WHEN I was still a child and had not yet read "War and Peace," I was
told that NATASHA ROSTOF was Aunt Tanya. When my father was asked
whether that was true, and whether DMITRY ROSTOF was such and such a
person and LEVIN such and such another, he never gave a definite answer,
and one could not but feel that he disliked such questions and was
rather offended by them.
In those remote days about which I am talking, my father was very keen
about the management of his estate, and devoted a lot of energy to it. I
can remember his planting the huge apple orchard at Yasnaya and several
hundred acres of birch and pine forest, and at the beginning of the
seventies, for a number of years, he was interested in buying up land
cheap in the province of Samara, and breeding droves of steppe horses
and flocks of sheep.
I still have pretty clear, though rather fragmentary and inconsequent,
recollections of our three summer excursions to the steppes of Samara.
My father had already been there before his marriage in 1862, and
afterward by the advice of Dr. Zakharyin, who attended him. He took the
kumiss-cure in 1871 and 1872, and at last, in 1873, the whole family
went there.
At that time my father had bought several hundred acres of cheap
Bashkir lands in the district of Buzuluk, and we went to stay on our new
property at a khutor, or farm.
In Samara we lived on the farm in a tumble-down wooden house, and beside
us, in the steppe, were erected two felt kibitkas, or Tatar frame tents,
in which our Bashkir, Muhammed Shah Romanytch, lived with his wives.
Morning and evening they used to tie the mares up outside the kibitkas,
where they were milked by veiled women, who then hid themselves from the
sight of the men behind a brilliant chintz curtain, and made the kumiss.
The kumiss was bitter and very nasty, but my father and my uncle Stephen
Behrs were very fond of it, and drank it in large quantities.
When we boys began to get big, we had at first a German tutor for two or
three years, Fyodor Fyodorovitch Kaufmann.
I cannot say that we were particularly fond of him. He was rather rough,
and even we children were struck by his German stupidity. His redeeming
feature was that he was a devoted sportsman. Every morning he used to
jerk the blankets off us and shout, "Auf, Kinder! auf!" and during the
daytime plagued us with German calligraphy.