Ilis need to attract attention by performing some spectacular deed was intensified by his ccrtainty that nobody could love him for his looks. lie had hoped his features would improve with time, but at nine, at ten, he still had his cauliflower nose and little steely eyes set deep in their sockets.0 Weary of asking God, in his nightly prayers, to make him as handsome as his brother Sergey, he decided he would be unusual, if nothing else. Seizing a pair of scissors he cut off his eyebrows, which he judged too thick. But they grew back coarser than ever. No doubt about it; the Almighty did not intend him to have any face but his own, crude, hairy and red.
This sense of his unsightlincss became more acute in the presence of Sonya Koloshin, a distant cousin, who was also nine years old, had silky blond hair and periwinkle eyes. Dazzled by the vivacious little girl, he dreamed of spending his life with her "in a black closet." The first time they spoke to each other in the familiar form he felt "a kind of intoxication." But he was shy and did not dare tell her that he admired and loved her. "I could not hope she would reciprocate," he wrote in Childhood, "and I did not even dream of it: my soul did not require so much, to be ecstatically happy. I did not see that in exchange for the love that filled me with delight one might demand still greater happiness, or desire anything more than that this feeling might go on forever." One night in bed, too agitated to sleep, he turned to his brother Sergey and told him in a low voice, in the dark, that he was "terribly much in love with Sonya"; but his brother sneered at this pla- tonic passion and said that in Leo's place he would "covcr the girl's fingers with kisses, and then her eyes, her lips, feet . . ." Horrified, Leo hid his face in the pillow to avoid hearing any more of such "foolishness."6
Later, he bccamc equally enamored of little Lyubov Islavin, and once, in a fit of jealousy, he pushed her so hard that she fell off the balcony. She was injured by the fall and limped for some time afterward.!
Leo's passion for girls did not prevent him from being attracted to certain boys of his age as well. He was subjugated by physical beauty, regardless of sex. In The Cossacks he wrote that there was "something akin to love"7 between Olenin and Lukashka; in War and Peace he describes the young officcr Ilin, who "tried to imitate Rostov and
0 On May 10, 1852, when he was twenty-four, he wrote in his diary, "Aquiline noses drive me to distraction. They seem to me to possess all the strength of character and good fortune in the world."
t Lyubov Islavin later married Dr. Behrs and had a daughter; and it was to this girl, Sonya, that Leo Tolstoy proposed in 1862. Thus he bccamc the son-in-law of the woman he had loved when he was a child and had pushed off the balcony to punish her for talking to other boys.
adored him like a woman in love";8 and he wrote in his diary, on November 29, 1851, "I have often been in love with a man. My first love was for the two Musin-Pushkin brothers." He was so obsessed by these two boys, Sasha and Alyosha Musin-Pushkin, that he sometimes wept when he thought of them and prayed God to show them to him in his dreams if he had not seen them during the day. "Besides the passionate attraction I felt for him," he wrote of one of them in Childhood, "his presence aroused in me an equal degree of terror of causing him any unhappiness, offending him, or displeasing him. Perhaps this was because he always wore such a haughty expression, or because, despising my own looks, I attached too much importance to beauty in others, or more probably—and this is an infallible sign of love—because I feared him as much as I loved him. The first time he spoke to me I was so overwhelmed by this unhoped-for good fortune that I turned pale, I blushed, I could say nothing in reply. ... No word was ever spoken between us in allusion to my love, but he was conscious of his power over me and, involuntarily but tyrannically, took advantage of it in our childish relations."9
Most of the time the Tolstoys and the Musin-Pushkin brothers played with lead soldiers, inventing military episodes: marches, battles, bivouacs and floggings. Full-scale novels were composed there on the table and rug, in a clutter of colorful figurines and cardboard boxes.
A more singular amusement consisted in burning pieces of paper in chamberpots.
On May 25, 1838, while the children were engaged in this pursuit, they heard rapid footsteps coming down the hall. In the midst of their laughter the door flew open and Prosper de St. Thomas appeared, pale, his lower jaw trembling. "Your grandmother is dead," lie said sharply. The children were struck dumb. Leo was filled with a holy terror. For the second time in eleven months a loved one had gone out of his life. Of course, he had known Grandmother was ill for weeks; when he went to visit her, lying in her bed, he had seen that she was very pale and her hands were swollen with hydropsy; but he had supposed she could go on living like that for ages.
This time, unlike the days after his father's death, he was present throughout all the preparations for the burial. Undertakers in black coats congregated in the house early in the morning. A glass-topped coffin arrived. The boy stared at his ancestor inside the big box on the table: stretched out full lenglh, with waxen facc and hooked nose, a white bonnet on her head, her expression was stern, remote and dissatisfied. She was still listening to the blind storyteller's legends. But when Leo kissed her forehead lie felt the icy skin under his lips and fled from the room with a cry. The next day, his grief undiminished, he nevertheless felt a strange thrill of joy as he put on a black mourning suit edged with white crqie and heard the visitors talking about him and his brothers in compassionate tones: "The father is hardly cold in his grave and the grandmother goes after him! Now they really are orphans."10 Leo was obsessed by the thought of death. In the air he sniffed smells of incense and wilted flowers that made his throat contract. "The inert body reminds me sharply and unpleasantly that I too shall have to die one day—a feeling that is usually mistaken for grief," lie wrote in Boyhood. "I do not miss Grandmother, and I doubt that anyone really docs."u
As long as the old lady was alive, neither Aunt Toinette nor Aunt Aline had dared to curtail the style of living to which she had so long been accustomed. But the moment the funeral was over, they resolved in the interests of economy to divide the family. Of the five Tolstoy children, only the two eldest, Nicholas and Sergey (aged fifteen and twelve), would remain in Moscow with Aunt Aline and St. Thomas; the younger children, Dmitry, Leo and Marya (eleven, ten and eight) would return to Yasnaya Polyana with Aunt Toinette. A small apartment was rented for the urbanites, and the others set out on July 6, 1838. Four coaches, harnessed troika style, bore them southward.
Leo's satisfaction at returning to the big house of his infancy, and the meadows, trees, river and ponds, was increased by the fact that one hundred and thirty miles now separated him from the abhorred St. Thomas. For his lessons there was soft-hearted, ignorant Fyodor Ivano- vich Rossel, restored to favor, and then a seminarian, and later a few unprepossessing and inoffensive tutors. But his most profitable lessons were those he learned from the peasants. He listened to their talk with friendly curiosity, and could not understand their resignation in the face of poverty. One of them—young Mitka Kopilov, who had been Count Tolstoy's coachman—was obliged to return to his aged father and resume the hard life of a muzhik when the Tolstoy family cut down its expenses. In one month the elegant house servant in silken blouse and velvet coat was transformed into a ragged bark-shod laborer. He plowed and scythed and sowed with laughing face and bright eyes, and never uttered a complaint. Nor did Kuzma, the groom, complain when Andrey Ilin, the strapping steward, led him away to the barn. As the two men passed him, Leo asked them what they were going to do. Kuzma hung his head and Andrey Ilin muttered, "I'm going to punish him." Leo was stupefied by this announcement. "I wondered then," he wrote in his Reminiscences, "whether I was too stupid to understand the reason for it or whether it was they, the adults, who were stupid. I finally persuaded myself that the grownups knew more about everything than I did, and that this was the way things had to be." That evening, however, when he told Aunt Toinette about the incident, she burst out, "Why did you not prevent it?" This added to his bewilderment. He did not think it was possible for him to intervene in a matter of such consequcnce. Sincc the beginning of time there had been serfs to obey and masters to command, and a few strokes now and then had never lessened the friendship that flourished between owners and muzhiks. Besides, at Yasnaya Polyana there was never any talk of physical punishment. Hence, this was an exceptional measure. Crimson with shame, as though he himself had been whipped, Leo told himself that he had been lacking in charity. Now it was too late! Poor Kuzma must be off having ointment put on his back to ease the pain. Next time . . . rlhe child comforted himself with long-term promises, but most often the generous impulses that sprang from his heart were throttled by the unconscious egotism of the young lord. The weather had been exceptionally dry that year, the harvest promised to be scanty, famine was threatening, and the animals' food was rationed; but he and his brother Dmitry stole into the peasants' fields to pull up oats and take them back to the stable to feed their own horses. "My brother and I did this while there were people who had not eaten for two days, whose sole source of sustenance was those same oats. I did not feel guilty about it, it didn't occur to me that it was wrong."12