I CAN remember the house at Yasnaya Polyana in the condition it was in
the first years after my father's marriage.
It was one of the two-storied wings of the old mansion-house of the
Princes Volkonsky, which my father had sold for pulling down when he was
still a bachelor.
From what my father has told me, I know that the house in which he was
born and spent his youth was a three-storied building with thirty-six
rooms. On the spot where it stood, between the two wings, the remains
of the old stone foundation are still visible in the form of trenches
filled with rubble, and the site is covered with big sixty-year-old
trees that my father himself planted.
When any one asked my father where he was born, he used to point to a
tall larch which grew on the site of the old foundations.
"Up there where the top of that larch waves," he used to say; "that's
where my mother's room was, where I was born on a leather sofa."
My father seldom spoke of his mother, but when he did, it was delightful
to hear him, because the mention of her awoke an unusual strain of
gentleness and tenderness in him. There was such a ring of respectful
affection, so much reverence for her memory, in his words, that we all
looked on her as a sort of saint.
My father remembered his father well, because he was already nine years
old when he died. He loved him, too, and always spoke of him reverently;
but one always felt that his mother's memory, although he had never
known her, was dearer to him, and his love for her far greater than for
his father.
Even to this day I do not exactly know the story of the sale of the old
house. My father never liked talking about it, and for that reason I
could never make up my mind to ask him the details of the transaction. I
only know that the house was sold for five thousand paper rubles [3] by
one of his relatives, who had charge of his affairs by power of attorney
when he was in the Caucasus.
It was said to have been done in order to pay off my father's gambling
debts. That was quite true.
My father himself told me that at one time he was a great card-player,
that he lost large sums of money, and that his financial affairs were
considerably embarrassed.
The only thing about which I am in doubt is whether it was with my
father's knowledge or by his directions that the house was sold, or
whether the relative in question did not exceed his instructions and
decide on the sale of his own initiative.
My father cherished his parents' memory to such an extent, and had such
a warm affection for everything relating to his own childhood, that it
is hard to believe that he would have raised his hand against the house
in which he had been born and brought up and in which his mother had
spent her whole life.
Knowing my father as I do, I think it is highly possible that he wrote
to his relative from the Caucasus, "Sell something," not in the least
expecting that he would sell the house, and that he afterward took the
blame for it on himself. Is that not the reason why he was always so
unwilling to talk about it?
In 1871, when I was five years old, the zala [4] and study were built on
the house.
The walls of the zala were hung with old portraits of ancestors. They
were rather alarming, and I was afraid of them at first; but we got
used to them after a time, and I grew fond of one of them, of my
great-grandfather, Ilya Andreyevitch Tolstoy, because I was told that I
was like him.
Beside him hung the portrait of another great-grandfather, Prince
Nikolai Sergeyevitch Volkonsky, my grandmother's father, with thick,
black eyebrows, a gray wig, and a red kaftan. [5]
This Volkonsky built all the buildings of Yasnaya Polyana. He was a
model squire, intelligent and proud, and enjoyed the great respect of
all the neighborhood.
On the ground floor, under the drawing-room, next to the entrance-hall,
my father built his study. He had a semi-circular niche made in the
wall, and stood a marble bust of his favorite dead brother Nikolai in
it. This bust was made abroad from a death-mask, and my father told us
that it was very like, because it was done by a good sculptor, according
to his own directions.
He had a kind and rather plaintive face. The hair was brushed smooth
like a child's, with the parting on one side. He had no beard or
mustache, and his head was white and very, very clean. My father's
study was divided in two by a partition of big bookshelves, containing
a multitude of all sorts of books. In order to support them, the
shelves were connected by big wooden beams, and between them was a thin
birch-wood door, behind which stood my father's writing-table and his
old-fashioned semicircular arm-chair.
There are portraits of Dickens and Schopenhauer and Fet [6] as a young
man on the walls, too, and the well-known group of writers of the
Sovremennik [7] circle in 1856, with Turgenieff, Ostrovsky, Gontcharof,
Grigorovitch, Druzhinin, and my father, quite young still, without a
beard, and in uniform.
My father used to come out of his bedroom of a morning--it was in a
corner on the top floor--in his dressing-gown, with his beard uncombed
and tumbled together, and go down to dress.
Soon after he would issue from his study fresh and vigorous, in a gray
smock-frock, and would go up into the zala for breakfast. That was our
dejeuner.
When there was nobody staying in the house, he would not stop long in
the drawing-room, but would take his tumbler of tea and carry it off to
his study with him.
But if there were friends and guests with us, he would get into
conversation, become interested, and could not tear himself away.
At last he would go off to his work, and we would disperse, in winter to
the different school-rooms, in summer to the croquet-lawn or somewhere
about the garden. My mother would settle down in the drawing-room to
make some garment for the babies, or to copy out something she had not
finished overnight; and till three or four in the afternoon silence
would reign in the house.
Then my father would come out of his study and go off for his
afternoon's exercise. Sometimes he would take a dog and a gun, sometimes
ride, and sometimes merely go for a walk to the imperial wood.
At five the big bell that hung on the broken bough of an old elm-tree in
front of the house would ring and we would all run to wash our hands and
collect for dinner.
He was very hungry, and ate voraciously of whatever turned up. My mother
would try to stop him, would tell him not to waste all his appetite on
kasha, because there were chops and vegetables to follow. "You'll have
a bad liver again," she would say; but he would pay no attention to
her, and would ask for more and more, until his hunger was completely
satisfied. Then he would tell us all about his walk, where he put up a
covey of black game, what new paths he discovered in the imperial
wood beyond Kudeyarof Well, or, if he rode, how the young horse he was
breaking in began to understand the reins and the pressure of the leg.
All this he would relate in the most vivid and entertaining way, so that
the time passed gaily and animatedly.
After dinner he would go back to his room to read, and at eight we
had tea, and the best hours of the day began--the evening hours, when
everybody gathered in the zala. The grown-ups talked or read aloud or
played the piano, and we either listened to them or had some jolly game
of our own, and in anxious fear awaited the moment when the English
grandfather-clock on the landing would give a click and a buzz, and
slowly and clearly ring out ten.
Perhaps mama would not notice? She was in the sitting-room, making a
copy.
"Come, children, bedtime! Say good night," she would call.
"In a minute, Mama; just five minutes."
"Run along; it's high time; or there will be no getting you up in the
morning to do your lessons."
We would say a lingering good night, on the lookout for any chance for
delay, and at last would go down-stairs through the arches, annoyed at
the thought that we were children still and had to go to bed while the
grown-ups could stay up as long as ever they liked.