore, when the rural community demarcated three hundred hectares of land for estates and the villagers began to sell these plots to summer residents, these people taught the village assembly to tax not buildings, but bare land, and, moreover, in proportion to its value.
In fact, the system has been simplified. Manor plots of five hundred square fathoms were divided into three categories, and the owners had to pay 5-7.5 and 10 rubles per year for them, regardless of whether they were built up or not. (A ruble at that time was equal to the daily wage of a good unskilled worker, and a square fathom was 4.55 square meters.)
The cement plant, which was built on peasant land, was subject to the same procedure. He paid for the surface a few kopecks per square fathom and a few kopecks per cubic fathom of mined stone. In addition, the plant was obliged to deliver cement free of charge for all public buildings and to bury quarries.
The results were most brilliant. At the expense of this tax, rural society collected three thousand rubles in annual taxes, which were extorted from each family per capita throughout Russia. The rural community built excellent schools, cement sidewalks, a church, and maintained watchmen and teachers.
Just part of the land rent from three hundred hectares of estate land and several hectares of factory, non-arable land was enough for this. And this tax was paid voluntarily and unnoticed for decades!..
Last flowers
Idealistic groups and settlements in this region arose and disintegrated constantly. One significant agricultural colony existed for more than thirty years, until the most fundamental reforms.
The colonies disintegrated, and most of the townspeople returned to the cities, but the most capable and selfless minority remained in the countryside and somehow merged with the agricultural population. As a result, by the time of my settlement, there were about thirty families in the volost, united by friendship and common ideas. We often, especially on winter evenings, got together, secretly from the tsarist police. I read a lot to the peasants. All the forbidden news that I received from Yasnaya were immediately copied and distributed. In addition, we read history, as well as Victor Hugo, Erckman-Chatrian, the publications of The Mediator, and secret revolutionary literature. The sectarians sang their hymns, and everyone loved me very much. I write to the teacher that this side of life is very pleasant.
The teacher's answer is like a delicate flower.
Thank you, dear friend, for your letter*. It’s just scary, which is very good for you. No matter how good it is, take care of a spiritual corner in your soul about a rainy day, Epictetus, into which you can go when something that outwardly pleases you is upset. And your relationship with your neighbors is excellent. Treasure them the most. I remember you and love you very much. I myself am very busy with lessons with the children. I run a Gospel and Reading Circle for children nearby. I'm not happy with what I did, but I don't despair.
I kiss you brotherly, fatherly. Hello mother.
Oh, I’m afraid for the Odessa community members. It’s terrible when people are disappointed in the most important thing, the sacred. To prevent this from happening, there must be internal spiritual work, and without it everything will probably go poorly.
The colony of Odessa residents, which is mentioned, consisted of one and a half dozen city residents of various professions. Technicians, postal officials, office and bank employees, women with and without children were united with the idea of buying land and managing things together. As usual, after a few months they quarreled, and two or three individual farmers remained on the earth.
But suddenly some strange rumor appears in the newspapers about a fire in Yasnaya Polyana. I'm worried. I telegraph Marya Lvovna* and write to Tolstoy. He answers.
I didn’t burn out, my dear young friend*, and I was very glad, as always, to receive your letter: but I was sick with influenza and was very weak, so I couldn’t do anything for three weeks. Now I come to life (for a short time). And during this time, so many letters have accumulated that today I wrote and wrote and still haven’t finished, but I don’t want to leave your letter unanswered. Although I won’t tell you anything worthwhile, at least I’ll tell you that I love you and that I feel very good in my soul, and if I lived just as long, I wouldn’t have to redo all that joyful work that I want to do, and which, of course, is the only one I won’t do the hundredth.
Kiss you. Respect and bow to Mother. Lev Tolstoy
I wanted to attribute a few more words to you, dear Lebrun, but the letter has already been sent and therefore I’m putting it in the parcel.
I wanted to say that you should not be discouraged that your life does not work out according to your program. After all, the most important thing in life is to cleanse ourselves of bodily hereditary abominations, always, under all conditions, possible and necessary, and we need one thing. This form of life must be the consequence of this work of enlightenment of ours. What confuses us is that the internal work of improvement is entirely in our power, and this makes us feel unimportant. The structure of external life is connected with the consequences of the lives of other people and seems to us the most important.
This is what I want to say. Only then can we complain about the bad conditions of external life when we put all our efforts into internal work. And as soon as we put in ALL our strength, either external life will turn out as we wish, or the fact that it is not as we wish will cease to bother us.
Vladimir Grigorievich Chertkov* was selflessly devoted to Tolstoy and the letter of his teaching. He was rich, but his mother did not give him his richest estate in the Kherson province, so that his ideological son could not give it to the peasants. She gave him only income. And Chertkov with this money provided enormous services to Tolstoy and especially to the dissemination of his writings, prohibited by censorship. When the tsarist government suppressed the “Mediator” and deprived it of the opportunity to print its motto on each book: “God is not in power, but in truth”*, Chertkov and several friends were exiled abroad. He immediately, following the example of Herzen, founded the publishing house of “Svobodnoe Slova”* in England with the same motto and most carefully published all the forbidden writings of Tolstoy and distributed them in Russia. In addition, he built Tolstoy’s “Steel Room”* to store original manuscripts. It also contained interesting materials on the history of Russian sectarianism, which was very numerous and varied.
On one of my visits to Yasnaya, Chertkov offered me a service in this institution of his. I accepted the offer in principle. Working for him would mean for me to continue the same work of spreading Tolstoy’s word, which then captured me. But circumstances beyond my control forced me to refuse this offer and remain a farmer. This was a very significant step in my life.
As is my custom, I write to the teacher about this. Marya Lvovna answers, and Tolstoy adds a few words at the end of the letter.
Dear Viktor Anatolyevich, we are very sorry that you are not going to see the Chertkovs. And they would bring him a lot of benefit and learn English themselves. Well, there’s nothing to do, you can’t go against the bullshit.
Well, what can I tell you about Yasnaya. Everyone is alive and well. I'll start by seniority. The old man is healthy, he works a lot, but the other day, when Yulia Ivanovna* asked him where the work was, he very cheerfully and playfully said that he sent her to hell, but the next day she returned from hell, and Sasha is still *chicks her on Remington*. This work: afterword to the article “On the meaning of the Russian revolution”*. Today Sasha is going to Moscow for a music lesson and must take her with her. Dad rides horseback and walks a lot. (Now I’m sitting with Yulia Ivanovna and writing, he came from riding and is talking next to Sasha about the article. And he went to bed.)
Mom has completely recovered and is already dreaming of concerts and Moscow. Sukhotin, Mikhail Sergeevich*, went abroad, and Tanya* and her family live in that house as before. We're still here, waiting to go. Now there is no road, the mud is impassable, Yulia Ivanovna took up painting very zealously. He makes screens and wants to sell them on occasion in Moscow. The girls seem to mind their own business, laugh a lot, go for walks, and rarely sing. Andrei still lives the same way, only he has no one to tickle, and therefore he is not so cheerful.
Dusan warms his feet in the evenings, and later comes out to us and writes a “Notebook”*, which he and my husband check and correct. So, you see, everything is exactly the same as before. We always remember you with love. Write how you will get settled in Gelendzhik. Everyone bows to you very much. I leave a place, dad wanted to attribute.
Maria Obolenskaya
And I regret and do not regret, dear Lebrun*, that you did not get to Chertkov YET. As always, I enjoyed reading your letter, write more often. I miss you very much. Despite your youth, you are very close to me, and therefore your fate, of course, not physical, but spiritual, interests me very much.
Gelendzhik, like any “dzhik” and whatever place you want, is good because no matter what the conditions are there, and the worse the better, you can live there and everywhere for the soul, for God.
Kiss you. Hello mother. L. Tolstoy.
Gradually, my correspondence with the elderly teacher became more and more animated.
Thank you, dear Lebrun*, for not forgetting me. I am always glad to communicate with you, and I am also glad to see the cheerful spirit of the letter.
I live in the old way and remember and love you, and so do all of us. Say my regards to your mother.
I’m always glad to receive your letter*, dear Lebrun, I’m glad because I love you. When I receive the article, I will treat it strictly and write to you.
Hello mother. L. T. (2/12.07)
Now I have received, dear Lebrun*, your good, good long letter and I hope to answer in detail, now I am writing only to let you know what I received and that I love you more and more.
I wanted to answer your long letter at length, dear friend Lebrun, but I don’t have time. I will only repeat what I already wrote, that state of mind your good. The main good thing about him is humility. Don't lose this precious foundation of everything.
Today I received your other letter with an addition to Herzen*. Dusan will answer you about the business side. My marks, crossing out, are the most insignificant. I started to make serious adjustments, but there was no time, so I left it. Maybe I'll do some proofreading. Goodbye for now. Kiss you. Bow to mother.
Suddenly the newspapers bring news that Tolstoy’s secretary has been arrested and exiled to the North. Chertkov brought N. N. Gusev* as secretary. This was the first paid and excellent secretary. With his knowledge of shorthand and complete devotion he was in highest degree useful to Tolstoy. While he and Dr. Makovitsky were in Yasnaya, I could be completely calm about my beloved teacher. Gusev's expulsion alarmed me to the core. I immediately write to the teacher, offering to come immediately to replace the exiled one.
The whole amazing soul of the thinker is visible in his answer.
Yasnaya Polyana. 1909.12/5.
I am so guilty before you, dear friend Lebrun, for taking so long to respond to your not only congenial and, as always, very intelligent, but also heartfelt, kind letter, that I don’t know (how) it’s better to apologize to you. Well, my fault, sorry. The main thing happened because I thought I answered.
Taking advantage of your self-denial is out of the question. Sasha and her friend do an excellent job of recording and putting in order my senile radotage*.
Everything I could say, I said as best I could. And it is so hopeless that those people who can be stabbed on the head and heart, as you put it, would move even an inch from the position in which they stand and in the defense of which they falsely use all the intelligence given to them, that to continue to understand that , which is clear as day, seems to be the most empty activity. Some of what I wrote about law and science in general is now being translated and published. When it comes out, I'll send it to you.
Despite this, my reluctance to continue to let, as Ruskin said, undoubted truths into one long ear of the World so that it, without leaving any trace, would immediately come out of the other, I still feel very good, little by little I am doing as I know how, my personal business, I won’t say improvement, but reduction of my nastiness, which gives me not only great interest, but also joy and fills my life with the most important thing that a person can always do, even a minute before death. I wish you the same and allow me to advise you.
Bow to your wife for me. What kind of person is she?
Hello to your mother. Leo Tolstoy, who loves you very much
Tolstoy felt very painfully when others were persecuted because of his writings. He always suffered greatly in such cases and wrote letters and appeals, asking the authorities to persecute only him, since only he is the source of what the authorities consider a crime. So it was now. He wrote a long accusatory letter to the police officer who arrested Gusev and, it seems, to someone else.
My heart was breaking looking at this, and I, a young man, decided to advise the elderly teacher to remain completely calm, “even if we were all hanged” and write not such letters, but only eternal and significant ones. Tolstoy answers.
Thank you, dear, dear Lebrun*, for your good advice and your letter. The fact that I did not answer for so long does not mean that I was not very happy about your letter and did not feel the recrudescence* of my friendship for you, but only that I am very busy, passionate about my work, and old and weak; I feel close to the limits of my strength.
The proof of this is that I started writing the day before yesterday and am now finishing it at 10 in the evening.
God help you in you - just don’t drown it out, he will give you strength - to fulfill your intention in marriage. All life is only an approximation to the ideal, and it is good when you do not let go of the ideal, but, whether crawling or sideways, put all your strength into getting closer to it.
Write your long letter in moments of leisure, a letter not to me alone, but to all people close in spirit.
For the most part, I don’t advise writing, especially to myself, but I can’t resist for now. I won’t advise you against it, because you are one of the people who thinks in an original way. Kiss you.
Hello to your mother, bride.
My “big letter”, which Tolstoy mentions, remained unwritten. The “minutes of leisure” that I had were too short. And there was too much to say. The subject that occupied me was too significant and versatile.
Seeing that time is passing and I can’t write at length, I send a short letter to the teacher. It seems like the first time in ten years of our correspondence. The answer was not delayed.
Thank you, dear Lebrun*, and for your short letter.
You are one of those people with whom my connection is firm, not direct, from me to you, but through God, it would seem the most distant, but on the contrary, the closest and firmest. Not by chords or arcs, but by radii.
When people write to me about their desire to write, I mostly advise them to abstain. I advise you not to refrain and not to rush. Tout vent a point a cetuf guff aft attendee*. And you have and will have something to say and the ability to express.
Your letter is unfounded in that you express your contentment in the spiritual area, and then seem to complain about dissatisfaction in the material area, in that area that is not in our power, and therefore should not cause our disagreement and dissatisfaction, if the spiritual is in the foreground . I am very happy for you that, as I see, you live the same life with your wife. This is a great blessing.
Please convey my heartfelt greetings to your mother and her.
Your letter found me with an unhealthy liver. That’s why this letter is so wrong.
Kiss you. What about Herzen?
I still cannot come to terms with the enormous transgression associated with this letter. This letter, Tolstoy's last letter*, remained unanswered. I had many, many friends and correspondents. And as far as I remember, correspondence with everyone ended with my letters. Only the gentle, beloved Tolstoy should have remained unanswered. Why now, re-reading these yellowed leaves, can’t I atone for my guilt?!
Then, in the heat of youth, there was too much to say to my beloved teacher. It didn't fit into the letter. There was no way to write in detail in the intense work environment that I created for myself. In addition, the new horizons that began to open from the new position of an independent farmer for me were still completely vague. Needed long years learning and experience to bring them into clarity. And then I suffered, took up the pen, threw away unfinished letters... Tolstoy was old. He had a year to live*. But I didn’t realize it. I was so caught up in the same ideas and the same ideals. Such is the blindness of youth. And the days and weeks changed with the same speed with which you leaf through a book!
In addition, events soon began in Yasnaya Polyana that radically disturbed my peace*.
Black impenetrable clouds obscured that lovely radiant horizon under which I lived these ten years of close communication with an intelligent, gentle and loving soul an unforgettable and brilliant teacher.
COMMENTS
S. b ...they talked about “Resurrection”... I decided to publish this only because it was necessary to quickly help the Doukhobors. - July 14, 1898 Tolstoy wrote to Chertkov: “Since it has now become clear how much money is still missing for the resettlement of the Doukhobors, I think this is what to do: I have three stories: “Irtenev”, “Resurrection” and “O. Sergius“ (I’ve been working on it lately and wrote the end in rough). So I would like to sell them<…>and use the proceeds to resettle the Doukhobors..." (Tolstoy L. N. PSS. T. 88. P. 106; see also: T. 33. P. 354-355; commentary by N. K. Gudzia). The novel “Resurrection” was first published in the magazine “Niva” (1899. Ha 11 -52), the entire fee was donated to the needs of the Doukhobors.
P. 8 ...The great Edison sent Tolstoy a recording phonograph as a gift. - On July 22, 1908, the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) turned to Tolstoy with a request to give him “one or two sessions of the phonograph in French or English, preferably in both” (the phonograph is Edison’s invention). V. G. Chertkov, on Tolstoy’s instructions, responded to Edison on August 17, 1908: “Leo Tolstoy asked me to tell you that he considers himself not entitled to reject your proposal. He agrees to dictate something for the phonograph at any time” (Tolstoy L.N. PSS. T. 37. P. 449). On December 23, 1908, D. P. Makovitsky wrote in his diary: “Two people arrived from Edison with a good phonograph<…>L.N. was worried a few days before the arrival of Edison’s people and today he practiced, especially in the English text. He translated and wrote himself into French. He spoke Russian and French well. The text of “The Kingdom of God” didn’t come out well in English, he stumbled over two words. Tomorrow he will speak again”; and December 24: “L. N. spoke English text into the phonograph” (“Yasnaya Polyana Notes” by D. P. Makovitsky. Book 3. P. 286). At first, Tolstoy used the phonograph quite often to dictate letters and a number of small articles for the book “Cool Readings.” The device interested him very much and made him want to talk. Tolstoy’s daughter wrote that “the phonograph makes his work very easy” (letter from A.L. Tolstoy to A.B. Goldenweiser dated February 9, 1908 - Tolstoy’s correspondence with T. Edison / Publ. A. Sergeenko // Literary Heritage. M ., 1939. T. 37-38. Book 2. P. 331). The beginning of the pamphlet “I Can’t Be Silent” was recorded on a phonograph.
P. 9 ...Lao-Tze... - Lao Tzu, Chinese sage of the 6th-5th centuries. BC e., perhaps a legendary figure, according to legend - the author of the philosophical treatise “Tao Te Ching” (“Book of the Path and Grace”), who is considered the founder of Taoism. Tolstoy found in the teachings of Lao Tzu much that was similar to his views. In 1884, he translated some fragments from the book “Tao-te-king” (see: Tolstoy L.N. PSS. T. 25. P. 884). In 1893, he corrected the translation of this book made by E.I. Popov, and he himself wrote a summary of several chapters (see: Ibid. T. 40. P. 500-502). In 1909, he radically revised this translation and wrote an article about the teachings of Lao Tzu. His translation, along with this article, appeared in the Posrednik publishing house in 1909 under the title “The Sayings of the Chinese Sage Lao-Tse, Selected by L. N. Tolstoy” (see: Ibid. T. 39. pp. 352-362) . The texts of Lao Tzu were also used in “The Reading Circle”, and Tolstoy gives them in abbreviation, every now and then inserting his own fragments when quoting, designed to explain the original source. At the same time, “the modern researcher is amazed<…>accuracy of translation, L. N. Tolstoy’s intuitive ability to choose the only correct version from several European translations and, with his inherent sense of words, select the Russian equivalent.” However, accuracy is observed only “until Tolstoy begins to edit his own translation “for the reader.” Thanks to this editing, throughout the entire “Circle of Reading” we always hear the voice of Tolstoy himself behind the voices of the Chinese sages” (Lisevich I.S. Chinese sources // Tolstoy L.N. Collected works: In 20 vols. M., 1998 T. 20: Reading circle 1904-1908. November - December, pp. 308).
P. 10 ... a book about John Ruskin that had just appeared - April 6, 1895. Tolstoy wrote in his diary: “I read the wonderful book Birthday Book by Ruskin” (Ibid. T. 53. P. 19; referring to the book by E. G. Ritchie A. G. The Ruskin Birthday Book. London, 1883). John Ruskin (eng. John Ruskin) (1819-1900) - English writer, artist, poet, literary critic, an art theorist who had a great influence on the development of art criticism and aesthetics in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries. Tolstoy highly valued him and largely shared his views regarding the connection between art and morality, as well as a number of other problems: “John Ruskin is one of the most remarkable people not only in England and our time, but in all countries and times. He's one of those rare people who thinks with his heart<…>and therefore he thinks and says what he himself sees and feels and what everyone in the future will think and say. Ruskin is famous in England as a writer and art critic, but as a philosopher, political economist and Christian moralist he is ignored<…>but the power of Ruskin’s thought and its expression are such that, despite all the friendly opposition that he met and meets especially among orthodox economists, even the most radical ones (and they cannot help but attack him, because he destroys everything to the ground their teaching), his fame begins to be established and his thoughts begin to penetrate the larger public” (Tolstoy L.N. PSS. T. 31. P. 96). Approximately half of the statements of English authors included in the “Circle of Readings” belong to Ruskin (see: Zorin V.A. English sources // Tolstoy L.N. Collected works: In 20 volumes. T. 20: Circle of Readings. P. 328-331).
...a new biography, Michel Angelo... - Perhaps Lebrun is referring to the biography of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) by R. Rolland, which he sent to Tolstoy in August 1906: “Vies des hommes illustre. La vie de Michel-Ange" (“Cahiers de la Quinzaine”, 1906, series 7-8, No. 18.2; see also: Tolstoy L. N. PSS. T. 76. P. 289).
…“.Notes of Catherine”… - Notes of Empress Catherine the Second / Translation from the original. St. Petersburg, 1907.
... Schopenhauer's long dialogue about religion ~ This translator was a member of the court... - Pyotr Sergeevich Porokhovshchikov, a member of the St. Petersburg District Court, on November 13, 1908 sent Tolstoy a letter along with the translation he completed (published: Schopenhauer A. On Religion: Dialogue / Trans. P. Porokhovshchikova. St. Petersburg, 1908). On November 21, Tolstoy replied: “I<…>Now I am especially happy to re-read your translation and, having started reading, I see that the translation is excellent. I very much regret that this book, which is especially useful in our time, is banned” (Tolstoy L.N. PSS. T. 78. P. 266). On November 20 and 21, D. P. Makovitsky wrote in his diary: “At lunch, L. N. advised<…>read Schopenhauer's "Dialogue on Religion". The book in Russian translation has just appeared and is already banned. Beautifully presented. L.N. read it before and remembers”; "L. N. about the dialogue “On Religion” by Schopenhauer: “The reader will feel the depth of these two views, religion and philosophy, and not the victory of one. The defender of religion is strong." L.N. recalled that Herzen read his dialogue with someone. Belinsky to him: “Why did you argue with such a blockhead?” The same cannot be said about Schopenhauer’s dialogue” (“Yasnaya Polyana Notes” by D. P. Makovitsky. Book 3. P. 251).
“Anarchism” by Eltzbacher - We are talking about the book: Eltzbacher R. Der Anarchismus. Berlin, 1900 (Russian translation: Elzbacher P. The Essence of Anarchism / Translated under the editorship and with a preface by M. Andreev. St. Petersburg, 1906). Tolstoy received this book from the author in 1900. The book outlined the teachings of V. Godwin, P.-J. Proudhon, M. Stirner, M. A. Bakunin, P. A. Kropotkin, B. Tukker and L. N. Tolstoy. P.I. Biryukov wrote: “Western scientists are beginning to take a serious interest in Lev Nikolaevich, and at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries a whole series of monographs about Tolstoy appeared in all kinds of languages. In 1900 it came out very interesting book on German Doctor of Laws Elzbacher entitled “Anarchism”. In this book, with the seriousness characteristic of German scientists, the teachings of the seven most famous anarchists, including Leo Tolstoy, are analyzed and presented. The author of this book sent his work to Lev Nikolaevich, and he responded with a letter of gratitude. Here are its essential parts: “Your book does for anarchism what was done for socialism 30 years ago: it introduces it into the program of political science. I liked your book extremely. It is completely objective, understandable and, as far as I can tell, has excellent sources. It only seems to me that I am not an anarchist in the sense of a political reformer. In the index of your book, under the word “coercion,” references are made to the pages of the works of all the other authors you examine, but there is not a single reference to my writings. Isn’t this proof that the teaching that you attribute to me, but which in fact is only the teaching of Christ, is not a political teaching at all, but a religious one?’” (Biryukov P.I. Biography of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy. T. IV . M.; Pg. 1923. P. 5).
P. 11 ...Romain Rolland in his good, perhaps the best, foreign work on Tolstoy - in the book “The Life of Tolstoy” (“Vie de Tolstoï”, 1911); the book appeared in Russian in 1915.
Meanwhile, it was to him, in response to his question, that Tolstoy wrote a long article... - On April 16, 1887, R. Rolland first addressed Tolstoy with a letter in which he asked questions related to science and art (excerpts of the letter in Russian translation see: Literary heritage. M., 1937. T. 31-32. Having received no answer, Rolland wrote a second time, asking Tolstoy to resolve his doubts regarding a number of moral problems, as well as questions about mental and physical labor(see: Ibid. pp. 1008-1009). On October 3(?) 1887, Tolstoy responded in detail to this undated letter (see: Tolstoy Λ. N. PSS. T. 64. P. 84-98); Lebrun calls Tolstoy’s answer “a long article.”
...H. N. Ge... - Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge (1831-1894) - historical painter, portrait painter, landscape painter; came from a noble family. For several years he abandoned painting; Ge was actively involved in agriculture and even became an excellent stove maker.
P. 13...N. G. Sutkova from Sochi... - Nikolai Grigorievich Sutkova (1872-1932) graduated from the Faculty of Law, was engaged in agriculture in Sochi, at one time sympathized with the views of Tolstoy, and visited Yasnaya Polyana several times. In his letter sent from Sochi, Sutkova reported that he was selecting thoughts from “The Reading Circle” and “For Every Day” to present them in a popular form. In his letter dated January 9, 1910, Tolstoy answered him: “I was very glad to receive your letter, dear Sutkova. I am also pleased with the work that you have planned and are doing. To set forth the doctrine of truth, the same throughout the world from the Brahmins to Emerson,
Pascal, Kant, so that it is accessible to large masses of people with an unperverted mind, to present it in such a way that illiterate mothers can pass it on to their children - and this is a great task that lies ahead for all of us. Let's do it with all our might while we're alive. L. Tolstoy, who loves you” (Ibid. T. 81. P. 30).
…Π. P. Kartushin... - Pyotr Prokofyevich Kartushin (1880-1916), a rich Don Cossack, like-minded person of L. N. Tolstoy, his acquaintance and correspondent, one of the founders of the publishing house “Renewal” (1906), where Tolstoy’s unpublished works were published in Russia under censorship conditions. S. N. Durylin recalled: “A Black Sea Cossack, handsome, short, in good health, with independent and fairly significant means of living, Kartushin experienced a deep spiritual upheaval: he left everything and went to Tolstoy to seek the truth. Own funds in 1906-1907 he gave money for the cheap publication of Tolstoy’s most extreme works, which even the “Mediator” did not print for fear of government punishment: with Kartushin’s money, the “Obnovlenie” publishing house published “The Approaching of the End”, “Soldier’s” and “Officer’s Memos”, “The End of the Century”, “ Slavery of our time,” etc. Kartushin himself led the life of a voluntary poor man. In letters to friends, he often asked: “help, brother, get rid of money.” And, indeed, he was freed from them: his money went to cheap editions of beautiful books of eternal significance, to their free distribution, to supporting people who wanted to “sit down on the land,” that is, to engage in land labor, and for many other good deeds. But this man of crystalline soul did not find religious peace in Tolstoy either. In 1910-1911 he became interested in the life of Alexander Dobrolyubov. Once the founder of Russian symbolism, “the first Russian decadent,” Dobrolyubov (born 1875) became a novice in the Solovetsky Monastery, and in the end accepted the feat of a wanderer, disappearing into the Russian sea of peasants. Kartushin was attracted to Dobrolyubov by his wanderings, his participation in the hard labor of the people (Dobrolyubov worked as an unpaid farm laborer for the peasants), and his religious teaching, in which the height of moral requirements was combined with spiritual depth and poetic beauty of external expression. But, having fallen in love with Dobrolyubov, Kartushin did not stop loving Tolstoy: to stop loving anyone, and especially Tolstoy, was not in the nature of this beautiful, tender and deep loving person"(Durylin S. In Tolstoy and about Tolstoy // Ural. 2010. No. 3. P. 177-216).
...Felten from St. Petersburg... - Nikolai Evgenievich Felten (1884-1940), a descendant of the academician of architecture Yu. M. Felten (1730-1801), for several years was engaged in the illegal publication and distribution of Tolstoy’s prohibited works; in 1907 he was arrested for this and sentenced to six months in a fortress. About Felten, see: Tolstoy. N. PSS. T. 73. P. 179; Bulgakov V.F. Friends and loved ones // Bulgakov V.F. About Tolstoy: Memoirs and stories. Tula, 1978. pp. 338-342.
...Young publishers of "Renewal" ... - the above-mentioned I. I. Gorbunov, N. G. Sutkova, P. P. Kartushin and H. E. Felten (the latter served as the executive editor). Founded in 1906 by like-minded people of Tolstoy, the Obnovlenie publishing house published his uncensored works.
...As for Arago, God was a “hypothesis” for me... - May 5, 1905 Tolstoy wrote in his diary: “Someone, a mathematician, told Napoleon about God: I never needed this hypothesis. And I would say: I could never do anything good without this hypothesis” (Tolstoy Λ. N. PSS. T. 55. P. 138). Lebrun recalls the same episode, believing that Napoleon's interlocutor was the French physicist Dominique Francois
Arago (1786-1853). However, according to the memoirs of Napoleon’s physician Francesco Ritommarchi, this interlocutor was the French physicist and astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827), who answered the emperor’s question why there was no mention of God in his “Treatise on Celestial Mechanics” with the words: “I did not need this hypothesis” (see: Dusheiko K. Quotations from World History. M., 2006. P. 219).
...in that same room “under the vaults”... - The room “under the vaults” at different times served as Tolstoy’s study room, since it was isolated from the noise in the house. In the famous portrait of I. E. Repin, Tolstoy is depicted in a room under the vaults (see: Tolstaya S. A. Letters to L. N. Tolstoy. P. 327).
P. 14 ...I always remember Matthew Arnold's definition... - Matthew Arnold (Arnold, 1822-1888) - English poet, critic, literary historian and theologian. His “Tasks” have been translated into Russian art criticism"(M., 1901) and "What is the essence of Christianity and Judaism" (M., 1908; both books were published by the publishing house "Posrednik"). The last work in the original is called “Literaturę and Dogma”. Tolstoy found that it was “surprisingly identical” with his thoughts (diary entry dated February 20, 1889 - Tolstoy L.N. PSS. T. 50. P. 38; see also p. 40). Arnold gives the following Old Testament definition of God: “An eternal, infinite power outside of us, demanding from us, leading us to righteousness” (Arnold M. What is the essence of Christianity and Judaism. P. 48).
This was shortly after Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church by the Holy Synod. - Tolstoy was not officially excommunicated from the Church. The “Church Gazette” published the “Decree of the Holy Synod of February 20-23, 1901, Xa 557 with a message to the faithful children of the Greek-Russian Orthodox Church about Count Leo Tolstoy,” which, in particular, said: “The Holy Synod in its care for children of the Orthodox Church, about protecting them from destructive temptation and about saving the erring, having a judgment about Count Leo Tolstoy and his anti-Christian and anti-Church false teaching, I considered it timely to publish as a warning to the church world<…>your message." Tolstoy was declared a false teacher, who “in the deception of his proud mind boldly rebelled against the Lord and against His Christ and against His holy property, clearly before everyone renounced the Mother who fed and raised him, the Orthodox Church, and devoted his literary activity and what was given to him from God talent for spreading among the people teachings contrary to Christ and the Church<…>. In his writings and letters, scattered in great numbers by him and his disciples all over the world, especially within our dear Fatherland, he preaches with the zeal of a fanatic the overthrow of all the dogmas of the Orthodox Church and the very essence of the Christian faith<…>. Therefore, the Church does not consider him its member and cannot consider him until he repents and restores his communion with her” (L.N. Tolstoy: Pro et contra: The personality and work of Leo Tolstoy in the assessment of Russian thinkers and researchers: Anthology. St. Petersburg ., 2000. pp. 345-346).
The “definition” of the Synod caused a stormy reaction in Russia, Europe and America. V. G. Korolenko wrote in his diary on February 25, 1901: “An act unprecedented in modern Russian history. True, the power and importance of a writer who, remaining on Russian soil, protected only by the charm of a great name and genius, would so mercilessly and boldly smash the “whales” of the Russian system: the autocratic order and the ruling Church, are also unparalleled. The gloomy anathema of the seven Russian “hierarchs”, resounding with echoes of the dark centuries of persecution, rushes towards an undoubtedly new phenomenon, marking the enormous growth of free Russian thought” (Korolenko V. G. Pol. collected works. State Publishing House of Ukraine, 1928. Diary. T. 4. P. 211). Korolenko expressed an opinion characteristic of most of Russian society. But at the same time, publications appeared in support of the Synod. Thus, on July 4, 1901, Korolenko noted in his diary an advertisement that appeared in newspapers about the exclusion of Tolstoy from honorary members of the Moscow Temperance Society. The basis was the fact that the Society includes only Orthodox Christians, and Tolstoy, after the “Definition” of the Synod, cannot be considered as such (see: Ibid. pp. 260-262). On October 1, Korolenko noted another statement that appeared in the newspapers, first published in the Tula Diocesan Gazette: “Many people, including those writing these lines, noticed an amazing phenomenon with the portraits of Count Λ. N. Tolstoy. After Tolstoy’s excommunication from the church, by the determination of the divinely established authorities, the expression on Count Tolstoy’s face took on a purely satanic appearance: it became not only angry, but ferocious and gloomy. This is not a deception of the feelings of a prejudiced, fanatical soul, but a real phenomenon that everyone can verify” (Ibid. p. 272). For more information about the “Definition” of the Synod, see: Why Leo Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Church: Sat. historical documents. M., 2006; Firsov S. L. Church-legal and social-psychological aspects of the “excommunication” of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy: (On the history of the problem) // Yasnaya Polyana collection-2008. Tula, 2008.
Tolstoy had just published his wonderful “Response to the Synod.” - According to a modern researcher, “Tolstoy reacted to the “excommunication”<…>very indifferent. Having learned about it, he only asked: was “anathema” proclaimed? And I was surprised that there was no “anathema”. Why then was it necessary to fence the garden at all? In his diary, he calls both the “definition” of the Synod and the warm expressions of sympathy that came to Yasnaya “strange”. L.N. was ill at that time...” (Basinsky P. Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise. M., 2010. P. 501). T.I. Polner, who was visiting Tolstoy at that moment, recalls: “The whole room was decorated with luxuriously smelling flowers.<…>"Marvelous! - says Tolstoy from the sofa. - The whole day is a holiday! Gifts, flowers, congratulations... here you are... Real name days! “He laughs” (Polner T.I. About Tolstoy: (Scraps of Memories) // Modern Notes. 1920. No. 1. P. 109 (Reprint commented edition: St. Petersburg. , 2010. P. 133). “Nevertheless, realizing that it is impossible to remain silent, Tolstoy writes a response to the resolution of the Synod, as usual, repeatedly reworking the text and finishing it only on April 4” (Basinsky P. Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise. P. 501). In “Response to the resolution of the Synod of February 20-22 and to the letters I received on this occasion,” Tolstoy confirmed his break with the Church: “The fact that I renounced the church, which calls itself Orthodox, is absolutely fair. But I renounced. from her, not because I rebelled against the Lord, but on the contrary, only because with all the strength of my soul I wanted to serve him “But I not only do not reject God the Spirit, God - love, the only God - the beginning of everything, but I really do not recognize anything.” existing except God, and I see the whole meaning of life only in fulfilling the will of God, expressed in Christian teaching" Tolstoy objected to the charges brought against him in the “Definition” of the Synod: “Resolution of the Synod<…>illegal or deliberately ambiguous because if it wants to be excommunication, then it does not satisfy the church rules according to which such excommunication can be pronounced<…>It is unfounded because the main reason for its appearance is the large spread of my false teaching seducing people, while I am well aware that there are hardly a hundred people who share my views and the spread of my writings on religion thanks to censorship is so insignificant that the majority of people who read resolution of the Synod, do not have the slightest idea of what I have written about religion, as can be seen from the letters I have received” (Tolstoy L. N. PSS. T. 34. pp. 245-253). Tolstoy's last statement does not entirely correspond to the facts. Great amount His religious and philosophical works circulated in manuscripts, were distributed in copies made on a hectograph, and came from abroad, where they were published in publishing houses organized by Tolstoy’s like-minded people, in particular, V. G. Chertkov. It was with publications received from abroad that Lebrun became acquainted while living in the Far East.
P. 15. It is not without reason that at the end of my article “On Religion and Morality”... - “So, answering your two questions, I say: “Religion is a known relationship established by man with his individual personality to the infinite world or the beginning of it. Morality is the ever-present guide of life, arising from this relationship.’” (Ibid. Vol. 39, p. 26). The exact title of the article is “Religion and Morality” (1893).
P. 16. ...father... - See about him: Russian World. No. 4. 2010. P. 30.
...“White Bride”, in Circassian Gelendzhik. - Most likely, Lebrun writes about the so-called False Gelendzhik. In a guide to the Caucasus, published in 1914, we read: “9 versts from Gelendzhik, a very poetic place with bizarre beams and hollows, “False Gelendzhik,” is quickly being built and populated.” “Once upon a time, over a hundred years ago, on the site of our village there was the Natukhai village of Mezyb. His name is preserved in the name of the river, which merges with Aderba near the seashore. In 1831, next to the village of Mezyb, on the shore of Gelendzhik Bay, the first fortification on the Black Sea coast was founded - Gelendzhik. Russian ships began to arrive in the bay, bringing provisions for the garrison of the Gelendzhik fortress. Sometimes such a ship sailed at night. The lights of the fortification burned dimly. That's where the ship headed. As he approached, the captain was puzzled: the lights he was walking toward did not belong to the Gelendzhik fortification, but to the Natukhai aul of Mezyb. This mistake was repeated several times, and gradually the name False Gelendzhik, or False Gelendzhik, was assigned to the village of Mezyb. The village is located on the low shore of the Black Sea, 12 kilometers from Gelendzhik. Among the dachas and owners of False Gelendzhik were engineer Perkun, the famous Moscow singer Navrotsskaya (her dacha was built of wood in the old Russian style), officer Turchaninov, Victor Lebrun, L. Tolstoy’s personal secretary, lived here for 18 years. On July 13, 1964, the place was renamed the village of Divnomorskoye. Information provided by the Gelendzhik Museum of History and Local Lore www.museum.sea.ru
P. 17. My father’s parents were good farmers in Champagne. - Champagne is a commune in France, located in the Limousin region. Department of the commune - Creuse. It is part of the canton of Bellegarde-en-Marche. The district of the commune is Aubusson. Champagne (French: Champagne, Latin: Campania) is a historical region in France, famous for its wine-making traditions (the word “champagne” comes from its name).
P. 18. ...research “A. I. Herzen and the revolution.” - Tolstoy’s follower Victor Lebrun in 1906 began compiling a collection of Herzen’s aphorisms and judgments with a biographical sketch about him, which grew into an independent manuscript “Herzen and the Revolution.” According to Lebrun, the manuscript fell victim to censorship. In December 1907, Tolstoy received an article about Herzen by his like-minded person V. A. Lebrun, which contained a number of quotes from Herzen sympathetic to Tolstoy. On the evening of December 3, according to Makovitsky’s notes, he read aloud from this manuscript Herzen’s thoughts about the Russian community, about “the orthodoxy of democracy, the conservatism of revolutionaries and liberal journalists” and about the suppression of European revolutions by military force. Makovitsky asked Tolstoy if he would write a preface to Lebrun's article. Tolstoy replied that he would like to write. On December 22 of the same year, Tolstoy, with guests who had arrived from Moscow, again spoke about this article and said about Herzen: “How little they know him and how useful it is to know him, especially now. So it is difficult to refrain from indignation against the government - not because it collects taxes, but because it removed Herzen from the everyday life of Russian life, eliminated the influence that he could have ... ". Despite the fact that Tolstoy again said in January 1908 that he intended to write a preface to Lebrun’s article, he did not write this preface, and Lebrun’s article was not published. (Literary heritage, vol. 41-42, p. 522, publishing house of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1941). “Continuing to admire Herzen, L.N. recalls one of his friends, a young Frenchman living in the Caucasus and who wrote a monograph about Herzen. L.N. speaks with tender sympathy about this work and says: I would very much like to write a preface to it. But I don’t know if I’ll have time. There is so little left to live..." (Sergeenko P. Herzen and Tolstoy // Russian Word. 1908. December 25 (January 7, 1909). No. 299). From the comments to Tolstoy's letters to Le Brun, it is known that Tolstoy sent his article to Posrednik, but it was not published. Most likely due to the ban on censorship.
P. 19. Vanity of vanities and vexation of spirit?... - Words of Solomon in the “Book of Ecclesiastes”, 1.1.
Thank you, dear Lebrun, for writing... - Lebrun dates this letter to November 6, 1905, which, apparently, is a mistake. The letter with the same text is dated November 6, 1908. See: Tolstoy L.N. PSS. T. 78. P. 249.
Thank you, dear Lebrun, for from time to time... - (Tolstoy L.N. PSS. T. 77. P. 150).
I kiss you and Kartushin fraternally... - See note to page 13 present. ed.
P. 20. Long before me, several intelligent followers of Tolstoy settled near Gelendzhik:<…> These people tried to organize an agricultural colony. - In 1886, a group of populist intellectuals led by V.V. Eropkin, N.N. Kogan, Z. S. Sychugov and A.A. Sychugova, having bought a plot of land (250 dessiatines in the region of the Pshady river near Gelendzhik), founded the agricultural community “Krinitsa”. The founder of “Krinitsa” was V.V. Eropkin, an aristocrat, brilliantly educated (law and mathematics faculties of Moscow University). Having become fascinated by the ideas of populism in his youth, he abandoned the environment that raised him and the means of subsistence provided by his family. He made several attempts to set up an agricultural artel in the Ufa and Poltava provinces, which ended unsuccessfully. After a long search, Eropkin bought a plot of land in the Mikhailovsky Pass area. Eropkin’s fate was tragic in its own way: in order to create a material basis for the development of Krinitsa, he was forced to live and work away from his brainchild. Only at the end of his life, seriously ill and paralyzed, was he brought to Krinitsa, where he died. The ideological inspirer of “Krinitsa” B. Ya. Orlov-Yakovlev, a student of the community, librarian, keeper of its archive, calls military doctor Joseph Mikhailovich Kogan. This anarchist and atheist composed the essay “Memo or Idea of Common Sense as Applied to the Conscious Life of People,” in which, in addition to criticizing modern conditions, “he recommended for the happiness of mankind to unite in communities with a complete community of ideas, land, property, labor” (Extracts from B’s diary . Y. Orlov, student of "Krinitsa". The work of I. M. Kogan in many ways anticipated the ideas later known as Tolstoyism. Perhaps for this reason, the Krinichians initially rejected Tolstoyism: “The cause of the Russian people is not Protestantism. Protestantism is the destiny of the German nation, where it has become a popular ideal. The business of the Russian people is creativity, the creation of new forms of life on moral principles, and therefore whoever understands this can be considered a Russian person. Protestantism also manifested itself large and brightly in the person of Tolstoy, but it is not a constructive movement, and therefore did not and does not have practical significance. Our job is to create better social forms on religious principles. In particular, “Krinitsa” is only the forerunner of that great popular movement that should take place in the coming era...” (Krinitsa. A quarter of a century of “Krinitsa”. Kiev: Co-op Publishing House. magazine “Our Business”, 1913. P. 166). However, later, warm and even business relations developed between Tolstoy and the Krinichans, as evidenced by Tolstoy’s letters (See Tolstoy’s letter to Strakhov (PSS. T. 66. pp. 111-112) and a letter to V.V. Ivanov (Literary inheritance. T. 69. Book 1. Publishing house of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Moscow, 1941. P. 540-541). In 1910, “Krinitsa” was transformed from a religious-communist community into an agricultural production cooperative, which was called the “Intelligent Agricultural Artel Krinitsa.” In the same year, a monument to L.N. Tolstoy was erected in “Krinitsa.”
...were at the same time Georgists. - We are talking about followers of the ideas of Henry George (1839-1897), an American publicist, economist and social reformer. In his book Progress and Poverty (1879), they explored the causes of continued impoverishment in industrialized capitalist countries (despite ever-increasing levels of production), as well as the problems of sharp economic downturns and permanent stagnation. According to George, their main reason is fluctuations in the value of land (in the form of land rent), causing active speculation on the part of landowners. His proposed solution amounted to a “single tax” system, according to which the value of land was to be taxed, which effectively meant common ownership of the land (without changing the legal status of the owner). At the same time, it was necessary to eliminate taxes on income from industrial activities, thereby giving a powerful impetus to free enterprise and productive labor.
...in science it is called ground rent. - Land rent - in exploitative socio-economic formations, part of the surplus product created by direct producers in agriculture, appropriated by land owners; the bulk of the rent paid to land owners by tenants of the land. 3. r. involves the separation of the use of land from ownership of it. In this case, land ownership turns into only a title, giving land owners the right to receive income from land used by other persons and to collect tribute from those who directly cultivate it. “Whatever the specific form of rent, all its types have in common the fact that the appropriation of rent is the economic form in which land ownership is realized...” (Marx K., Engels F. Works. 2nd ed. T. 25. Part 2 . P. 183).
P. 21. Thank you, dear friend, for your letter. - See: Tolstoy L.N. PSS. T. 77. P. 84.
No matter how good it is, take care of a spiritual corner in your soul about a rainy day, Epictetus is a Comrade... - Epictetus (50-138) - ancient Greek philosopher, representative of the Nikopol school of stoicism. Λ. N. Tolstoy here hints at the doctrine of Epictetus: “It is not the phenomena and objects of the surrounding world that make us unhappy, but our thoughts, desires and ideas about the world around us. Therefore, we ourselves are the creators of our own destiny and happiness.”
...Marya Lvovna... - Maria Lvovna Obolenskaya (1871-1906) - daughter of L.N. Tolstoy. Since 1897 she has been married to Nikolai Leonidovich Obolensky. See about her: Russian World. No. 8. 2013. P. 105.
P. 22. I didn’t burn out, my dear young friend... - “Letter No. 33, January 30, 1907, Ya. P. Published from copy book No. 7, pp. 248 and 249" (Tolstoy L.N. PSS. T. 77. P. 30). See about the fire: Russian World. No. 4. 2010. P. 39.
...Vladimir Grigorievich Chertkov... - See about him: Russian World. No. 4. 2010. P. 38.
... “God is not in power, but in truth” ... - These words are attributed to Alexander Nevsky by the unknown author of his “Life”. See Monuments of literature of Ancient Rus': XIII century. M., 1981. P. 429.
...founded the publishing house of “Free Word” in England... - V. G. Chertkov founded several publishing houses: in Russia - “Posrednik”, in England in 1893 - “Free Word”, and after his exile there in 1897 - an English-language one "Free Age Press" and the magazines "Free Word" and "Free Sheets"; returned from England in 1906 and settled near Tolstoy's estate.
... "The Steel Room" by Tolstoy. - See: Russian World. No. 8. 2013. P. 103.
P. 23. ...Yulia Ivanovna... - Igumnova Yu. I. (1871-1940) - artist, friend of T. L. Tolstoy, secretary of L. N. Tolstoy.
...Sasha... - Alexandra Lvovna Tolstaya (1884-1979), daughter of L.N. Tolstoy. See about her: Russian World. No. 8. 2013. P. 105.
...on a Remington. “That’s what almost every typewriter was called at that time.” One of the first known typewriters was assembled in 1833 by the Frenchman Progrin. She was extremely imperfect. It took about forty years to perfect this device. And only in 1873 was a fairly reliable and convenient model of a typewriter created, which its inventor Scholes proposed famous factory Remington, which produced weapons, sewing and agricultural machines. In 1874, the first hundred cars were already put on sale.
... "On the meaning of the Russian revolution." - The final title of the article, which was originally called “Two Roads.” On April 17, 1906, he writes in his diaries: “...I’m still busy with “Two Roads”. I’m not moving well.” (Leo Tolstoy. Collected works in 22 volumes. T. 22. M., 1985. P. 218). Separately published by the publishing house of V. Vrublevsky in 1907. The article appeared in response to Khomyakov’s article “Autocracy, the experience of systems for constructing this concept.” The conclusion to the article grew into a separate work, “What to do?” The first edition was published by the Posrednik publishing house, it was immediately confiscated, and the publisher was brought to justice. After Tolstoy's death, it was reprinted for the third time in the Nineteenth Part of the 12th edition of the Collected Works, which was also seized by censorship.
Sukhotin Mikhail Sergeevich... - Sukhotin M. S. (1850-1914) - Novosilsk district leader of the nobility, member of the First State Duma from the Tula 1 province. In his first marriage, he married Maria Mikhailovna Boda-Kolycheva (1856-1897) and had six children. In 1899 he married Tatyana Lvovna Tolstoy, daughter of the writer Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Their only daughter Tatyana (1905-1996), married to Sukhotin-Albertini.
...Tanya... - Tatyana Lvovna (1864-1950), daughter of L.N. Tolstoy. Since 1897 she has been married to Mikhail Sergeevich Sukhotin. Artist, curator of the Yasnaya Polyana Museum, then director of the State Museum of Leo Tolstoy in Moscow. In exile since 1925.
Andrey... - son of L. N. Tolstoy - Tolstoy Andrey Lvovich (1877-1916). See about him: Russian World. No. 8. 2013. P. 104.
Dushan warms his feet in the evenings, and later comes out to us and leads the “Notebook”... - See about him: Russian World. No. 8. 2013. pp. 93-94.
And I regret and I don’t regret, dear Lebrun... - This note from Tolstoy to a letter from his daughter addressed to Lebrun is shown in the PSS as a separate letter from Tolstoy to Lebrun: “Printed from a copy by the hand of Yu. I. Igumnova in the copy book Ha 7, l. 153. Response to a letter from Viktor Anatolyevich Lebrun dated October 20, 1906.” (Tolstoy L. N. PSS. T. 76. P. 218).
P. 24. ...Thank you, dear Lebrun... - Lebrun mistakenly indicated 1905 instead of 1907. (Tolstoy L. N. PSS. T. 77. P. 214).
Always glad to receive your letter... - Incorrectly dated by Lebrun: 2/12/07. “Letter Ha 301, 1907 November 27. Ya. P. Reply to V. A. Lebrun’s letter dated November 16, 1907 with a notification that the manuscript of his article about Herzen was sent to Tolstoy for review” (Tolstoy L. N. PSS. T. 77. P. 252).
Now I have received it, dear Lebrun... - See: Tolstoy K. N. PSS. T. 77. P. 257.
I wanted to answer at length... - See: Tolstoy L.N. PSS. T. 77. P. 261.
...a letter with an addition to Herzen. - This letter, concerning V. A. Lebrun’s article about Herzen, was not found in the archive. Tolstoy sent the article to the publisher of Posrednik, I. I. Gorbunov-Posadov. As far as is known, the article was not published (Tolstoy L. N. PSS. T. 77. P. 261).
...N. Gusev... - Gusev Nikolai Nikolaevich (1882-1967), Soviet literary critic. In 1907-1909 he was L. N. Tolstoy’s personal secretary and accepted his moral teachings. In 1925-1931, director of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow. Participated in editing the anniversary edition of the Complete Works of Tolstoy in 90 volumes (1928-1958). Author of works on the life and work of L. N. Tolstoy.
P. 25. I am so. guilty before you... - “Letter No. 193, October 12, 1909. Ya.P.” In Tolstoy's date, the month is incorrectly written in Roman numerals. An excerpt published in the journal Vegetarian Review, 1911, 1, p. 6. Reply to letter
V. A. Lebrun dated August 30, 1909 (mail, pcs.), in which Lebrun offered Tolstoy his services as a secretary in return for the expelled N. N. Gusev. In connection with information that had reached him about Tolstoy’s work on an article on science, he asked him to at least briefly express his attitude “not to the imaginary science prostituted in the service of the rich, but to true science.” On the envelope of this letter, received in Yasnaya Polyana in early September, Tolstoy wrote a note for the secretary’s response: “Answer: I’m so busy with false science that I don’t highlight the real one. And she is.” Then no one answered, probably in view of Tolstoy’s departure to Krekshino. In a reply letter dated November 22, V. A. Lebrun wrote in detail about his life and experiences. On the envelope is Tolstoy’s note: “A lovely letter...” (Tolstoy A.N. PSS. T. 80. P. 139).
…radotage - fr. nonsense.
...as Ruskin said it... - This thought by J. Ruskin is placed in “The Reading Circle” (Tolstoy L.N. PSS. T. 41. P. 494). About John Ruskin, see note on page 10 present. ed.
P. 26. Thank you, dear, dear Lebrun... - “Letter to Ha, July 15, 1909, 8-10. Ya. P. Printed from a typewritten copy. Reply to Lebrun's letter dated May 30, 1909." (Tolstoy L.N. PSS. T. 80. P. 12-13).
...recrudescence... - fr. strengthening, increase.
...Thank you, dear Lebrun... - Lebrun was probably mistaken in the date. He dates this letter to October 12, 1909. A letter with the specified date exists (Tolstoy A.N. PSS. T. 80. P. 139), but it contains a completely different text. This is a significant mistake, because further in the text of the book Lebrun calls this letter the last letter from Tolstoy and deeply regrets that he did not have time to answer it. A letter that matches the text: “Letter No. 111 1910. July 24-28.Ya. P. Printed from a copy. The date July 24 is determined by the copy, July 28 - by the notes of D. P. Makovits - who is on the envelope of Le Brun's letter and in the registration book of letters. Envelope without postmark; Apparently, the letter was brought and handed over to Tolstoy by someone personally. ...Response to Lebrun’s letter dated June 15, in which Lebrun described his life, full of economic worries that prevented him from writing, and greeted Tolstoy on behalf of his wife and mother” (Tolstoy L.N. PSS. T. 82. P. 88 ).
Tout vent a point a cetuf guff aft attendee. - The text of the original source is distorted by typewriting. Translation from French: Everything comes on time for those who know how to wait.
P. 27. ...Tolstoy's last letter... - This is really Tolstoy's last letter to Lebrun. But it was written not in 1909 (as Lebrun noted), but in 1910, which significantly changes the course of events (according to Lebrun) in the last years of Tolstoy’s life.
He had a year to live. - Le Brun insists that Tolstoy’s last letter was written to him in 1909, that is, a year before Tolstoy’s death. This is a mistake, because Tolstoy’s last letter was written in July 1910, that is, the year of Tolstoy’s death, if you trust the book of Tolstoy’s letters.
In addition, events soon began in Yasnaya Polyana that radically disturbed my peace. - There were plenty of events in Yasnaya Polyana in 1909. However, the truly dramatic events there began not in 1909, but precisely in July 1910, when Tolstoy’s last letter was written.
At that time for me they languish in silence
Hours of languid vigil:
In the inactivity of the night they burn more alive in me
Snakes of heart's remorse;
Dreams are boiling; in a mind overwhelmed by melancholy,
There is an excess of heavy thoughts;
The memory is silent before me
The scroll develops its long one:
And, reading my life with disgust,
I tremble and curse
And I complain bitterly, and I shed bitter tears,
But I don’t wash away the sad lines.
In the last line I would only change it like this, instead of: lines sad...would put: lines shameful I don’t wash it off.
Under this impression, I wrote the following in my diary:
I am now experiencing the torments of hell: I remember all the abomination of my former life, and these memories do not leave me and poison my life. It is common to regret that a person does not retain memories after death. What a blessing that this is not the case. What a torment it would be if in this life I remembered everything bad, painful for my conscience, that I did in my previous life. And if you remember the good, then you must remember all the bad. What happiness that memory disappears with death and only consciousness remains - consciousness, which represents, as it were, a general conclusion from good and bad, as if complex equation, reduced to its simplest expression: x = positive or negative, large or small value. Yes, great happiness is the destruction of memories; it would be impossible to live joyfully with it. Now, with the destruction of memory, we enter life with a clean, white page on which we can write again the good and the bad.”
It is true that not my whole life was so terribly bad - only one 20-year period of it was like that; It is also true that even during this period my life was not completely evil, as it seemed to me during my illness, and that even during this period impulses for good awoke in me, although they did not last long and
soon drowned out by uncontrolled passions. But still, this work of thought of mine, especially during my illness, clearly showed me that my biography, as biographies are usually written, with silence about all the nastiness and criminality of my life, would be a lie, and that if you write a biography, then you need to write the whole real truth. Only such a biography, no matter how ashamed I may be to write it, can be of real and fruitful interest to readers. Remembering my life in this way, that is, considering it from the point of view of the good and evil that I did, I saw that my life falls into four periods: 1) that wonderful, especially in comparison with the subsequent, innocent, joyful, poetic period of childhood up to 14 years old; then a second, terrible 20-year period of gross debauchery, serving ambition, vanity and, most importantly, lust; then the third, 18-year period from marriage to my spiritual birth, which, from a worldly point of view, could be called moral, since during these 18 years I lived a correct, honest life family life, not indulging in any vices condemned by public opinion, but all whose interests were limited to selfish concerns about the family, about increasing his fortune, about acquiring literary success and all kinds of pleasures.
And finally, the fourth, 20-year period in which I now live and in which I hope to die and from the point of view of which I see all the meaning past life and which I would not wish to change in anything, except in those habits of evil that I have acquired in past periods.
I would like to write such a story of life from all these four periods, completely, completely truthful, if God gives me strength and life. I think that such a biography written by me, even with great shortcomings, will be more useful for people than all that artistic chatter with which my 12 volumes of works are filled and to which people of our time attribute an undeserved significance.
Now I want to do this. I will first tell you about the first joyful period of childhood, which especially attracts me; Then, ashamed as I may be, I will tell you, without hiding anything, the terrible 20 years of the next period. Then the third period, which may be least interesting, and, finally, last period my
awakening to the truth, which gave me the highest blessing of life and joyful peace in view of approaching death.
In order not to repeat myself in the description of childhood, I re-read my writing under this title and regretted that I wrote it: it was so bad, literary, and insincerely written. It could not have been otherwise: firstly, because my idea was to describe the story not of my own, but of my childhood friends, and therefore there was an awkward confusion of the events of their and my childhood, and secondly, because at the time of writing this I was far from independent in forms of expression, but was influenced by two writers, Stern (his “Sentimental journey”) and Töpfer (“Bibliothèque de mon oncle”), who had a strong influence on me at that time.
In particular, I now did not like the last two parts: adolescence and youth, in which, in addition to the awkward mixing of truth with fiction, there is also insincerity: the desire to present as good and important what I did not consider then good and important - my democratic direction . I hope that what I write now will be better, most importantly, more useful to other people.
I
I was born and spent my first childhood in the village of Yasnaya Polyana. I don’t remember my mother at all. I was 1½ years old when she passed away. By a strange coincidence, not a single portrait of her remains, so I cannot imagine her as a real physical being. I am partly glad of this, because in my idea of her there is only her spiritual appearance, and everything that I know about her is wonderful, and I think - not only because everyone who told me about my mother tried to talk about There was only good in her, but because there really was a lot of this good in her.
However, not only my mother, but also all the people surrounding my childhood - from my father to the coachmen - introduce themselves
1 Stern ("Sentimental Journey") and Töpfer ("My Uncle's Library") (English) And French).
to me exclusively good people. Probably, my pure childhood feeling of love, like a bright ray, revealed to me the best qualities in people (they always exist), and the fact that all these people seemed to me exceptionally good was much more true than when I saw them alone flaws. My mother was not good-looking and very well educated for her time. She knew, in addition to Russian - which she, contrary to the then accepted Russian illiteracy, wrote correctly - four languages: French, German, English and Italian - and should have been sensitive to art, she played the piano well, and her peers told her me that she was a great master at telling enticing tales, inventing them as she told them. Her most valuable quality was that, according to the servants’ stories, she was, although quick-tempered, restrained. “She will blush all over, even cry,” her maid told me, “but she will never say a rude word.” She didn't even know them.
I still have several letters from her to my father and other aunts and a diary of the behavior of Nikolenka (elder brother), who was 6 years old when she died, and who, I think, was most like her. They both had a character trait that was very endearing to me, which I assume from my mother’s letters, but which I knew from my brother - indifference to people’s judgments and modesty, going so far as to try to hide the mental, educational and moral advantages that they had in front of other people. They seemed to be ashamed of these advantages.
In my brother, about whom Turgenev very correctly said that he did not have those shortcomings that are needed to be a great writer, I knew this well.
I remember once how a very stupid and bad man, the governor’s adjutant, who was hunting with him, laughed at him in front of me, and how my brother, looking at me, smiled good-naturedly, obviously finding great pleasure in this.
I notice the same feature in letters to my mother. She was obviously spiritually superior to her father and his family, with the exception of Tat. Alex. Ergolskaya, with whom I lived half my life and who was a woman of remarkable moral qualities.
In addition, both had another trait that, I think, determined their indifference to the judgment of people - this is the fact that they never, precisely never, anyone - I already know this for sure about the brother with whom I lived half my life - no one was ever judged. The sharpest expression of a negative attitude towards a person was expressed by his brother with subtle, good-natured humor and the same smile. I see the same thing in my mother’s letters and heard from those who knew her.
In the lives of Dmitry of Rostov there is one thing that has always touched me very much - this is the short life of one monk, who, known to all the brethren, had many shortcomings and, despite this, appeared in a dream to an elder among the saints in the very best place Raya. The surprised elder asked: what did this monk, intemperate in many ways, deserve such an award? They answered him: “He never condemned anyone.”
If there were such awards, I think my brother and my mother would have received them.
Another third feature that set my mother apart from her environment was the truthfulness and simplicity of her tone in her letters. At that time, expressions of exaggerated feelings were especially common in letters: incomparable, adored, the joy of my life, invaluable, etc. - these were the most common epithets between loved ones, and the more pompous, the more insincere they were.
This trait, although not to a strong degree, is visible in my father’s letters. He writes: “Ma bien douce amie, je ne pense qu’au bonheur d’être auprès de toi...” 1 etc. This was hardly entirely sincere. She always writes the same thing in her address: “mon bon ami” 2, and in one of her letters she directly says: “Le temps me paraît long sans toi, quoiqu'à dire vrai, nous ne jouissons pas beaucoup de ta société quand tu es ici » 3, and is always signed the same way: “ta dévouée Marie” 4.
1 My most tender friend, I only think about the happiness of being near you (French).
2 my good friend (French).
3 Time drags on for me for a long time without you, although, to tell the truth, we enjoy your company little when you are here (French).
4 Mary devoted to you (French).
My mother lived her childhood partly in Moscow, partly in the village with an intelligent, proud and gifted man, my grandfather Volkonsky.
II
What I know about my grandfather is that, having reached the high ranks of general-in-chief under Catherine, he suddenly lost his position due to his refusal to marry Potemkin’s niece and mistress Varenka Engelhardt. To Potemkin’s proposal, he replied: “Why did he think that I would marry his b....”.
For this answer, he not only stopped in his career, but was appointed governor of Arkhangelsk, where he remained, it seems, until the accession of Paul, when he retired and, having married Princess Ekaterina Dmitrievna Trubetskoy, settled on the estate received from his father Sergei Fedorovich Yasnaya Polyana.
Princess Ekaterina Dmitrievna died early, leaving my grandfather only daughter Maryu. It was with this much-loved daughter and her French companion that my grandfather lived until his death around 1816.
My grandfather was considered a very strict master, but I had never heard stories about his cruelties and punishments, so common at that time. I think that they were, but the enthusiastic respect for importance and rationality was so great among the serfs and peasants of his time, whom I often asked about him, that although I heard condemnations of my father, I heard only praise for intelligence, thriftiness and care for peasants and, in particular, my grandfather’s huge servants. He built wonderful rooms for the courtyard servants and made sure that they were always not only well-fed, but also well dressed and having fun. On holidays, he organized entertainment for them, swings, and round dances. He cared even more, like any smart landowner of that time, about the welfare of the peasants, and they prospered, especially since his grandfather’s high position, inspiring respect from the police officers, police officers and assessors, freed them from the oppression of their superiors.
He probably had a very fine aesthetic feeling. All his buildings are not only durable and comfortable,
but extremely graceful. The park he laid out in front of the house is the same. He probably also loved music very much, because he kept his good small orchestra only for himself and his mother. I also found a huge elm tree, three girths wide, growing into the wedge of a linden alley and around which benches and music stands were made for musicians. In the mornings he walked in the alley, listening to music. He hated hunting, but loved flowers and greenhouse plants.
A strange fate brought him together in the strangest way with the same Varenka Engelhardt, for whose abandonment he suffered during his service. This Varenka married Prince Sergei Fedorovich Golitsyn, who as a result received all kinds of ranks, orders and awards. It was with this Sergei Fedorovich and his family, and therefore with Varvara Vasilievna, that my grandfather became close to such an extent that my mother was betrothed from childhood to one of Golitsyn’s ten sons and that both old princes exchanged portrait galleries (of course, copies painted by serfs painters). All these portraits of the Golitsyns are now in our house, with Prince Sergei Fedorovich in St. Andrew's ribbon and the fat red-haired Varvara Vasilievna - a cavalry lady. However, this rapprochement was not destined to happen: my mother’s fiancé, Lev Golitsyn, died of fever before the wedding, whose name was given to me, the 4th son, in memory of this Lev. I was told that my mother loved me very much and called me: mon petit Benjamin 1.
I think that love for the deceased groom, precisely because it ended in death, was that poetic love that girls experience only once. Her marriage to my father was arranged by her and my father's relatives. She was rich, no longer in her early youth, an orphan, but her father was a cheerful, brilliant young man, with a name and connections, but with my grandfather Tolstoy’s very upset (so upset that my father even refused the inheritance). I think that my mother loved my father, but more as a husband and, most importantly, the father of her children, but she was not in love with him. Her real loves, as I understand it, were three or maybe four: love for her deceased fiancé, then passionate friendship with her companion -
1 my little Benjamin (French).
the Frenchwoman m-elle Hénissienne, about whom I heard from my aunts and who ended, it seems, in disappointment. This M-elle Hénissienne married her mother’s cousin, Prince Mikhail Volkhonsky, the grandfather of the current writer Volkhonsky. This is what my mother writes about her friendship with this m-elle Henissienne. She writes about her friendship on the occasion of the friendship of two girls who lived in her house: “Je m'arrange très bien avec toutes les deux: je fais de la musique, je ris et je folâtre avec l'une et je parle sentiment, ou je médis du monde frivole avec l'autre, je suis aimée à la folie par toutes les deux, je suis la confidente de chacune, je les concilie, quand elles sont brouillées, car il n'y eut jamais d'amitié plus querelleuse et plus drôle à voir que la leur: ce sont des bouderies, des pleurs, des réconciliations, des injures, et puis des transports d'amitié exaltée et romanesque. Enfin j'y vois comme dans un miroir l'amitié qui a animé et troublé ma vie pendant quelques années. Je les regarde avec un sentiment indéfinissable, quelquefois j’envie leurs illusions, que je n’ai plus, mais dont je connais la douceur; disant le franchement, le bonheur solide et réel de l'âge mûr vaut-il les charmantes illusions de la jeunesse, où tout est embelli par la toute puissance de l'imagination? Et quelquefois je souris de leur enfantillage" 1 .
The third strong, perhaps the most passionate, feeling was her love for her older brother Coco, a journal of whose behavior she kept in Russian, in which she wrote down his misdeeds and read to him. This journal shows a passionate desire to do everything possible to raise Coco in the best possible way, and at the same time a very unclear idea of what it will take to do this. So,
1 I feel good with both of them, I make music, I laugh and fool around with one, I talk about feelings, I discuss frivolous light with the other, I am madly loved by both, I enjoy the trust of each, I reconcile them when they quarrel, since there was no friendship more quarrelsome and funnier to look at than their friendship. Constant displeasure, crying, consolation, scolding and then outbursts of friendship, enthusiastic and sensitive. So I see, as if in a mirror, the friendship that animated and confused me for several years. I look at them with an inexpressible feeling, sometimes I envy their illusions, which I no longer have, but whose sweetness I know. Frankly speaking, the lasting and real happiness of mature age, is it worth the charming illusions of youth, when everything is decorated with the omnipotence of the imagination? And sometimes I smile at their childishness (French).
for example, she reprimands him for being too sensitive and crying when he sees animals suffering. A man, according to her concepts, needs to be firm. Another shortcoming that she tries to correct in him is that he “thinks” and instead of bonsoir 1 or bonjour 2 he says to his grandmother: “Je vous remercie” 3.
The fourth strong feeling, which perhaps existed, as the aunties told me, and which I so wished to exist, was love for me, which replaced the love for Coco, who at the time of my birth had already separated from my mother and entered the hands of men.
She needed to love someone other than herself, and one love was replaced by another. This was the spiritual appearance of my mother in my mind.
She seemed to me to be such a high, pure, spiritual being that often in the middle period of my life, during the struggle with the temptations that beset me, I prayed to her soul, asking her to help me, and this prayer always helped me.
My mother’s life in my father’s family, as I can conclude from letters and stories, was very happy and good. My father's family consisted of an old grandmother, his mother, her daughter, my aunt, Countess Alexandra Ilyinichna Osten-Sacken, and her pupil Pashenka; another aunt, as we called her, although she was a very distant relative to us, Tatyana Alexandrovna Ergolskaya, who was brought up in my grandfather’s house and lived all her life in my father’s house; teacher Fyodor Ivanovich Ressel, whom I described quite correctly in “Childhood.”
There were five of us children: Nikolai, Sergei, Dmitry, me, the youngest, and my younger sister Mashenka, as a result of whose birth my mother died. My mother's very short married life - it seems no more than 9 years - was happy and good. This life was very full and decorated with the love of everyone for her and her for everyone who lived with her. Judging by the letters, I see that she lived very secluded then. Almost no one, except for the close neighbors of the Ogarevs and relatives who happened to be driving along the main road and stopped by to see us,
1 Good evening (French).
2 hello (French).
3 Thank you (French).
did not visit Yasnaya Polyana. The mother's life was spent in classes with children, in evening reading aloud novels for grandmother and serious reading, like "Emile" by Rousseau, for herself and reasoning about what she read, in playing the piano, in teaching Italian to one of the aunts, in walks and housekeeping. In all families there are periods when illness and death are still absent and family members live calmly, carefree, without reminders of the end. Such a period, I think, was experienced by the mother in her husband’s family before her death. No one died, no one became seriously ill, and my father’s upset affairs were getting better. Everyone was healthy, cheerful, and friendly. Father amused everyone with his stories and jokes. I didn't find this time. When I began to remember myself, my mother’s death had already left its mark on the life of our family.
III
I describe all this from stories and letters. Now I begin about what I experienced and remember.
I will not talk about vague infantile, unclear memories in which you cannot yet distinguish reality from dreams. I’ll start with what I clearly remember, from that place and those people who surrounded me from the first years. The first place among these persons is occupied, although not in terms of influence on me, but in terms of my feelings for him, of course, my father.
From a young age, my father remained the only son of his parents. His younger brother Ilinka was hurt in childhood, became hunchbacked and died in childhood. In 12, my father was 17 years old, and he, despite the reluctance and fear and dissuasion of his parents, entered military service. At that time, Prince Nick. Iv. Gorchakov, a close relative of my grandmother Prince. Gorchakova, was the Minister of War, and the other brother, Andrei Ivanovich, was a general who commanded something in the army, and his father was assigned as his adjutant. He made campaigns in 13-14, and in 14, somewhere in Germany, having been sent by courier, he was captured by the French, from which he was freed only in 15, when our troops entered Paris. At the age of 20, my father was no longer an innocent youth, and even before joining the military
Service, therefore, at the age of 16, his parents united him, as they thought then, for his health, with a yard girl. From this connection there was a son, Mishenka, who was assigned to be a postman and who lived well during his father’s life, but then lost his way and often turned to us, adult brothers, for help. I remember that strange feeling of bewilderment that I experienced when this brother of mine, who had fallen into beggary, was very similar (more than all of us) to his father, asked us for help and was grateful for the 10, 15 rubles that were given to him.
After the campaign, the father, disillusioned with military service- this can be seen from the letters - he retired and came to Kazan, where, already completely bankrupt, my grandfather was the governor. In Kazan, my father’s sister, Pelageya Ilyinichna, was married to Yushkov. The grandfather soon died in Kazan, and the father was left with an inheritance that was not worth all the debts, and with an old mother, sister and cousin, accustomed to luxury, in his arms. At this time, they arranged for him to marry my mother, and he moved to Yasnaya Polyana, where, after living with his mother for 9 years, he became a widower and where, as far as I remember, he lived with us.
The father was of average height, well-built, lively sanguine, with a pleasant face and always sad eyes.
His life was spent in farming, in which he, it seems, was not a great expert, but in which, for that time, he had great quality: he was not only not cruel, but rather kind and weak. So even during his time I never heard of corporal punishment. These punishments were probably carried out. At that time it was difficult to imagine government without the use of these punishments, but they were probably so rare and the father took so little part in them that we, the children, never heard about it. It was only after my father’s death that I learned for the first time that such punishments were carried out among us. We children and the teacher were returning from a walk and near the threshing floor we met the fat manager Andrei Ilyin and, walking behind him, with a sad look that struck us, the assistant coachman, the crooked Kuzma, a married man and no longer young. One of us asked Andrei Ilyin where he was going, I calmly answered that he was going to the threshing floor, where Kuzma needed to be punished. I cannot describe the terrible feeling that these words and the sight of the kind and sad man made on me.
Kuzma. In the evening I told this to Aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna, who raised us and hated corporal punishment, who never allowed it for us, as well as for the serfs where she could have influence. She was very indignant at what I told her and said reproachfully: “How come you didn’t stop him?” Her words saddened me even more. I never thought that we could interfere in such a matter, but meanwhile it turned out that we could. But it was already too late, and the terrible deed had already been done.
I return to what I knew about my father and how I imagine his life. His occupation consisted of housekeeping and, most importantly, processes, of which everyone then had a lot and, it seems, especially a lot of his father, who had to unravel the affairs of his grandfather. These processes forced my father to often leave home. In addition, he often left for hunting - both for guns and for hounds. His main hunting companions were his friend, the old bachelor and rich man Kireyevsky, Yazykov, Glebov, Islenyev. My father shared a common property of landowners at that time - a predilection for certain favorites from the courtyard. His favorites were his two brothers, valets Petrusha and Matyusha, both handsome, dexterous guys and dashing hunters. At home, my father, in addition to taking care of the housework and us children, also read a lot. He collected a library consisting, at that time, of French classics, historical and natural history works - Buffon, Cuvier. The aunts told me that my father made it a rule not to buy new books until he had read the previous ones. But, although he read a lot, it is difficult to believe that he mastered all these Histoires des croisades et des papes 1 that he acquired for the library. As far as I can judge, he had no inclination towards science, but was at the level of education of the people of his time. Like most of the people of the first Alexander’s time and the campaigns of 13, 14, 15, he was not what is now called a liberal, but simply out of self-esteem, he did not consider it possible for himself to serve either at the end of the reign of Alexander I or under Nicholas. In one letter from Moscow to his mother, he writes in his humorous tone about Osip Ivanovich Yushkov, the brother of his son-in-law: “Osip Ivanovich
1 Stories of the Crusades and Popes (French).
imagines because he is a master of the horse. But I'm not the least bit afraid of him. I have my own horseman." Not only did he not serve anywhere during the time of Nicholas, but even all his friends were the same free people, not serving and slightly opposed to the government. Throughout my childhood and even youth, our family did not have close relations with any official. Of course, I did not understand anything about this as a child, but I understood that my father never humiliated himself before anyone, did not change his lively, cheerful and often mocking tone. And this self-esteem that I saw in him increased my love, my admiration for him.
I remember him in his office, where we came to say goodbye to him, and sometimes just to play, where he sat on a leather sofa with a pipe and caressed us and sometimes, to our great joy, let us sit behind him on the leather sofa and continued either reading or talk with the clerk standing at the door lintel or with S.I. Yazykov, my godfather, who often visited us. I remember how he came down to us and drew us pictures that seemed to us the height of perfection. I remember how he once made me read to him the poems of Pushkin that I loved and memorized: “To the Sea”: “Farewell, free element...” and “Napoleon”: “A wonderful lot has been fulfilled: a great man has died out...” and etc... He was obviously struck by the pathos with which I pronounced these poems, and after listening to me, he somehow exchanged significant glances with Yazykov, who was there. I realized that he saw something good in this reading of mine, and I was very happy about it. I remember his funny jokes and stories at lunch and dinner, as my grandmother, my aunt, and we children laughed while listening to him. I also remember his trips to the city and how amazing beautiful view, which he had when he dressed in a frock coat and tight trousers. But most of all I remember it in connection with hound hunting. I remember his hunting trips. It always seemed to me later that Pushkin based his husband’s hunting trip in Graf Nulin on them. I remember how we went for a walk with him and how the young greyhounds that tagged along with us, frolicking across the unmown meadow, where the tall grass spurred them on and tickled them under their bellies, flew around with their tails bent to the side, and how he admired them. I remember how for the hunting holiday, the 1st
September, we all went out in a line to the weaned forest in which the fox was planted, and how the hounds chased it and somewhere - we did not see - the greyhounds caught it. I remember especially clearly the cage of the wolf. It was near the house. We all went out on foot to watch. On a cart they took out a big man with tied legs, gray wolf. He lay quietly and only glanced sideways at those approaching him. Arriving at the place behind the garden, they took out the wolf, pressed it to the ground with a pitchfork and untied its legs. He began to tear and twitch and viciously chewed on the string. Finally they untied the string at the back of his head, and someone shouted: “Let go.” The pitchforks were raised, the wolf stood up and stood for about ten seconds. But they shouted at him and let the dogs go. The wolf, dogs, horsemen and horses flew down the field. And the wolf left. I remember my father reprimanded something and waved his hand angrily as he returned home.
My most pleasant memories of him are him sitting with my grandmother on the sofa and helping her play solitaire. Father was polite and affectionate with everyone, but with grandmother he was always somehow especially affectionately obsequious. Grandmother used to sit, with her long chin in a cap with a ruffle and a bow, on the sofa and lay out cards, sniffing occasionally from a golden snuffbox. Next to the sofa, the Tula gunsmith Petrovna sits on an armchair in her jacket with cartridges and spins and occasionally knocks the ball against the wall, where she has already made a notch with the ball. This Petrovna is a merchant, for some reason my grandmother fell in love with her, and she often visits us and always sits next to her in the living room on the sofa. Aunties are sitting on armchairs, and one of them is reading aloud. On one of the chairs, having pressed a hole in it, lies the black and piebald Hortai Milka, her father’s favorite playful dog, with beautiful black eyes. We come to say goodbye, and sometimes we sit right there. We say goodbye, always kissing our grandmother and aunts, kissing hand in hand. I remember once, in the middle of playing solitaire and reading, my father stopped my auntie who was reading, pointed at the mirror and whispered something.
We are all looking the same way.
This is the waiter Tikhon, knowing that his father is in the living room, going to his office to take his tobacco from a large leather tobacco case that folds like a rose. His father sees him in the mirror and laughs at his tiptoeing figure walking carefully.
The aunties laugh. Grandma doesn’t understand for a long time, but when she understands, she smiles joyfully. I admire my father’s kindness and, bidding him farewell, I kiss his white, sinewy hand with special tenderness.
I loved my father very much, but I did not yet know how strong my love for him was until he died.
But more on that later. Now about the next members of our family, among whom I spent my childhood.
IV
Grandmother Pelageya Nikolaevna was the daughter of the blind prince Nik, who amassed a large fortune for himself. Ivan. Gorchakova. As far as I can form an idea about her character, she was narrow-minded, poorly educated - she, like everyone else then, knew French better than Russian (and that was the limit of her education), and very spoiled - first by her father, then by her husband, and then, with me, as a son, a woman. In addition, as the daughter of the eldest in the family, she enjoyed great respect from all the Gorchakovs: the former Minister of War Nikolai Ivanovich and Andrei Ivanovich and the sons of the freethinker Dmitry Petrovich - Peter, Sergei and Mikhail of Sevastopol. My grandfather Ilya Andreevich, her husband, was also, as I understand him, a limited man, very gentle, cheerful and not only generous, but stupidly wasted, and most importantly, gullible. On his estate in Belevsky district, Polyany, - not Yasnaya Polyana, but Polyany - there was a long, non-stop feast, theaters, balls, dinners, skating, which, especially with his grandfather’s tendency to play big at ombre and whist, not knowing how to play, and with his readiness to give to everyone who asked, both on loan and without repayment, and most importantly, by scams and ransoms, it ended with the fact that his wife’s large estate was all so entangled in debt that there was nothing to live on, and the grandfather had to get and take, which was easy for him with his connections, the position of governor in Kazan. Grandfather, as I was told, did not take bribes, except from the tax farmer, which was then a generally accepted custom, and was angry when they were offered to him, but grandmother, as I was told, secretly took offerings from her husband. In Kazan, the grandmother gave her younger daughter Pelageya to Yushkov, the eldest, Alexandra, back in
Petersburg she was married to Count Saken. After the death of her husband in Kazan and my father’s marriage, my grandmother settled with my father in Yasnaya Polyana, and then I found her already an old woman and remember her well.
My grandmother passionately loved my father and we, our grandchildren, amused ourselves with us and loved our aunts, but, it seems to me, she didn’t quite love my mother, considering her unworthy of my father and being jealous of him for her. With people and servants, she could not be demanding, because everyone knew that she was the first person in the house, and tried to please her, but with her maid Gasha, she gave in to her whims and tormented her, calling her: “you, my dear” and demanding from her what she did not ask, and tormenting her in every possible way. And it’s a strange thing, Gasha, Agafya Mikhailovna, whom I knew well, caught the grandmother’s capricious manner with her girl, and with her cat, and in general with creatures with whom she could be demanding, she was just as capricious as her grandmother was with her.
My earliest memories of my grandmother, before our trip to Moscow and life there, boil down to three strong impressions associated with her. The first is how my grandmother washed herself and with some special soap blew amazing bubbles on her hands, which, it seemed to me, only she could do. We were deliberately brought to her - probably our surprise and admiration for her soap bubbles amused her - to see how she washed herself. I remember: a white blouse, a skirt, white old hands, and huge bubbles rising on them, and her contented, smiling white face. The second memory was how her father’s valets took her without a horse in her arms in a yellow convertible with springs, in which we went for a ride with Fyodor Ivanovich, to a small order to collect nuts, of which there were especially many this year. I remember a thicket of dense and dense hazel trees, into the depths of which, pushing apart and breaking the branches, Petrusha and Matyusha brought a yellow convertible with their grandmother, and how they bent over branches with clusters of ripe, sometimes spilling nuts, and how the grandmother herself tore them and put them in a bag, and like us, where we ourselves bent the branches, where Fyodor Ivanovich surprised us with his strength, bending thick nuts for us, and we picked from all sides and still saw that there were still nuts left unnoticed by us, when Fyodor Ivanovich let them out and the bushes, slowly clinging, straightened out.
I remember how hot it was in the clearings, how pleasantly cool it was in the shade, how the tart smell of a nut leaf was breathed in, how the nuts that were gnawing by the girls who were with us clicked from all sides, and how we, without ceasing, chewed fresh, full, white kernels . We collected them in our pockets and hems and carried them into the convertible, and grandma received and praised us. How we came home, what happened after, I don’t remember anything, I only remember that grandmother, the hazel tree, the tart smell of the nut leaf, the valets, the yellow convertible, the sun - all combined into one joyful impression. It seemed to me that, just as soap bubbles could only be with grandma, so the forest, nuts, sun and shadow could only be with grandma in the yellow convertible, driven by Petrusha and Matyusha.
The strongest memory associated with my grandmother is the night spent in my grandmother’s bedroom, and Lev Stepanych. Lev Stepanych was a blind storyteller (he was already an old man when I got to know him), a remnant of the old nobility, the nobility of his grandfather.
He was bought only to tell tales, which, due to the extraordinary memory characteristic of the blind, he could tell word for word after they had been read to him twice.
He lived somewhere in the house and was not seen all day. But in the evenings he came upstairs to his grandmother’s bedroom (this bedroom was in a low room, which had to be entered by two steps), and sat on the low window sill, where they brought him dinner from the master’s table. Here he waited for his grandmother, who, without shame, could do her night toilet in front of a blind man. On the day when it was my turn to spend the night with my grandmother, Lev Stepanovich with his white eyes, in a long blue frock coat with puffs on his shoulders, was already sitting on the windowsill and having dinner. I don’t remember how my grandmother undressed, in this room or in another, and how they put me to bed, I remember only that minute when the candle was put out, there was only one lamp left in front of the gilded icons, grandmother, that same amazing grandmother who blew extraordinary soap bubbles, all white, in white and covered with white, in her white cap, she was lying high on the pillows, and from the windowsill the even, calm voice of Lev Stepanych was heard: “Do you want to continue?” - “Yes, continue.” - “Dear
“sister,” she said, “Lev Stepanovich spoke in his quiet, even, senile voice, “tell us one of those most curious fairy tales that you know how to tell so well.” “Willingly,” answered Scheherazade, “I would tell the wonderful story of Prince Kamaralzaman, if our ruler expresses his consent.” Having received the consent of the Sultan, Scheherazade began like this: “One sovereign king had an only son...”
And, obviously, word for word from the book, Lev Stepanych began to tell the story of Kamaralzaman. I did not listen, I did not understand what he was saying, I was so absorbed in the mysterious appearance of my grandmother, her wavering shadow on the wall and the appearance of an old man with white eyes, whom I did not see now, but whom I remembered sitting motionless on the windowsill and speaking in a slow voice: - those strange words, which seemed solemn to me, sounding lonely in the semi-darkness of the room, illuminated by the trembling light of the lamp.
I must have fallen asleep immediately, because I don’t remember anything further, and only in the morning I was again surprised and admired by the soap bubbles that my grandmother made on her hands while washing herself. I’ll tell you later about my further impressions of my grandmother during the move to Moscow and life there, but now I’ll tell you what I know and remember about another important person for my childhood - my dear aunt, Alexandra Ilyinichna Countess Osten-Sacken, who lived with us.
V
Aunt Alexandra Ilyinichna was married off to the wealthy Baltic Count Osten-Sacken very early in St. Petersburg. The match seemed to be very brilliant, but in terms of marriage it ended very sadly for the aunt, although perhaps the consequences of this marriage were beneficial for her soul. Aunt Aline, as her family called her, must have been very attractive, with her big blue eyes and the meek expression of her white face, as she is depicted as a 16-year-old girl in a very good portrait.
Soon after the wedding, Osten-Sacken left with his young wife to his large Baltic Sea estate, and there more and more
and his mental illness began to manifest itself more, which at first was expressed only by very noticeable causeless jealousy. In the first year of his marriage, when his aunt was already pregnant, this illness intensified so much that he began to experience moments of complete madness, during which it seemed to him that his enemies, who wanted to take his wife away from him, were surrounding him, and his only salvation is to run away from them. It was summer. Getting up early in the morning, he announced to his wife that the only means of salvation was to run, that he had ordered the carriage to be laid and they were now on their way to get it ready.
Indeed, a carriage was brought, he put my aunt in it and ordered her to go as quickly as possible. On the way, he took two pistols from the box, cocked the hammer and, giving one to his aunt, told her that if only the enemies found out about his escape, they would catch up with him, and then they died, and the only thing left for them to do was kill his friend friend. The frightened, stunned aunt took the pistol and wanted to persuade her husband, but he did not listen to her and only turned back, expecting a chase, and chased the coachman. Unfortunately, on a country road leading onto the main road, a carriage appeared, and he screamed that everything was lost, and ordered her to shoot herself, and he himself shot at point-blank range in the aunt’s chest. Apparently, having seen what he had done and the fact that the carriage that had frightened him had passed in the other direction, he stopped, carried the wounded, bloody aunt out of the carriage, laid it on the road and galloped off. Luckily for her aunt, the peasants soon came upon her, picked her up and took her to the pastor, who bandaged her wound as best he could and sent for a doctor. The wound was right through the right side of the chest (my aunt showed me the remaining mark) and was not severe. While she, recovering and still pregnant, was lying with the pastor, her husband, having come to his senses, came to her and, telling the pastor the story of how she was accidentally wounded, asked to see her. The date was terrible; He, cunning like all mentally ill people, pretended to repent of his actions and was only concerned about her health. After sitting with her for quite a long time, talking about everything quite rationally, he took advantage of the moment when they were alone to try to fulfill his intention. As if taking care of her
health, he asked her to show him her tongue, and when she stuck it out, he grabbed his tongue with one hand and with the other pulled out the razor he had prepared with the intention of cutting it off. There was a struggle, she broke away from him, screamed, people ran in, stopped him and took him away.
From then on, his madness was completely defined, and he lived for a long time in some institution for the mentally ill, without having any contact with his aunt. Soon after this, the aunt was transported to her parents' home in St. Petersburg, and there she gave birth to a stillborn child. Fearing the consequences of grief from the death of the child, she was told that her child was alive, and they took the girl who was born at the same time from a familiar servant, the wife of the court cook. This girl is Pashenka, who lived with us and was already an adult girl when I began to remember myself. I don’t know when the story of her birth was revealed to Pashenka, but when I knew her, she already knew that she was not her aunt’s daughter.
After what happened to her, Aunt Alexandra Ilyinichna lived with her parents, then with my father, and then after my father’s death she was our guardian, and when I was 12 years old, she died in Optina Pustyn.
This aunt was a truly religious woman. Her favorite pastimes were reading the lives of saints, conversations with wanderers, holy fools, monks and nuns, some of whom always lived in our house, and some only visited my aunt. Among those who almost constantly lived with us was the nun Marya Gerasimovna, my sister’s godmother, who in her youth went to wander under the guise of the holy fool Ivanushka. Marya Gerasimovna was her sister’s godmother because her mother promised her to take her as godfather if she begged God for a daughter, whom the mother really wanted to have after four sons. A daughter was born, and Marya Gerasimovna was her godmother and lived partly in the Tula convent, partly in our house.
Aunt Alexandra Ilyinichna was not only outwardly religious, observed fasts, prayed a lot, communicated with people of holy life, as Elder Leonid was in her time in Optina Hermitage, but she herself lived truly Christian life, trying not only to avoid all luxury and service, but trying, as much as possible, to serve others. She never had money, because she gave away everything she had to those who asked.
The maid Gasha, who came to her after the death of her grandmother, told me how during her Moscow life, on her way to matins, she diligently tiptoed past the sleeping maid and herself did everything that, according to accepted custom, was usually done by the maid. In food and clothing, she was as simple and undemanding as one can imagine. As much as I hate to say this, from childhood I remember the special sour smell of Aunt Alexandra Ilyinichna, which probably came from the sloppiness of her toilet. And it was that graceful, poetic Aline with beautiful blue eyes, who loved to read and copy French poetry, played the harp and always had great success at the biggest balls.
I remember how she was always equally affectionate and kind, just the same with all important men and ladies, as with nuns, pilgrims and pilgrims.
I remember how her son-in-law Yushkov loved to joke about her and just from Kazan sent a large box, a parcel addressed to her. In the box there was another box, then a third, and so on until a small box in which lay a porcelain monk in cotton wool. I remember how she laughed good-naturedly, showing my aunt this parcel. I also remember how at dinner my father told how she and her cousin Molchanova allegedly caught a priest they respected in church in order to receive a blessing from him. The father told this in the form of persecution, as if Molchanova had grabbed the priest from the royal doors, he rushed to the northern ones. Molchanova gave a steal, rushed, and then Aline captured him. I remember her sweet, good-natured laugh and her face beaming with pleasure. That religious feeling that filled her soul was obviously so important to her, was to such an extent above everything else that she could not be angry, upset by anything, could not attribute to worldly affairs the importance that is usually attributed to them. She took care of us when she was our guardian, but everything she did did not absorb her soul, everything was subordinated to the service of God, as she understood this service.
VI
The third and most important [person] in terms of influence on my life was Auntie, as we called her, Tatyana Aleksandrovna Ergolskaya. She was a very distant relative of the Gorchakovs' grandmother. She and her sister Liza, who later married Count Pyotr Ivanovich Tolstoy, remained little girls, poor orphans from their dead parents. There were several more brothers whom their relatives somehow settled in, but the girls decided to be raised by Tat, famous in her circle in the Chernsky district and at one time powerful and important. Sem. Skuratova and my grandmother. They rolled up the tickets, put them under the icon, prayed, took them out, and Tatyana Semyonovna went to Lizanka, and the little black one to grandma. Tanenka, as we called her, was the same age as her father, born in 1795, brought up exactly the same as my aunts and was dearly loved by everyone, just as it was impossible not to love her for her firm, decisive, energetic and at the same time selfless spirit. character. The event with the ruler that she told us about, showing a large, almost palm-sized, burn mark on her arm between the elbow and hand, really illustrates her character. They read the story of Mucius Scaevola as children and argued that none of them would dare to do the same. “I will,” she said. “You can’t do it,” said Yazykov, my godfather, and, which is also typical of him, he lit a ruler on the candle so that it was charred and smoking all over. “Here, put this on your hand,” he said. She extended her white hand—back then girls always wore low necklines—and Yazykov applied a charred ruler. She frowned, but did not withdraw her hand. She moaned only when the ruler with the skin tore off her hand. When the big ones saw her wound and began to ask how it happened, she said that she did it herself, she wanted to experience what Mucius Scaevola experienced.
She was so determined and selfless in everything. She must have been very attractive with her stiff black curly, huge braid and agate-black eyes and lively, energetic expression. V. I. Yushkov, the husband of Pelageya Ilyinichna’s aunt, a big red tape worker, often already an old man, with the feeling with which lovers talk about their former object of love, recalled about her: “Toinette, oh, elle était
charmante" 1. When I began to remember her, she was already over forty, and I never thought about whether she was beautiful or ugly. I just loved her, loved her eyes, her smile, her dark, wide, small hand with an energetic cross-vein.
She must have loved her father, and her father loved her, but she did not marry him in her youth so that he could marry my rich mother, and later she did not marry him because she did not want to spoil her pure, poetic relationship with him and with us. In her papers, in a beaded briefcase, lies the following note, written in 1836, 6 years after the death of my mother, a note:
“16 Août 1836. Nicolas m'a fait aujourd'hui une étrange proposition - celle de l'épouser, de servir de mère à ses enfants et de ne jamais les quitter. J'ai refusé la première proposition, j'ai promis de remplir l'autre - tant que je vivrai" 2 .
That’s what she wrote down, but she never told us or anyone about it. After her father's death, she fulfilled his second wish. We had two aunts and a grandmother. All of them had more rights to us than Tatyana Alexandrovna, whom we called auntie only out of habit, since our relationship was so distant that I could never remember it, but she, by the right of love for us, is like Buddha with a wounded swan , took first place in our education. And we felt it. And I had flashes of enthusiastically tender love for her. I remember just on the sofa in the living room, I was about five years old, I fell behind her, she, caressing me, touched me with her hand. I grabbed this hand and began to kiss it and cry from tender love for her.
She was raised by a young lady of a rich house - she spoke and wrote French better than Russian, played the piano beautifully, but for 30 years she did not touch the piano. She only started playing when I was learning to play as an adult, and sometimes, playing four hands,
1 Toinette, oh she was charming (French).
2 August 16, 1836. Nikolai made me a strange proposal today - to marry him, replace the mother of his children and never leave them. I refused the first offer, I promised to fulfill the second as long as I was alive. (French).
surprised me with the correctness and grace of her playing. She was kind to the servants, never spoke angrily to them, could not bear the thought of beatings or rods, but she believed that serfs were serfs and treated them like a lady. But despite this, unlike others, all people loved her. When she died and was carried around the village, peasants came out of all the houses and ordered a memorial service. Her main feature was love, but no matter how much I wanted it to be different - love for one person - my father. Only from this center did her love spread to all people. It was felt that she loved us for him, that through him she loved everyone, because her whole life was love. Because of her love for us, she had the greatest rights to us, but her aunts, especially Pelageya Ilyinichna, when she took us to Kazan, had external rights, and she submitted to them, but her love did not weaken because of this. She lived with her sister, gr. L.A. Tolstoy, but she lived with us in spirit and, as soon as possible, returned to us. The fact that she lived the last years of her life, about 20 years, with me in Yasnaya Polyana was great happiness for me. But we don’t know how to appreciate our happiness, especially since true happiness is always quiet and unnoticeable. I appreciated it, but not nearly enough. She loved to keep sweets in her room in different dishes: wine berries, gingerbread, dates, and she loved to buy and treat them to me first. I cannot forget, and without a cruel reproach of conscience, remember how several times I refused her money for these delicacies and how she fell silent, sighing sadly. True, I was short of money, but now I cannot remember without horror how I refused her.
Already when I was married and she began to weaken, she once waited for the time when both my wife and I were in her room, she turned away (I saw that she was ready to cry) and said: “That’s what, mes chers amis 1, My room is very good and you will need it. “And if I die in it,” she said in a trembling voice, “the memory will be unpleasant for you, so you transfer me so that I don’t die here.” She was like this from the very first times of my childhood, when I still could not understand her.
I said that Aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna had
1 mine Dear friends (French).
biggest influence on my life. This influence was, firstly, in the fact that even in childhood she taught me the spiritual pleasure of love. She taught me this not with words, but with her whole being she infected me with love. I saw and felt how good it was for her to love, and I understood the happiness of love. This is the first. The second thing is that she taught me the delights of a leisurely, lonely life. Although this memory is no longer childhood, but adult life, I cannot help but remember my single life with her in Yasnaya Polyana, especially on the long autumn and winter evenings. And these evenings remained a wonderful memory for me.
Her room was like this: in the left corner there was a wardrobe with countless little things that were valuable only to her, in the right corner there was an ark with icons and a large savior in a silver robe, in the middle there was a sofa on which she slept, and a table in front of it. To the right is the door to her maid and another sofa, on which the good-natured old woman Natalya Petrovna, who lived with her, slept, not for her, but because she had nowhere to live. Between the window, under the mirror, there was her desk with jars and vases containing sweets: gingerbread, dates, which she treated me to. There are two armchairs by the window, and to the right of the door there is an embroidered comfortable armchair, on which she loved for me to sit, and I often sat on this armchair in the evenings.
The main charm of this life was the absence of any material worries, good relations with everyone, firm, undoubtedly, good relations with those closest to us, which could not be violated by anyone, and in the slowness, in the unawareness of the passing of time. To these evenings I owe my best thoughts, the best movements of my soul. You sit on this chair, read, think, occasionally listen to her conversations with Natalya Petrovna or with Dunechka, the maid, always kind, affectionate, exchange a word with her and again sit, read, think. I still have this wonderful chair, but it’s not the same.
Then one could say: “Wer darauf sitzt, der ist glücklich, und der glückliche bin ich” 1 . And indeed, I was truly happy when I sat in this chair. After a bad life in Tula, with neighbors, with cards,
1 Whoever sits on it is happy, and that lucky one is me (German).
gypsies, hunting, stupid vanity, you will return home, you will come to her, according to the old habit you will kiss her hand in hand, I will kiss her sweet, energetic hand, she will kiss my dirty, vicious hand, you will also say hello according to the old habit in French, you will joke with Natalya Petrovna and sit on the quiet chair. She knows everything that I did, she regrets it, but she will never reproach me, always with the same even caress, with love. I sit on an armchair, read, think, listen to her conversation with Natalya Petrovna. They remember the old days, they play solitaire, they notice omens, they joke about something, and both old ladies laugh, especially the aunt, with a childish, sweet laugh, which I can hear now. I tell him that a friend’s wife cheated on her husband, and I say that the husband must be glad that he is freed from her. And suddenly the aunt, who was just talking to Natalya Petrovna about how the growth on the candle means a guest, raises her eyebrows and says, as a matter long ago decided in her soul, that the husband should not do this, because he will completely ruin his wife. Then she tells me about the drama at the courtyard, which Dunechka told her about, then she rereads the letter from her sister Mashenka, whom she loves, if not more, then just as much as me, and talks about her husband, her dear nephew, not judging, but sad about the grief he caused Mashenka. Then I read again, she goes through her things - all her memories. The main two properties of her life that involuntarily infected me were, firstly, her amazing general kindness to everyone without exception. I try to remember and I can’t remember a single case when she got angry, said a harsh word, reproached, condemned, and I can’t remember a single case in 30 years of my life. She spoke kindly about another aunt, her own, who had cruelly upset her by taking us away from her, without condemning her sister’s husband, who treated her very badly. There is nothing to say about the servants. She grew up with the concept that there are masters and people, but she used her dominance only to serve people. She never reprimanded me directly for my bad life, although she suffered for me. She also did not reproach her brother Sergei, whom she also loved dearly, even when he became involved with a gypsy woman. The only shade of concern about him was that when he didn’t come for a long time, she used to say: “Something about our Sergeius?”
Only instead of Seryozha - Sergeius. She never taught how to live in words, she never read moral teachings, all moral work was processed inside her, and only her deeds came out - and not deeds - there were no deeds, but her whole life, calm, meek, submissive and loving, not with anxious, self-admiring love, but with quiet, unnoticeable love.
She was doing an internal work of love, and therefore she did not need to rush anywhere. And these two qualities - love and slowness - imperceptibly attracted me to closeness to her and gave a special charm to this closeness. Because of this, just as I don’t know of a case where she offended anyone, I don’t know anyone who didn’t love her. She never spoke to herself, never about religion, about how to believe, about how she believes and prays. She believed in everything, but rejected only one dogma - eternal torment: “Dieu qui est la bonté même ne peut pas vouloir nos souffrances” 1. Except at prayer services and panafidas, I have never seen her pray. Only from the special friendliness with which she greeted me, when I sometimes went to see her late in the evening after saying goodbye for the night, I guessed that I had interrupted her prayer.
“Come in, come in,” she would say. “And I’m just telling Natalya Petrovna that Nicolas will come to see us again.” She often called me by her father's name, and this was especially pleasant to me, because it showed that the idea of me and her father was united in her love for both. On these late evenings she was already undressed, in a nightgown, with a scarf thrown over her, with chicken legs in shoes, and Natalya Petrovna in the same negligee. “Sit down, sit down, let’s play solitaire,” she said, seeing that I didn’t want to sleep or that loneliness was hard. And these illegal, late seats are especially sweetly memorable to me. It used to be that Natalya Petrovna or I would say something funny, and she would laugh good-naturedly, and immediately Natalya Petrovna would laugh, and both old ladies would laugh for a long time, not knowing why, but like children, only because they love everyone and everyone loves them they love and feel good.
More than one love for me was joyful. The atmosphere of love for everyone present was joyful,
1 God, who is goodness itself, cannot want our suffering (French).
absent, living and dead people and even animals.
If I have to tell my life, I will still talk a lot about it. Now I will only say about the attitude of the people, the Yasnaya Polyana peasants towards her, expressed during her funeral. When we carried it through the village, there was not one yard out of 60 from which people would not come out and demand a stop and a memorial service. “She was a kind lady, she did no harm to anyone,” everyone said. And she was loved and loved deeply for it. Laodze says that things are valuable because of what they do not contain. Life is the same: its main price is that there is no evil in it. And there was nothing bad in Aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna’s life. It's easy to say, but difficult to do. And I only knew one such person.
She died quietly, gradually falling asleep, and she died as she wanted, not in the room where she lived, so as not to spoil it for us. She died, recognizing almost no one. She always recognized me, smiled, shone like a light bulb when you press a button, and sometimes she moved her lips, trying to pronounce Nicolas, before her death, completely inseparably connecting me with the one she loved all her life.
And I denied her that little joy that dates and chocolate brought her, and not so much for myself, but to treat me, and the opportunity to give a little money from myself to those who asked her. I can’t remember this without a painful reproach of conscience. Dear, dear auntie, forgive me. Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait 1 not in the sense of the good that you did not take for yourself in your youth, but in the sense of the good that you did not give, and the evil that you did to those who no longer exist.
VII
Our German teacher Fed. Iv. I described Rössel in as much detail as I could in “Childhood” under the name of Karl Ivanovich. And his history, and his figures, and his naive calculations - all this really happened. I will tell you about my brothers and sister, if possible, describing my childhood. But, besides my brothers and sister, from the age of 5, Dunechka Temesova, who was the same age as me, grew up with us, and I need to tell you who
1 If youth knew, if old age could (French).
she was and how she got to us. Among our visitors, memorable to me in childhood: my aunt’s husband, Yushkov, a strange-looking for children, with a black mustache, sideburns and glasses (we’ll have to talk a lot about him), and my godfather S.I. Yazykov, remarkably ugly, smelling smoking tobacco, with excess skin on his large face, which he contorted into the strangest, incessant grimaces, besides these two and our neighbors, Ogarev and Islenyev, we were also visited by a distant relative of the Gorchakovs, the rich bachelor Temeshov, who called his father brother and cared for him some kind of ecstatic love. He lived forty miles from Yasnaya Polyana, in the village of Pirogovo, and once brought from there piglets with curled tails, which were laid out on a large tray on the table in the waiter's room. Temeshov, Pirogovo and the piglets were united in my imagination into one.
In addition, Temeshov was memorable to us children for the fact that he played some kind of dance tune on the piano in the hall (that’s all he knew how to play) and made us dance to this music. When we asked him what dance should be danced, he said that all dances could be danced to this music. And we loved using it.
It was a winter evening, we drank tea, and we were soon to be taken to bed, and my eyes were already drooping, when suddenly from the waiter’s room into the living room, where everyone was sitting and only two candles were burning and it was semi-dark, through the open large door with the quick step of soft boots a man entered and, going out into the middle of the living room, fell to his knees. The lit pipe on a long stem, which he held in his hand, hit the floor, and sparks scattered, illuminating the face of the one who was kneeling - it was Temeshov. What Temesov said to his father, falling on his knees in front of him, I don’t remember, and I didn’t even hear, but only later I found out that he fell on his knees in front of his father because he brought with him his illegitimate daughter Dunechka, about whom he had already agreed with his father so that her father would accept her to be raised with his children. Since then, we had a girl with a wide, freckled face, my age, Dunechka, with her nanny Eupraxia, a tall, wrinkled old woman, with a drooping chin, like an Indian rooster, an Adam's apple, in which there was a ball, which she gave us to feel .
The appearance of Dunechka in our house was associated with a complex property transaction between my father and Temeshov. This is what the deal was like.
Temeshov was very rich; he had no legitimate children. But there were only two daughters: Dunechka and Verochka, a hunchbacked girl, from his former serf, the freed girl Marfushi. Temeshov's heirs were his sisters. He provided them with all his other estates, and Pirogovo, in which he lived, he wanted to transfer to his father so that the value of the estate, 300 thousand (about Pirogovo they always said that it was a goldmine, and it was worth much more), the father would transfer two girls. In order to arrange this matter, the following was invented: Temeshov made a sales note, according to which he sold Pirogovo to his father for 300 thousand, while his father gave bills of exchange to three outsiders - Islenyev, Yazykov and Glebov for one hundred thousand each. In the event of Temeshov’s death, the father received the estate and, having explained to Glebov, Islenyev and Yazykov, for what purpose the bills were given in their names, paid 300 thousand, which should have gone to the two girls.
Perhaps I am mistaken in the description of the entire plan, but I know without a doubt that the Pirogovo estate passed to us after the death of my father and that there were three bills in the names of Islenyev, Glebov and Yazykov, that the guardianship paid these bills and the first two transferred 100 thousand each girls, Yazykov appropriated this money that did not belong to him. But more on that later.
Dunechka lived with us and was a sweet, simple, calm, but not smart girl and a big crybaby. I remember how I, already trained in French literacy, was forced to learn its letters. At first things went well for us (she and I were 5 years old), but then, probably, she got tired and stopped correctly naming the letter that I showed her. I insisted. She began to cry. Me too. And when they came to our roar, we could not say anything from desperate tears. Another thing I remember about her is that when one plum was stolen from a plate and they could not find the culprit, Fyodor Ivanovich with a serious look, without looking at us, said: what he ate was nothing, but if he swallowed the pit, he might die.
Dunechka could not stand this fear and said that she spat out the bone. I also remember her desperate tears when she and her brother Mitenka started a game,
consisting of spitting a small copper chain into each other's mouths, and she spat so hard, and Mitenka opened his mouth so wide that he swallowed the chain. She cried inconsolably until the doctor arrived and calmed everyone down.
She was not smart, but she was a good, simple girl, and most importantly, she was so chaste that between us boys and her there was never anything other than a brotherly relationship.
VIII
The further I go in my memoirs, the more hesitant I become about how to write them. I cannot coherently describe events and my mental states, because I do not remember this connection and sequence of mental states. Describing, as I have done so far, individual persons among whom my childhood passed, I do not know where to stop in describing the fate of these persons: I don’t want to stop where my childhood ends, because maybe I won’t have to To return to these persons already, and these persons are interesting, to continue the description of the life of these persons beyond my childhood will be unclear to the reader, the connection of the story is lost.
I will continue as necessary. I will hardly have time to write my whole life, I probably won’t even have time, and therefore I will write as I have to, without corrections. Anything is better than nothing, for those who may be interested in my life, and for me, who is experiencing and experiencing many good things in this experience.
So, I continue as I wanted: first describing those closest people, the servants, who left all the good memories in me, and then my sister and brothers. When I finish these descriptions, I will tell the story in time, although incoherently, in fits and starts, about what I remember from my strongest impressions, what happened before and after. So, about the servants: 1) Praskovya Isaevna, 2) nanny Tatyana Filippovna, 3) Anna Ivanovna, 4) Evprakseya. Men: 1) Nikolai Dmitrich, 2) Foka Demidych, 3) Akim, 4) Taras, 5) Pyotr Semenych [?], 6) Pimen, 7) valets: Volodya, 8) Petrusha, 9) Matyusha, 10) Vasily Trubetskoy , 11) coachman Nikolai Filipich, 12) Tikhon.
I described Praskovya Isaevna quite correctly in “Childhood.” Everything I wrote about her was true. I don’t know why it was arranged this way - the house was large, 42 rooms. Praskovya Isaevna was a respectable person - a housekeeper, and yet, in her small room, there was our children's boat. I remember one of the most pleasant experiences was after the lesson or in the middle of the lesson to sit in her room and talk to her and listen. She probably loved to see us in these times of especially happy and tender frankness. “Praskovya Isaevna, how did grandfather fight? On horseback?" - you ask her, groaning, just to talk and listen.
He fought in every possible way, both on horseback and on foot. But he was the chief general,” she will answer and, opening the cupboard, takes out tar, which she called Ochakov’s smoking. According to her, it turned out that grandfather had brought this tar from near Ochakov. He lights a piece of paper on the lamp near the icons and lights the tar, and it smokes with a pleasant smell.
In addition to the offense she caused me by beating me with a wet tablecloth, as I described it in “Childhood,” she offended me another time. Among her duties was also to give us enemas when necessary. One morning, not in the women’s quarters, but downstairs, in Fyodor Ivanovich’s quarters, we had just gotten up and the older brothers had already gotten dressed, but I hesitated and was just about to take off my dressing gown and get dressed, when Praskovya Isaevna came in with quick old lady steps with her tools. . The instruments consisted of a tube, for some reason wrapped in a napkin so that only a yellowish bone tube was visible from it, and of a saucer with wooden oil, into which the bone tube was dipped. Seeing me, Praskovya Isaevna decided that the one on whom the aunt ordered the operation was me. In essence, it was Mitenka, but by chance or out of cunning, knowing that he was threatened by an operation that we all really disliked, he hastily got dressed and left the bedroom. And, despite my sworn assurances that it was not me who was scheduled for the operation, she performed it on me.
Besides her devotion and honesty, I especially loved her because she and Anna Ivanovna seemed
to me a representative of the mysterious old life of my grandfather with Ochakov and smoking.
Anna Ivanovna lived alone, and once or twice she was in the house, and I saw her. They told her that she was 100 years old, and she remembered Pugachev. She had very black eyes and one tooth. She was that old age that is scary for children.
Nanny Tatyana Filippovna, small, dark-skinned, with plump little hands, was a young nanny, an assistant to the old nanny Annushka, whom I almost don’t remember precisely because I knew of myself only with Annushka. And just as I didn’t look at myself and don’t remember myself, what I was like, I don’t remember Annushka either. So, I remember Dunechka’s newly arrived nanny, Eupraxia, with her ball around her neck very well. I remember how we took turns feeling her ball, how I, like something new, realized that nanny Annushka is not a universal property of people. And that Dunechka has a very special nanny from Pirogov.
I remember Nanny Tatyana Filippovna because she later was the nanny of my nieces and my eldest son. This was one of those touching creatures from the people who become so accustomed to the families of their pets that they transfer all their interests to them and for their family they only imagine the possibility of begging and inheriting the money they have acquired. They always have spendthrift brothers, husbands, sons. And the same were, as far as I remember, Tatyana Filippovna’s husband and son. I remember she died heavily, quietly and meekly in our house in the very place where I am now sitting and writing these memories.
Her brother, Nikolai Filippovich, was a coachman whom we not only loved, but for whom, like most master’s children, we had great respect. He had especially thick boots, he always smelled pleasantly of manure, and his voice was gentle and sonorous.
I interrupt the begun description of the servants in order. It seemed boring to me and doesn't work. I will describe my life, remembering as much back as I can.
Yes, but first I’ll say at least a few words about the valets and Tikhon.
In the old days, everyone, especially hunters, had favorites. My father had two brothers like that, valets Petrusha and Matyusha, both handsome, strong, dexterous
hunters. Both of them were released and received all kinds of benefits and gifts from their father. When my father died suddenly, there was a suspicion that these people poisoned him. The reason for this suspicion was given by the fact that all the money and papers that were with him were stolen from his father, and only the papers - bills of exchange and others - were planted in the Moscow house through a beggar. I don't think this was true, but it was possible. Such cases often happened, namely, that serfs, especially those exalted by their masters, instead of slavery suddenly received enormous power, went crazy and killed their benefactors. It is difficult to imagine the entire transition from complete slavery not only to freedom, but to enormous power. I don’t know how or why, but I know that this happened, and that Petrusha and Matyusha were just such crazy people, who could not be satisfied with what they received, but naturally wanted to rise higher and higher. I, of course, did not understand this, and I simply liked them - especially Petrusha, with her agility, strength, courageous beauty, cleanliness of clothes and affection towards us children, and especially towards me. I always just admired them, saw in them special people. What aroused in me great respect for them were those porcelain and wooden painted dolls of people, dogs, cats, monkeys that stood on their windows, in the rooms on the lower floor in which they lived. Passing by them, we always looked at these dolls with respect. It seemed something special and important to me. Both of them were single, and both were unloved by the servants.
Tikhon the waiter, the one who carried tobacco and whom we loved very much, was a man of a completely different type. He was a small, narrow man, all shaved, with a long gap, as is often the case with comedian actors, between his nose and firmly folded mouth and moving forehead and eyebrows over cheerful, gray eyes. He was a flutist in my grandfather's orchestra. His duties in the house consisted of cleaning the state rooms and serving at the table. He was a natural actor. He obviously took pleasure in imagining anything and making comical grimaces that delighted us children. Everyone always laughed at him. And there were stories about him among the servants about how he ended up in an adventure in the village
to infantry. In the mornings he cleaned the rooms in stockings and a jacket with a crown of pond reeds; in the afternoon he sat in the hallway and knitted stockings.
(Here follows my first memoirs, published in the 12th volume of the 10th edition, p. 447.)
Yes, there are so many interesting and important things ahead that I would like to tell, but I can’t tear myself away from my childhood, a bright, tender, poetic, loving, mysterious childhood. Entering life, as a child we feel, recognize all its amazing mystery, we know that life is not only what our feelings give us, and then this true premonition or after-feeling of the entire depth of life is erased. Yes, it was an amazing time. So we finished our lessons, finished our walk and were brought into the living room to go to dinner. Living room - sofa, large, round, mahogany table, four chairs at right angles to the table. Opposite the sofa there is a balcony door and in the spaces between it and the high windows there are two mirrors in carved gilded frames. Grandmother sits on the left side of the sofa with a gold snuff box and a frilly cap. Aunties Alexandra Ilyinishna, Tatyana Alexandrovna, Pashenka, Mas[henka], daughter with her godmother Marya Gerasimovna (whom I’ll tell you about now), Fyodor Ivanovich, everyone has gathered, waiting for daddy from the office. Here he comes out with a cheerful, fast step, with his sanguine red neck, soft flat boots, kind beautiful eyes and gracefully courageous movements. Sometimes he comes out with a pipe in his hand and gives it to the footman. He comes out and sits down next to grandma, kissing her hand and joking something with us, the aunties or Fyodor Ivanovich.
Why don't they give you lunch? - he will shout in his cheerful and affectionate voice. One of his valets-hunters comes out of the waiter's room: Volodya, Matyusha, Petrusha (we need to tell about them too.).
They're serving now.
And indeed, through the hugely high door (dark red, painted over, the doors remained that way) comes the butler, a former second violin in his grandfather’s orchestra, Foka Demidych, in a blue frock coat with high ruffled shoulders, with his converging raised eyebrows and with obvious pride and solemnly announces:
The food has been served.
Everyone gets up, father gives his hand to grandmother, followed by the aunties, Pashenka, Fyodor Ivanovich and I, someone living and Marya Gerasimovna. I approach (I remember this, as I always remember one moment vividly for some reason) from the left side to my father, his hand touches my hair, my neck, I love this white hand with a red characteristic stripe on the outer protruding part of the palm and I hold it, and not I dare, and finally kiss; a hand squeezes my cheek, and I am touchingly happy. We pass the waiter's platform in front of the stairs and enter a large hall. Behind almost every chair there are footmen with plates, which they hold in their left hands on the left side of their chests. If there are guests, their footmen always stand behind their chairs and serve them. On the table, covered with the work of their weavers with a rough tablecloth, there are decanters of water, mugs of kvass, old silver spoons, iron knives and forks with wooden handles, and the simplest, thin glasses. The soup is poured into the buffet, and lackeys bring pies to go with the soup. But for some reason they don’t give us any pies, and the valet, Petrusha, who is especially friendly to me, slowly slips a pie to me. How amazingly delicious this pie is! At dinner, however, everything is fun, everything is joyful, everything is delicious, everything is fun. It is only difficult to sit still, and if you are not allowed to move your upper body, then you replace this by dangling vigorously under the table with the thick little legs in white thread stockings that are missing from the floor, made by your deaf Alexei the shoemaker. Everything is delicious, except for the occasional piece of stringy beef stuck in your mouth, which you mash and mash and, while the big ones are busy talking, spit it out into your small palm and throw it under the table. The porridge is delicious, the baked potatoes, turnips are delicious, the chicken with cucumbers is delicious and, most importantly, the cakes, all kinds of cakes, pancakes, milk noodles, twigs, cottage cheese with sour cream are delicious. It’s fun sometimes to listen to the conversations of your elders when you understand them, and to talk with your brothers about our own subjects that are interesting to us, and it’s especially fun to look at Tikhon. Tikhon is a former flute in his grandfather’s orchestra, a cheerful little man with what we thought was an amazing talent for comedy. He used to stand behind his grandmother or father, and suddenly, stretching out his long shaved lips, he would wave his plate and make a comical trick. We
Let's laugh. One of the big ones will look back, and Tikhon stands like a statue, frozen in a motionless position with a plate at his chest. It also happens at dinner when people pay attention to me and show off my art of charades to the public.
Come on, Levka the Bubble (that was my name, I was a very fat child), distinguish yourself with a new charade! - says the father.
And I am distinguished by a charade of this kind: my first is a letter, my second is a bird, and everything is a small house. This is a fucking duck booth. While I speak, they look at me and smile, and I know, I feel that these smiles do not mean that there is anything funny in me or my speeches, but that they mean that those looking at me love me. I feel it, and my soul is delighted and happy.
Lunch is over. Father is handed a lit pipe, he goes to his room, grandmother goes into the living room, we go downstairs, and drawing begins. Sometimes my father comes and speaks to Fyodor Ivanovich in German, surprising us with his accent. He speaks correctly: Sie - zi, ganz - ganz, and we speak Saxon, like Fyodor Ivanovich - si and yanz, and listen with disbelief to our father’s reprimand. He sometimes draws for us. Then we go to say goodbye to our grandmother and aunts, Nikolai Dmitrich, our uncle, collects our dress, hangs it on his arm and wishes us good night and a pleasant sleep. Sometimes we stay awake and talk until Fyodor Ivanovich comes in in the dark, strikes a fire, lights a blue fire, then a candle, lies down on his bed with high pillows, puts out the candle, and I fall asleep.
BROTHERS
I'll start with the younger ones. Mitenka is one year older than me.
Not yet. I can't move on to my brothers. It is necessary to mention the barman Vasily Trubetskoy. He was a sweet, affectionate man, who obviously loved children and therefore loved us, especially Seryozha, the same one for whom he later served and died. I remember the kind, crooked smile of his shaved face, which with its wrinkles and neck was closely visible, and also the special smell when he took us in his arms and sat us on a tray (this was one of
great pleasures: “And me! now me!”) and carried around the buffet, a mysterious place for us, with some kind of underground passage. One of the strong memories associated with him was his departure to Shcherbachevka, the Kursk estate his father inherited from Perovskaya. It was (the departure of Vasily Trubetskoy) on Christmastide, while we, the children, and several servants in the hall were playing "Fuck the ruble." We also need to talk about these Yuletide activities. Yuletide entertainment took place like this: all the courtyards, a lot of them, about 30 people, dressed up, came to the house and played various games and danced to the violin playing of old Grigory, who only appeared in the house at these times. It was very funny. The costumers were, as always, a bear with a guide and a goat, Turks and Turkish women, robbers, peasant women - men and men - women. I remember how beautiful some of the mummers seemed to me and how beautiful Masha the Turkish woman was especially. Sometimes my aunty dressed us up too. Particularly desirable was some kind of belt with stones and muslin towels embroidered with silver and gold, and I seemed very handsome with a mustache drawn on with burnt cork. I remember how, looking in the mirror at my face with a black mustache and eyebrows, I could not hold back a smile of pleasure, but I had to put on the majestic face of a Turk. We walked around all the rooms and treated ourselves to various delicacies. On one of the Christmastides in my first childhood, during Christmastide, all of Islenyev’s mummers came to us: my father, my wife’s grandfather, his three sons and three daughters. Everyone wore costumes that were amazing to us: there was a toilet, there was a boot, a cardboard clown and something else. The Islenyevs, having arrived 40 miles away, changed clothes in the village, and, entering the hall, Islenyev sat down at the piano and sang the poems he had composed in a voice that I still remember. The verses were:
Happy New Year to you
We came here;
If you manage to amuse,
We'll be happy then.
It was all very surprising and probably good for the big ones, but for us children, the best thing was the courtyard ones.
Such entertainment took place on the first days of Christmas and on New Year's Eve, sometimes even after, before baptism. But after
The New Year had already come a little, and the entertainment was sluggish. So it was on the day when Vasily left for Shcherbachevka. I remember in the corner of an almost unlit hall we sat in a circle on homemade, mahogany wooden chairs with leather cushions and played ruble. One walked around and had to find a ruble, and we passed it from hand to hand, chanting: “here’s a ruble, here’s a ruble.” I remember one servant in a particularly pleasant and faithful voice wrote out the same words. Suddenly the door of the buffet opened, and Vasily, somehow especially buttoned up, without a tray or utensils, walked across the edge of the hall into the office. Only then did I find out that Vasily was leaving as a clerk in Shcherbachevka. I understood that this was a promotion, and I was happy for Vasily, and at the same time I was not only sorry to part with him; to know that he wouldn’t be in the buffet, he wouldn’t carry us around on a tray, but I didn’t even understand, I didn’t believe that such a change could happen. I felt terribly mysteriously sad, and the chants: “Fuck the ruble” became touchingly touching. When Vasily returned from his aunt’s and with his sweet crooked smile came up to us, kissing our shoulders, I experienced for the first time horror and fear of the impermanence of life and pity and love for dear Vasily.
When I later met Vasily, I saw in him a good or bad steward of my brother, a man whom I suspected, and there was no longer a trace of the former holy, brotherly, humane feeling.
Now, it seems, I can move on to the brothers.
Mitenka is a year older than me. Large black, stern eyes. I hardly remember him when he was little. I only know from stories that he was very capricious as a child: they said that he was so capricious that he became angry and cried because the nanny was not looking at him, then he was just as angry and shouted that the nanny was looking at him. I know from stories that my mother suffered a lot with him. He was closer to me in age, and we played with him more, but I did not love him as much as I loved Seryozha and as I loved and respected Nikolenka. We lived together amicably, I don’t remember quarreling. They probably quarreled and even fought, but, as happens with children, these fights did not leave the slightest trace. And I loved him with a simple, even, natural love and therefore did not notice it and do not remember it. I think I even know, because
I experienced this, especially in childhood, that love for people is a natural state of the soul, or rather a natural attitude towards all people, and when it is like this, you don’t notice it. It changes only when you don’t love (not don’t love, but fear) someone (so I was afraid of beggars, I was afraid of one Volkhonsky, who pinched me; it seems, no one else) and when you especially love, as I loved Aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna , brother Seryozha, Nikolenka, Vasily, nanny, most importantly Pashenka. As a child, I don’t remember anything special about him except childish, cheerful nonsense. His peculiarities were evident and memorable to me already in Kazan, when we moved in 1940, and he was 13 years old. Before that, in Moscow, I remember that he did not fall in love, like me and Seryozha, he did not particularly like dancing or military spectacles, which I will tell you about later, and he studied well and diligently. I remember the teacher, student Poplonsky, who gave us lessons, defined us, three brothers, in relation to the teaching as follows: Sergei wants and can, Dmitry wants, but cannot (this was not true), and Lev neither wants nor can. I think it was absolutely true.
IX
So my real memories of Mitenka begin in Kazan. In Kazan, I, who always imitated Seryozha, began to become corrupted (I’ll also tell you later). Not only from Kazan, but even before that I took care of my appearance: I tried to be secular, comme il faut. There was not a trace of any of this in Mitenka; he seems never to have suffered from the usual vices of adolescence. He was always serious, thoughtful, pure, decisive, quick-tempered, courageous, and he took what he did to the limit of his strength. When it happened to him that he swallowed the chain, he, as far as I remember, was not particularly worried about the consequences of this, while in my mind I remember what horror I felt when I swallowed the pit of the French prune that my aunt gave me, and how solemnly I before his death, he would have announced this misfortune to her. I also remember how we were little kids sledding down a steep mountain past the corner (how fun it was) and some passer-by, instead of driving along the road, drove his troika up this mountain. It seems Seryozha
with a village boy rolled and, unable to hold the sled, fell under the horses. The guys got out without injuries. The trio drove up the mountain. We were all busy with the incident: how he crawled out from under the restraint, how the native got scared, etc. Mitenka, a boy of about 9 years old, approached the traveler and began to scold him. I remember how I was surprised and didn’t like the fact that he said that for this, so that they don’t dare drive where there is no road, they should be sent to the stables. In the language of that time it meant to flog.
Its peculiarities began in Kazan. He studied well, smoothly, wrote poetry very easily, I remember he perfectly translated Schiller's Der Knabe am Bach 1, but did not indulge in this activity. He communicated little with us, he was always calm, serious and thoughtful. I remember how he once got naughty and how the girls were delighted with it. And I became envious, and I thought it was because he was always serious. And I also wanted to imitate him in this. The guardian-auntie had a very stupid idea to give us each a boy so that later he would be our devoted servant. Mitenka was given Vanyusha (this Vanyusha is still alive). Mitenka often treated him badly, it seems he even beat him. I say, it seems, because I don’t remember this, but I only remember his repentance for something to Vanyusha and humiliated requests for forgiveness.
So he grew up unnoticed, communicating little with people, always, except in moments of anger, quiet, serious, with thoughtful, stern, large brown eyes. He was tall, thin, quite strong - not very strong, with long big hands and a stooped back. His peculiarities began from the time he entered the university; he was a year younger than Sergei, but he entered the university with him in the mathematics department only because his older brother was a mathematician. I don’t know how and what brought him to religious life so early, but from the very first year of his university life it began. Religious aspirations naturally directed him towards church life. And he devoted himself to her, as he always did, to the end. He began to eat lean, go to everything church services and became even stricter with myself in life.
Mitenka must have had that precious character trait that I imagined in my mother and which I knew in Nikolenka, and which I was completely
1 Young man at the stream (German).
deprived - a trait of complete indifference to people's opinions about oneself. I always, until very recently, could not get rid of caring about people’s opinions, but Mitenka did not have this at all. I never remember on his face that suppressed smile that involuntarily appears when you are praised. I always remember his serious, calm, sad, sometimes unkind, almond-shaped, big brown eyes. From Kazan we only began to pay attention to him, and only because, while Seryozha and I attributed great importance comme il faut, in general appearance, he was sloppy and dirty, and we condemned him for it. He did not dance and did not want to learn it, he did not go out into society as a student, he wore only a student's frock coat with a narrow tie, and from a young age he developed a tic - a twitch of his head, as if freeing himself from the narrowness of the tie. His peculiarity first appeared during the first fasting. He fasted not in the fashionable university church, but in the casemate church.
We lived in Gortalov's house, opposite the prison. In the prison at that time there was a particularly devout and strict priest, who, as something unusual, did what he did during Holy Week, read all the Gospels, as was required, and because of this the services lasted especially long. Mitenka stood by them and made acquaintance with the priest. The prison church was built in such a way that it was separated only by a glass partition with a door from the place where the convicts stood. One time one of the convicts wanted to give something to the clerks: a candle or money for candles; none of those in the church wanted to take on this task; Mitenka, with his serious face, immediately took it and handed it over. It turned out that this was forbidden, and he was reprimanded, but he, believing that it was necessary, continued to do the same thing. We, most importantly Seryozha, made acquaintance with aristocratic comrades and young people, Mitenka, on the contrary, from all his comrades chose the pathetic, poor, ragged student Poluboyarinov (whom our joker friend called Polubezobedov, and we, pathetic guys, found it funny and laughed over Mitenka). He was only friends with Poluboyarinov and prepared for exams with him.
We lived then on the corner of the Arsky field, in Kiselevsky’s house, upstairs. The top was divided by choirs above the hall. In the first part of the top, up to the choir, Mitenka lived in a room
Seryozha and I lived behind the choir. We, Seryozha and I, loved gizmos, we cleaned our tables like big ones, and they gave us and gave us gizmos for this. Mitenka did not have any belongings. He took one from his father's things - these are minerals. He divided them into divisions and placed them under glass in a box. Since we, the brothers, and also our aunt, looked at Mitenka with some contempt for his low tastes and acquaintances, our frivolous friends adopted this look. One of these, a very narrow-minded person, engineer E., our friend not so much by our choice, but because he stuck to us, once, passing through Mitenka’s room, drew attention to the minerals and asked Mitenka. EU. was unsympathetic, unnatural. Mitenka answered reluctantly. EU. moved the box and shook them. Mitenka said: “Leave it.” EU. didn't listen. And he joked about something, I think he called him Noah. Mitenka became enraged and hit Yes in the face with his huge hand. EU. started running. Mitenka follows him. When he came running into our property, we locked the doors. But Mitenka told us that he would beat him up when he went back. Seryozha and, it seems, Shuvalov went to advise Mitenka to let Yes through. But he took a floor brush and announced that he would certainly beat him up. I don’t know what would have happened if the EU. I went through his room, but he himself asked to be led somehow, and we led him, almost crawling in some places, through the dusty attic.
This is how Mitenka was in his moments of anger, but this is how he was when nothing made him angry. Somehow, a most strange and pitiful creature, a certain Lyubov Sergeevna, a girl, I don’t know what last name she was given, somehow joined our family, was taken out of pity. Lyubov Sergeevna was the fruit of Protasov’s incest (one of those Protasovs from whom Zhukovsky was born). How she got to us, I don’t know. I heard that they pitied her, caressed her, wanted to settle her, even marry her to Fyodor Ivanovich, but all this failed. She lived with us at first - I don’t remember this; and then Aunt Pelageya Ilyinichna took her to Kazan, and she lived with her. So I recognized her in Kazan. It was a pitiful, meek, downtrodden creature. She had a room, and the girl served her. When I got to know her, she was not only pathetic, but disgusting. I don't know which one she had
illness, but her face was all swollen, the way swollen faces are when stung by bees. The eyes were visible in narrow slits between two swollen, glossy pillows without eyebrows. The same swollen, glossy, yellow cheeks, nose, lips, mouth were the same. And she spoke with difficulty, since there was probably the same tumor in her mouth. In the summer, flies landed on her face, and she did not feel them, and this was especially unpleasant to see. Her hair was still black, but sparse, not hiding her bare skull. Vl. Iv. Yushkov, the aunt’s husband, an unkind joker, did not hide his disgust for her. She always smelled bad. And in her room, where the windows and vents were never opened, there was a suffocating smell. It was this Lyubov Sergeevna who became Mitenka’s friend. He began to go to her, listen to her, talk to her, read to her. And - an amazing thing - we were so morally stupid that we just laughed at it, Mitenka was so morally high, so independent of caring about people's opinions, that he never showed, either by word or hint, that he considered what he was doing good . He just did. And this was not an impulse, but this continued the entire time we lived in Kazan.
How clear it is to me now that Mitenka’s death did not destroy him, that he was there before I knew him, before he was born, and is now after he died.
When we shared, according to custom, they gave me the estate in which we lived, Yasnaya Polyana. Seryozha, since he was a lover of horses, and there was a stud farm in Pirogovo, they gave Pirogovo, this is what he wanted, Mitenka and Nikolenka were given the remaining two estates: Nikolenka - Nikolskoye, Mitenka - the Kursk estate Shcherbachevka, inherited from Perovskaya. I now have a note from Mitenka about how he looked at the ownership of serfs. There was absolutely no thought among our circle in the forties that this should not have happened, that it was necessary to let them go. Ownership of serfs by inheritance seemed to be a necessary condition, and all that could be done to prevent this ownership from being bad was to take care not only of the material, but of the moral condition of the peasants. And in this sense, Mitenka’s note was written very seriously, naively and sincerely. He, a young man of twenty (when he finished the course), took upon himself the responsibility, believed that he could not help but take on the responsibility of guiding the morality of hundreds
peasant families and direct threats of punishment and punishment. Just as it is written in Gogol’s letter to the landowner. I think and remember that Mitenka read these letters, that the prison priest pointed them out to him. This is how Mitenka began his duties as a landowner. But, in addition to these duties of the landowner to the serfs, at that time there was another duty, the failure of which seemed unthinkable - military or civil service. And Mitenka, having completed the course, decided to serve in the civilian sector. In order to decide which service to choose, he bought an address calendar and, having considered all branches of the civil service, decided that the most important branch was legislation. And, having decided this, he went to St. Petersburg and there he went to the secretary of state of the second department during his receptions. I can imagine Taneyev’s surprise when, among the petitioners, he stopped in front of a tall, stooped, poorly dressed man (Mitenka always dressed only to cover his body), with a calm and serious, [c] beautiful eyes, face and, having asked what he needed, received the answer that he was a Russian nobleman, completed the course and, wanting to be useful to the fatherland, chose legislation as his activity.
What is your last name?
Count Tolstoy.
Have you served anywhere?
I just finished the course, and my only desire is to be useful.
What kind of place do you want to have?
I don't care, one in which I could be useful.
The sincere seriousness struck Taneyev so much that he took Mitenka to the second department and handed him over to the officials there. It must have been the attitude of the officials towards him and, most importantly, towards the case that pushed Mitenka away, and he did not enter the second department. Mitenka had no one acquaintances in St. Petersburg except the lawyer Dmitry Aleksandrovich Obolensky, who in our Kazan times was a solicitor there.
Mitenka came to Obolensky’s dacha. Obolensky told me, laughing. Obolensky was a very secular, tactful, and ambitious person. He told how while he had guests
(probably from the high society that Obolensky always adhered to), Mitenka came to him through the garden in a cap and a nankeen coat. “I (Obolensky) didn’t recognize him at first, but when I found out, I tried to le mettre à sou aise 1, introduced him to the guests and invited him to take off his coat, but it turned out that there was nothing under the coat.” He found it unnecessary. He sat down and immediately, not embarrassed by the presence of guests, turned to Obolensky with the same question as to Taneyev: where is it better to serve in order to bring more benefit? - Obolensky, probably, with his views on service representing only a means of satisfying ambition, such a question probably never occurred to him. But with his characteristic tact and outward good nature, he responded, pointing out various places, and offering his services. Mitenka, obviously, was dissatisfied with both Obolensky and Taneyev and left St. Petersburg without entering the service there. He went to his village and in Sudzha, it seems, he entered some kind of noble position and took up farming, mainly peasant farming.
After he and I left the university, I lost sight of him. I know that he lived the same strict, abstinent life, knowing neither wine, nor tobacco, nor, most importantly, women under 25 years old, which was very rare at that time. I know that he got along with monks and wanderers and became very close to a very original person who lived with our guardian Voeikov, whose origin no one knew. His name was Father Luke. He wore a cassock, was very ugly, short, askew, black, but very clean and unusually strong. He shook hands as if with pincers, and always spoke somehow significantly and mysteriously. He lived with Voeikov near the mill, where he built a small house and planted an extraordinary flower garden. Mitenka took this father Luka with him and, as I heard, hung out with an old man of the old order, a hoarding landowner, neighbor Samoilov.
It seems that I was already in the Caucasus when an extraordinary revolution happened to Mitenka. He suddenly began drinking, smoking, wasting money and visiting women. How this happened to him, I don’t know; I didn’t see him at that time. I only know that his seducer was very
1 encourage him (French).
an outwardly attractive, but deeply immoral man, the youngest son of Islenyev. I'll tell you about it later, if I have time. And in this life he was the same serious, religious man as he was in everything. He bought the woman, the prostitute Masha, whom he first recognized, and took him in. But in general this life did not last long. I think that it was not so much the bad, unhealthy life that he led for several months in Moscow, but rather the internal struggle and reproaches of conscience that immediately destroyed his powerful organism. He fell ill with consumption, went to the village, was treated in the cities and fell ill in Orel, where I last saw him after the Sevastopol War. He was terrible. The huge hand of his arm was attached to two bones of the elbow, his face was all eyes and the same beautiful, serious, and now inquisitive ones. He coughed and spat incessantly, and did not want to die, did not want to believe that he was dying. The pockmarked Masha he bought, tied with a scarf, was with him and followed him. In my presence, at his request, they brought a miraculous icon. I remember the look on his face when he prayed for her.
I was especially disgusting at this time. I came to Oryol from St. Petersburg, where I went out into society and was all full of vanity. I felt sorry for Mitenka, but not enough. I turned around in Orel and left, and he [died] a few days later. Really, it seems to me that the hardest thing about his death for me was that it prevented me from participating in the court performance, which was then being organized and where I was invited.
I abandoned the chronological method of presentation - I thought it would be better, but I don’t like this method either. I will not describe the brothers S[erezha] and N[ikolenka] separately and will write again in order, as I remember.
FANFARONOVA MOUNTAIN
Yes, Fanfaronova Mountain. This is one of the most distant and sweet and important memories. My older brother Nikolenka was 6 years older than me. He was, therefore,
10-11, when I was 4 or 5, exactly when he took us to Fanfaronova Mountain. In our first youth, I don’t know how it happened, we said “you” to him. He was an amazing boy and then amazing person. Turgenev said about him very correctly that [he] did not have only those shortcomings that are needed in order to be a writer. He did not have the main drawback necessary for this: he had no vanity, he was completely uninterested in what people thought about him. The qualities of a writer that he had were, first of all, a subtle artistic sense, an extreme sense of proportion, good-natured, cheerful humor, an extraordinary, inexhaustible imagination and a truthful, highly moral worldview, and all this without the slightest self-satisfaction. His imagination was such that he could tell fairy tales or ghost stories or humorous stories in the spirit of Mme Radcliff without stopping or hesitating for hours and with such confidence in the reality of what he was telling that one forgot that it was fiction.
When he wasn't talking or reading (he read extremely a lot), he was drawing. He almost always drew devils with horns, curled mustaches, interlocking with each other in a wide variety of poses and busy with a wide variety of activities. These drawings were also full of imagination and humor.
So, when my brothers and I were - I was 5, Mitenka was 6, Seryozha was 7 years old - he announced to us that he had a secret, through which, when it was revealed, all people would be happy, there would be no illnesses, no troubles , no one will be angry with anyone and everyone will love each other, everyone will become ant brothers. (They were probably the Moravian Brothers, which he had heard or read about, but in our language they were the Ant Brothers.) And I remember that the word “ant” was especially liked, reminiscent of ants in a hummock. We even played a game of ant brothers, which consisted of sitting under chairs, blocking them with drawers, covering them with scarves, and sitting there in the dark, huddling together. I remember feeling a special feeling of love and tenderness and really loved this game.
The ant brotherhood was revealed to us, but the main secret is how to make sure that all people do not know any misfortunes, never quarrel or get angry, and
would be constantly happy, this secret was, as he told us, written by him on a green stick, and this stick was buried by the road, on the edge of the ravine of the old Order, in the place where I am, since I need to bury my corpse, asked me to be buried in Nikolenka’s memory. Besides this stick, there was also some Fanfaron mountain, to which he said that he could take us if only we fulfilled all the conditions laid down for that. The conditions were, firstly, to stand in a corner and not think about the polar bear. I remember how I stood in the corner and tried, but I couldn’t help but think about the polar bear. I don’t remember the second condition, it was something very difficult... to walk through the crack between the floorboards without tripping, and the third easy one: for a year, not to see a hare, it doesn’t matter whether it’s alive, or dead, or roasted. Then you must swear not to reveal these secrets to anyone.
The one who fulfills these conditions, and others, more difficult, which he will discover later, one desire, whatever it may be, will be fulfilled. We had to say our wishes. Seryozha wished to be able to sculpt horses and chickens from wax, Mitenka wished to be able to draw all sorts of things, like a painter, in a large form. I couldn’t think of anything except to be able to draw in a small form. All this, as happens with children, was very soon forgotten, and no one entered Fanfaronova Mountain, but I remember the mysterious importance with which Nikolenka initiated us into these secrets, and our respect and awe for the amazing things that were revealed to us.
In particular, the ant brotherhood and the mysterious green stick that was associated with it and was supposed to make all people happy left a strong impression on me. As I think now, Nikolenka probably read or heard a lot about the Freemasons, about their desire to make humanity happy, about the mysterious rites of admission to their order, probably heard about the Moravian brothers and combined all this into one in his vivid imagination and love for people , out of kindness, he came up with all these stories and rejoiced at them himself and fooled us with them.
The ideal of ant brothers clinging lovingly to each other, only not under two armchairs hung with scarves, but under everything firmament all the people of the world, remained the same for me. And how I believed then that there was that green stick on which was written what should be
to destroy all evil in people and give them great good, so I believe now that this truth exists and that it will be revealed to people and will give them what it promises.
BROTHER SEREZHA
I respected Nikolenka, I was friends with Mitenka, but I admired Seryozha and imitated him, loved him, wanted to be him. I admired his handsome appearance, his singing - he always sang - his drawing, his joy and, in particular, oddly enough, his spontaneity, his egoism. I always remembered myself, I was aware of myself, I always sensed, wrongly or not, what others thought about me and felt towards me, and this spoiled the joys of life for me. This is probably why I especially loved in others the opposite of this - spontaneity, selfishness. And for this he especially loved Seryozha - word I loved wrong. I loved Nikolenka, but I admired Seryozha as something completely alien to me, incomprehensible. It was human life, very beautiful, but completely incomprehensible to me, mysterious and therefore especially attractive. He died the other day, and in his dying illness and dying, he was just as incomprehensible to me and just as dear as in the ancient times of childhood. In his old age, lately, he loved me more, valued my affection, was proud of me, wanted to agree with me, but could not, and remained as he was: completely special, himself, handsome, thoroughbred, proud and, most importantly, , such a truthful and sincere person that I have never met. He was what he was, he didn’t hide anything and didn’t want to appear like anything. I wanted to be with Nikolenka, talk, think; with Seryozha I only wanted to imitate him. This imitation began from early childhood. He got his own chickens, and I got the same ones. This was hardly my first insight into the life of animals. I remember different breeds of chickens: gray, speckled, with tufts, how they ran when we called, how we fed them and hated the big Dutch, old, shabby rooster who offended them. Seryozha got these chickens by begging for them; I did the same, imitating him. Seryozha drew on a long piece of paper and painted (it seemed to me surprisingly well) different
flowers of chickens and cockerels, and I did the same, but worse. (This is where I hoped to improve through Fanfaron Mountain.) Seryozha came up with the idea, when the windows were installed, to feed the chickens through the key hole using long sausages made of black and white bread- and I did the same.
We will have to talk a lot more about the brothers later, if we manage to bring the memories at least to marriage.
I’ll try to remember the most lively and joyful ones (there were no sad or difficult ones) before moving to Moscow.
Three miles from Yasnaya Polyana there is the village of Grumant (this place was named so by my grandfather, a former governor in Arkhangelsk, where there is the island of Grumant). There is a barnyard and a house that my grandfather built for his summer visit. Just as everything that grandfather built was elegant and not vulgar, and solid, durable, solid, so was the house with a cellar for milk storage. Wooden, with light windows and shutters, a large strong door, a wooden sofa and a table with large drawers, folded like a package, four sides inward and also unfolded, turning on the middle pivot, so that these flaps lay on the corners and made up a large, arshin two square, table.
The house stood behind the village [in] four or five courtyards, in a place called a garden, very beautiful, overlooking the Funnel winding through the valley in the meadows, with forests on both sides. In this garden there was a forest above a ravine, in which there was a cold and abundant spring of beautiful water. From there they carried water every day to the manor's house; and in front of the ravine, as a continuation of it, there is a large, deep, cold flowing pond with carp, tench, bream, perch and even sterlet. The place was lovely, and not only to drink milk and cream there with black bread, cold and thick, like sour cream, and to be present while fishing, but just to be there, to run uphill and downhill, to and from the pond was a great pleasure. Occasionally in the summer, when the weather was good, we all went there for a ride. The aunts, Pashenka and the girls were in the lineup, and the four of us with Fyodor Ivanovich were in my grandfather’s yellow convertible with high round springs and yellow armrests (there weren’t any others then).
Over lunch, they talk about the weather and make a plan for how to travel. Two hours. We must leave at four and be back by tea. Everything is ready, but they hesitate to send the horses to the pawn; From the west, a cloud comes in from behind the village and the Order. We're all excited. Fyodor Ivanovich tries to put on a stern, calm appearance, but we excite him too, and he goes out onto the balcony, into the wind. Grey hair the tails of his tailcoat flutter at the back of his head, and he looks out significantly over the railing. And we are waiting for his decision. “This one is on Satinka,” he says, pointing to the largest purple cloud. “And this one is empty,” he says, pointing to another one coming from the east.
"Well? Wie glauben Sie?”
"Muss warten" 1 .
But a cloud covers the entire sky. We are in sorrow. They were sent to harness it, now they are sending Misha to stop. It's raining. We are despondent and sad. But then Seryozha ran out onto the balcony and shouted: “It’s clearing up! Fedor Ivanovich, kommen sie. Blauer Himmel!
Kommen sie!” 2
Indeed, between the spreading clouds, the blue piece is either tightened or stretched. Here's more, more. The sun was shining.
Auntie! It's gone wild! True, by God, look, Fyodor Ivanovich said.
The name is Fyodor Ivanovich, he hesitantly but confirms. Hesitation both in the sky and among the aunties. Aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna smiles and says: “Je crois, Alexandrine, en effet, qu’il ne pleuvera plus.” Il ne pleuvera pas! 3 Look."
Auntie, my dear, tell me to harness it. Please. Auntie, my dear! - Seryozha and I shout the most, and the girls help us. And so it was decided to lay it down again. Tikhon himself makes entreche and runs to the stable. And so we stomp our little feet on the porch,
1 “What do you think?”
"We have to wait" (German).
2 Come here. Blue sky!
Come here! (German).
3 I really think, Alexandrin, there won’t be any more rain. No longer! (French).
waiting first for the horses, then for the aunts. A ruler with a canopy and an apron arrives. Nikolai Filipich rules. Harnessed by Neruchino bay horses, the left one is light bay, wide and the right one is dark, bony, with a strong body, as Nikolai Filipich said. Behind the line is a large bay in a yellow convertible.
The aunties and girls sit down in their own way. Our places have been allocated once and for all definitely. Fyodor Ivanovich sits on the right side and rules, next to him are Seryozha and Nikolenka; The convertible is so deep that we sit behind them - Mitenka and I - with our backs apart, to our sides, with our legs together. The whole road past the threshing floor according to the Order: on the right is the old one, on the left is the young Order - pure pleasure. But then we approach a mountain that descends steeply to a river and a bridge. “Halten sie sich, Kinder” 1, says Fyodor Ivanovich, frowning solemnly, intercepts the reins, and so we go down, down, but at the last moment, about thirty steps, Fyodor Ivanovich lets the horse go, and we fly, as it seems to us, with terrible speed. We are waiting for this moment, and our hearts are already skipping ahead. We cross the bridge, drive along the river, again the bridge [?] and climb the mountain, the village, and drive through the gate, into the garden and to the house. The horses are tied. They trample the grass and smell of sweat like horses have never smelled since. The coachmen stand in the shade of the trees. Light and shadows run across their faces, kind, cheerful, happy faces. Matryona the cowgirl comes running, in a shabby dress, saying that she has been waiting for us for a long time, and is glad that we have arrived. And I not only believe, but I cannot help but believe that everyone in the world does nothing but rejoice. Matryona, the auntie, rejoices, asking her with sympathy about her daughters, the dogs that surrounded Fyodor Ivanovich Berfa (frog charlot), who came running after us, rejoice, the chickens, roosters, peasant children rejoice, the horses, calves, fish in the pond, birds in the forest rejoice. Matryona and her daughter bring a large salted piece of black bread, open an amazing, unusual table and place soft juicy cottage cheese with napkin prints, cream like sour cream, and jars of fresh whole milk.
We drink, we eat, we run to the spring, we drink water there,
1 Hang in there, kids. (German).
we run around the pond where Fyodor Ivanovich casts his fishing rods, and after spending half an hour, an hour on Grumant, we return the same way, just as happy. I remember only once our joy was disrupted by an incident that made us - at least Mitenka and I - cry bitterly. Berfa, Fyodor Ivanovich’s sweet, brown dog with beautiful eyes and soft curly fur, ran, as always, either behind or in front of the convertible. Once, when leaving the Grumant garden, the peasant dogs rushed after her. She rushed to the convertible, Fyodor Ivanovich could not restrain the horse and ran over its paw. When we returned home, and the unfortunate Berfa ran on three legs, Fyodor Ivanovich and Nikolai Dmitrich, our uncle, also a hunter, examined her and decided that her leg was broken, the dog was spoiled and would never be suitable for hunting.
I listened to what Fyodor Ivanovich was saying to Nikolai Dmitrich in a small room upstairs, and could not believe my ears when I heard the words of Fyodor Ivanovich, who said in some brave, decisive tone: “It’s no good. Hang him up. One end."
The dog is suffering, sick, and should be hanged for it. I felt that this was bad, that this should not have been done, but the tone of Fyodor Ivanovich and Nikolai Dmitrich, who approved this decision, was so decisive that I, just like when Kuzma was flogged, when Temeshov said that he I gave up a man as a soldier because he ate meat during Lent; he felt that something was wrong, but in view of the undoubted decisions of older and respected people, he did not dare to believe his feeling.
I won’t go through all my joyful childhood memories, both because there will be no end to it, and because they are dear and important to me, and I won’t be able to convey them so that they seem important to outsiders.
I’ll tell you only about one mental state that I experienced several times in my first childhood and which, I think, was important, more important than many, many feelings experienced later. It was important because this state was the first experience of love, not love for someone, but love for love, love for God, a feeling that I subsequently only rarely experienced; rarely, but still experienced it, thanks to the fact that, I think, this trail was laid in my first childhood. This feeling was expressed like this: we, especially me, Mitenka and the girls,
sat under the chairs as close to each other as possible. They hung these chairs with scarves, blocked them with pillows and said that we were ant brothers, and at the same time we felt special tenderness for each other. Sometimes this tenderness turned into affection, stroking each other, snuggling with each other. But this was rare. And we ourselves felt that this was not it, and immediately stopped. To be ant brothers, as we called it (probably some stories about the Moravian brothers that came to us through Nikolenka's Fanfaron Mountain), only meant to hang ourselves from everyone, to separate ourselves from everyone and everything, and to love each other. Sometimes we talked under our chairs about what and who someone loves, what is needed for happiness, how we will live and love everyone.
It started, as I remember, from playing on the road. They sat on chairs, harnessed the chairs, arranged a carriage or wagon, and then those sitting in the wagon passed from travelers to ant brothers. Others joined them. It was very, very good and I thank God that I could play it. We called it a game, and yet everything in the world is a game, except this.
Events in the nursery village life were the following: father's trips to Kireevsky and to the departing field, stories about hunting adventures, to which we, children, listened as if they were important events.
Then - the arrivals of my godfather Yazykov with his grimaces, his pipe, the footman standing behind his chair during dinner. Then came the visits of Islenyev and his children, one of whom later became my mother-in-law. Then came the visits of Yushkov, who always brought something strange: caricatures, dolls, toys.
One childhood memory about an insignificant event left a strong impression on me - as I now remember, Temeshov was sitting on our children's top and talking with Fyodor Ivanovich. I don’t remember why the conversation turned to observing fasts, and Temeshov, good-natured Temeshov, very simply said: “My cook (or lackey, I don’t remember) decided to eat fasting meals. I gave him up as a soldier." That’s why I remember this now because it seemed to me then something strange, incomprehensible to me.
There was another event - Perov's legacy. Memorable
a convoy with horses and high-laid carts, which arrived from Neruch when the inheritance process, thanks to Ilya Mitrofanovich, was won.
Ilya Mitrofanovich was a heavy drinker, a tall old man with white hair, a former serf of Perovskaya, a great expert on all sorts of slander that happened in the old days. He led the business of this inheritance, and for this he lived and was kept in Yasnaya Polyana until his death.
Another memorable impression: the arrival of Pyotr Ivanovich Tolstoy, the father of Valerian, my sister’s husband, who entered the living room in a dressing gown, we did not understand why this was, but then we found out that it was because he was in the last stage of consumption. Another is the arrival of his brother, the famous American Fyodor Tolstoy. I remember he drove up in a postal carriage, entered my father’s office and demanded that they bring him his special, dry French bread. He didn't eat anything else. At this time, brother Sergei had severe toothache. He asked what was wrong with him, and when he found out, he said that he could stop the pain with magnetism. He entered the office and locked the door behind him. A few minutes later he came out with two cambric scarves. I remember they had a purple border of patterns, and I gave my auntie the scarves and said: this one, when he puts it on, the pain will go away, and this one, so that he can sleep. They took the scarves and put them on Seryozha, and we were left with the impression that everything happened as he said.
I remember his beautiful face, bronze, shaved, with thick white sideburns reaching to the corners of his mouth, and the same white curly hair. I would like to tell a lot about this extraordinary, criminal and attractive, extraordinary person.
The third impression was a visit to some - I don’t know - mother’s cousin, prince, hussar Volkonsky. He wanted to caress me and put me on his lap and, as often happens, while continuing to talk with elders, he held me. I was eager, but he only held me tighter. This lasted for about two minutes.
But this feeling of captivity, lack of freedom, violence outraged me to such an extent that I suddenly began to break, cry and fight.
MOVING TO MOSCOW
This was in 1937. But I can’t remember when - in autumn or winter. The only thing in favor of the fact that it was winter is that there were 7 carriages and there was a cart for the grandmother with such wide outlets, on which valets stood all the way, that in Serpukhov the cart did not enter the gate. I remember this probably from stories. My memories remain of a trip on wheels. Maybe I got it wrong, and these carts were there when we left for Kazan. Rather, we were driving on wheels. I remember this because I was left with the impression that my father was riding behind me in a stroller and during breaks - it was a great joy - they took us to him. I remember that I had the opportunity to enter Moscow in a stroller with my father. It was a good day, and I remember my admiration at the sight of Moscow churches and houses, admiration caused by the tone of pride with which my father showed me Moscow. Another sign by which I remember that it was along the black trail is that on the 1st day of our ride (we rode on delivery vehicles - two days; we spent the night) in the evening, when it was already dark, we heard that a fox appeared near the road , and Petrusha, his father’s valet, who was carrying with him a greyhound male, gray Zhiran, let him go after the fox and ran after her. We didn't see anything, but we were very worried and sad when we learned that the fox had left.
Tolstoy L.N. Memories // L.N. Tolstoy. Collected works in 22 volumes. M.: Fiction, 1983. T. 14. P. 378-435.
Lesson objectives: learn to use different types of reading (introductory, search); cultivate interest in reading; develop the ability to work independently with text, the ability to listen to your friends; cultivate emotional responsiveness to what you read.
Equipment: computer, book exhibition.
During the classes.
1. Introduction to the topic of the lesson.
Guys, look at the exhibition of books. Who is the author of all these works?
Today in class we will get acquainted with an excerpt from Leo Tolstoy’s autobiographical story “Childhood”.
2. Acquaintance with the biography of the writer.
1. The biography of the writer is told by a previously prepared student.
Listen to a story about the writer's life.
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born in Yasnaya Polyana, near the city of Tula, in 1828.
His mother, born Princess Maria Nikolaevna Volkonskaya, died when Tolstoy was not yet two years old. Tolstoy wrote about her in “Memoirs of Childhood”: “My mother was not good-looking, but very well educated for her time”; she knew French, English, German, played the piano beautifully, and was an expert at composing fairy tales. Tolstoy learned all this from others - after all, he himself did not remember his mother.
His father, Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy, died when the boy was less than nine years old. A distant relative of the Tolstoys, Tatyana Aleksandrovna Ergolskaya, became the teacher of himself, his three older brothers and his younger sister.
Tolstoy spent most of his life in Yasnaya Polyana, from where he left ten days before his death.
In Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy organized a school for peasant children. For the school, he created the “ABC”, consisting of 3 books for primary education. The first book of the “ABC” contains “an image of letters”, the second – “an exercise in connecting warehouses”, the third – a book for reading: it includes fables, epics, sayings, proverbs.
Tolstoy lived long life. In 1908, Tolstoy abandoned the celebration of his anniversary, held a final meeting, and on November 28, 1910, left home forever...
The great writer died at the Astapovo railway station from pneumonia; he was buried in Yasnaya Polyana.
2. Sightseeing tour of the Leo Tolstoy house-museum.
Now we will take a tour of the house where Leo Tolstoy used to live. Now there is a museum there.
This is Leo Tolstoy's house from the south side.
This is the front room of Leo Tolstoy's house.
Hall in the house.
Leo Tolstoy at the dinner table. 1908
Leo Tolstoy's bedroom. A washbasin that belonged to Leo Tolstoy’s father. Hospital chair of Leo Tolstoy.
The grave of Leo Tolstoy in Stary Zakaz.
Thousands of people flocked to Yasnaya Polyana for the funeral. The old man, who tried to live according to his conscience, turned out to be dear and necessary to all good people.
Many were crying. People knew that they were orphaned...
3. Work on the text.
1. Introductory reading of the text out loud.
The text is given in the textbook.
Children read.
2. Exchange of views.
What new things have you learned about the writer’s childhood from his memoirs?
(We learned that L.N. Tolstoy was a younger brother. As a child, Tolstoy and his brothers dreamed that all people would be happy.)
What did he like to play with his brothers?
(He loved to play ant brotherhood.)
What did you find particularly interesting about the memories?
(The children loved to play and fantasize; they loved to draw, sculpt, and write stories.)
Do you think Leo Tolstoy’s childhood can be called happy?
4. Physical exercise.
“And now everyone has stood up together...”
We raise our hands up,
And then we lower them,
And then we'll separate them
And we’ll quickly press you to us.
And then faster, faster,
Clap, clap more cheerfully!
5. Work in notebooks.
Find the answers in the text and write them down.
- How many brothers did Leo Tolstoy have? List their names.
(L.N. Tolstoy had 3 brothers: Nikolai, Mitenka, Seryozha.) - What was your older brother like?
(He was an amazing boy and then an amazing person... He had such an imagination that he could tell fairy tales and ghost stories or humorous stories...) - What was the main secret of the ant brotherhood?
(The main secret is how to make sure that all people do not know any misfortunes, never quarrel or get angry, but are constantly happy.)
6. Exercise in the ability to ask questions.
Select an episode from the text as desired and formulate the correct question for it. Children must answer the question by reading this episode.
(Who did Nikolai like to draw in his drawings?) The second paragraph is read out as an answer.
(How did the brothers arrange the game of ant brothers?) Read out the episode from the third paragraph.
(What wishes did the brothers make?)
7. Determination of the genre of the work.
Remember from the beginning of the lesson what genre does this work belong to?
(Tale.)
If children cannot remember, turn to the cover again.
Why is it called an autobiographical story?
8. Lesson summary.
What did Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy believe in all his life?
(He believed that it was possible to reveal the secret that would help destroy all evil in people and teach them to live in peace.)
In the next lessons we will get acquainted with other works of Leo Tolstoy.
And I would like to end the lesson with the words of the writer himself:
“...We must try, first of all, to read and get to know the best writers of all centuries and peoples.”
Thanks for the work.