"WHAT'S this saber doing here?" asked a young guardsman, Lieutenant
Afanasyi Afanasyevitch Fet, of the footman one day as he entered the
hall of Ivan Sergeyevitch Turgenieff's flat in St. Petersburg in the
middle of the fifties.
"It is Count Tolstoy's saber; he is asleep in the drawing-room. And Ivan
Sergeyevitch is in his study having breakfast," replied Zalchar.
"During the hour I spent with Turgenieff," says Fet, in his
reminiscences, "we talked in low voices, for fear of waking the count,
who was asleep on the other side of the door."
"He's like that all the time," said Turgenieff, smiling; "ever since he
got back from his battery at Sebastopol, [16] and came to stay here, he
has been going the pace. Orgies, Gipsies, and gambling all night long,
and then sleeps like a dead man till two o'clock in the afternoon. I did
my best to stop him, but have given it up as a bad job.
"It was in this visit to St. Petersburg that I and Tolstoy became
acquainted, but the acquaintance was of a purely formal character, as I
had not yet seen a line of his writings, and had never heard of his
name in literature, except that Turgenieff mentioned his 'Stories of
Childhood.'"
Soon after this my father came to know Fet intimately, and they struck
up a firm and lasting friendship, and established a correspondence which
lasted almost till Fet's death.
It was only during the last years of Fet's life, when my father was
entirely absorbed in his new ideas, which were so at variance with
Afanasyi Afanasyevitch's whole philosophy of life, that they became
estranged and met more rarely.
It was at Fet's, at Stepanovka, that my father and Turgenieff quarreled.
Before the railway was made, when people still had to drive, Fet, on
his way into Moscow, always used to turn in at Yasnaya Polyana to see my
father, and these visits became an established custom. Afterward,
when the railway was made and my father was already married, Afanasyi
Afanasyevitch still never passed our house without coming in, and if he
did, my father used to write him a letter of earnest reproaches, and
he used to apologize as if he had been guilty of some fault. In those
distant times of which I am speaking my father was bound to Fet by a
common interest in agriculture as well as literature.
Some of my father's letters of the sixties are curious in this respect.
For instance, in 1860, he wrote a long dissertation on Turgenieff's
novel "On the Eve," which had just come out, and at the end added
a postscript: "What is the price of a set of the best quality of
veterinary instruments? And what is the price of a set of lancets and
bleeding-cups for human use?"
In another letter there is a postscript:
"When you are next in Oryol, buy me six-hundred weight of various ropes,
reins, and traces," and on the same page: "'Tender art thou,' and the
whole thing is charming. You have never done anything better; it is all
charming." The quotation is from Fet's poem:
The lingering clouds' last throng flies over us.
But it was not only community of interests that brought my father and
Afanasyi Afanasyevitch together. The reason of their intimacy lay in
the fact that, as my father expressed it, they "thought alike with their
heart's mind."
I also remember Nikolai Nikolayevitch Strakhof's visits. He was a
remarkably quiet and modest man. He appeared at Yasnaya Polyana in the
beginning of the seventies, and from that time on came and stayed with
us almost every summer till he died.
He had big, gray eyes, wide open, as if in astonishment; a long beard
with a touch of gray in it; and when he spoke, at the end of every
sentence he gave a shy laugh.
When he addressed my father, he always said "Lef Nikolayevitch" instead
of Lyoff Nikolaievich, like other people.
He always stayed down-stairs in my father's study, and spent his whole
day there reading or writing, with a thick cigarette, which he rolled
himself, in his mouth.
Strakhof and my father came together originally on a purely business
footing. When the first part of my father's "Alphabet and Reading-Book"
was printed, Strakhof had charge of the proof-reading. This led to a
correspondence between him and my father, of a business character at
first, later developing into a philosophical and friendly one. While he
was writing "Anna Karenina," my father set great store by his opinion
and valued his critical instinct very highly.
"It is enough for me that that is your opinion," he writes in a letter
of 1872, probably apropos of the "Alphabet."
In 1876, apropos of "Anna Karenina" this time, my father wrote:
"You ask me whether you have understood my novel aright, and what I
think of your opinion. Of course you understood it aright. Of course I
am overjoyed at your understanding of it; but it does not follow that
everybody will understand it as you do."
But it was not only his critical work that drew my father to Strakhof.
He disliked critics on the whole and used to say that the only people
who took to criticism were those who had no creative faculty of their
own. "The stupid ones judge the clever ones," he said of professional
critics. What he valued most in Strakhof was the profound and
penetrating thinker. He was a "real friend" of my father's,--my father
himself so described him,--and I recall his memory with deep affection
and respect.
At last I have come to the memory of the man who was nearer in spirit to
my father than any other human being, namely, Nikolai Nikolayevitch
Gay. Grandfather Gay, as we called him, made my father's acquaintance
in 1882. While living on his farm in the Province of Tchernigoff, he
chanced to read my father's pamphlet "On the Census," and finding a
solution in it of the very questions which were troubling him at the
time, without delay he started out and hurried into Moscow. I remember
his first arrival, and I have always retained the impression that from
the first words they exchanged he and my father understood each other,
and found themselves speaking the same language.
Just like my father, Gay was at this time passing through a great
spiritual crisis; and traveling almost the same road as my father in his
search after truth, he had arrived at the study of the Gospel and a new
understanding of it. My sister Tatyana wrote:
For the personality of Christ he entertained a passionate and tender
affection, as if for a near and familiar friend whom he loved with
all the strength of his soul. Often during heated arguments Nikolai
Nikolayevitch would take the Gospel, which he always carried about with
him, from his pocket, and read out some passage from it appropriate to
the subject in hand. "This book contains everything that a man needs,"
he used to say on these occasions.
While reading the Gospel, he often looked up at the person he was
talking to and went on reading without looking at the book. His face
glowed at such moments with such inward joy that one could see how near
and dear the words he was reading were to his heart.
He knew the whole Gospel almost by heart, but he said that every time he
read it he enjoyed a new and genuine spiritual delight. He said that not
only was everything intelligible to him in the Gospel, but that when
he read it he seemed to be reading in his own soul, and felt himself
capable of rising higher and higher toward God and merging himself in
Him.