her wonderful gift of relating tales of her own invention.
His father he did in some degree remember. His was a genial yet ironical spirit; a sad-eyed man who dwelt upon his estates, leading an independent, unambitious life. Tolstoy was nine years old when he lost him. His death caused him “for the first time to understand the bitter truth, and filled his soul with despair.”[1] Here was the child’s earliest encounter with the spectre of terror; and henceforth a portion of his life was to be devoted to fighting the phantom, and a portion to its celebration, its transfiguration. The traces of this agony are marked by a few unforgettable touches in the final chapters of his Childhood, where his memories are transposed in the narrative of the death and burial of his mother.
Five children were left orphans in the old house at Yasnaya Polyana.[2] There Leo Nikolayevitch was born, on the 28th of August, 1828, and there, eighty-two years later, he was to die. The youngest of the five was a girl: that Marie who in later years
- ↑ Childhood, chap. xxvii.
- ↑ Yasnaya Polyana, the name of which signifies “the open glade” (literally, the “light glade”), is a little village to the south of Moscow, at a distance of some leagues from Toula, in one of the most thoroughly Russian of the provinces. “Here the two great regions of Russia,” says M. Leroy-Beaulieu, “the region of the forests and the agricultural region, meet and melt into each other. In the surrounding country we meet with no Finns, Tatars, Poles, Jews, or Little Russians. The district of Toula lies at the very heart of Russia.”
