Soon after, the mother's health declined. She had been exhausted by childbearing. She ran a continual fever and complained of violent headaches. The servants said she was certainly going to lose her mind. After taking communion, she asked to see her loved ones, to bid them farewell. The family assembled around her bed. In his nurse's arms little- Leo, twenty-three months old, screamed in terror at the sight of the livid mask whose eyes, full of tears, were fixed upon him with unbearable tenderness. He did not recognize his mother. He hated this strange woman. The nurse took him back to his bedroom where he grew calm again amidst his toys.5 Countess Marya Nikolayevna Tolstoy died on August 4, 1830.
Left a widower, Nicholas Tolstoy fully realized how large a place this woman he married in cold blood had occupied in his life during the last eight years. What was to become of the children and the house without her? Perhaps the time had come to give a second chance to his cousin Toinette, previously rejected on financial grounds. For the sake of appearances, he let a few years go by and then asked her to be his wife. She was deeply touched, for she had gone on loving him in secret, but refused out of loyalty to the deceased. The evening of their conversation, she wrote on a scrap of paper, "August 16, 1836. Today Nicholas made me a singular proposaclass="underline" to be his wife and a mother to his children, and never to leave them. I refused the first and promised to fulfill the second as long as I shall live." She put the note away in a little pearl-embroidered purse, and nothing more was ever said by her or her cousin of a project which, by bringing them together, would probably have destroyed their respect for each other.
2. Childhood
The harder little Leo tried to remember his mother, the more she eluded him. He tried to identify her by questioning those who had known her, but in vain. They told him she was good, gentle, upright, proud, intelligent, and an excellent storyteller, but he could not attach a face to this assortment of qualities, and as though to deepen the mystery, there was not a single portrait of her in the house. Only a silhouette cut out of black paper, showing her at the age of ten or twelve, with a round forehead and a round chin, her hair in a veil at the nape of her neck. I lis whole life long Leo Tolstoy tried to instill life into this frustrating profile. He grew older, but his mother remained a little girl. Driven by his need for love, he finally came to think of her as a mythical being to whom he had recourse in times of distress and upon whom he relied for supernatural assistance. Only a few years before his death he wrote, "... I walk in the garden and I think of my mother, of Maman; I do not remember her, but she has always been an ideal of saintliness for me. I have never heard a single disparaging remark about her."1 And also, "Felt dull and sad all day. Toward evening the mood changed into a desire for caresses, for tenderness. I wanted, as when I was a child, to nestle against some tender and compassionate being and weep with love and be consoled . . . become a tiny boy, close to my mother, the way I imagine her. Yes, yes, my Maman, whom I was never able to call that because I did not know how to talk when she died. She is my highest image of love—not cold, divine love, but warm, earthly love, maternal. . . . Maman, hold me, baby me! ... All that is madness, but it is all true."2
Although Leo Tolstoy could not remember his mother, he did remember—or thought he did—things that happened even before her death. "I am all bound up; I want to stretch out my arms and I cannot," he wrote in his Reminiscences. "I scream and cry and I hate my own screaming, but I cannot stop. People are leaning over me—I can't remember who—and everything is shrouded in semi-darkness. There are two of them. My screaming affects them; they arc anxious; but they do not release me as I want them to, and I scream still louder." His second memory was a brighter one. He was sitting in a wooden tub, surrounded by a sourish smell, while a servant-woman rubbed his body with bran. "For the first time," he wrote in the same work, "I bccamc aware of and liked my little body with the ribs sticking out on my chest, and the dark, smooth wooden tub, and my nurse's sleeves rolled up, and the warm, steaming, agitated water and its lapping noise and, most of all, the polished feeling of the wet rim of the tub when I ran my little hands along it. It is strange and frightening to think that from the day I was born until I was three years old, all the time I was nursing and being weaned, beginning to crawl and walk and talk, however I rack my brains, I can remember nothing but these two impressions. . . . From the child of five to rnc there is only a step. From the embryo to the newborn child an abyss. And from non-existence to the embryo, not an abyss but the inconceivable."
Gradually, however, the shadows moving around him assumed form. He could attach names to the faces. At five he was living contentedly in his little upstairs room with his sister Marya and Dunya, a little girl the family had adopted, when the grownups decided it was time for him to join his older brothers downstairs and pass from the hands of his nurse into those of the German tutor, Fyodor Ivanovich Rosscl. lie was frightened to tears at the thought of this change, and Aunt Toi- nctte tried to pacify him as she dressed him in his new clothes—a real boy's outfit, in denim, with braces. When she had finished, she kissed him. "I remember her," he wrote, "being rather small and thick-set, with brown hair and an expression of kindness, tenderness, compassion. . . . I saw that she was feeling the same thing as I—it was sad, very sad, but it had to be." She led him down the stairs. When he appeared, hanging back and sniffling, his brothers called him a blubber-puss. But their insults fell unheeded. He was oblivious to all but his terror of Fyodor Ivanovich Rossel, who had pale eyes behind big spectacles, an aquiline nose and a tasselcd cap, and wore a quilted, flower-patterned dressing gown that he changed for a dark blue redingote before coming to table.
This awesome-looking personage soon revealed itself to be the most good-natured and soft-hearted man alive. His German accent, when he spoke Russian, was utterly comical; sometimes he lost his temper, shouted and struck his pupils with a ruler or a pair of braces, but his tantrums inspired laughter more than tears. lie was supposed to instruct tlic children in all subjects, but he chiefly taught them the "language of Goethe." Their instructor in the "language of Voltaire" was Aunt Toinette. At five Leo Tolstoy knew the French alphabet as well as the Russian; and he said later that he often thought directly in French.
But for the time being, he was bent only on having fun with his brothers who, after teasing him, accepted him as one of their group. He loved the smile and big dark eyes and curious whims of Dmitry, closest to his own age; he looked up to Nicholas, who was five years his senior; but Sergey, two years older than he, was the one he worshiped—handsome Sergey, remote and strange, who was always singing, drew extraordinary roosters with colored pencils, and raised chickens in secret. "I copied him, I loved him, I wanted to be him,"3 wrote Tolstoy. But Sergey paled before Nicholas, when it came to inventing a new game. Nicholas had such a lively imagination that he could tell fantastic or droll stories for hours on end, making them up out of thin air and embellishing them with drawings of homed and mustachioed devils. One day he told his brothers that he knew a secret, and when the secret was unveiled all sickness would vanish from the earth and love would flower in every heart, and all men, happy at last, would become Ant Brothers.* While awaiting this glorious apocalypse, the boys used to sit together under shawl-draped chairs, where, huddling in the shadows, they felt a sense of profound mystery. Little Leo in particular, cuddling into the tribal heat and smell, held his breath and listened to the beating of his own heart, and was moved to tears by the thought of the "brotherhood of ants." He would dearly have loved to know the chief secret thanks to which all men would bccome healthy and never quarrel again, but Nicholas said it was carved on a green stick, and the green stick was buried on the edge of a ravine in the old Zakaz forest. "I used to believe," he later wrote, "that there was a green stick on which words were carved that would destroy all the evil in the hearts of men and bring them everything good, and I still believe today that there is such a truth, that it will be revealed to men, and will fulfill its promise." And, remembering where the green stick was supposedly hidden, he added, "Since my body has to be buried somewhere, I have asked that it be in that place, in memory of Nicholas."