Sick peasants used to come to me and, as far as I could, I used to treat them, and I was fond of the work. We planted apple trees and other trees and took pleasure in watching them grow. Once we had a school in the house and the village children were taught with ours as they grew up. But this did not last long, because we had to have our own children educated and we wanted to make their life as varied as possible. In the winter the whole family, including us parents, the tutors, and governesses, skated on the ice or tobogganed on the hills, and we cleared the snow from the pond ourselves. Every summer, for twenty years, the family of my sister, T. A. Kuzminskii, came to Yasnaya Polyana, and our life was so merry that the summer with us was a continuous holiday. There were various games like croquet and tennis, amateur theatricals, and other amusements like bathing, gathering mushrooms, boating, and driving, and besides these, the summer was devoted to music, and concerts arranged by the children and grown-ups, with piano, violin, and singing.
One summer all the young people worked on the land, and with Leo Nikolaevich gathered in the crops for the poor peasant women. Already at the same time, i. e. at the end of the ‘seventies and beginning of the ‘eighties, he felt in him that inner crisis, that desire for a different, more simple and spiritual, life which never left him until the end of his life. But there also came an end to the undisturbed happiness with which we had lived so many years. At the beginning of his spiritual crisis Leo Nikolaevich, as is well known, gave himself ardently to the orthodox faith and church. He saw himself united in it with the people. But gradually he left it, as his later writings show. It is difficult to trace the steps of this crisis in Leo Nikolaevich, and when it was exactly that I, with my intensely hardworking life and maternity, could no longer live so completely in my husband’s intellectual interests, and he began to go further and further away from family life. We had already nine children, and the older they grew, the more complicated became the problem of their education and our relations to them. But their father was withdrawing himself more and more from them, and at last he refused altogether to have anything to do with the education of his children, on the plea that they were being taught according to principles and a religion which he considered harmful for them.
I was too weak to be able to solve the dilemma, and I was often driven to despair; I became ill, but saw no way out. What could be done? Go back to the country and give up everything? But Leo Nikolaevich did not seem to want that either. Against my will he bought a house in Moscow, and thus seemed to fix our life in the town.
The difference between my husband and myself came about, not because I in my heart went away from him. I and my life remained the same as before. It was he who went away, not in his everyday life, but in his writings and his teachings as to how people should live. I felt myself unable to follow his teachings myself. But our personal relations were unaltered: we loved each other just as much, we found it just as difficult to be parted even temporarily, and, as an old and respected friend of our family expressed it in a letter to me: “Not a jot could be added to or taken from either of you without disturbing the wonderful harmony of your private spiritual life in the midst of the multitude of people surrounding you….”
Only rarely was our happiness clouded and the harmony broken by flashes of mutual jealousy, which had no ground at all. We were both hot-tempered and passionate; we could not bear the thought that anyone should alienate us. It was just this jealousy which woke up in me with terrible force when, towards the end of our life, I realized that my husband’s soul, which had been open to me for so many years, had suddenly been closed to me irrevocably and without cause, while it was opened to an outsider, a stranger.
VI
IN FOUR YEARS we had suffered five losses in the family. The two aunts died, in 1874 Tatyana Alexandrovna Ergolskii, and in 1875 Pelageya Ilinishna Yushkov. Also three of our young children died; I caught whooping-cough from them, and at the same time became ill with peritonitis which brought on child-birth prematurely and I was on the point of death.
Whether these events influenced Leo Nikolaevich or whether there were other causes, his discontent with life and his seeking for truth became acute. Everyone knows from his Confession and other works that he even contemplated hanging himself, when he did not find satisfaction in his seeking. I could not feel as happy as before, when my husband, though without saying it frankly, threatened to take his life, as later he threatened to go away from his family.
It was difficult for me to discover the causes of his despair or to induce myself to believe in them. Our family lived its normal, good life, but it no longer satisfied him; he was looking for the meaning of life in something different; he was seeking for belief in God, he always shuddered at the thought of death, and he could not find that which might comfort him and reconcile him with it. At one time he would speak to Count Bobrinsky of the teaching of Radstock, at another to Prince S. S. Urusov of the orthodox faith and church, at another with pilgrims and sectaries, and later with bishops, monks, and priests. But nobody and nothing satisfied Leo Nikolaevich or put his mind at rest. A spirit which rejected the existing religions, the progress, science, art, family, everything which mankind had evolved in centuries, had been growing stronger and stronger in Leo Nikolaevich, and he was becoming gloomier and gloomier.
It was as though his inner eye was turned only to evil and suffering, as though all that was joyful, beautiful, and good had disappeared. I did not know how to live with such views; I was alarmed, frightened, grieved. But with nine children I could not, like a weather-cock, turn in the ever changing direction of my husband’s spiritual going away. With him it was a passionate, sincere seeking; with me it would have been a silly imitation, positively harmful to the family. Besides, in my innermost heart and beliefs I did not wish to leave the church to which from my childhood I had always turned in prayer. Leo Nikolaevich was himself for nearly two years at the beginning of his seeking extremely orthodox and observed all rituals and feasts. At the time the family also followed his example. When exactly we parted from him and over what, I do not know, I cannot remember.
Leo Nikolaevich’s denial of the church and orthodoxy had a sharp contrast in his recognition of the efficacy and wisdom of Christ’s teaching, which he considered incompatible with the doctrine of the church. Personally I could have no difference with him regarding the Gospel, since I considered the Gospel to be the foundation of the orthodox faith. When he accepted Christ’s teaching and tried to live in accordance with the Gospel, Leo Nikolaevich began to suffer through our apparently luxurious mode of life, which I could not alter. I simply did not understand why I should alter it, nor could I alter conditions which had not been created by ourselves.
If I had given away all my fortune at my husband’s desire (I don’t know to whom), if I had been left in poverty with nine children, I should have had to work for the family — to feed, do the sewing for, wash, bring up my children without education. Leo Nikolaevich, by vocation and inclination, could have done nothing else but write. He was always rushing off from Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana; he lived alone there, read, wrote, and thought out his work. I bore these partings from him with difficulty, but I considered them necessary for my husband’s intellectual work and peace of mind.
In my turn, as I grew older, the external and internal complexity of life made me look seriously into its demands, and again, as in my early youth, I turned to philosophy, to the wisdom of the thinkers who had preceded us. At that time, about 1881 or 1882, Prince Leonid Dmitrievich Urusov, an intimate friend who often visited us and who was Deputy Governor of the Tula Province, translated into Russian The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and brought us the book to read.
The thoughts of that royal sage produced a great impression on me. Later Prince Urusov gave me the works of Seneca in a French translation. The brilliant style and
