When the holidays were over, a large contingent of guests lingered on in the house. Even in such a capacious residence—thirty-two rooms, counting the outbuildings!—privacy was impossible. Everyone was entangled in the joys and tribulations of everyone else. Even had one wanted to think only of one's own affairs, other faces and other troubles assailed you at every turn in the corridor, drawing room, stable, village.
One day Prascovya Isayevna, the housekeeper, scolded Leo and rubbed his nose on a napkin he had inadvertently soiled. Choking with anger, he ran to hide on the balcony. "By what right does that servant- woman dare to speak familiarly to me, me, her master, and strike me in the face with a wet napkin as though I were some little muzhik?"6 he thought. But he found nothing to retort when a stablcboy reprimanded him for whipping the old horse Raven to make him go. "Ah, my little master, there's no pity in you!" Scarlet with shame, Leo slid off the horse's back and, "kissing the animal on the neck, begged his pardon for mistreating him."7 Sometimes a conversation overheard among the grownups would also leave him peqjlexed. Temyashev, a neighbor visiting Yasnaya Polyana, told in Leo's presence how he had sent his cook to the army for twenty-five years because the fellow had
t And not forty-two, as Tolstoy mistakenly says in his Reminiscences.
taken it into his head to eat meat during Lent. Some time later, this same Temyashev was announced in the drawing room one winter evening when the family was having its tea by the light of two candles, lie strode into the room and fell to his knees; the long pipe in his hand struck the floor and sparks flew up; in the sudden illumination Leo saw his anxious facc. Still prostrated, Temyashev explained to Nicholas Ilich l'olstoy that he had brought his illegitimate daughter Dunyechka to be raised by him. This little scene was part of a prearranged agreement between the two men: Temyashev was a confirmed bachelor, who had more money than he knew what to do with, and two illegitimate children; he wanted to bequeath part of his fortune to them, but under the law his sisters would inherit it all. To get round the difficulty, he had conceived the plan of signing a fictitious sale contract for one of his estates in the name of Nicholas Ilich Tolstoy; after his death Tolstoy would legitimize the transaction by paying back the three hundred thousand rubles he received to the orphans. 'Hie papers were signed then and there and, as a pledge of mutual trust, Dunyechka, blank-eyed and sniveling, remained behind in the house with her nursemaid Eupraxya, a thick, bony, wrinkled old woman "whose Adam's-apple hung down and swung like a turkey gobbler's." Inside these folds of flesh there was a hard ball, which she condcsccndcd to let the children touch.
"Childhood candor, carefree heart, need to love, and faith: shall I ever find you again?" wrote Leo Tolstoy. "What time could be better than that when the two highest virtues, innocent joy and a limitless need to love, are the only mainsprings of life?" When he was little he believed a current of love was passing perpetually between his family and the rest of the world, even though the grownups were occasionally a disappointment to him. Curled up under the blankets in the glow of the vigil light burning below the icon, he thought, "I love Nanny; Nanny loves me and she loves Mitya (Dmitry); I love Mitya; Mitya loves me and he loves Nanny; and Nanny loves Aunt Toinette and me and Papa; and everybody loves and everybody is happy."8 But if everybody was happy, how was one to explain the fact that Christ died crucified, as Aunt Toinette said?
"Auntie, why did they torture him?"
"They were wickcd people."
"But he was good, so good! . . . Why did they beat him? Did it hurt him, Auntie, did it hurt him?"9
Nor was Christ the only one to be pitied. Hadn't he heard that gentle Fyodor Ivanovich Rossel was going to have his dog killed just because its paw had been crushed? Leo could not bear the thought of this unjust execution; his tears welled up again. His brothers began to call him "Lyova Ryova," "Leo Cry-Baby." His mother, who had been such a stickler for strength of character, would certainly have been horrified by this son who had so little control over his emotions. The fact was that he felt everything more intensely than the others. A melody plunged him into morbid melancholy, the stable smells enthralled him, he thrilled to feci a dog's cold muzzle under his fingers, he wanted to drink the wind that lashed his face in the fields and cat the earth whose color and smell in the springtime made him dizzy with joy. In Childhood10 he wrote, "The sounds of voices and hoofs and carts, the gay piercing call of quail and buzzing of insccts circling round, and the smell of wormwood tufts and the straw and horses' sweat, and the thousand different shadows and colors which the burning sun set off on the pale yellow fields, the blue line of the forest and the pink-tinged white clouds, and the white gossamer floating in the air or lying on the stubble—I saw it all, I heard it, I felt it." And thus he moved with equal zest, eyes wide open, nostrils flaring and ears cocked, from ants to plants, plants to horses and horses to men. This free and gay life would assuredly never endl However, the grownups were already saying that it was impossible to give the children a decent education at Yasnaya Polyana. The oldest boy, Nicholas, was going on fourteen, and Leo, the youngest, was eight. The lessons of good old Fyodor Ivanovich Rossel were no longer enough, they said, to fill these young minds thirsting for knowledge. They needed real professors, who would force them to study seriously. To Leo's sorrow and anxiety, his father told him in the last day's of 1836 that all of them would soon be moving to Moscow.
3. The World Outside
On January 10, 1837 the family and oldest servants gathered in the drawing room for the leave-taking prayer. Everybody sat in a circle for a minute without speaking, then they rose and crossed themselves facing the icon, and those who were leaving went out onto the steps, one by one. As they passed, weeping serfs caught at the children's hands and kissed them on the shoulder, and Leo inhaled, with a mixture of sadness and repulsion, the "odor of grease" given off by the bent heads. He had a lump in his throat. Leave the house! To go where? Find what? Luckily, all the people he loved were coming too. Papa, with an authority that must have reminded him of his days of military glory, assigned them to their places in the coaches lined up before the peristyle. Grandmother, Aunt Toinette, Aunt Aline and her adopted child Pashenka, the five Tolstoy children, the count's ward Dunycchka, the tutors and, lastly, thirty servants, crowded into the covered sledges and tarantasses. Dogs whined and barked in the snow around the motionless teams. A groom led the relay horses out of the stables by their bridles. A few servants, red-nosed from the cold, lashed the baggage into place on the coaches with heavy ropes. A11 order rang out, and the convoy slowly moved off, gliding between a hedge of muzhiks in sheepskin coats and women in striped kerchiefs, and, passing between the two towers that marked the entrance to the estate, turned onto the road used by the rest of the world. When he could no longer see his birthplace, Leo nearly burst into sobs. A little later he consoled himself with the thought that lie was wearing "a new suit, with trousers that had straps under the heel."