Leo Tolstoy in my life (composition). My Tolstoy

Summing up the results of the competition

"Leo Tolstoy in my life"

Venue: Literary Memorial MuseumF. M. Dostoevsky.

In the year of the celebration of the 185th anniversary of the birth of L.N. Tolstoy, the Literary and Memorial Museum of F.M. Dostoevsky in Semey, togetherwith the Russian Socio-Cultural Center, the State Memorial and Natural Reserve Museum-estate of L. N. Tolstoy "Yasnaya Polyana" and the education department of the city of Semey announced essay competition "Leo Tolstoy in my life" among students of high schools of the city.

The aim of the competition was:

Introducing the younger generation to the creative heritage of the classic of world fiction L.N. Tolstoy, who is a contemporary of F. M. Dostoevsky;

Formation the younger generation of love for the book and the desire to read fiction;

- identification and support of gifted children;

To evaluate the competitive works, ajury, which included museum staff, representatives of the city education department, representatives of the Russian cultural center.

I. Avtushko T.K. (chairman of the commission)

E.A. Tolstaya Director of the Museum-estate of L.N. Tolstoy "Yasnaya Polyana"

committee members:

Kozyreva N.K. - AND ABOUT. Chairman of the NGO "Semipalatinsk Russian

socio-cultural center"

Kirichenko G.A. - representative of the NGO "Semipalatinsk Russian

socio-cultural center"

Akhmetova G. M. - specialist of the city department of education

Titaeva T. G. - head. mass education department

Solovieva I. A. - head. scientific and exposition department

The competition commission considered64 creative work submitted to the competition out of 16 educational institutions cities, age of participants from 11 to 18 years.

After checking, eight works were selected, which were sent to the Yasnaya Polyana estate museum, to determine the winners of the competition, in accordance with the requirements put forward by the organizers of the competition. These requirements included:

Correspondence of the idea and content of the work with the topic. The completeness of the disclosure of the idea, the logical completeness of the work.

Composition, language and style of presentation.

Literate writing skills.

Imagery of thought and originality.

The level of prize-winning works showed that the authors are well versed in the skills of competent writing, figurative expression of thoughts.

The works that were awarded prizes and incentives, met the conditions of the competition, are characterized by a serious, thoughtful reading of both the literary texts of the great writer, his stories, novellas, novels, and a sincere interest in the philosophy of Tolstoy the thinker.

Top places:

1st place D. NazarenkoGrade 10 "B" school-lyceum No. 7.

In Darya Nazarenko's essay, we see a non-standard form of presenting our thoughts on Tolstoy. This form of diary entries, which allows the author of the work to be frank in his thoughts and conclusions about both the historical aspect and the modern sound of classical literature. Daria Nazarenko focuses on the moral and ethical views of Tolstoy, endows her heroes with inner nobility, honesty in friendship, love, in serving Russia, fulfilling a patriotic duty to the Motherland. Daria considers the search for the meaning of life by the heroes of the works of the great writer to be an indispensable property of a real person even today. Reading the classics, according to Daria, "teaches children to think, grow up, determine their position in life."
2nd place E. Belousova 10 class "A" KSU secondary school No. 15

Elena Belousova begins her essay with the epigraph: “Why live and what am I?” (from the diary of Pierre Bezukhov), L.N. Tolstoy "War and Peace". But Elena Belousova is interested not only in the epic "War and Peace" with its sharp formulation of the main philosophical question of the two main characters Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky. The young author of essays is also attracted by the treatise “What is Art?” written by Tolstoy much later than “War and Peace”. She writes that the questions are: how to live? Why do I live? The youth of today are also interested and excited.
3rd place Kenesbek Araylym 10th grade "A" gymnasium No. 37

The composition of Kenesbek Arailym also draws attention to the modern sounding of the artistic and philosophical heritage of Tolstoy. It turns out that young people of our time have an interesting search for the Truth of God - "Do not resist evil with violence."

Diplomas and memorable gifts were awarded to the following works:

Lukyanenko Svetlana, students of grade 10 "A" of KSU secondary school No. 28

Kamenskaya Anastasia students (class "A" KSU secondary school No. 29

Protasov Andrey, student of grade 5 "A" KSU secondary school No. 10

Dzhumataeva Asem students of grade 10 "B" KSU secondary school No. 12

Yulia Sosnina, student of the Pedagogical College named after M.O. Auezov

Representatives of the Russian Social and Cultural Center of Semey, the city department of education took part in the award ceremony.

Members of the National Choir of Veterans came to congratulate the winners, who sang songs based on S. Yesenin's verses and incendiary ditties.

and my cry affects them: they are disturbed by my cry, but they do not untie me, what I want, and I cry even louder. It seems to them that this is necessary (that is, that I be bound), while I know that this is not necessary, and I want to prove it to them, and I burst into a cry that is disgusting to myself, but uncontrollable. I feel the injustice and cruelty not of people, because they pity me, but of fate and pity for myself. I don’t know and will never know what it was: did they swaddle me when I was breastfeeding, and I tore out my hands, or did they swaddle me, already when I was over a year old, so that I wouldn’t comb my lichen, did I gather it into one recollection, as happens in a dream, many impressions, but it is true that this was my first and most powerful impression of my life. And what I remember is not my cry, not my suffering, but the complexity, the inconsistency of the impression. I want freedom, it does not interfere with anyone, and they torture me. They feel sorry for me, and they tie me up, and I, who needs everything, I am weak, and they are strong.

Another happy memory. I am sitting in the trough, and I am surrounded by a strange, new, not unpleasant, sour smell of some substance with which my naked body is rubbed. It was probably bran, and probably I was washed in water and a trough every day, but the novelty of the impression of bran woke me up, and for the first time I noticed and fell in love with my little body with visible ribs on my chest, and a smooth dark trough, and rolled up the nurse's hands, and the warm, steamy, strained water, and the sound of it, and especially the feeling of the smoothness of the wet edges of the trough when I ran my little hands over them. It is strange and scary to think that from my birth to three, four years, at the time when I was breastfeeding, I was weaned, I began to crawl, walk, talk, no matter how much I searched in my memory, I cannot find no memories other than these two. When did I start? When did you start living? And why is it joyful for me to imagine myself then, but it used to be scary, as it is scary for many now, to imagine myself when I again enter that state of death, from which there will be no memories that can be expressed in words. Didn't I live then, those first years, when I learned to look, listen, understand, speak, sleep, suck on my breast and kiss my breast, and laugh, and make my mother happy? I lived and lived happily. Isn't it then

I acquired everything by which I now live, and acquired so much, so quickly, that in the rest of my life I did not acquire even 1/100 of it. From a five-year-old child to me, only a step. And from a newborn to a five-year-old is a terrible distance. From the fetus to the newborn - the abyss. And from non-existence to the embryo, it is no longer the abyss that separates, but incomprehensibility. Not only are space and time and reason the essence of thought forms and that the essence of life is outside these forms, but our whole life is a greater and greater subjugation of ourselves to these forms and then again liberation from them.

My next reminiscences date back to four or five years, but there are very few of them, and not one of them relates to life outside the walls of the house. Nature up to five years - does not exist for me. Everything that I remember, everything happens in bed, in the upper room, no grass, no leaves, no sky, no sun exists for me. It can’t be that they didn’t let me play with flowers, leaves, so that I wouldn’t see the grass, so that they wouldn’t protect me from the sun, but until the age of five or six there is not a single memory of what we call nature. One must probably get away from her in order to see her, and I was nature.

The memory following the trough is a memory Eremovna."Eremyevna" was the word that scared us children. And they probably scared me for a long time, but my memory of her is this: I'm in bed, and I'm happy and good, as always, and I wouldn't remember it, but suddenly a nanny or someone from what made up my life, he says something in a voice that is new to me and goes away, and I do, besides being fun, also scary. And I remember that I am not alone, but someone else is the same as me (this is probably my younger sister Masha, with whom our beds are in the same room), and I remember that there is a bed near my bed, and my sister and I rejoice and are frightened by the extraordinary thing that happened to us, and I hide in pillows, and hide and look out the door, from which I expect something new and cheerful. And we laugh and hide and wait. And now someone appears in a scarf and a cap, everything is as I have never seen, but I find out that this is the one who is always with me (nanny or aunt, I don’t know), and this someone says in a rough voice, which I recognize, something terrible about bad children and about Ereyevna. I squeal with fear and joy

and I’m as if horrified and glad that I’m scared, and I want the one who scares me not to know that I recognized her. We fall silent, but then again on purpose we begin to whisper in order to call Ereyevna again.

Similar to Eremovna's recollection, I have another, probably later in time, because it is clearer, but forever remained incomprehensible to me. In this recollection, the German Fyodor Ivanovich, our teacher, plays the main role, but I know for sure that I am not yet under his supervision, therefore this happens before the age of five. And this is my first impression of Fedor Ivanovich. And it happens so early that I still don’t remember anyone - neither brothers nor father. If I have an idea of ​​any individual person, it is only of my sister, and that only because she was equally afraid of Eremovna with me. With this recollection, I also have the first idea that we have an upper floor in the house. How I got there, whether I went in myself, who brought me, I don’t remember anything, but I remember that there are a lot of us, we all hold hands in a round dance, among those holding there is a strange woman (for some reason I remember that this was a washerwoman ), and we all begin to spin and jump, and Fyodor Ivanovich jumps, raising his legs too high and too noisy and loud, and at the same moment I feel that this is not good, depraved, and I notice him and, it seems, I start to cry and everything ends.

That's all I remember until the age of five. Neither my nannies, aunts, brothers, sister, nor father, nor rooms, nor toys, I remember nothing. More definite memories begin with me from the time I was transferred downstairs to Fyodor Ivanovich and to the older boys.

When I was being transferred down to Fyodor Ivanovich and the boys, I experienced for the first time and therefore stronger than ever after, that feeling that is called the sense of duty, is called the feeling of the cross that every person is called to bear. It was a pity for me to leave the habitual (habitual from eternity), it was sad, poetically sad, to part not so much with people, with my sister, with a nanny, with an aunt, but with a bed, with a bed, with a pillow, and that new life was terrible, in which I entered. I tried to find fun in that new life

I tried to believe the affectionate speeches with which Fyodor Ivanovich lured me to him, tried not to see the contempt with which the boys accepted me, the smaller one, to themselves, tried to think that it was a shame for a big boy to live with girls and that nothing good I had not been upstairs with a nanny in this life, but my heart was terribly sad, and I knew that I was irretrievably losing innocence and happiness, and only self-esteem, the consciousness that I was doing my duty, supported me. Many times later in my life I had to experience such moments at the crossroads of life, embarking on new roads, I experienced a quiet grief about the irretrievability of what was lost. I still didn’t believe that it would happen, although they told me that they would transfer me to the boys, but, I remember, the dressing gown with a suspender sewn to the back, which they put on me, seemed to cut me off forever from the top, and here I am for the first time I noticed not all those with whom I lived upstairs, but the main person with whom I lived and whom I did not remember before. It was Aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna. I remember short, dense, black-haired, kind, gentle, compassionate. She put a robe on me, hugged me, girded me and kissed me, and I saw that she felt the same thing as I did, which is pitiful, terribly pitiful, but it must be. For the first time, I felt that life was not a toy, but a difficult task. Maybe I will feel something when I die: I will understand that death or the future life is not a toy, but a difficult task.

1833-1834

There are already many memories. Calling one another, they rise in my imagination.

My life of that year is more obvious than real life, it is composed of two sides: one is familiar, constituting, as it were, a continuation of the former, which had no beginning, life, and the other, new life, now pleasing with its novelty and attracting, now terrifying, then repulsive, but still attractive.

I wake up, and the brothers' beds, the brothers themselves, getting up or getting up, Fyodor Ivanovich in a dressing gown, Nikolai (our uncle), a room, sunlight, a stove, washstands, water, what I say and hear - everything is just

Publisher's Preface

Unknown Leo Tolstoy

In the literary circles of the early 20th century, he was known as Count Leo Tolstoy the Son or Count Leo Tolstoy the Younger. And no one guessed what pain this clarification echoed in the soul of the proud author. The only child of L.N. Tolstoy, who chose the profession of a writer, he was doomed to always remain in the shadow of a great father. There cannot be two Leo Tolstoys in the history of culture. Name given by parents for luck, in real life became a source of misunderstandings, sorrows and resentment.

Among his portraits and photographs, there are several particularly revealing ones. One picture shows "the son-student Lev Lvovich, the most beautiful, very similar to his mother." From the portrait of I.E. Repin, made in April 1905, a broken man, exhausted by life, who has lost much of his youthful hopes and received very little in return, looks at the viewer. A whole life lay between them, in which attraction to the father and repulsion from Tolstoy's teachings took almost all the time, which was generously released by L.L. Tolstoy.

He was born at the end of spring, May 20, 1869 in Yasnaya Polyana, and his first childhood memories are somehow connected with his native nest, tenderness and care of the family. Later, he recreated much of what he experienced in the first twelve years of his life in the book "Yasha Polyanov: Memories for Children from Childhood", in my opinion, the best of everything that he wrote during his long and painful life. One of the lyrical digressions in it sounds like this:

“When I write these memoirs, it seems to me that I remember not only how Petya and my other brothers were bathed in a bath, sprinkled with yellow powder, swaddled, fed, but also myself. It still seems to me now that it was I myself lying on my mother's lap and sucking her warm, sweetish milk. She lovingly leans over me and carefully examines. And I am so busy with my work, I am so diligently drawing in delicious milk that I do not want to break away, and yet I am pleasantly aware that my mother is taking care of me and lovingly studying me.

Do I really not remember that hurtful, bitter feeling when you want to move your little hands, but you can’t, because the terrible diapers pulled you tight? When you want to complain about something, you squeak and toss and turn, but they don’t hear or understand you? Do I really not remember how, in those rare moments when they unwrapped me, I began to kick and rejoice and choke with pleasure at the feeling of the short freedom given to me? And these evenings, dark autumn evenings, when the lamp in our nursery used to be lit, obscured by a green lampshade, and everything was quiet and quiet all around the house ... Nanny was sitting at the table in her corner and knitting a stocking. I lie on mamba's knees and doze sweetly. Mamb is talking to the nanny in an undertone about something. God, how I loved these voices dear to me, always caring and a little sad, how I felt them and how I wanted these two people to always feel good in the world. But if I'm wrong, and it wasn't me on my mother's lap, and if I'm confusing later memories with older ones, then it's probably because I often saw the mambas feeding my other little brothers in the evenings, and often imagined myself in their place. For the same reason, it now seems to me that I remember how I learned to walk, how I learned to pronounce my first words, how I learned to eat from a spoon.

I have been crawling all over the room on all fours for a long time, sometimes getting up on my feet, but I am still afraid to take more than two steps if there are no outstretched hands in front of me. A mambo enters our nursery. The nanny wants to show her my progress and makes her go. I try my best not to disgrace myself in front of the mambas and, getting up from the floor myself, I run to the nanny. She backs away from me, holding out her arms to me all the time, and I imperceptibly run across the room and fall into my nanny's arms. Mamb runs up to me, and lifts me into his arms, and kisses, and gently caresses me. And I lovingly repeat her name. What is this? Memory or imagination?

This question arises more than once when reading the works of L.L. Tolstoy.

The consciousness of chosenness came to him quite early. Barely crossed the threshold of the classical men's gymnasium L.I. Polivanov in Moscow, he began to sign, like a father, as if trying on, trying on this burden: "Leo Tolstoy." Still not fully understanding how strange this combination looks in relation to a boy in a gymnasium uniform, he c September 1884 in a letter to his mother explained: “ L. Tolstoy- I'm already signing for a magazine<е>when I'm on duty in the class ".

And in February 1902, being already a very famous writer, he was forced to place in the journal Monthly Works, in parallel with the chapters of his new work, an explanation: Letter from Leo Tolstoy-son. The author of the novel "Search and Reconciliation" about the signature of his Leo Tolstoy son asks us to print his following note: “Some readers, perhaps, are unusual and unsympathetic for some reason, this signature of mine. But I had to replace the old one with it: L.L. Tolstoy, because abroad this last signature was often confused with my father's, which gave rise to undesirable misunderstandings.

This was the result of the first decade of his literary life. Contemporaries called him differently: N.S. Leskov - Kit Kitych, Leo the second; V.V. Stasov and A.S. Suvorin - Tiger Tigrich; journalists later practiced wit, pejoratively calling him either Leo Tolstoy, or Leo Tolstoy of the New Times. But in the eyes of those who treated him kindly, he was not only L.L. Tolstoy, but above all, as Leskov wrote to the young writer V. Mikulich, "the son of your beloved Great Man and our mutual friend."

Since 1878 L.L. Tolstoy tried to keep a diary. His first records have not been preserved, and we know about them only from the mentions of his older sister T.L. Sukhotina-Tolstoy. Later, the diary of L.L. Tolstoy formed the basis of his book of memoirs "The Experience of My Life", on which the memoirist did not stop until his death in 1945.

In the best works of L.L. The fat reader was captivated by the author's sincerity, lively intonation, and the authenticity of situations, images, and pictures. All this makes the book of memoirs L.L. Tolstoy is a unique document in its own way. The author does not try to whitewash himself, with rare courage he reproduces the most dangerous episodes, including disputes with his father in the summer of 1910, when he, without hesitation, unambiguously took the side of his dearly beloved mother, essentially without noticing mental illness S.A. Tolstoy.

A few months after the death of his father, L.L. Tolstoy in Paris, where he studied with O. Rodin since 1909, begins to draw and sculpt L.N. Tolstoy. This bronze sculptural portrait of the great writer is widely known not only in Russia, where it was shown in the autumn of 1912 at an exhibition in St. Petersburg along with a bust of S.A. Tolstoy, but also in America, where L.L. Tolstoy visited in the spring of 1911 and donated a bronze bust of his father to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In general, the image of the father did not give L.L. Tolstoy rest, and he drew and sculpted it again and again. One gets the impression that the hands of L.L. Tolstoy were smarter than his head. Where the writer polemicized with the teachings of Tolstoy, the sculptor and artist seemed to seek to atone for the sins of that last summer of 1910. He painted his father with a screaming mouth and piercing eyes - the way he probably remembered him in those days before his departure from Yasnaya Polyana.

In the book of memoirs, as in 1918 on the pages of the Vestochka newspaper he published, L.L. Tolstoy continues his polemic with his father, and looks for something in Tolstoy's teaching that was previously understood only by the “dark”, but now it suddenly turned out to be vitally important for him too.

Handing over to me the manuscript of L.L. Tolstoy, his son and executor Nikita Lvovich Tolstoy (1902-1992) emphasized: “<…>Papb asked that the memoirs be published in full in print, "as a warning to posterity"<…>» .

Almost two decades have passed, but the book has not found its publisher, although its scientific-biographical and historical-literary value is obvious. It complements our understanding of the atmosphere of the Yasnaya Polyana house, corrects it in some way and in many ways allows us to take a fresh look at the Tolstoy family drama.

I thank the staff of the State Museum L.N. Tolstoy in Moscow, Yasnaya Polyana Memorial Estate Museum, Department of Manuscripts of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) Russian Academy Sciences, domestic and foreign colleagues, without the active assistance of which this publication could not take place.

Special thanks and thanks to Professor G.V. Krasnov, who many years ago opened for me the family circle of L.N. Tolstoy; professor M.G. Sokolyansky(Lübeck) for help in deciphering certain passages in the text; professor Takashi Fujinuma, in whose translation the responses of the Japanese press to the stay of L.L. Tolstoy in the Land of the Rising Sun in the winter of 1917; friend of the Swedish descendants L.L. Tolstoy, translator T.L. Baldovskaya; editor N.L. Pankratova, who patiently worked with the manuscript until the Consent publishing house ceased to exist.

Memoirs of L.L. Tolstoy are printed from an authorized typescript with extensive handwritten revisions sent to me for work and publication in Russia by Sergei Mikhailovich Tolstoy(1911-1996) and transferred by me for storage to the State Museum of L.N. Tolstoy in Moscow ( OR GMT. Archive L.L. Tolstoy).

Valeria Abrosimova

L.L. Tolstoy

Book 1

Chapter 1

Genus Tolstoy. Parents and me. My birth. Nanny and mother. Brothers and sisters

Respect, honor and recognize those who were your ancestors. Through effort and suffering, they have given you the best gift in the world, the gift of life.

Your family and your clan, who grew up in the same country and on the same soil where you were born, lived and fought not so that you would be more insignificant, weaker and more unhappy than them, but so that in every respect you would become more perfect and take advantage of their knowledge and experience.

Honor your ancestors, they were the heroes of life, as they wanted you to be.

Is it necessary to emphasize that the strength of any nation is in the veneration of the clan - ancestors, parents and family, and its unity and power rest on it? In Russia, as in most other European countries, the idea of ​​a clan is lost under the influx of a mass of mixed nationalities that flooded the ancient tribal generations.

Meanwhile, what could be more important for the development of the life of the individual and the people, the preservation of their ancient tribal roots intact, the first offspring of which united and created the state, and what could be more natural for a person, no matter how the veneration of these genera from generation to generation in an effort to continue and improve them?

Of course, I'm not talking about the cult of ancestors of exclusively noble families. It is equally important for all people, all classes, because there are aristocracies: peasant, worker, merchant, and others, and they must equally honor their ancestors.

In the Russian encyclopedic dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron one can find a long series of Tolstoy names, one way or another marked by Russian life and history (4).

generals, statesmen, writers, poets, artists - they left their mark in many areas and in many fields of life.

There are two volumes of Russian noble families, with all the female lines, in which the genealogical tree of the Tolstoys is placed, up to my father Lev Nikolayevich (5). This genus, or "clan", which entered the life of Russia from the depths of centuries, is, in essence, not a genus, but a whole separate, unlike the others, race that has retained its characteristics to this day. With rare exceptions, the Tolstoys protected themselves from the influences of blood, which could significantly modify the main features of their character, and until their 22nd generation remained the same Tolstoys as they were before.

The generally accepted version is that the beginning of the Tolstoyan family must be sought from 1353, when “a certain honest man” nicknamed Indris from “Indros” - “a German who left”, “from the Caesar’s land” arrived in the city of Chernigov (6).

What exactly this entry means is not easy to establish exactly. Our ancestor came to Russia from Indros, perhaps from Sweden, since in this country there was a whole tribe that was once called the "Rosses", from whom, according to some historians, Russia took its name. Until now, the coast of the Baltic Sea north of Stockholm is called Roslagen (7) - these are the eastern skerries of Uplandia, from which, heading to the East, the ancient Vikings sailed.

Count S.M. Tolstoy-Miloslavsky (8), who is currently researching the origin of the Tolstoy family, claims to have found documents that can be used to prove for sure that Indris was a direct descendant of the Count of Flanders, who lived in VIII century(9). According to this version, we, therefore, came out of ancient Belgium or northern France.

Be that as it may, but the further descendants of Indris, already according to historical sources, descended from his great-grandson Andrei, who moved to Moscow under the Grand Duke Vasily the Dark (10) and received the nickname Tolstoy for his thickness.

Since that time, the line has been going on continuously, and my father is listed from the first Tolstoy in the twentieth, and we are in the twenty-first generation from Indris (11).

Cheerful and viable, quick-tempered, brave, proud and arrogant, egoists, which are few in the world, practical, but dreamers - Fat people have two great qualities: they have bright, clear heads and sensitive, tender hearts sensitive to everything noble and good. In each of them you will find one or the other, or even both qualities. But each Tolstoy needs to fight a lot with his vices and shortcomings, each of them suffers a lot because of them, not always able to cope with his passionate temper. Nevertheless, they usually emerge victorious from difficulties and internal struggles, thanks to the spiritual forces invested in them. Gifted with curiosity and observation, they are always mentally awake. Passionately loving women and children, they good family men and they understand and love the Russian people, with whom they have become accustomed for centuries. Capable in one area or another, they are musical and, with few exceptions, good statesmen.

Therefore, in the Tolstoy family, and from its very beginning, one must also look for that female influence, and those outstanding women who gave it vitality.

Who were our ancestors of the VIII, IX, X, XI centuries and earlier? Finding them and learning more about them is left to the future, and I think that this study is not without interest.

In our hard time few of the Tolstoys remained in Russia; the majority of them are scattered all over the world, and although almost all are in financial need and are in poverty in every possible way, none of them has lost their main appearance - a bright and cheerful attitude to life.

I must say that the world fame of Lev Nikolaevich gave rise to whole line impostors Tolstoy, who used to be called by other names (12). So, for example, there are Tolstoys in Washington ( D. C .) - butchers and tailors with their names on signs. In addition, very many have been called and are called by our name on separate occasions for various benefits. How many times have we all heard from different people that they met or knew our relatives there and there, where they had never been and could not be.

It seems to me that the law of every country and international law should have prohibited such borrowing of other people's names, even foreign ones, since it has not been proven that the consent of the clan has been given for this or that this clan has finally died out.

Such a prohibition would eliminate much of the confusion stemming from false names and pseudonyms that many take on. Each genus should cherish its name and should, for its part, protect it and persecute all those who in one way or another abuse it. It would be necessary not only to ban the borrowing of other people's names for life, but also literary and political pseudonyms, which also mislead people. Why is it necessary to be called Dante, and not Durante(13), Voltaire, and not Arouet(14)?

If people have achieved this or that fame, calling themselves by their pseudonyms, then they would be known without them, but also more understandable to the masses.

How much more honest and noble sound the proper names of famous people (15).

When I was born, my mother was 25 years old, my father was forty, and in the prime of his life and happiness he wrote his best, immortal essay "War and Peace". During these years, satisfied with his family life and creativity, among the Russian nature and people around him, cheerful, cheerful and full of hope, he infinitely loved life and in it, in the first place, my mother.

Together they were infinitely, terribly happy, and I was born in this brilliant time of their lives, at noon on one fragrant May Russian day. This strange event took place according to the old style on May 20, 1869, and according to the new one on June 2, 1869, in the sign of Gemini. My father remembered this day more than once, because he was worried about my mother and me. He said that this spring day was extraordinarily beautiful.

My mother had had two miscarriages before me, and therefore, in order to avoid a repetition of the misfortune a third time, she was ordered to lie down for five months of pregnancy until my birth.

I was born in a ladies' society, taking advantage of the moment when the doctor (16) and my father went for a walk in the Chapyzh forest (17), and my mother was left alone with the midwife Marya Ivanovna (18).

My first childhood affections were my mother and the old nanny Marya Afanasyevna (19), who smelled especially and had one finger red, once chopped off with an axe. I loved the nurse and to such an extent that at one time I could not imagine that I would outlive her.

My father characterizes me, a three-year-old child, in one of his letters to Countess Alexandra Andreevna Tolstoy (20): “Pretty, dexterous, memoryful and graceful. Every dress on him, as if specially made for him. He does everything like the others, deftly and well. But he doesn’t quite understand yet” (21).

My father mistook my powers of observation for a good memory, which is not the same thing. My memory is no more than average, but my powers of observation have been very strong since childhood, which enabled me from that age to stock up on a numerous and varied store of impressions, thoughts, conclusions and knowledge. I had black, lively eyes, which others called "highlights", and dark hair that curled in rings.

When I was born, there were four in our family: the elder Seryozha - 6 years old (22), sister Tanya - 5 years old (23), brother Ilyusha - 3 years old (24) and me. Tanya and I were called "black" children (25), unlike the rest, whose eyes were bright.

<Через>two years after me, the still thin and fragile blond Masha (26), a friend of my early childhood, was born. For Masha, a year later, - Petya (27), a brunette, for him, a year later - Nikolushka (28), - both who died as children. Behind them was another girl, Varenka, who lived only half an hour (29).

Only<через>seven years after the birth of sister Masha, brother Andryusha (30) was born, who remained to live until the age of 38, and two years later Misha (31) was born after him. Two years later<родился>brother Alyosha with dark eyes, who also died as a child (32).

Five years later, the mother had two more last children - daughter Alexandra (33) and, finally, Benjamin (34) of the family - beloved Vanechka (35).

So, in total, the mother had fifteen pregnancies. Of the thirteen living children, only five are now alive: Sergey, Tatyana, me, Mikhail and Alexandra. Of the dead, three survived to adulthood, the rest all died as children under the age of eight.

According to my personal observations, my older sister Tanya and I, the “black” children of the family, took more mental features, which can be called the inner or spiritual appearance of a person, from the father and his line, but physically we are more like the mother (36); the rest of the children, although they had a lot of their father's on the physical side (brother Ilya, for example, was very similar in appearance to his father), nevertheless, in spiritual and mental makeup, they were little like him. Brother Ilya's letters, for example, are ludicrously similar to mother's letters.

Sister Masha was a blonde with bright eyes, sweet and receptive, but in character she was more like a mother.

In Yasnaya Polyana you will find portraits of our ancestors - Prince N.S. Volkonsky, my father's grandfather (37), and my other great-grandfather, Count Ilya Andreevich Tolstoy (38). The first has dark eyes, the second has light eyes. From childhood, brother Ilya looked like great-grandfather Tolstoy, and I looked like great-grandfather Volkonsky.

Of my brothers who died as small children, three had dark eyes, a type of "black", which shows that life was more difficult for this type of our family.

Interestingly, as a child, I did not feel at all internally similar to either my mother or my father.

Later, by my character and certain peculiarities of thought, I often recognized my father in myself, although in many respects I sharply disagreed with him.

From my mother I took her common sense and true instinct for life. From the paternal line, especially Prince Volkonsky - his calm and sensible mind and pride, along with ardor, although I combined a whole lot of other traits that I took from my other ancestors, which created a very complex and passionate, kind and evil out of me , weak and strong, more bad than a good person.

Chapter 2

How I was raised as a child –spiritually, mentally and physically

I described my childhood in the book for children "Yasha Polyanov" and I think that the time has passed when it was possible to poeticize this period of our life and see only light in it. On the contrary, from the angle from which I now illuminate it, one can see in it much more negative than positive.

Why didn’t they give me deep spiritual foundations from childhood and didn’t awaken in me and didn’t reveal to me my spiritual, divine essence? How could it happen that neither father nor mother - both adults, well-bred and intelligent people - did not know her in themselves, or at least did not tell me that they did? Why didn't they tell me what's in it main point life, and therefore one must be kind and honest, calm and joyful, silent and temperate? Why didn’t they teach me then to love my soul and through it all living things and the soul of the world, as I am trying to learn to love it now, after long suffering?

When I was just a child, my mother, instinctively feeling that I needed spiritual education, taught me how to pray, as she herself prayed. In the evening, before going to bed, I knelt in bed and, looking at the icon in the corner of the room, recited two prayers by heart - first “Theotokos” and “Our Father”. Later, my mother taught me another prayer -<Св.>Ephraim the Syrian (39) - “Lord and Master of my life, the spirit of idleness, despondency, lust and idle talk does not even<дь>me”, etc. These three prayers I repeated as a child. First only the first, then two, and<став>older, sometimes all three. When I asked my mother who God is, she found it difficult to describe Him to me, and when I wanted to know why He is triple - Father, Son and Holy Spirit, she tried to explain the Trinity to me in a church way, as she herself understood it. I was not satisfied with these explanations and felt that there was something wrong. Mother told me that Jesus was God and that He was crucified and composed the Lord's Prayer for us, and I loved Him for that. I also knew that the Theotokos was the mother of Christ, but that She was a Virgin - I could not understand this. I did not like the prayers of the Theotokos: "Theotokos, Virgin, rejoice, blessed is the fruit of thy womb" (40). These last words I forcibly uttered.

One little boy in Moscow, when I was already a schoolboy, also could not pronounce the tricky words of this prayer and simplified it by mixing it with rhymes about a goat and kids. He read it like this:

"Mother of God, Virgin, rejoice,

Your mother has come

She brought milk.

Later, when my father returned to the Orthodox Church, on Sundays we were taken to the village church in the village of Kochaki (41) for Mass. We had to be baptized and kneel on time, and at the end of the service kiss the cold silver cross with a crucifix, which the priest held in his hand somehow especially sideways and raised it to the lips of the worshipers with a habitual gesture. During the Holy Week of Great Lent we fasted, confessed and took communion, and on the Bright Resurrection of Christ, this time at night, we were taken to church for matins, and we, excited, waited with excitement for twelve hours, when all the bells would suddenly ring out and the solemn cross will begin. walking around the church, among the old graves, singing: "Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death."

That's all they gave me in the sense spiritual education between the ages of five and twelve, except for the lessons of the "Law of God", first with his mother, then with the village priest, which consisted of reading stories from the Old and New Testaments, set out in a bad textbook. They could not give me anything else for the simple reason that I lived in a country where people knew nothing else, and its entire civilization was barely supported by two obsolete institutions - Autocracy and Orthodoxy (42).

Father himself was just beginning to look around and seek his own truth; mother, having accepted the foundations once and for all Orthodox faith, could not and did not want to discard them.

Mentally, I was brought up even poorer than spiritually, and what I was given in terms of useful knowledge during the twelve years of my childhood was so insignificant that one could easily do without it. An Englishwoman (43) and a French tutor (44) taught me to chat in English and French, and when I was ten years old, they began to prepare me for the exam in the Tula gymnasium, and history, geography and German. For German language a terribly thin German woman (45) traveled from the city of Tula, and when I sucked a pencil instead of studying, she angrily shouted to me: “Leonide, pencil.” I didn't like her because she didn't even know my name.

Everything that was taught to me in childhood did not fit in my head, and, except for the rare moments of pleasure in the lessons of the Russian language with my mother, all my mental education was torment for me. The worst lessons were with my father, when he suddenly decided to study arithmetic with me. He took the task and began to explain it, but in such a voice that I was numb with fear. He got angry, screamed wildly, and finally left me alone in tears. He considered mathematics to be the basis of all sciences, as the most exact science, he himself was interested in it, but, in essence, he was a bad mathematician (46).

When I remember now how I was taught as a child, before our family moved to Moscow, I feel sorry that so many years of my life, when I could gain a lot of useful knowledge, have passed fruitlessly. There were no teachers, no textbooks, no teaching aids, no maps, no sculpture, no pictures, nothing needed for at least a tolerable teaching of general knowledge.

I also cannot remember my physical upbringing with joy and gratitude towards my educators.

It passed in the realm of complete ignorance and brought terrible harm to my health and my whole life.

In terms of abundant and constant use of fresh air, in terms of rational nutrition, hygienic housing, use of fresh water and exercise of the body - in everything there was not only a lack and errors, but gross misunderstanding and ignorance. I slept for eight months a year with the windows closed and in a heated room, very close to the huge stove. In winter, the double-paned windows were sealed shut, and the only air came out of a tall vent, which was opened once or twice a day.

They fed me three times too plentiful and fatty food. My nursery was located in the north and looked at the fetid ditches; morning and evening I was not washed with fresh water and never forced to properly exercise the muscles of my body. In the evenings, when I could not sleep, I looked for a long time through a large Venetian window at the gloomy Ursa Major on the northern, dark side of the sky, where my window was turned, although I loved the other - south and southeast - side of the house, where there were empty living rooms, a hall and a bedroom of parents. On the other side, from the southeast, behind the linden alleys, the moon rose in the evenings, and bright stars shone. From there, in the mornings, the bright sun, which promised us everything, rose.

In Yasnaya there was always a full bowl for both the family and outsiders. The mother was glad when the children ate their fill, and loved to treat the guests. Therefore, there were always mountains of food in the house, stored on glaciers, in pantries and cellars.

Our schedule was as follows: at 8 1/2 in the morning<мы пили>hot cocoa with bread and butter, or acorn coffee with milk, muffins, bread, or fatty flatbread.

At 12 o'clock at breakfast, two or three dishes were served with leftovers from yesterday's dinner: meat, cereals, vegetables, dairy, sweets, flour and vinaigrettes. At 5:00<был>a four-course dinner: soup with greasy pies or pie, or cabbage soup, or borscht with buckwheat porridge, then greens, meat and “cake”, i.e. sweet dish. And all this was washed down with effervescent bread kvass and layered with fresh black bread. At 8 1/2 pm again<был>samovar, tea, fresh rolls, rich bread, butter, dairy, marshmallow, fig, jam, and in summer and autumn there are also berries and fruits, apples, plums, strawberries, strawberries, raspberries, melons, watermelons by the whole mountains.

They ate three times as much as they should, twice too often, and twice too fast. There were only 4-5 hours between breakfast and lunch; but we were so perverted that in these intervals we managed to get something else "tasty" from the housekeeper - first my former nanny Marya Afanasyevna (47), and later from Dunechka (48), who grumbled, but did not refuse. Later, she called the house of Yasnaya Polyana a "happy hotel", where guests did not pay for care and for the hard work that all the servants and the mistress of the house carried.

I hate to admit that I have been a glutton since childhood. Our French governess (49) said about me: “Lyon a les ueux plus grands que le ventre” . From this vice, my stomach was spoiled from an early age (50), and excess food, instead of helping my physical development, as his mother wanted it, only delayed him. Along with the stomach, teeth deteriorated, hair fell out, and blood circulation was disturbed. In all my childhood, I never felt the beneficial feeling of real, acute hunger, which I experienced much later. Never, except during periods of my illness, did they give my stomach either rest or time, and on holidays - Christmas, Maslenitsa, Easter and birthdays of family members - they prepared for us all sorts of especially harmful things, like puddings, birthday cakes, turkeys, piglets, pancakes with sour cream, butter and caviar, Easter and Easter cakes. All this Russian barbaric traditional heavy food lay like a stone on the stomach and completely, often in a sharp form, upset him.

What about parents? Did they give an example of temperance? Mother, no doubt. She only ate once a day, at five o'clock in the afternoon, at dinner. In the morning she drank coffee with milk, bread and butter, and in the evening tea with bread and jam - that's all. My father did not have breakfast, but he dined and dined late in the evening. In my childhood, he ate an enormous amount of cold roast beef before going to bed, washing it down with Crimean white wine. He was intemperate, although he somehow managed to cope with excesses, thanks to hunting, on which he often spent whole days on horseback or on foot.

Naturally, as a result of poor hygienic conditions, I often fell ill in childhood, and especially in the spring, when debilitating fevers began to shake me. The fever suddenly rose to forty-one degrees, and this went on for weeks. Whether I was affected by the noxious miasma and fumes coming from our ponds, from the dirty yard and from the stinking ditches, from the cellar under our window and the deep well in its neighborhood, or whether the general bad conditions weakened me, I do not know. Probably due to both, but during my childhood I suffered all kinds of diseases: measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, tonsillitis, mumps and dysentery - and only miraculously escaped from them.

Nevertheless, I survived, and, I think, because I found from early childhood a means to escape from illnesses, which I use to this day. The means is movement. Barely out of bed and barely dressed, I rushed out of the nursery into the hall and started running around the table countless times until I was stopped by force and imprisoned for hot cocoa. Then games, all sorts of games in which you could move, move without end. Balls, head over heels, which we spent hours spurring with whips, serso, snakes, all kinds of jumping, skating, downhill and downstairs on pillows and trays, in the summer running after mushrooms, berries, flowers, later horseback riding, croquet, tennis etc. - all this defeated the accumulated poisons in my body and helped him somehow etch them out. After intense movement, I would get hot, my temperature would rise, and I would get sick, sometimes only for a day or two. Then they put me to bed, I slept for twenty-four hours, drenched in sweat, and the next morning I got up healthy.

It goes without saying that, remembering how badly I was brought up in childhood, I am far from thinking of blaming my parents for it.

Mother did what she could, with the heavy burden that she had to share. The father was too busy with his work.

Chapter 3

Art in my childhood and its influence on me

The first art most needed by man is the art of thinking. It can be called wisdom, the ability to think the most important and great, eternal and fair.

Who possessed this art from my relatives at the time of my childhood and who could influence me then in this sense?

Father, mother, brothers, governesses, teachers, servants, guests, books?

I will seek wisdom in Yasnaya Polyana at that time in vain. Maybe she was hidden somewhere far away on the dusty shelves of the library, but in our family life she was not known, because if she were known and if she existed, then the whole life of our family, and maybe the whole Russia would have been different then and now. Meanwhile, healthy and simple wisdom, necessary for the happiness of a person, has long been set forth and exists, at least in ancient Chinese philosophy alone (51).

Why didn't they let me learn its basics as a child?

I would understand it much easier than the prayer of the Mother of God, and it would give me the necessary strength for the rest of my life.

How did the second most important influence on me, a child, was the art of the word? Did my parents and caregivers understand what role it played and should have played in my life?

From morning to evening I listened to conversations or reading and read myself. I listened to the singing of love romances - my aunt Tanya (52) sang them beautifully - which was expressed in loving passionate words, listened to church services and the singing of a deacon, in which I did not understand a single Slavic word, listened to the arguments of parents and their guests, read and listened to fairy tales and light poems.

What else? Nothing but the empty chatter of the family that surrounded me that covered and absorbed everything.

Among this verbal chaos, the third, according to my classification, art, music, influenced me much more strongly than the word. Even in my mother's arms, I knew this strange pleasure, when she lulled me to sleep with a naive and soothing song: “I took you a moon, stars and an eagle as a nurse” (53).

The art of sound and melody awakened mysterious feelings in my soul from early childhood and called to other, better worlds.

I have been musical since childhood and I myself sang all the songs and romances that I heard. When the hunt took over, I went somewhere into the forest or into my room, lay on my back and, so as not to forget, sang all the songs that I knew in a row.

Once the young Princess Shakhovskaya came to Yasnaya with her married sister (54) and in the evening, after dinner, she sang wonderfully and for a long time. On the occasion of the event, I was allowed to stay in the hall and go to bed later.

The princess sang everything: both sad and cheerful Russian songs, and French bergerettes, and modern romances. For the first time I saw the beauty of music in harmony with the beauty of a young Russian girl. I wanted to cry and laugh, I wanted to throw myself on the princess's neck and tell her how madly I loved her. She herself, excited, looked at me from time to time and smiled, understanding my mood. The hour of her departure came, and everyone went downstairs to the hall to see her off. I tried to be near her as close as possible, and I thought with horror that now she would leave and take away with her everything that she had awakened in me. She suddenly leaned over and kissed me.

“Young man,” she said warmly, “you have won my heart.

I rushed upstairs to the nursery and burst into tears (55).

Music in my childhood awakened in me tenderness and love, courage and courage, hope and delight. She reconciled me with people, brought me closer to them, made me search, dream and think about everything that was most important and beautiful.

Music is the singing of the soul, an attempt by our spiritual essence to free itself and fly out into the open from its bodily captivity. The best music always expresses this desire and therefore takes the form of a melody.

Russian music has taken one of the first places in the world, thanks to the richness of Russian folk melody, the expression of the people's soul.

Sculpture in my childhood could not play a great educational role for the simple reason that it was almost non-existent in the Yasnaya Polyana house.

There was only one well-made marble bust of my uncle, my father's brother, Count Nikolai Nikolayevich Tolstoy, which stood in a wall niche in my father's office (56). I loved this bust more than all the things in the house, and it affected me more than all the portraits and paintings. I sometimes looked at him for a long time, studying his smooth, pleasant forms. It seemed to me that my uncle Nikolai was almost alive when I touched him and stroked his cheeks. I knew that he was a wonderful person (57), and this familiarity with him ennobled and spiritualized me.

What about the art of dancing? His father despised him and did not see anything in him, except that ballerinas lift their legs high (58). Mother, on the contrary, loved ballet and as a girl, before marriage, she herself fluttered around her Moscow Kremlin apartment (59), portraying dancers. Nevertheless, in my childhood, people danced in our house and in the family, and nearby in the village there were dances at Sunday round dances and at work.

We danced the waltz, the polka, the mazurka, and the quadrille, and sometimes my father would waltz himself, always with the same lady of his, my mother. He picked her up light figure and, to the general delight of us children, he quickly made a whole circle with her around the hall (60). I myself, besides the waltz, loved the mazurka with all sorts of figures and danced it with passion (61).

The dancing of the women and children in the round dances of the village was sometimes beautiful in its boldness and movements, but only a few of the women and children danced well.

In the Yasnaya Polyana house in the balcony living room, which later became my father's study, there are several engravings from paintings by ancient Italian masters. The wall on which they hung has always attracted my attention and on it especially the Madonna "Di San Sisto" by Raphael (62), with its wonderful details. Everything was beautiful in this picture and seemed to me a long time ago familiar. I also loved the portraits of my ancestors in the hall, which I often looked at and always regretted that they told me little about them (63).

What influence could architecture have on me as a child? Our simple brick house with bare walls, next to miserable peasant huts, gave me nothing. Nevertheless, our great joy was the new additions to the house (64), or when new huts and porches appeared in the village, or even a fresh smooth thatched roof “combed” (65).

Looking back at how art influenced me as a child, I see that this influence was very great, but it could and should have been a thousand times stronger.

Through art, I could know both my spiritual and mental essence and gain a lot of knowledge, if each of the arts was presented at its proper height and in its proper place.

The influence of art on the issue of children's education is a huge field for development.

Chapter 4

"Classical" Polivanov Gymnasium in Moscow –my teachers and friends

Before our family moved from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow in 1881, an unhealthy, nervous atmosphere reigned in the house. Mother no longer coped alone with all family concerns; the father, although he saw that the village did not provide the necessary conditions for the upbringing of grown children, at that time was going through his so-called "religious crisis" and was thinking about moving to the city with great displeasure (66).

While the issue was being resolved, my upbringing was even more neglected, and instead of helping, my parents made another mistake with me in this regard, when, at the insistence of my father and against the wishes and tears of my mother and myself, I was transferred from the female half, from my dear English Miss Any (67), down to the rooms of the elder brothers and the tutor (68).

This change affected me especially badly in the sense that "from the boys" I learned only bad things, that is, things that harmed my life.

When we nevertheless moved to Moscow and I was sent to the Polivanovsky classical gymnasium in the third grade, I was sincerely glad that my real upbringing and education would finally begin, which, I felt, they could not give me at home.

Our best teacher at the gymnasium was “Lev” himself, Lev Ivanovich Polivanov, one of the outstanding Russian teachers, director and most beautiful, intelligent person (69). Hot-tempered and nervous, with a gray mane of thick hair combed back, thin and quick, Polivanov not only knew how to teach, but knew how to evoke their best feelings in his students. He was our teacher of Russian language and literature. When he was angry, he lost his temper and did not remember what he said. Once, in a fit of anger, he shouted, threatening his disciples with his pale, thin fist: “This is not a tavern, but drinking institution"! He wanted to say<:> educational institution.

Yet everyone loved and respected him (70).

He was especially attentive and kind to me. Later, when my mother visited him about the teachings of my younger brothers, each time he asked with interest and even love about me, saying that I had a real vocation to write and that this was my real business. He once read in the newspaper my short article, in which I described one meeting of the Salvation Army in Paris (71), and found that it was well written. He was one of the few who believed in my future. Mother in a letter to her father tells about this (72).

I remember, just in the last grade of the gymnasium, I recited "Lion" of "The Prophet" by Pushkin, and he listened, lowering his gray mane. When I finished, he smiled approvingly and gave me the highest score:

And he cut my chest with a sword,

And took out a trembling heart ...

Perhaps there is no poem deeper in meaning in all world poetry, and I must say that for the entire period of my youthful school life it was for me the only, clear, true and simple revelation of what what should be the highest spiritual life of man. So far, I have not seen anyone better. To become a prophet, one must see and hear"the shudder of heaven and the flight of heavenly angels", you need conquer passions, know wisdom and only then - replacing the idle language with the wise sting of the snake, - a person who has seen and heard everything, dares to go into the world of people and, by the Divine will, kindle a fire in their hearts.

I also loved Pushkin's other quatrain, "The Boy", the meaning of which I proudly turned to myself:

“The fisherman spread the net along the shore of the icy sea;

The boy helped his father. Otrok, leave the fisherman!

Other things await you, other worries:

You will catch minds, you will be an assistant to kings.

Although our gymnasium was "classical", that is, in it we had to study Greek and latin languages and with them the foundations of Greek and Roman civilization, this study was reduced to cramming grammar and irregular declensions and conjugations, so that there was not even time for other things.

If we translated Homer, Caesar and Horace and wrote " e xtemporalia,” they did it mechanically and with boredom, so deep was the routine of bad pedagogy.

Two good-natured Petr Petrovich taught us ancient languages ​​- both purebred Russian people who claimed to be "classics" (73). The Latin teacher, a former army captain we called Petya, liked to pace around the classroom and spit in the corner. When he approached the corner, the whole class whispered loudly: “Spit,” and Petya obediently spat, although his supply of saliva had long since run out (74).

My schoolboys teased the Greek teacher in Greek: "tini, tinos" and added: "Pyotr Petrovich by the nose" (75).

Very nice was our old history teacher Fuchs, a Jew by origin. He was also a French teacher (76).

In general, all our teachers were excellent people, but all were weak-willed, half-dead, in essence, deeply ignorant morally and intellectually. I'm not talking about the lessons of the "Law of God", which was taught by the dearest priest, our "father" (77). No one ever knew his lessons in catechism or worship, exactly as it should have been, although these lessons contained everything our spiritual upbringing to awaken our spiritual essence. Every morning before classes and at the end of them, one of the comrades from the place read a prayer, looking at the icon in the corner, and everyone was quickly baptized. I have never been able to catch a single word of this prayer and have never listened to it. Tra-ta-ta-ta - and it's over. At that moment we were not even aware that we were praying to some god.

My poor comrades, half of whom are no longer alive.

What animal-like, pathetic creatures were among them. Their heredity and first upbringing were even poorer than mine, and therefore their life was even more miserable.

Here is Watermelon, a merchant's son, with a huge round belly and a small red head, always rude, vulgar, stupid, makes me sign on a white piece of paper. I sign my name, and he writes at the top: “I undertake to bring three rubles to Vishnyakov on such and such a date.”

And here is the Caucasian prince from Armenia, although he is only in the third grade, but he has already lived, experienced everything, he looks like a depraved man. He persuades me to go with him to brothel, and out of curiosity and weakness I agree. This house was in one of the then famous alleys of Moscow. When we entered the “institution”, there were dances “to the piano” and violin in the salon. The "hostess" led us into a separate room, decorated with velvet and gilding, and asked us to wait. A minute later, rustling silk, two well-dressed ladies entered us, one brunette, the other blonde. The prince began to look disgustingly at the unpleasant blonde, stroking her thighs, and I looked at the pretty brunette, not daring to move. She, guessing my innocence, silently and embarrassedly smiled at me. But without sitting down, I rushed to the door and past the saloon where the violin was squealing, rolled down the stairs and, like a madman, jumped out into the street. The waiting driver looked at me in surprise and asked something, laughing. I sat on the sled, covered myself with a bear's cavity and began to wait for my Caucasian "friend", regretting that I had gone with him.

And here is poor Chick - a physical freak, sickly, lopsided and pathetic, over which everyone laughed, pinched and teased: "Chick, chick, chick."

Here are two more huge, mature and terrible people - also, like my prince, Armenian guys, rich horse breeders, rude, stupid, lazy. And here are the Russian guys, merchant sons: one is the first student, red-haired, quiet and capable, but spiritually limited and gloomy, the other is presumptuous and unpleasant, always angry with someone. Once, out of anger, he began to choke me, taking me by the neck so that I almost suffocated.

There were also more normal boys among my comrades, with whom I was friends, especially in the later classes, when the best students were picked up.

Of those close to me, first was Skobeltsyn, with whom we walked on our hands and jumped over tables, then Comrade Kh., who wrote beautiful poetry, later died of syphilis (78). But friends, true friends, I did not find among the comrades of the school. Why? Because friendship, real friendship, is created only on spiritual and reasonable foundations.

At the gymnasium, I got used to smoking early, because all the elders smoked and during the break they gathered for this in a stinking lavatory. When I had breakfast during a big break in the common room and ate my sandwiches prepared by the housekeeper "Dunechka", I felt that these sausages and cheeses with dry bread were harmful to me, but, hungry, I filled my stomach with them. In terms of physical exercise, the school gave me zero, since our two, three hours of gymnastics a week could not be considered as such. As before, as in Yasnaya Polyana, I escaped from an unhealthy school life by movement and outdoor sports, especially by skating.

I think that major mistake and the gap in the Russian gymnasium of my time was the complete absence of a living, cordial, mental and vital connection between students and teachers.

I felt this deficiency throughout my entire course at the gymnasium, and especially during all the breaks between lessons, when the teachers went into their teachers' room to chat and smoke, and the schoolboys scattered in different directions with their interests and conversations. Then the last connection between us and the teachers was broken.

There was also no organized mental connection between the students themselves, because the older ones were not entrusted with the supervision of the younger ones, as is customary, for example, in England. The unity of students among themselves and with teachers was impossible in a school where neither teachers nor students themselves knew why and why they teach and study and what goal they pursue in life.

The goal of the gymnasium was to bring us through this dry and absurd program to the university, but what was this program and what will happen to us later - this was of no interest to anyone.

Isn’t it amazing that thousands of years have passed since wise people came to know life and showed us what basic knowledge is needed for its happy living, but we still study and teach our children subjects that are completely unnecessary, empty and insignificant, and all important and necessary for life are left aside by us (79)?

Four basic Life Textbooks should be written for all people and all nations.

The first is how to live alone as an individual, the second is how to live in a family, the third is how to serve society and the state and how to treat it, and the fourth is how to serve humanity and treat other nations.

These four major sciences of life should be taught in all the schools of the world.

Chapter 5

Heavy strife of parents at home. Birth of Sasha's sister.

Her memories and last letter

Despite its shortcomings, the gymnasium was still for me partly a rest and a distraction from what I was going through at home and which completely upset my health and almost carried me to the grave.

Already in the summer of 1884, just before the birth of my sister Alexandra (80), on one hot June day, after a terrible scene, my father almost left home and did not leave the family forever. In any case, he threatened to do so, and without any apparent reason, simply because my poor mother was in the middle of a period and on the eve of the birth of a huge child, which she never wanted and which she carried with great difficulty. She was unusually heavy in those days and apparently suffered physically. Instead of helping her and being calm and kind to her, her father got angry over evening tea without any serious reason and, jumping up, announced that he was leaving home forever and leaving for America. His mother begged him to stay, but he took some things into a canvas bag, put it on his back and left the house down the birch alley leading from the Yasnaya Polyana house to the pond and gate (81).

I was present at all this quarrel, and when my father was out of sight, I, together with Alcide Seuron (82), the son of our French governess, (83), rushed to console my mother, who, all in tears and completely exhausted, sat down on a small green a bench on the edge of the croquet court. I began to persuade her to enter the house, and finally, when the sisters, the midwife (84) and aunt Tanya (85) came running, we managed to take her into the bedroom.

The first contractions began, and at six o'clock in the morning Alexandra Lvovna was born, whom her mother did not want to feed for anything and gave her to the breadwinner (86).

It is strange that Sasha's sister was one of the main, albeit indirect, reasons for the tragic and premature end of Lev Nikolaevich, his break with his mother and his leaving home (87). She also wrote obscene memoirs about her mother, which are hard to talk about (88). In order to be able, without hiding one’s anger towards the one who gave birth to her into the world, to write how the “heels of our poor martyr mother jumped nervously”, how she ate and similar, supposedly “artistic” details, one needs truly not possess any mental tact (89). Not to mention that everything she wrote about me is so unlike me that it is impossible to object to it. She, for example, seriously believed that I shared the opinion of my teacher, the sculptor Rodin (90), when he jokingly said to me: “ il ne faut pas penser du tout par ce que cela use la servelle". She still asserts in her memoirs that I stood for the death penalty (91), while I never expressed or had such an opinion. On the contrary, I think and wrote this that it is not needed, and I put and put Sweden as an example, where it does not exist (92).

When I once made a remark to my little spoiled and ill-mannered nephew Ilyusha (93) and told him jokingly: “You were not spanked enough,” Sasha took this seriously and immediately went to complain about this to her father (94).

When I see my sister's book here in Florence at street vendors, I feel ashamed and hurt that people read it and form false ideas about people (95).

I didn’t want to touch on this issue at all, but still I have to say that if Sasha had been different, she would have felt sorry for her mother, she would have felt sorry for her father, instead of fanning the fire of their differences and, together with Chertkov (96) and his friends, pile on all moral responsibility on my unfortunate mother, who gave her whole life to her family (97).

I am happy to announce that Sister Sasha, now living in America (98), is aware of her guilt and asked her family for forgiveness for her mistakes.

I myself am to blame for the fact that, having completely taken the side of my mother, I was not gentle enough with my old father, although I tried in every possible way to help both him and my mother.

Sasha and I exchanged letters the other day. Here is her last letter to me from America:

"Thank you, Leva.

I was happy to recognize your handwriting, I was happy to read what you wrote. And it felt so good in my heart. I felt so rich, like a hundred thousand, no, I won much more, and you can’t compare it with anything.

For a long time already I have only love for my mother, for you, for all the brothers, there is not a shadow of any alienation. I must be, even probably, I am to blame for you in many ways, if I am to blame - forgive me, but not malice, not unkind leadership, maybe in some respects - erroneous.

Strange, the more you live, the further away all petty hostility, disputes. It must be because death is near. My mother is gone, and only with great tenderness, pity and suffering do I remember her, and only, perhaps, now I truly love and understand her (99). Chertkov left (100), and again there is no malice, no hostility, but only some bewilderment that he was destined to be the bearer of his father's ideas; we will all leave, and soon, and only one eternal, unchanging, beautiful will remain, which people spoil, distort, try to pollute with dirty paws, it stands unshakable and waits for us to come to our senses.

For some time now I have somehow been afraid to use the word God. They use Him too much, they treat Him too lightly, too familiarly. Ilya, dying, was afraid to say "God", it must be that what he experienced was so wonderful that he could not find a word for it.

“Infinity is love,” he once said.

And he said wonderfully: “You know, I can no longer wish for anything for myself, and I was sad. Now I came up with, I lie and think what I would like for all my loved ones. It is very good". It was, of course, a prayer, but he was afraid to say the word "prayer." I often remember him and every time I cry not from grief, but from joy. He taught me a lot by his death. I want to write it all, but I'm afraid of falsehood, I carry everything in myself, I don't know if I can (101).

I am completely alone. Today is a gray, rainy morning, the lilac smells so strongly through the window, and the canary is sitting on it. My garden is all green, and I rejoice in it. Now it's 6 o'clock<ов>in the morning, life has not yet begun all around. Later, people will pass along the road. My farm is surrounded by regular forests for a large area. That's why I'm writing to you, because it's so quiet, calm and good in my soul and I wanted to have a heartfelt talk with you.

Do you know that the Swede who came here to us two years ago (102) knows all your people and told me a lot about them? Praises everyone very much. How lucky you are to have so many loved ones.

I would really like to go to Europe, but I can't because of financial reasons. I can barely make ends meet. Now, for example, I have nothing, no income, except for the garden, which gives very little. I do everything myself, I even do my laundry. Yesterday I did a very difficult job: I dug a hole for a closet. I just called a man to help me put it on. I'm used to work, and I have muscles like a man's.

For Americans, I am too straightforward in my views. They don’t always like that I smash the Bolsheviks, attack smoking, here every girl at the age of 16 smokes, I don’t recognize their conventionalities and I can’t always depict on my face p leasant smile. I kiss you very hard, dear brother, and once again I thank you for the bright glare with which you lit up my life.

Sister Sasha "(103).

Chapter 6

Tolstoyism and its harmful influence. Bad mood of the father and the reasons for this

The main and first religious-philosophical and social works of his father: “Confession” (104), “What should we do” (105) and “What is my faith” were written in those years when, unsatisfied mental and spiritual With the food that the gymnasium gave me, I looked everywhere for answers to the serious questions of life, reading everything that was at hand and carefully listening to my elders. It was during these years that the ardent and convinced word of the newly born Tolstoy was heard loudly and confidently, allegedly giving the right decision all the tasks of life.

“You are looking for truth, it is in the Gospel, cleansed of the mysterious and miraculous. It is in the central commandment of Christ - non-resistance to evil by violence. It is in the five commandments set out in the book What Is My Faith (106).

What to look for next? There is no higher, more truthful and purer teaching and cannot be. Following him, you will become the "salt of the earth", a martyr and a hero, one of his first great disciples, for the salvation of mankind is in him. Just give up military service and from the oath, quit smoking and drinking, remain a virgin, go to the village to plow the land with the peasants - and you will be famous, glorious and happy.

And I was so carried away by my father's teaching that everything else receded into the background and ceased to interest me (107). One can imagine how successfully I could prepare a Greek or Latin translation or an algebraic problem after sitting for three or four hours until late in the evening in my father's small rooms, with low ceilings, where there was a thick cloud of tobacco smoke and it was impossible to to see the faces of those gathered, but where there were heated debates about a new doctrine that was supposed to save the world. I, along with tobacco smoke, was saturated with truths that were supposed to eradicate the evil and lies of life, and I did not see anything higher than them. What was my miserable gymnasium next to great tasks? Even if they kick me out of it; that tomorrow with its lessons and myself, when, together with my father, I understood and confessed the greatest of revelations?

Finally, tired and morally tormented, I went to bed in a stuffy room with closed windows and fell into a heavy, unhealthy sleep, so that tomorrow I could run to the gymnasium early, without knowing a single lesson, and swallow my dry sandwich.

Sometimes my father asked me if I had prepared the assignment in the gymnasium, but he never forced me to do it.

To be truthful, I must say that not only my father's ideas, his visitors and their conversations prevented me from living and studying properly at home, but also the whole way and course of life of our large and stormy family.

Calls, servants, traffic and noise, music, guests, relatives, our comrades and dinner parties, receptions, running and crying of small children - all this together at times merged into a continuous hell, from which there was only salvation - flight. Then I ran away to the garden, where I cleared the snow or watered the skating rink, or went to the relatives of our family - Shidlovsky, Obolensky or Nagornov - in a quieter and more normal environment.

In our family, the teachings of my father were especially fond of - my sister Masha and I (108). About us, he wrote to someone that we, his “middle” children, were “more spiritual” than the elders and did not take his “rudeness” from him (109). But our “spirituality” is not real, but instilled, and friendship with our father cost us dearly ... Poor, very good Masha was never happy and died an exhausted, young childless woman, because all her numerous pregnancies ended in early miscarriages (110) .

But I paid with a long and serious illness (111), which I overcame only thanks to the fact that I forever buried and condemned Tolstoy's teaching, taken as a whole, and, having got out of semi-wild, stupid Russia, I saw and understood the rational and organized West.

But during the period of ardent enthusiasm for my father's ideas, I loved them sincerely and loved, even adored my father (112). I sympathized with him with all my heart, sharing his joys when, for example, new and “real” students came to him and declared themselves as such (M.A. Schmidt (113), V.G. Chertkov, P.I. Biryukov (114 ), A.N. Dunaev (115) and many others). I went with my father in Moscow to doss houses and factories, where he watched the urban poor and the life of workers, and carefully, vigilantly followed the development of his ideas. I hung on his every word and admired his every new "discovery", not missing even the smallest things (116).

One thing I continued to hate was his attitude towards my mother, when he unfairly and unpleasantly reproached her, bringing her to tears. Then he suddenly kissed her hand and spoke to her in a kind and gentle voice. That unkindly began to condemn in a nasty, terrible tone, blaming her for everything - her, on which all the hard work of the family was heaped. She cried helplessly and touchingly, and he, angry, left the house for a long walk, on foot or on horseback.

An evil feeling then stirred towards him in my soul. He was wrong, deeply wrong. A strange split was felt in him, and it seemed that there was no way out of this situation for him. As a boy and young man I noticed this, but did not yet understand where and in what was the mistake.

Now it seems clear to me his intellectual mood of that time and everything that happened in his soul. He suffered for three main reasons.

Firstly, the physical, former strengths left, and all his bodily worldly life weakened over the years.

Secondly, he created a new world religion, which was supposed to save humanity and which was built by him from principles accepted once and for all as truth, such as non-resistance to evil by violence, celibacy, pacifism, manual labor, etc. - and since, creating this "religion", he himself could not understand the countless contradictions and absurdities that flowed from it - he suffered, feeling that he would not succeed in the task of creating a new religion.

Thirdly, he suffered like all of us,<из->for the injustices and untruths of the world, unable to give him a personal rational and bright example.

All of Tolstoyism is explained by these feelings, and its weakness and temporary influence are also explained.

Not I alone, but many young or sensitive kind people fell under it; but only limited people followed him to the end.

Despite, however, the harmful influence of my father, I continued to study somehow at the gymnasium and, finally, having made an enormous effort on myself and trying to retire as much as possible from the family, I passed the maturity exam and entered the Moscow University at the Faculty of Medicine (117), although the father in every possible way found fault with both doctors and science at that time. But after reading the biography of the famous Russian doctor Pirogov (118), I was inspired by his example and life and dreamed of serving people in a useful field. I still have nightmares about my matriculation exam. Many times I dreamed after him that I failed, and I woke up in horror. And during the exam itself, I had a real attack of such nervous excitement and weakening that I felt as if life itself had suddenly left and poured out of me from extreme excitement.

How much effort was criminally wasted in those years, how much stupidity was done, how much absurdity was imagined only because there were no proper spiritual and intellectual educators who guided me, and the same environment around me ...

The school and the family—both of these institutions, instead of strengthening and strengthening me, weakened me, and I now see clearly that only when life itself becomes a rational school, and the school a part of intelligent life, that is, when both of them merge into one harmonious and consonant whole, only then will we find the true and eternal forms and tools of education (119).

Chapter 7

At the university, at the medical faculty and the first love interests

Every child who begins to learn to read and write should be told that he will study all his life and that constant learning is not torment, but the highest joy. Then, when they leave the lower school in order to enter the middle and higher schools, the students will not imagine that now a freer and easier time begins for them, as almost all gymnasium students imagine when they enter the university, and all students who finish university courses. In any case, this was the case in Russia of my time.

After graduating from the gymnasium, I entered the university to study medicine, but at the same time I imagined that after the suffering and difficulties of the gymnasium I would breathe more freely. At the same time, I imagined that at the university professors would closely supervise my studies and help me. I was wrong about both.

As far as the curriculum was concerned, the Faculty of Medicine was overloaded with subjects, so that there would not be a free moment if I began to cram them all, and there was not even a hint of direct guidance from the professors.

A crowd of helpless students like me ran around the classrooms, wanting to find out when such and such a lecture or why such and such a professor did not appear. Lectures were given languidly, with the usual routine, so that it was disgusting to follow them. Most of the students therefore did not even consider it necessary to attend them properly, relying on textbooks and printed lectures.

At the same time, I was immediately cooled to the Faculty of Medicine and the fact that the program of the first two years was, in fact, not medical, but natural sciences: physics, chemistry, anatomy, botany, etc. And just as ancient languages ​​were taught in the gymnasium without any connection with the living traces of ancient civilizations, dead and dry, so also university professors, lecturing on the natural sciences, necessary for the knowledge of medicine and closely connected with it, not only did not dwell on those points where, when and how such and such a natural science serves medicine, but they did not even try to interest us in this.

I had a close friend at the faculty, Vanya Raevsky (120), with whom we went to lectures together; but both of us did not have enough energy to, like our comrades, energetic and unspoiled Jews, who were a fussy crowd, get used to all the inconveniences and shortcomings of university life and accept them meekly.

I was also alien to the language of professors, in which 50% of the words were scientific gallicisms, alien and disgusting smelly anatomical theater, where we cut human corpses; disgusting was vivisection, when the famous Professor Sechenov (121) choked and tortured guinea pigs, rats, frogs and rabbits, and, finally, the student environment itself was alien, with which I found little in common (122).

Nevertheless, I began to study and listen to lectures not only on my course, but also on the elders in order to get acquainted with them, and I also attended many operations in clinics (123).

All of this together gave me an early idea of ​​what was in store for me as a medical student for five years and then as a doctor, and rather repelled me rather than attracted me. In addition, at that time, as a result of the general abnormal atmosphere that prevailed in our family, my health was undermined, despite my natural strength, and I was afraid that I would not overcome my chosen profession.

After a quick decision, in the spring of 1890 I applied to be transferred from the medical to the philological faculty (124) and thus abandoned medicine forever, although later I regretted it more than once (125).

Remembering now my mood of that period of my life, I see that my passionate nature, always carried away by something or someone, was also a great obstacle to its calmness and correct course. These hobbies prevented me from studying and awakened the desire to start living a full life as soon as possible.

From early childhood, I was almost constantly in love, not only with life and nature, but also with women, and at times this feeling drowned out all the others in me. First painful attachment to mother, nannies and English women, then to various girls of my age or older, and later to adult girls and women.

When my father bought the house of the merchant Arnautov in Khamovnichesky lane (126) in Moscow, the Olsufievs became our neighbors, whose old house was on Devichye Pole, and the garden converged with ours.

Old Olsufiev (127), an old-fashioned gentleman, was married three times and had a bunch of children. From his second marriage, he had a beautiful daughter, Katya, ten years old, a brunette with a thick braid of dark hair on a chiseled head, unusually thoroughbred, calm and graceful. I liked her so much that I decided that she should become my wife. But less than a year later, Katya suddenly died of some sudden childhood illness. I remember my terrible grief, which I did not tell anyone about (128).

My other adolescent and youthful hobbies were Princess Lily Obolenskaya (129), daughter of Prince Dmitry Dmitrievich (130), cousin Masha Kuzminskaya (131), Nata Filosofova (132), Verochka Severtsova (133), "Goat" in the Ural Mountains (134) , and most importantly - a young peasant woman Dasha Chekuleva, love for which lasted for many years and was the strongest in these years.

Of all these women, it seems only Dasha, whom I have not seen since I left Russia twenty years ago, has survived to this day (135).

Dasha was married to Mishka, a cab driver. He did not live with his wife, but in the city of Tula and only occasionally came home. His old father and Dasha did the field work together, while her sickly mother-in-law did housework (136).

Dasha was of medium height, light as a bird, strongly built, with regular features and large bright eyes. Her body was as hard as steel, hardened by hard and constant work. When I met her, from a distance I noticed her quick, fiery look, but when I came closer, her heavy eyelids fell. But in the evening, at rural round dances or at mowing, she sang louder and better than anyone, and sometimes she started to dance, and then she could not restrain herself. Suddenly he stops, straightens up all over, screams, and again starts circling smoothly in a round dance, stamping his half-boots and throwing back his pretty head, tied with a red scarf. Passionate, but reserved and secretive, I liked Daria endlessly. My love flared up especially in the summer, when we returned from Moscow to Yasnaya. How many moonlit nights I did not sleep because of her, and how many I avoided forests, fields and meadows, pursuing her everywhere! She was a part of nature and life for me.

On holidays, I went to village round dances with a violin and played “The Lady” for hours to the accompaniment of someone's harmonica, in order to see Darya and feel close to her. She sang and danced, and I admired her.

When I met her alone in the forest, where she went for grass, on some deaf path or clearing, along which she walked, in a hurry, with bare strong feet, I ran up to her and begged her to stop and sit with me. She threw the sack on the ground, sat on it, pushed the handkerchief back from her forehead and, looking at me, smiled, her eyes shining. When I hugged her and pressed her hard breasts to mine, she suddenly jumped to her feet, quietly pushed me away and whispered: “Don't, don't, you're my garden apple. I'm not a match for you."

And with a deft movement, throwing a bag full of odorous grass onto her back, she ran away, and then I did not dare to pursue her further. Sometimes Dasha would go far, thirty versts from Yasnaya to another village to visit her old mother, an honest and intelligent Russian woman just like herself. These days I harnessed the droshky and went hunting to meet Darya somewhere on the high road - the ant along which she was supposed to go.

For hours I waited for her in the field, and when at last her figure appeared in the distance, I was agitated with sweet joy. Again we sat side by side, I stroked her lovely body, shook her clumsy hands, but as soon as I allowed myself more, she broke free, jumped up and ran away.

"We are not a couple, my dear."

Memories of my remaining completely pure love for Daria are connected with the best months, days and hours of my youthful life - with spring nightingales and lilies of the valley, with the thick and shadow of forests, with the expanse of fields and meadows and thirst, crazy thirst for life and happiness.

Why was it that neither I nor she could quench this thirst?

Why are so many fiery desires and worries spent fruitlessly and only these bright, deeply disturbing memoirs remain about them, even now?

Chapter 8

Travels during the student years. family section

and my first printed writings

Having avoided and traveled since childhood all of Yasnaya Polyana and its environs, I gradually began to expand my acquaintance with the world, and from the very first years of my student days I began to travel around Russia in order to get to know it better.

First to the Volga, Ufa and Urals, then to the Caucasus and Crimea.

In the summer of 1890, from Nizhny I went down the Volga to Kazan (137), then up the Kama and Belaya I got to Ufa, from where I reached the Ural Mountains along the then new Ufa-Zlatoust railway.

At that time, the mother's younger brother, engineer Vyacheslav Andreevich Bers, was building the first branch of the Siberian Railway and lived at the Telyak station<и>, where I arrived at the cargo area of ​​the wagon, although my uncle sent a special wagon for me, which I did not find in Ufa (138).

Poor uncle Vyacheslav was badly married and at that time had two small children - a girl and a boy (139). His old devoted nanny, Nastasya (140), who was the only survivor of old family Bersov. She used to be my grandmother's maid, Lyubov Alexandrovna (141).

Vyacheslav was sincerely glad of my arrival and tried his best to entertain me. Hunting in the foothills of the Urals was then wonderful, and I spent whole days walking with a gun through the wonderful surroundings.<станции>calf<и>raising clouds of ducks. Once I wandered far and came to a forest glade, where there was a lonely apiary. The old beekeeper invited me to his hut and treated me to a glass of amber wine distilled from honey. This drink seemed divine to me.

Hunting was a distraction for me, and often a rescue from thoughts of women, who tormented me more and more persistently. Yet up to now I have managed to remain a virgin, although I had long ago been sensually depraved in another sense. I avoided women for two reasons: firstly, I was afraid of getting infected, and secondly, dreaming of a happy marriage, I wanted to keep my "purity" before it.

But it became more and more difficult, and when at the Telyak station<и>I met the driver's pretty daughter, and I immediately struck up an affair with her. Fortunately, Uncle Vyacheslav cooled my ardor in time, warning that, according to rumors, this girl was infected with syphilis.

In the Urals, I also fell in love with the "Kozochka", which walked along the edges of the most terrible cliffs, and with a lovely Jewess, the wife of an engineer, whom I met in Miass at an engineers' ball (142). I liked this Jewess of rare beauty because she looked, as I then imagined, to Anna Karenina. There was nothing typically Jewish about her, except for her large black eyes, which still look inquisitively at me.

Returning from the Urals trip to Yasnaya Polyana, I found in it the same family atmosphere that made it unbearable at times and was glad when the time came to leave for Moscow, where lectures began at my new faculty. At that time, a whole galaxy of famous professors shone on it with Klyuchevsky (143) and Vinogradov (144) at the head, and these lectures interested me so much that I no longer regretted the abandoned medicine. Near the university, I began to read a lot, following Russian and French literature with my father.

In the spring of 1891, I fell ill (145), but quickly recovered from the illness and, having made an effort on myself, passed a new university test, moving on to the third semester of the Faculty of Philology (146).

In the same year, in April, the father distributed all his property to his children and wife, dividing it into ten equal parts (147), and thus freed himself forever from material property, which was now a moral burden for him and contrary to his views and the whole doctrine.

This event was very important for the family and at the same time it showed even then how much the father contradicted himself and how much the worldly person was stronger than the spiritual one in him.

Firstly, if he considered property to be an evil, it was not necessary to transfer this evil to his wife and children, making them owners.

Secondly, if he denied power and laws, then it was not necessary, resorting to them, to make official acts.

Nevertheless, all of us and the father himself were very pleased.

The division took place in the Yasnaya Polyana House by common consent. I drew lots, according to which I got the old Tolstoy estate - "Nikolskoye-Vyazemskoye" in Chernsky district, which once belonged to my father's older brother, Nikolai Nikolayevich. But since this part of the property suited brother Serezha more than me, and I, in view of the possibility of being free, liked the other part that he got - a house in Moscow and land near the village of Bobrovka, Samara province, Serezha and I exchanged our lots to our mutual pleasure. He became a Chernsky landowner, and I became a Moscow landlord and Samara farmer (148).

Only brother Ilya fought for his unit, proving that he was offended. Perhaps this was true, and something else needed to be added to his estate "Grinevka" next to "Nikolsky" (149).

The Samara large estate of the father of the Buzuluk district, in which there were more than 5,000 acres, was given to the younger children - Andryusha, Misha and Sasha, and Yasnaya was divided in half between the youngest in the family, Vanechka, and his mother. The sisters Tanya and Masha received their parts, although Masha, in her Tolstoyan convictions, wanted to give up hers. Nevertheless, having married later, she accepted it (150).

In the same memorable year an event happened in my life that seemed to me at that time very significant. Under the pseudonym L. Lvov, I published my first two stories - one for children in children's magazine"Spring" under the title "Montecristo" (151), another - in the book of the magazine "Nedelya" under the title "Love" (152). My father approved the first one and praised it several times (153), my mother also wrote it in her diary (154) ... In St. Petersburg, this story was called a “pearl” (155).

The second story was noticed by our mutual friend A.F. Koni (156), although he did not know who was hiding under his signature.

I took this pseudonym, bearing too heavy a literary name, but later, agreeing with the opinion of Schopenhauer (157), I decided that it was dishonest to hide under a false name, and began to sign my full, no matter how difficult, name.

Chapter 9

Parents' quarrels. Bibikov farm and drought.

Heir Tsesarevich and Orenburg. Caucasus, Crimea and Odessa

In those years, I often willingly left Yasnaya, feeling the abnormal relationship between my parents, which darkened my life, and something wrong, even painful, in my father's views.

Scenes and disputes between father and mother did not stop and sometimes reached the point that the mother was looking for suicide, and the father suffered even more acutely from the contradictions between his life and teaching (158). When in those years he decided to announce in the newspapers that he was giving away all his religious-social and other writings written after 1881 to the common property (159), this desire met with a sharp rebuff from his mother, who considered this unfair. These works included both artistic things and some philosophical ones, which my mother treasured, and it was a shame for her to give the rights to them to the first publisher she met.

Then her father told her all sorts of troubles - that she was a stupid and greedy woman, and so upset her that she ran to the station to throw herself under the train.

We children did not then know all the intimate reasons and details of such scenes, yet they were hard to feel for us, and therefore, and also in order to improve my weakened health, in June 1891 (160) I was glad to leave again from Clear in order to first visit the koumiss in the Samara steppes at the Bibikov farm (161), then go down the Volga this time to Astrakhan, and from there drive along the Caspian Sea to Baku. I now wanted to see the Caucasus, the Caspian and Black Seas, and Odessa, and return home through Little Russia.

Aleksey Alekseevich Bibikov, married to a peasant woman Vasilisa (162), himself an old lordly soul, but a liberal and democrat, physically strong and handsome, with gray hair and a beard, an aquiline nose and bulging eyes, rented a large plot of government land on the border of Nikolaevsky and Buzuluk districts next to our steppe estate.

He had a bunch of wild and dirty children who had to be fed, and therefore in the summer he took koumiss, whom he placed somehow in his sheds and barns.

That year there was a terrible drought all over Russia. Bread perished on the vine, and in the Samara steppe, literally, "from ear to ear no human voice was heard." The black earth cracked so that cracks were formed, through which in places it was necessary to jump over. All wells and ponds dried up to the bottom, and an unprecedented famine was approaching. Bibikov, who knew the Samara peasants well, could not imagine how they would get through the winter.

In the villages, when I stopped at Gavrilovka or Patrovka, the peasants surrounded me, saying that their end had come. In these areas, the people live exclusively on bread. Crop failure - and he has neither food nor money. But such a drought as in 1891 has never been seen here before (163).

In the same summer, the Heir Tsesarevich Nikolai Alexandrovich passed through the Samara steppes, returning with his retinue from the city of Uralsk and heading further on his Far Eastern journey (164).

The village where he was to stay for the night (165) was fifty versts from the Bibikov farm, and I decided to go there to look at the future tsar, and maybe have the opportunity to be introduced to him. In the retinue was Prince Esper Ukhtomsky (166), a friend of Serezha's brother, who himself accidentally came to the farm these days to buy horses for his estate (167). Upon learning of the arrival of the Heir with his retinue, my brother also decided to go with me to meet with Ukhtomsky.

After the passage of the heir, we decided to go to Orenburg in order to buy horses there, at the "exchange yard".

When we arrived at the village where we were waiting for the Heir, I stood in the crowd of people near the village village church.

A cloud of black dust appeared in the distance, then the heads and arches of sweaty horses galloping furiously, and several troikas with bells rolled into the village and abruptly stopped near the little church. The heir was the first to jump out of his carriage. Passing by me on the porch of the church, he looked with surprise at my student uniform with gold buttons among the people and quickly entered the church.

When later brother Sergei saw Ukhtomsky, and I hinted to him that we would like to introduce ourselves to the Heir, the prince decisively rejected this proposal, saying that the Heir was too tired to still see new people.

This was my first negative impression of the environment of the Heir Nikolai Alexandrovich, and my hope of getting to know him and someday working with him for the benefit of Russia was immediately overshadowed by this.

We checked into a hotel and started the day with a tour of the famous mosque in the city. Our Bashkirian Nagim was especially interested in her, whom Seryozha took with him as a connoisseur of horses (168). Leaving the mosque, we noticed some strange people sitting here and there in the square watching us. We went to a free bench and sat down to rest. One of these strange, handsome gentlemen, cleanly dressed, sitting next to us, suddenly turned to brother Sergei and politely asked him why we had come to Orenburg.

“Throw bombs,” Seryozha thumped angrily, looking angrily at him from under his glasses.

The impression was extraordinary, as if a terrible bomb had really exploded.

There was a movement on the square, people rushed to run somewhere, and when we returned to the hotel, policemen were standing at the entrance and on the stairs, and our room was sealed.

They demanded that we sign an immediate departure from the city, which Seryozha gave, but I refused to give it, and we, without having time to see and buy horses, left for the station (169).

The worthy and handsome Nagim was especially upset, silently shaking his head, decorated with a skullcap embroidered with gilding.

- Well, is it possible, - he whispered, - that, that, that, that ...

My brother left for Russia, and, having reached Samara with him, I boarded a steamer bound for Astrakhan to continue my journey (170).

Coming out of the Astrakhan branches of the Volga into the open Caspian Sea, for the first time in my life I saw the expanse of the sea and experienced severe sea rolling.

In Baku, I was struck by the endless city of oil rigs and oil fountains, powerful and thick, noisily escaping from the depths of the earth. On the day of my arrival, a terrible fire was burning in one of the large fountains, and the smoke from it covered the entire sky with a black ominous veil. Millions died from one deliberate or careless spark.

After Baku, I was in Tiflis, Vladikavkaz, Pyatigorsk, Kislovodsk and Novorossiysk (171).

Forever white snow Caucasian Range with his Elbrus, forever noisy in the Terek gorges, clouds below the road, wild mountaineers in the wild and nearby are the same as everywhere else - Russian cities and Russian people - this is the Caucasus.

At the Kazbek station, where I reached on foot at night with Ossetian guides, since the Daryal Gorge was washed out by the flood and the message on the coachmen was interrupted, I met a little doctor who was spinning cigarettes and saying: “Omnia mea mea mecum porto”.

I told him that I was Tolstoy, but he did not believe me and called me "quasi - Tolstoy".

At night, when I was walking with guides through the Caucasus Mountains, we came across half-wild Ingush sitting around a fire. One of them stepped forward, impudently asking for a cigarette. But my Ossetian Christians did not even answer him and silently let me know that I should not stop, but move on.

In Pyatigorsk, I began to court a Cossack woman I liked, who made my bed in a hotel, but she cooled me down with contempt.

In Vladikavkaz, where I had friends in the Nizhny Novgorod Dragoon Regiment, I got to a military cavalry festival, and they stupidly made me drink white wine from silver cups that could not be put down, but had to be drunk to the bottom. At night I slept in a tent in the pouring rain and was sick.

Between Sevastopol and Odessa on a steamboat I met an old man, Anton Rubinstein, with his handsome head, and talked to him (172). He was on his way to see his old mother (173) and all the way, sitting alone on the deck, he hummed Glinka's romance: "Calm down, excitement of passion" (174).

I liked Odessa for its beautiful location and comparative culture. I met her Count Tolstoy, who enjoyed universal respect there (175). I regret not seeing him much. I did not understand then how joyful and important it is to meet members of one's kind. When you are young, you are always in a hurry to go somewhere, and I was especially in a hurry. Returning from my journey to Yasnaya, I indulged in my two passions: hunting (176) and love for Dasha (177).

The family was unhappy.

Her father's teachings and his own attitude towards life continued to poison her atmosphere.

Chapter 10

Hungry winter in the Samara steppes

It still seems to me like a terrible dream that hard winter, during which I helped the starving population, but I am grateful to fate for giving me the opportunity to see the depth of human suffering and alleviate them (178).

In the autumn of 1891, when I returned from Yasnaya to Moscow and again began to attend the university, all of Russia, as one person, spoke only of a terrible disaster, this time seizing almost all of its territory (179).

I described this year in separate articles published in the journal "Vestnik Evropy" (180) and later published as a separate book under the title - "In the hungry years" (181).

Here I will only briefly touch on it, as it has affected my personal life and thought.

In October, remembering the Samara fields, scorched by the sun, without a single ear, and having received a desperate letter from Bibikov (182), I decided to go to Samara to feed the starving and leave the university (183).

Father, although he was against charity, saying that charity without love is not valid, he nevertheless went to Begichevka, the estate of the Raevskys in the Ryazan province, to open people's canteens there (184).

But I acted independently without any desire to imitate him, but according to the personal dictates of my heart (185). This act almost cost me my life and was main reason my many years of illness after this winter, but I never repented of it.

Eighty thousand people were fed by our help, and, of course, we saved many unfortunate people from death amid terrible epidemics of typhus, diphtheria, scurvy and smallpox.

In the village of Patrovka, where I lived, dozens died every day, so that the priest did not have time to bury them. In clay huts, covered with snow above the roofs, on the earthen floor, sometimes five or six typhoid cases lay in a row, and among them already dead.

We had hospitals, doctors, nurses and orderlies, yet we felt almost helpless in the face of a terrible disaster.

Worked with me the most beautiful people, of which I have kept the most gratifying memory: P.I. Biryukov (186), Prince Peter D<митриевич>Dolgorukov, who brought with him two sanitary detachments (187), Ivan Alexandrovich Berger, manager of Yasnaya (188), two doctors - Gorbachev (189) and Tkachenko (190), orderlies and sisters (191).

Foreign journalists also came, among them - the Englishman Steveny (192) and the Swede Stadling (193) and two English Quakers (194).

By spring, almost all of our doctors and sisters had contracted typhus (195) and, finally, I also fell ill, although by some miracle I endured the whole disease on my feet (196). With forty degrees of heat, I got up every morning and dressed, and then worked all day. I remember this to explain my long illness that followed that winter.

I remember with horror one hungry family in the village of Patrovka, whose members, noseless, with red eyes and gaping wounds on their cheeks, were all infected with syphilis. They ate together from a common wooden cup, which we carried separately for them.

What about scurvy patients, apathetic and swollen, with loose teeth and dark blue spots on their legs and faces? ..

How can mother nature bring her children to such a state?

Only people are able to create living conditions in which such mutilation is possible.

But along with these horrors was the normal life of the region, in which there were both bright and joyful sides.

Religious life went on, and its influence on the population, apparently, grew not only from the side of rational Christian sects, especially the Molokans, to whose meetings and readings I went (197), but also from the side of the Orthodox Church.

When one of the poor peasants, whom we fed, once began to answer me with the words of the Sermon on the Mount, I asked him where he learned them, he replied that he had heard them in the Orthodox Church.

People treated me with big love and believed in me as in a saint.

Once, one of the Patrovsky peasant women almost dragged me by force to her hut and led me to a bench on which her son was lying in severe typhus. I asked her what she wanted from me.

“Just look, dear, look at him,” the woman replied.

When I recovered from typhus and again went out into the street, people said: “But how could you be sick? All the people prayed to God for you” (198).

Such manifestations of gratitude pleased and excited me, although I was physically overwhelmed. Nevertheless, in the spring I was so strong that I could ride around distant villages (199).

One day I came to a remote village in the Nikolaevsky district, where the local priest was instructed to oversee our canteens.

A widower of about forty, with a bald head, a gray beard and cunning dirty eyes, he received me very kindly in his cozy and clean house, where, to my great surprise, I found a beautiful young woman, whom at first I took for his daughter.

She was a local rural teacher who kept herself in the priest's house as a hostess.

When I was leaving, the peasants surrounded me on the porch and began to complain indignantly about their priest.

“They found me at the altar with a teacher—that’s the kind of priest we have!” Stopped many times. Defiled our church.

Even then, comparing the Orthodox Church with the rationalistic Russian sects, I saw how much higher spiritually the latter were and how people from the people who joined them and left Orthodoxy were more developed and healthier than the Orthodox vivus (live) and section (dissection).

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy is a great Russian writer, by origin - a count from a famous noble family. He was born on August 28, 1828 in the Yasnaya Polyana estate located in the Tula province, and died on October 7, 1910 at the Astapovo station.

Writer's childhood

Lev Nikolaevich was a representative of a large noble family, the fourth child in it. His mother, Princess Volkonskaya, died early. At this time, Tolstoy was not yet two years old, but he formed an idea of ​​\u200b\u200bhis parent from the stories of various family members. In the novel "War and Peace" the image of the mother is represented by Princess Marya Nikolaevna Bolkonskaya.

Leo Tolstoy's biography early years marked by another death. Because of her, the boy was left an orphan. The father of Leo Tolstoy, a participant in the war of 1812, like his mother, died early. This happened in 1837. At that time the boy was only nine years old. The brothers of Leo Tolstoy, he and his sister were transferred to the upbringing of T. A. Ergolskaya, a distant relative who had a future writer a huge impact. Childhood memories have always been the happiest for Lev Nikolaevich: family traditions and impressions from life in the estate became rich material for his works, reflected, in particular, in the autobiographical story "Childhood".

Studying at Kazan University

Leo Tolstoy's biography early years marked as such important event like studying at a university. When the future writer was thirteen years old, his family moved to Kazan, to the house of the children's guardian, a relative of Lev Nikolaevich P.I. Yushkova. In 1844, the future writer was enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy of Kazan University, after which he transferred to the Faculty of Law, where he studied for about two years: the young man did not arouse keen interest in studying, so he indulged himself with passion in various social entertainment. Having filed a letter of resignation in the spring of 1847, due to poor health and "domestic circumstances", Lev Nikolayevich left for Yasnaya Polyana with the intention of studying the full course of legal sciences and taking an external exam, as well as learning languages, "practical medicine", history, Agriculture, geographical statistics, painting, music and writing a dissertation.

Youth years

In the autumn of 1847, Tolstoy left for Moscow, and then for St. Petersburg in order to pass the candidate's exams at the university. During this period, his lifestyle often changed: he studied various subjects all day long, then he devoted himself to music, but wanted to start a career as an official, then he dreamed of becoming a cadet in a regiment. Religious moods that reached asceticism alternated with cards, carousing, trips to the gypsies. The biography of Leo Tolstoy in his youth is colored by the struggle with himself and introspection, reflected in the diary that the writer kept throughout his life. In the same period, interest in literature arose, the first artistic sketches appeared.

Participation in the war

In 1851, Nikolai, the elder brother of Lev Nikolaevich, an officer, persuaded Tolstoy to go to the Caucasus with him. Lev Nikolaevich lived for almost three years on the banks of the Terek, in a Cossack village, leaving for Vladikavkaz, Tiflis, Kizlyar, participating in hostilities (as a volunteer, and then was hired). The patriarchal simplicity of the life of the Cossacks and the Caucasian nature struck the writer with their contrast with the painful reflection of the representatives of an educated society and the life of the noble circle, gave extensive material for the story "Cossacks", written in the period from 1852 to 1863 on autobiographical material. The stories "Raid" (1853) and "Cutting down the forest" (1855) also reflected his Caucasian impressions. They left a mark in his story "Hadji Murad", written in the period from 1896 to 1904, published in 1912.

Returning to his homeland, Lev Nikolaevich wrote in his diary that he fell in love with this wild land, in which "war and freedom" are combined, things that are so opposite in their essence. Tolstoy in the Caucasus began to create his story "Childhood" and anonymously sent it to the journal "Contemporary". This work appeared on its pages in 1852 under the initials L.N. and, along with the later "Boyhood" (1852-1854) and "Youth" (1855-1857), made up the famous autobiographical trilogy. The creative debut immediately brought real recognition to Tolstoy.

Crimean campaign

In 1854, the writer went to Bucharest, to the Danube army, where the work and biography of Leo Tolstoy were further developed. However, soon the boring staff life forced him to transfer to the besieged Sevastopol, in Crimean army, where he was a battery commander, showing courage (awarded with medals and the order of St. Anna). Lev Nikolaevich during this period was captured by new literary plans and impressions. He began to write "Sevastopol stories", which were a great success. Some ideas that arose even at that time make it possible to guess in the artillery officer Tolstoy the Preacher late years: he dreamed of a new "religion of Christ", cleansed of mystery and faith, a "practical religion".

Petersburg and abroad

Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich arrived in St. Petersburg in November 1855 and immediately became a member of the Sovremennik circle (which included N. A. Nekrasov, A. N. Ostrovsky, I. S. Turgenev, I. A. Goncharov and others). He took part in the creation of the Literary Fund at that time, and at the same time became involved in the conflicts and disputes of writers, but he felt like a stranger in this environment, which he conveyed in "Confession" (1879-1882). Having retired, in the fall of 1856 the writer left for Yasnaya Polyana, and then, at the beginning of the next, in 1857, he went abroad, visiting Italy, France, Switzerland (impressions from visiting this country are described in the story "Lucerne"), and also visited Germany. In the same year, in the autumn, Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich returned first to Moscow, and then to Yasnaya Polyana.

Opening of a public school

Tolstoy in 1859 opened a school for the children of peasants in the village, and also helped set up more than twenty such educational institutions in the Krasnaya Polyana region. In order to get acquainted with the European experience in this area and apply it in practice, the writer Leo Tolstoy again went abroad, visited London (where he met with A. I. Herzen), Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium. However, European schools somewhat disappoint him, and he decides to create his own pedagogical system based on the freedom of the individual, publishes study guides and works on pedagogy, applies them in practice.

"War and Peace"

In September 1862, Lev Nikolaevich married Sofya Andreevna Bers, the 18-year-old daughter of a doctor, and immediately after the wedding he left Moscow for Yasnaya Polyana, where he devoted himself entirely to household chores and family life. However, already in 1863, he was again captured by a literary plan, this time creating a novel about the war, which was supposed to reflect Russian history. Leo Tolstoy was interested in the period of our country's struggle with Napoleon in the early 19th century.

In 1865, the first part of the work "War and Peace" was published in the Russian Messenger. The novel immediately drew a lot of responses. The subsequent parts provoked heated debates, in particular, the fatalistic philosophy of history developed by Tolstoy.

"Anna Karenina"

This work was created in the period from 1873 to 1877. Living in Yasnaya Polyana, continuing to educate peasant children and publish his pedagogical views, Lev Nikolaevich in the 70s worked on a work about the life of his contemporary high society, building his novel on the contrast of two storylines: the family drama of Anna Karenina and the domestic idyll of Konstantin Levin, close and psychological drawing, and by convictions, and by the way of life to the writer himself.

Tolstoy strove for an outward nonjudgmental tone of his work, thereby paving the way for a new style of the 80s, in particular, folk stories. The truth of peasant life and the meaning of the existence of representatives of the "educated class" - this is the range of questions that interested the writer. “Family thought” (according to Tolstoy, the main one in the novel) is translated into a social channel in his creation, and Levin’s self-disclosures, numerous and merciless, his thoughts about suicide are an illustration of what he experienced in the 1880s spiritual crisis author, matured while working on this novel.

1880s

In the 1880s, the work of Leo Tolstoy underwent a transformation. The upheaval in the mind of the writer was also reflected in his works, primarily in the experiences of the characters, in that spiritual insight that changes their lives. Such heroes occupy a central place in such works as "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (years of creation - 1884-1886), "Kreutzer Sonata" (a story written in 1887-1889), "Father Sergius" (1890-1898), drama "The Living Corpse" (left unfinished, begun in 1900), as well as the story "After the Ball" (1903).

Publicism of Tolstoy

Tolstoy's journalism reflects him emotional drama: depicting pictures of the idleness of the intelligentsia and social inequality, Lev Nikolaevich raised questions of faith and life before society and before himself, criticized the institutions of the state, going as far as denying art, science, marriage, court, and the achievements of civilization.

The new worldview is presented in "Confessions" (1884), in the articles "So what shall we do?", "On the famine", "What is art?","I can not be silent" and others. The ethical ideas of Christianity are understood in these works as the foundation of the brotherhood of man.

Within the framework of the new worldview and humanistic idea of ​​the teachings of Christ, Lev Nikolayevich opposed, in particular, the dogma of the church and criticized its rapprochement with the state, which led to the fact that he was officially excommunicated from the church in 1901. This caused a huge uproar.

Novel "Sunday"

Mine last novel Tolstoy wrote between 1889 and 1899. It embodies the whole range of problems that worried the writer during the years of the spiritual turning point. Dmitry Nekhlyudov, main character, is a person who is internally close to Tolstoy, who goes through the path of moral purification in the work, eventually leading him to comprehend the need for active goodness. The novel is built on a system of evaluative oppositions that reveal the unreasonable structure of society (the falsity social peace and the beauty of nature, the falsehood of an educated population and the truth of the peasant world).

last years of life

The life of Leo Tolstoy in recent years was not easy. The spiritual break turned into a break with his environment and family discord. Renunciation of possession private property, for example, caused discontent among the writer's family members, especially his wife. The personal drama experienced by Lev Nikolayevich was reflected in his diary entries.

In the autumn of 1910, at night, secretly from everyone, 82-year-old Leo Tolstoy, whose dates of life were presented in this article, accompanied only by his attending physician D.P. Makovitsky, left the estate. The journey turned out to be unbearable for him: on the way, the writer fell ill and was forced to disembark at the Astapovo railway station. In the house that belonged to her boss, Lev Nikolaevich spent the last week of his life. Reports about his health at that time were followed by the whole country. Tolstoy was buried in Yasnaya Polyana, his death caused a huge public outcry.

Many contemporaries arrived to say goodbye to this great Russian writer.