IV

During the first years of our married life we had few people to stay

with us. I remember that Count Sollogub, the author of _Tarantas_, with

his two sons, used to come and visit us. He was a clever and amiable

man, and we all liked him very much; he won my heart by saying to Leo

Nikolaevich: "Lucky man to have such a wife." To me he once said: "You

are, in fact, the nurse of your husband's talent, and go on being that

all your life long." I always remembered this wise and friendly advice

of Count Sollogub, and I tried to follow it as well as I could.

Very often Fet used to come to us; Leo Nikolaevich was fond of him and

Fet was fond of us both. On his journeys between Moscow and his estate

he used to stay with us, and his good wife, Marie Petrovna, often came

with him; he used to make the house ring with his loud, brilliant, often

witty, and sometimes flattering, talk.

In the early summer of 1863, he was at Yasnaya Polyana when Leo

Nikolaevich was tremendously interested in bees and used to spend whole

days among the hives; sometimes I used even to bring the lunch out

there. One evening we all decided to have tea in the apiary. Everywhere

in the grass glow-worms began to shine. Leo Nikolaevich took two of them

and laughingly held them to my ears, saying: "Look, I always promised

you emerald ear-rings; could anything be better than these?" When Fet

left, he wrote me a letter in verse, ending as follows:

In my hand is yours,

What a marvel!

And on the earth are two glow-worms,

Two emeralds.{85}

Almost always after a visit Afanasii Afanasevich Fet sent me a poem, and

many of them were dedicated to me.{86} In one of them I was pleased by

the, perhaps, undeserved description of the qualities of my soul in the

following stanza:

And, behold, enchanted

By thee, here, remote,

I understand, bright creature,

All the _purity_ of thy soul.

When we settled down in Moscow, Fet bought a house near us and often

visited us, saying that in Moscow all he wanted was a _samovar_. We

laughed at this unexpected desire of Fet's, and he explained: "I must be

certain that in such and such a house, in the evening, the samovar is

boiling and that there is sitting there a sweet hostess with whom I can

spend a pleasant evening."

Among the interesting visitors at Yasnaya Polyana was Turgenev, who came

twice. The first time was in 1878, and the second when he came to ask

Leo Nikolaevich to be present at the opening of the Pushkin memorial. He

was amiable and lively and liked our happy family life, and he said to

Leo Nikolaevich: "How well you did for yourself, my dear, in marrying

your wife."{37}

I thank those dear, dead, _real_ friends of ours for their invariable

goodness and kindness to me. Many of them were more than twenty years

older than I and treated me, as a young woman, with kindliness.

Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov often came to us on long visits; he was for

all of us a loved and respected friend and he was always deeply touched

by our life and was fond of the children. He used to say: "I must write

about Yasnaya Polyana and the life here." But his intention remained

unfulfilled.

Many other guests came to us at Yasnaya Polyana and in Moscow. Among

them were foreigners, Riepin, the famous artist, Gue, Syerov, Ginsburg,

Truberskoi, Aronson who painted and sculptured Leo Nikolaevich and

myself. My portraits for some reason were never like me.

A great deal could be written about this happy period of my life, when

everything was so full of joy, interest, and occupation. I regret that

at the time I kept few records of events and the interesting

conversation of visitors and of Leo Nikolaevich himself; now I remember

little, for I have passed through different experiences in which I had

to pay with sorrow and tears for former happiness, experiences caused by

painful circumstances and by wicked people.

V

When children began to appear upon the scene, I could no longer devote

myself entirely to my husband's service and to the constant sympathy

with his work. We had many children: I bore thirteen. Ten of them I

nursed myself, on principle and because I wanted to do so. I did not

want to have wet-nurses. Owing to difficulties, I had to give up the

principle on three occasions.

The children were growing up, and at that time we were of one mind with

regard to their education. Leo Nikolaevich always himself engaged or

found teachers and governesses for them. We parents taught them a great

deal ourselves. Their father wanted to give them a most refined

education, and to the boys an exclusively classical one. He learnt Greek

himself with great labour in order to teach our eldest son, Serge, whom

Leo Nikolaevich wanted to go to the university. "By that time Tanya will

be grown up," he would say, "and we shall have to bring her out." I had

to teach the children those subjects for which at the time there were no

teachers, French, German, music, drawing, Russian literature, and even

dancing. I knew very little English. Leo Nikolaevich, who also at that

time had a poor knowledge of the language, began teaching it to me, and

the first book which we read together in English was Wilkie Collins's

_The Woman in White_.{38} Later on I easily acquired the language from

the English governess whom we had for the children.

What we were chiefly concerned for in the education of the elder

children, we obtained in 1881 when we moved to Moscow for the winter.

Our eldest son, Serge, entered the university; our two other sons, Ilya

and Leo, were sent by Leo Nikolaevich to L. I. Polivanov's classical

school. He sent our daughter, Tanya, to the School of Painting and

Sculpture, and he took her out to her first fancy-dress ball at the

Olsufevs, as I was expecting my eighth child, Alesha, born on 31

October, and did not go out anywhere.

The move to Moscow and our life in the town turned out for both of us to

be much more difficult than we could have anticipated. It is true that

Leo Nikolaevich wrote to me from the Samara steppes, where he had gone

for a kumiss cure: "If God will, I shall come and help you in your

Moscow affairs willingly--you have only to give me the order"; but he

was unable to carry out his word and he suddenly fell into despondency.

Now that he was away from the country and nature, the impressions of

town life, which he had forgotten, but which now came fresh to him, with

its poverty on the one side and its luxury on the other, threw him into

despondency, so that it often made me cry to see his moods which became

much worse after he took part in the Moscow census. City life was for

the first time presented, as it were, to his impressionable mind. But a

return to our previous life was impossible, as the children's education

had just been begun and had become the principal problem in our life.

With sadness I had to look back and recognize that the nineteen years

which we had spent continuously at Yasnaya Polyana were the happiest

time of our lives. Besides the family and the copying for Leo

Nikolaevich, what a number of good occupations I had in the country!

Sick peasants used to come to me and, as far as I could, I used to treat

them, and I was fond of the work. We planted apple trees and other trees

and took pleasure in watching them grow. Once we had a school in the

house and the village children were taught with ours as they grew up.

But this did not last long, because we had to have our own children

educated and we wanted to make their life as varied as possible. In the

winter the whole family, including us parents, the tutors, and

governesses, skated on the ice or tobogganed on the hills, and we

cleared the snow from the pond ourselves. Every summer, for twenty

years, the family of my sister, T. A. Kuzminskii, came to Yasnaya

Polyana, and our life was so merry that the summer with us was a

continuous holiday. There were various games like croquet and tennis,

amateur theatricals, and other amusements like bathing, gathering

mushrooms, boating, and driving, and besides these, the summer was

devoted to music, and concerts arranged by the children and grown-ups,

with piano, violin, and singing.

One summer all the young people worked on the land, and with Leo

Nikolaevich gathered in the crops for the poor peasant women. Already at

the same time, _i. e._ at the end of the 'seventies and beginning of the

'eighties, he felt in him that inner crisis, that desire for a

different, more simple and spiritual, life which never left him until

the end of his life. But there also came an end to the undisturbed

happiness with which we had lived so many years. At the beginning of his

spiritual crisis Leo Nikolaevich, as is well known, gave himself

ardently to the orthodox faith and church. He saw himself united in it

with the people. But gradually he left it, as his later writings show.

It is difficult to trace the steps of this crisis in Leo Nikolaevich,

and when it was exactly that I, with my intensely hardworking life and

maternity, could no longer live so completely in my husband's

intellectual interests, and he began to go further and further away from

family life. We had already nine children, and the older they grew, the

more complicated became the problem of their education and our relations

to them. But their father was withdrawing himself more and more from

them, and at last he refused altogether to have anything to do with the

education of his children, on the plea that they were being taught

according to principles and a religion which he considered harmful for

them.

I was too weak to be able to solve the dilemma, and I was often driven

to despair; I became ill, but saw no way out. What could be done? Go

back to the country and give up everything? But Leo Nikolaevich did not

seem to want that either. Against my will he bought a house in Moscow,

and thus seemed to fix our life in the town.{39}

The difference between my husband and myself came about, not because _I_

in my heart went away from him. I and my life remained the same as

before. It was _he_ who went away, not in his everyday life, but in his

writings and his teachings as to how people should live. I felt myself

unable to follow his teachings myself. But our personal relations were

unaltered: we loved each other just as much, we found it just as

difficult to be parted even temporarily, and, as an old and respected

friend of our family expressed it in a letter to me: "Not a jot could be

added to or taken from either of you without disturbing the wonderful

harmony of your private spiritual life in the midst of the multitude of

people surrounding you...."

Only rarely was our happiness clouded and the harmony broken by flashes

of mutual jealousy, which had no ground at all. We were both

hot-tempered and passionate; we could not bear the thought that anyone

should alienate us. It was just this jealousy which woke up in me with

terrible force when, towards the end of our life, I realized that my

husband's soul, which had been open to me for so many years, had

suddenly been closed to me irrevocably and without cause, while it was

opened to an outsider, a stranger.{40}