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Updated: June 1, 2025
My wife was at Yasnaya Polyana in October, and when she came home she told me that there was something wrong there. "Your mother is nervous and hysterical; your father is in a silent and gloomy frame of mind." I was very busy with my office work, but made up my mind to devote my first free day to going and seeing my father and mother. When I got to Yasnaya, my father had already left it.
The voice that cried from the comfortable wilderness of Yasnaya Polyana furnished unique "copy" for newspapers. Alas! the pity of it all. The moral dyspepsia that overtook Carlyle in middle life was the result of a lean, spoiled, half-starved youth; the moral dyspepsia that seized the soul of the wonderful Tolstoy was the outcome of a riotous youth, a youth overflowing with the "joy of life."
Educational enterprise was aroused, and some forty schools for peasant children were started on the model of that opened by Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana . The literary world throbbed with new life, and a brilliant company of young writers came to the surface, counting among them names of European celebrity, such as Dostoevsky, Nekrassov, and Saltykov. Unhappily the reign of Progress was short.
Tolstoy's father was a kindly-natured man, and those who brought up the dreamy boy at Yasnaya had insisted on gentle dealings with both men and animals. There was a story which he loved of an orderly, once a serf on the family estate, who had been taken prisoner with his father after the siege of Erfurt.
Besides his own family, the aged Maria Mikhailovna and her daughters, his sister, Maria Nikolayevna, who told me the story, was with him, too, and from hour to hour they expected the arrival of my father, for whom they had sent a messenger to Yasnaya. They were all troubled with the difficult question whether the dying man would want to receive the holy communion before he died.
She issued, about five years ago, a cheaper edition of her husband's works, the only edition available hitherto having been very expensive. The wisdom of her step was proved by the large profits derived from it in the course of three years, fifty thousand dollars, all of which was applied to the needs of the family. The count is not the only one at Yasnaya Polyana to deny himself.
At last he came across a treatise of Lyeff Nikolaevitch, and decided that he was wrong and Lyeff Nikolaevitch right. He removed to Yasnaya Polyana, married his former mistress, and began to live and work among the peasants." The peasants laughed at him and at Lyeff Nikola'itch." Mrs. F. came to the countess with her griefs, and the latter helped her with food, clothing, and in other ways.
In the autumn of 1883, after Turgenieff's death, when the family had gone into Moscow for the winter, my father stayed at Yasnaya Polyana alone, with Agafya Mikhailovna, and set earnestly about reading through all Turgenieff's works. This is what he wrote to my mother at the time: I am always thinking about Turgenieff. I am intensely fond of him, and sorry for him, and do nothing but read him.
That is why I do not care for children under two or three; I don't understand. This letter was written in 1872, when I was six years old. My recollections date from about that time. I can remember a few things before. FROM my earliest childhood until the family moved into Moscow that was in 1881 all my life was spent, almost without a break, at Yasnaya Polyana. This is how we live.
Some long conversations with Henry George, while he was on a visit to Yasnaya Polyana, gave additional strength to Tolstoy's conviction that in these theories lay the elements essential to the transformation and rejuvenation of human nature, going far towards the levelling of social inequalities.
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