He scarcely knew his parents. Those delightful narratives, Childhood and Youth, have, therefore, but little authenticity; for the writer’s mother died when he was not yet two years of age. He, therefore, was unable to recall the beloved face which the little Nikolas Irtenieff evoked beyond a veil of tears: a face with a luminous smile, which radiated gladness...
“Ah! if in difficult moments I could only see that smile, I should not know what sorrow is.”
Yet she doubtless endowed him with her own absolute candour, her indifference to opinion, and her wonderful gift of relating tales of her own invention.
His father he did in some degree remember. His was a genial yet ironical spirit; a sad-eyed man who dwelt upon his estates, leading an independent, unambitious life. Tolstoy was nine years old when he lost him. His death caused him “for the first time to understand the bitter truth, and filled his soul with despair.” Here was the child’s earliest encounter with the spectre of terror; and henceforth a portion of his life was to be devoted to fighting the phantom, and a portion to its celebration, its transfiguration. The traces of this agony are marked by a few unforgettable touches in the final chapters of his Childhood, where his memories are transposed in the narrative of the death and burial of his mother.
Five children were left orphans in the old house at Yasnaya Polyana. There Leo Nikolayevitch was born, on the 28th of August, 1828, and there, eighty-two years later, he was to die. The youngest of the five was a girl: that Marie who in later years became a religious; it was with her that Tolstoy took refuge in dying, when he fled from home and family. Of the four sons, Sergius was charming and selfish, “sincere to a degree that I have never known equalled “; Dmitri was passionate, self-centred, introspective, and in later years, as a student, abandoned himself eagerly to the practices of religion; caring nothing for public opinion; fasting, seeking out the poor, sheltering the infirm; suddenly, with the same quality of violence, plunging into debauchery; then, tormented by remorse, ransoming a girl whom he had known in a public brothel, and receiving her into his home; finally dying of phthisis at the age of twenty-nine. Nikolas, the eldest, the favourite brother, had inherited his mother’s gift of imagination, her power of telling stories; ironical, nervous, and refined; in later years an officer in the Caucasus, where he formed the habit of a drunkard; a man, like his brother, full of Christian kindness, living in hovels, and sharing with the poor all that he possessed. Tourgenev said of him “that he put into practice that humble attitude towards life which his brother Leo was content to develop in theory.”
The orphans were cared for by two great-hearted women, one was their Aunt Tatiana, of whom Tolstoy said that u she had two virtues: serenity and love.”Her whole life was love; a devotion that never failed. “She made me understand the moral pleasure of loving.”