Reminiscences of Tolstoy Part 13

[Footnote 2: The instinct for lime, necessary to feed their bones, drives Russian children to nibble pieces of chalk or the whitewash off the wall. In this case the boy was running to one of the grown-ups in the house, and whom he called uncle, as Russian children call everybody uncle or aunt, to get a piece of the chalk that he had for writing on the blackboard. "Us," he said to some one when the boy was gone. Which of us would have expressed himself like that? You see, he did not say to "get" or to "break off," but to "bite off," which was right, because they did literally "bite" off the chalk from the lump with their teeth, and not break it off.]

[Footnote 3: About $3000.]

[Footnote 4: The zala is the chief room of a house, corresponding to the English drawing-room, but on a grand scale. The gostinaya--literally guest-room, usually translated as drawing-room--is a place for more intimate receptions. At Yasnaya Polyana meals were taken in the zala, but this is not the general Russian custom, houses being provided also with a stolovaya, or dining-room.]

[Footnote 5: Kaftan, a long coat of various cuts, including military and naval frock-coat, and the long gown worn by coachmen.]

[Footnote 6: Afanasyi Shens.h.i.+n, the poet, who adopted his mother's name, Fet, for a time, owing to official difficulties about his birth-certificate. An intimate friend of Tolstoy's.]

[Footnote 7: "Sovremennik," or "Contemporary Review," edited by the poet Mekrasof, was the rallying-place for the "men of the forties," the new school of realists. Ostrovsky is the dramatist; Gontcharof the novelist, author of "Oblomof"; Grigorovitch wrote tales about peasant life, and was the discoverer of Tchekhof's talent as a serious writer.]

[Footnote 8: The balks are the banks dividing the fields of different owners or crops. Hedges are not used for this purpose in Russia.]

[Footnote 9: Pazanki, tracks of a hare, name given to the last joint of the hind legs.]

[Footnote 10: A Moscow monthly, founded by Katkof, who somehow managed to edit both this and the daily "Moskovskiya Vyedomosti," on which "Uncle Kostya" worked at the same time.]

[Footnote 11: Dmitry. My father's brother Dmitry died in 1856; Nikolai died September 20, 1860.]

[Footnote 12: That is to say, his eyes went always on the straightest road to attain satisfaction for himself.]

[Footnote 13: Khamsvniki, a street in Moscow.]

[Footnote 14: Maria Mikhailovna, his wife.]

[Footnote 15: Tolstoy's sister. She became a nun after her husband's death and the marriage of her three daughters.]

[Footnote 16: Tolstoy was in the artillery, and commanded a battery in the Crimea.]

[Footnote 17: Fet, at whose house the quarrel took place, tells all about it in his memoirs. Tolstoy dogmatized about lady-like charity, apropos of Turgenieff's daughter. Turgenieff, in a fit of nerves, threatened to box his ears. Tolstoy challenged him to a duel, and Turgenieff apologized.]

[Footnote 18: Turgenieff was ten years older than Tolstoy.]

[Footnote 19: I had written to my father that my fiancee's mother would not let me marry for two years.]

[Footnote 20: My father took Griboyehof's PRINCESS MARYA ALEXEVNA as a type. The allusion here is to the last words of Griboyehof's famous comedy, "The Misfortune of Cleverness," "What will PRINCESS MARYA ALEXEVNA say?"]

[Footnote 21: Be loved by them.]

[Footnote 22: His wife's.]

[Footnote 23: A novelist, died 1895.]

[Footnote 24: One of the authors of "Junker Schmidt."]

[Footnote 25: The curious may be disposed to trace to some such "corrections beforehand" the remarkable discrepancy of style and matter which distinguishes some of Tolstoy's later works, published after his death by Mr. Tchertkof and his literary executors.]

[Footnote 26: Tolstoy's private secretary, arrested and banished in 1908.]

[Footnote 27: Five weeks after Leskof's death.]

[Footnote 28: The Countess Tolstoy.]