“He used to get up at three o’clock in the morning, light his samovar, which was prepared for him the night before by his orderly, and begin his calculations. Urusov was trying to find a way of solving the different forms of equations. Later he went quite mad. Nothing came of his calculations. When, in the belief that he had arrived at a positive result, he decided to read a paper to the Mathematical Society, there was so awkward a silence after his paper was read that all felt ashamed.” ...
Tolstoi went on to say:
“I was always surprised that mathematicians who are so exact in their own science are so vague and inexact when they try to philosophize.”
Tolstoi also mentioned Professors Nekrasov and B., whom he knew personally. Tolstoi recollected how one evening he visited B.:
“His wife was an unpleasant woman. That evening she was decolletée, and, as is always the case on such occasions, one feels something superfluous, unnecessary—one doesn’t know where to look. Looking at her I remembered Turgenev’s story,—how in Paris he always bought himself a loaf in the morning, and the baker’s girl would hand it over to him with her bare arm, which was more like a leg than an arm.”
August 20th. A certain gentleman from Petersburg (I don’t remember his name) now and then sends books to Tolstoi. Recently he sent him the Sovremennik for 1852 in which Tolstoi’s Childhood was published. Tolstoi read the books with great interest and said that the Sovremennik was at that time a very interesting review. Marie Nikolaevna, who was on a visit to Yasnaya, described how she read Childhood for the first time. She lived then with her husband in the country, in the Chernsky district of the Tula province, and Turgenev used to come to visit them fairly often. Her brother Sergey Nikolaevich also lived there. During one visit Turgenev read them the MS. of his Rudin. Next time he brought a number of the Sovremennik and said to them:
“There is a wonderful new writer; a remarkable work by him is published here, Childhood”; and he began to read it aloud.
From the very first words Marie Nikolaevna and Sergey Nikolaevna were amazed:
“But he is describing us! Who is he?”
“At first we did not think of Levochka,” Marie Nikolaevna went on. “He was in debt and had been sent to the Caucasus. We were rather inclined to think that our brother Nikolay had written Childhood.”