AT this point I shall turn back and try to trace the influence which
my father had on my upbringing, and I shall recall as well as I can the
impressions that he left on my mind in my childhood, and later in the
melancholy days of my early manhood, which happened to coincide with the
radical change in his whole philosophy of life.
In 1852, tired of life in the Caucasus and remembering his old home at
Yasnaya Polyana, he wrote to his aunt, Tatyana Alexandrovna:
After some years, I shall find myself, neither very young nor very old,
back at Yasnaya Polyana again: my affairs will all be in order; I shall
have no anxieties for the future and no troubles in the present.
You also will be living at Yasnaya. You will be getting a little old,
but you will be healthy and vigorous. We shall lead the life we led in
the old days; I shall work in the mornings, but we shall meet and see
each other almost all day.
We shall dine together in the evening. I shall read you something that
interests you. Then we shall talk: I shall tell you about my life in the
Caucasus; you will give me reminiscences of my father and mother; you
will tell me some of those "terrible stories" to which we used to listen
in the old days with frightened eyes and open mouths.
We shall talk about the people that we loved and who are no more.
You will cry, and I, too; but our tears will be refreshing,
tranquilizing tears. We shall talk about my brothers, who will visit
us from time to time, and about dear Masha, who will also spend several
months every year at Yasnaya, which she loves, with all her children.
We shall have no acquaintances; no one will come in to bore us with
gossip.
It is a wonderful dream; but that is not all that I let myself dream of.
I shall be married. My wife will be gentle, kind, and
affectionate; she will love you as I do; we shall have children who will
call you granny; you will live in the big house, in the same room on the
top floor where my grandmother lived before.
The whole house will be run on the same lines as it was in my father's
time, and we shall begin the same life over again, but with a change of
roles.
You will take my grandmother's place, but you will be better still than
she was; I shall take my father's place, though I can never hope to be
worthy of the honor.
My wife will take my mother's place, and the children ours.
Masha will fill the part of both my aunts, except for their sorrow;
and there will even be Gasha there to take the place of Prashovya
Ilyinitchna.
The only thing lacking will be some one to take the part you played
in the life of our family. We shall never find such a noble and loving
heart as yours. There is no one to succeed you.
There will be three new faces that will appear among us from time to
time: my brothers, especially one who will often be with us, Nikolenka,
who will be an old bachelor, bald, retired, always the same kindly,
noble fellow.
Just ten years after this letter, my father married, and almost all his
dreams were realized, just as he had wished. Only the big house, with
his grandmother's room, was missing, and his brother Nikolenka, with the
dirty hands, for he died two years before, in 1860. In his family life
my father witnessed a repetition of the life of his parents, and in us
children he sought to find a repetition of himself and his brothers. We
were brought up as regular gentlefolk, proud of our social position and
holding aloof from all the outer world. Everything that was not us was
below us, and therefore unworthy of imitation. I knew that my father
felt very earnestly about the chastity of young people; I knew how much
strength he laid on purity. An early marriage seemed to me the best
solution of the difficult question that must harass every thoughtful boy
when he attains to man's estate.
Two or three years later, when I was eighteen and we were living in
Moscow, I fell in love with a young lady I knew, my present wife, and
went almost every Saturday to her father's house.
My father knew, but said nothing. One day when he was going out for a
walk I asked if I might go with him. As I very seldom went for walks
with him in Moscow, he guessed that I wanted to have a serious talk
with him about something, and after walking some distance in silence,
evidently feeling that I was shy about it and did not like to break the
ice, he suddenly began:
"You seem to go pretty often to the F----s'."