1841
In the autumn of that year the whole family moved to Moscow, returning to Yásnaya for the following summer. The next autumn their guardian, the kind good Countess Alexandra Osten-Saken, died in the Convent or 'Hermitage' founded by Óptin (a robber chief of the fourteenth century) in the Government of Kaloúga, to which she had retired.
After her death her sister, Pelagéya Ilýnishna Úshkof, became their guardian. She was the wife of a Kazán landowner. Aunty Tatiána and she were not on friendly terms; there was no open quarrel between them, but V. I. Úshkof (Pelagéya's husband) had been a suitor for Tatiána's hand in his youth, and had been refused. Pelagéya could not forgive her husband's old love for Tatiána.
The change of guardianship led to the removal of the family to Kazán, and to the children being separated from Aunty Tatiána, much to her grief.
The books which up to the age of fourteen, when he went to Kazán, had most influenced Tolstoy were, he tells us, the Story of Joseph from the Bible, the Forty Thieves and Prince Kamaralzaman from the Arabian Nights, various Russian folk-legends, Poúshkin's Tales and his poem Napoleon, and The Black Hen by Pogorélsky. The influence the story of Joseph had on him, he says, was 'immense.'
In his aptitude for abstract speculation, as in other respects, the boy was truly father to the man; and in a passage, certainly autobiographical, in Boyhood, he says:
It will hardly be believed what were the favourite and most common subjects of my reflections in my boyhood—so incompatible were they with my age and situation. But in my opinion incompatibility between a man's position and his moral activity is the surest sign of truth....
At one time the thought occurred to me that happiness does not depend on external causes, but on our relation to them; and that a man accustomed to bear suffering cannot be unhappy. To accustom myself therefore to endurance, I would hold Tatíshef's dictionaries in my outstretched hand for five minutes at a time, though it caused me terrible pain; or I would go to the lumber room and flog myself on my bare back with a cord so severely that tears started to my eyes.
At another time suddenly remembering that death awaits me every hour and every minute, I decided (wondering why people had not understood this before) that man can only be happy by enjoying the present and not thinking of the future; and for three days, under the influence of this thought, I abandoned my lessons, and did nothing but lie on my bed and enjoy myself, reading a novel and eating honey-gingerbreads, on which I spent my last coins....
But no philosophic current swayed me so much as scepticism, which at one time brought me to the verge of insanity. I imagined that except myself no one and nothing existed in the world, that objects are not objects but apparitions, appearing only when I pay attention to them and disappearing as soon as I cease to think of them. In a word, I coincided with Schelling in the conviction that what exists is not objects, but only my relation to them. There were moments in which under the influence of this fixed idea, I reached such a stage of absurdity that I glanced quickly round hoping to catch Nothingness by surprise, there where I was not.
The philosophical discoveries I made greatly flattered my vanity: I often imagined myself a great man, discovering new truths for the benefit of humanity, and I looked on other mortals with a proud consciousness of my own dignity; yet, strange to say, when I came in contact with these mortals I grew timid before each of them. The higher I stood in my own opinion the less was I able to show any consciousness of my own dignity before others, or even to avoid being ashamed of every word or movement of my own—even the simplest.
At the time of the move to Kazán, a serf lad of about his own age was presented to each of the young Tolstoys to attend on him. Alexis, the one given to Leo Tolstoy, remained in his service all his life, and died at Yásnaya a few years ago.