This perpetual self-analysis refined his intellect, but it taxed his nerves. Suddenly he would ask himself, "What am I thinking about? I am thinking about what I am thinking!—-And now what am I thinking about?—I think that I am thinking about what I am thinking about." Ilis brain began to reel and he saw a scries of mirrors multiplying liis thought into infinity. "My mind broke down, beyond the limits of reason," he went on. "However, my vanity was enormously flattered by my philosophical discoveries; I often imagined myself as a great man discovering new truths for the benefit of mankind, and I contemplated other mortals with a proud awareness of my own merit. But the strange thing was that the moment I came into contact with those same mortals I lost all my confidence before the lowliest among them; and the higher I held myself in my own esteem the less capable I was, in their presence, not only of imposing my sense of my dignity upon them, but even of teaching myself not to be embarrassed by my simplest remark or most ordinary action."15
In the thick of his philosophical interrogations, he would be visited by dreams of earthly success. If lie passed a general in the street, he imagined him being struck by Leo's air of intelligence and boldness, taking him under his wing, guiding him in his military carccr, decorating him for bravery. Or he would see himself a poet, adulated and worshipped like that Pushkin who had been killed in a duel by a Frenchman three years before. When lie returned to Yasnaya Polyana with the rest of the family, lie wrote a poem in five stanzas, expressing his affection for Aunt Toinette, copied it onto a sheet of fine paper and gave it to her on her name-day, January 12, 1840. These unpolished verses delighted the grownups. After reading them in Moscow, Prosper de St. Thomas himself deigned to write a letter of congratulation to their author: "I read them to Princess Gorchakov; the whole family wanted to read them too, and all were enchanted with them. Do not imagine, however, that their praise was intended for the skill with which they were written, for they contain imperfections due to your ignorance of the canons of versification; they praised you, as I did myself, for the thought, which was admirable, and all hope you will not stop there; that would be a great shame."16
With such encouragement, Leo launched into more ambitious literary projects. No event was too mighty for his pen; Napoleonic wars, the battle of Kulikovo, the exploits of Marfa Pozadnitsa leading the people of Novgorod; he wrote his own versions of them all in a ruled notebook. His brain was boiling over with patriotic zeal when he wrote, "The walls of Moscow witnessed the shame and defeat of the invincible armies of Napoleon." The fate of Pompeii, on the other hand, he evoked with melancholy: "How fickle and unstable are all the things of this world: Pompeii, the second city of Italy at the height of its glory and splendor, is today nothing but a heap of ruins and ash. . . . Thus, when God wishes to punish, he can change the rich man into a pauper in an hour."
In those days he read a great deal. I lis preferences ranged from the Bible (he wept with compassion at the tale of Joseph and his brothers) to the Thousand and One Nights, the legends of the Russian people and Pushkin's poems. His brothers, too, were reading and writing. In 1841, they spent the summer together at Yasnaya Polyana. But Aunt Aline was not well. She was haunted by thoughts of death, and finally took refuge in the convent of Optina-Pustyn, where she quietly passed away 011 August 30 of that year. She was buried in the nuns' cemetery; Leo wrote an epitaph in verse which was engraved upon her tomb:
How sweet and enviable in our dream
Thy rest in the celestial haven does seem!
Once again there were the mourning suits and tears and family complications. With Aunt Aline gone, a new guardian had to be appointed. Legally, this honor fell to Aunt Pelagya Yushkov, sister of the deceased. Nicholas, the eldest Tolstoy child, wrote to her on behalf of them alclass="underline" "Do not abandon us, dear Aunt, you are all we have left in the world."
Aunt Pelagya arrived in Moscow forthwith, called the little tribe together and decided to "sacrifice herself ," as she put it.
In reality this "sacrifice" gave her considerable satisfaction: if she had declined, the guardianship would have passed to Aunt Toinette as next of kin, and she hated Aunt Toinette with all her soul, and had hated her for years—Pelagya could never forget that her husband, retired colonel of the hussars Vladimir Ivanovich Yushkov, had married her as a last resort after being turned down by Toinette, with whom he had been in love. lie might still be cherishing some impure feelings toward that outwardly unexciting and faded creature. One had to be so careful with men! In any event, Pelagya had been too humiliated at the time of her engagement to pass up any opportunity for revenge. In her ex-rival's presence she feigned effusive and artificial affcction, but she had laid her plans. She could have accepted the guardianship and let Toinette continue to have actual custody of the children; instead, she abruptly decidcd to take them back to Kazan with her and send them to school there. Of course, should she so desire, Aunt Toinette would be welcome to live in her house, as a guest. Pained and dignified, the old spinster refused this humiliating proposaclass="underline" "It is a cruel and barbaric thing to separate me from the children whom I have cared for so tenderly for nearly twelve years!" she wrote, in French, to Vladimir Ivanovich Yushkov.
Hers was a strange fate: she had rejected Yushkov because she was in love with Nicholas Tolstoy, and here the children of that same Nicholas Tolstoy were being ravished from her by the woman Yushkov had married to console himself for losing her. She must have spent many an evening ruefully recalling the marriage proposal her dear cousin Nicholas had made so long ago. Had she listened to him then, no one would be able to take the orphans away from her today. As usual, she resigned herself and yielded. It was agreed that she would go to live at Pokrovskoye with her sister Elizabeth Alcxandrovna Ergol- skaya, widow of another Tolstoy.t The separation was heart-rending. The children wept. Little Masha wanted to run away with Auntie. At last, one misty November morning, the family left Yasnaya Polyana for Kazan, traveling by short stages. The furniture and heavy baggage had been loaded onto barges that were to go down the Oka to the Volga. The numerous household staff piled onto other barges; carpenters, tailors, harness makers, cobblcrs, cooks, scrubwomcn, grooms, men- servants and chambermaids. The young gentlefolk traveled by road, in a closed coach. Now and then they stopped at the edge of a forest,
t Peter Ivanovich Tolstoy, cousin of Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy.
bathed in a stream or gathered mushrooms, and the gay activity and constantly changing scenery helped Leo to bear the thought that Aunt Toinette was far away and he would not sec her again until the summer holiday.
At the end of two weeks in the carriage, the churches and minarets of Kazan appeared on the horizon.
4. Kazan
The city was built on a range of hills above a boggy plain that was flooded every spring by the Volga and its tributary the Kazanka, and the only exotic thing about it was its legend. The mind dreamed of past glories and scenes of violence inside the crumbling Kremlin walls and under the pointed tower of Suyumbeka; the Tatar district was a quaint site with its bric-a-brac of ramshackle minarets and dusty booths; there was a certain stateliness in the neo-classical pediments of the official buildings; but a veil of boredom and lassitude floated over all. To enliven the monotony of provincial life, the people of high socicty entertained each other incessantly. "At Kazan," a contemporary wrote,1 "it was possible for a bachelor not to keep a table of his own, for there were at least twenty or thirty houses where people gathered for dinner without being invited. . . . After the meal and after coffee and chat of this and that, they all went their separate ways home for a little nap. . . . In the evening off we went again, to a reception or a ball, that always ended in a Lucullan feast. . .