Our first governesses were German; we were taught French first by mother, then by governesses, and later by the French lecturer of the university. We were taught the Russian language and science by university students. One of them tried in his own way to develop my mind and to make me a believer in extreme materialism; he used to lend me Blüchner and Feuerbach, suggested that there was no God and that religion was an obsolete superstition. At first I was fascinated by the simplicity of the atomic explanation and the reduction of everything in the world to the correlations of atoms, but I soon felt the want of the ordinary orthodox faith and church, and I gave up materialism for ever.
Up to the time of the examinations we daughters were educated at home. At the age of sixteen I went in for the private teacher’s examination at the Moscow university, taking Russian and French as my principal subjects. The examiners were the well-known professors, Tikhonravov, Ilovaiskii, Davidov, Father Sergievskii, and M. Paquaut. It was an interesting time. I was working with a friend, the daughter of the Inspector of the University, and therefore moved in university circles, among intelligent professors and students. It was the beginning of the ‘sixties, a time of intellectual ferment. The abolition of serfdom had just been announced; every one was discussing it, and we young people were enthusiastic for the great event. We used to meet, discuss, and enjoy ourselves.
At that time a new type had just appeared in life and in literature; there was the new breath of nihilism among the young. I remember how at a large party, when professors and students were present, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons was read aloud, and Bazarov seemed to us to represent a strange type, something new, something which contained a promise for the future.
I was not a good student, always concentrating exclusively upon the subject which I liked. For instance, I liked literature very much. I was carried away by Russian literature and read a great many books, getting the oldest books and manuscripts from the university library, beginning with the chronicles and ending with the latest Russian writers.
I was fascinated and surprised that the Russian tongue should have developed out of the feeble beginnings in monastic writings into the language of Pushkin. It was like the growth of a living creature.
In my youth Tolstoy’s Childhood and Dickens’s David Copperfield made the greatest impression on me. I copied out and learnt by heart passages in Childhood which I particularly liked, for instance: “Will one ever get back the freshness, the freedom from care, the desire for love, and the power of belief which one possessed in childhood?— “ When I finished David Copperfield, I cried as though I were being separated from a close friend. I did not like studying history from the text-books; in mathematics I only liked algebra, and that, owing to a complete lack of mathematical gifts, I soon forgot.
I was successful in the university examinations; in both Russian and French I received the mark “excellent,” and I was given a diploma of which I was very proud. Later, I remember, I was pleased at hearing Professor Tikhonravov praise my essay on “Music” to my husband; he added: “That is just the wife you need. She has a great flair for literature; in the examination her essay was the best of the year.”
Soon after the examination I began writing a story, taking as the heroines myself and my sister Tanya, and calling her Natasha. Leo Tolstoy also called the heroine in his War and Peace Natasha. He read my story some time before our marriage and wrote of it in his diary: “What force of truth and simplicity.” Before my marriage I burnt the story and also my diaries, written since my eleventh year, and other youthful writings, which I much regret.
Of music and drawing I learnt little; I did not have enough time, though throughout my life I have loved all the arts and have more than once returned to them, using the little leisure left to me from a life which, in my girlhood and particularly during my marriage, was always busy and hardworking.
III
COUNT LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY had known my mother from his childhood and was a friend of hers, though he was two and a half years younger. Now and then on his way to Moscow he used to pay a visit to our family. His father, Count Nikolai Ilitch Tolstoy was very friendly with my grandfather, Alexander Mikhailovich Islenev, and they used to visit each other at the village Krasnoye and the hamlet Yasnaya Polyana. In August, 1862, my mother took us girls to see our grandfather at the village of Ivitsi in Odoevski, and on our way we stopped at Yasnaya Polyana which my mother had not seen since she was a child; at the time my mother’s greatest friend, Marie Nikolaevna Tolstoy, was staying there, having just returned from Algiers.
On our way back Leo Nikolaevich accompanied us as far as Moscow, and he used to come and see us almost daily at our country-house in Pokrovskoye, and afterwards in Moscow. On the evening of 16 September he handed me a written proposal of marriage. Up to that time no one knew the object of his visits. There was a painful struggle going on in his soul. In his diary at the time he wrote, for instance:
12 Sept. 1862.
I am in love, as I did not think it was possible to be in love.
I am a madman; I’ll shoot myself, if it goes on like this. They had an evening party; she is charming in everything….
13 Sept. 1862.
To-morrow as soon as I get up, I shall go and tell everything or shoot myself….
I accepted Leo Nikolaevich and our engagement lasted only one week. On 23 September we were married in the royal church of the Nativity of Our Lady, and immediately afterwards left for Yasnaya Polyana in a new carriage with a team of six horses and a postillion. We were accompanied by Alexei Stepanovich, Leo Nikolaevich’s devoted servant, and the old maid-servant, Varvara.
After coming to Yasnaya Polyana, we decided to settle down there with Aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna Ergolskii. From the very first I assisted my husband in the management of the house and estate, and in copying out his writings.
After the first days of our married life had passed, Leo Nikolaevich realized that besides his happiness he needed activity and work. In his diary of December, 1862, he wrote: “I feel the force of the need to write.” That force was a great one, creating a great work which made the first years of our married life bright with joy and happiness.
Soon after our marriage Leo Nikolaevich finished Polikushka, finally completed The Cossacks and gave it to Katkov’s Russkii Vyestnik. He then began to work on the Decembrists whose fate and activity interested him a great deal. When he began to write about that period, he considered it necessary to relate who they were, to describe their origin and previous history, and so to go back from 1825 to 1805. He became dissatisfied with the Decembrists, but The Year 1805 served as a beginning for War and Peace and was published in Russkii Vyestnik. This work, which Leo Nikolaevich did not like to be called a novel, he wrote with pleasure, assiduously, and it filled our life with a living interest.
In 1864 a good deal of it was already written, and Leo Nikolaevich often read aloud to me and to our two cousins, Varya and Lise, the daughters of Marie Nikolaevna Tolstoy, the charming passages as soon as he had written them. In the same year he read a few chapters to friends and to two literary men, Zhemchuzhnikov and Aksakov, in Moscow, and they were in raptures over it. Generally Leo Nikolaevich read extraordinarily well, unless he was very excited, and I remember how pleasant it was in Yasnaya Polyana to listen to him reading Molière’s comedies, when he had not anything new from War and Peace.
During the first years at Yasnaya Polyana we lived a very retired life. I could not recall anything of importance during that time in the life of the people, society, or State, because everything passed us by; we lived the whole time in the country, we followed nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing — it did not interest us. I desired nothing else but to live with the characters of War and Peace; I loved them and watched the life of each of them develop as though they were living beings. It was a full life and an unusually happy one, with our mutual love, our children, and, above all, that great work, beloved by me and later by the whole world, the work of my husband. I had no other desires.
Only at times in the evenings, when we had put the children to bed and sent off the MSS. or corrected proofs to Moscow, as a recreation we would sit down at the piano and till late at night play duets. Leo Nikolaevich was particularly fond of Haydn’s and Mozart’s symphonies. At that time I played rather badly, but I tried very hard to improve. Leo Nikolaevich too, it was clear, was satisfied with his fate.
In 1864 he wrote in a letter to my brother: “It is as though our honeymoon had only just begun.” And again: “I think that only one in a million is as lucky as I am.”
