Rebels and Reformers: Biographies for Young People

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby; Dorothea Ponsonby

As to the boots which Tolstoy made, a man to whom he had given a pair and who had worn them, was asked whether they were well made. “Couldn’t be worse,” was his reply.

Now for a time the whole Tolstoy family and their friends were filled with this enthusiasm for outdoor work. They rose early, and in company with the peasants the Tolstoy children and their mother, in a Russian dress, uncles, aunts, and even grandmothers, mowed the grass and strove to outdo the other. They had no theories about it, but simply found it a change and a pleasant satisfactory way of taking exercise.

All sorts of people now made pilgrimages to Yasnaya, to learn how to live, for Tolstoy’s fame as a teacher had begun to go about the land. Rich aristocrats wanted to throw away their gold and do the housework, and a governess of the Tolstoys, who has written rather malicious though amusing accounts of Tolstoy’s life at this time, describes enthusiastic ladies who came to Yasnaya and manured the fields in white dressing jackets! Tolstoy suffered from the silliness of some of his followers, and once sadly said he supposed he should be known through them and their eccentricities. There is a good deal of truth in the saying that a man’s admirers are sometimes his worst enemies.

Tolstoy gave up writing novels, and wrote only one more, “Resurrection,” quite at the end of his life. This was written with a great moral purpose, and is a serious and terrible book. His earlier novels he now referred to as “wordy rubbish”; he hated them, as he felt they were frivolous and could only be interesting to the upper classes. He wrote, however, a great many books on life, conduct, and religion, and children’s stories. They were printed very cheaply and taken round by pedlars. The peasants read and loved these books, and they seemed to penetrate right into the heart of Russia. They were written simply, and the peasants understood them. Tolstoy was very happy that he had been able to help and please the poor people.

Now, preaching as Tolstoy did against property and the extraordinarily unfair system which allows one man to have a thousand acres and another not even a foot, he could not satisfy himself until he had got rid of his own property; so difficulties arose with his family. His wife would not have felt so strongly about it, no doubt, if she had had only herself to think of; but it is difficult for a mother to believe that her children will be happier and better without money and possessions; she did not want to see her children impoverished. Tolstoy thought a mother’s love was selfish, and often writes about it in this sense.

Countess Tolstoy had been upset when her husband gave up writing novels, for they brought in a lot of money; and now, with their largely increased family, their income, instead of becoming more, became less. Tolstoy, in a letter to his wife on this subject, says:

... but I cannot help repeating that our happiness or unhappiness cannot in the least depend on whether we lose or acquire something, but only what we ourselves are. Now if we left Kostenka (one of their children) a million, would he be happier?... What our life together is, with our joys and sorrows, will appear to our children real life, but neither languages, nor diplomas, nor society, and still less money, make our happiness or unhappiness, and therefore the question how much our income shrinks cannot occupy me.

Tolstoy finally satisfied himself by giving up his estates to his family. The house itself he left to the youngest, Ivan. This was a tradition in the family, Tolstoy, as his mother’s youngest son, having inherited Yasnaya Polyana.

This little boy, who was born when Tolstoy was quite old, promised to be very remarkable, and his father took more interest in him than any of his other children. The child Ivan understood things just as his father did. When one day his mother said to him, “Ivan, Yasnaya is yours,” he was very angry and stamped his foot passionately, crying “Don’t say that Yasnaya Polyana is mine! everything is everyone else’s.” The child died when he was seven, and it was a most bitter grief to Tolstoy. But Masha, his second daughter, was a comfort to him; she took her father’s side when she was only fifteen, and though she was very delicate, she used all the strength she had in working for the poor, looking after the peasants’ wives and doing their work for them when they were ill, minding the children and cleaning and cooking.

Many people blame Countess Tolstoy for not seeing eye to eye with her husband, but I think it would have been a very great deal to expect of any woman, that she should discard all the habits of a lifetime and renounce everything she had been accustomed to, to change her way of living and of bringing up her children. She describes her feelings very well in a letter to her sister, saying that her husband is a leader, one who goes ahead of the crowd pointing the way men should go. “But I am the crowd,” she says; “I live in its current, and see the light of the lamp which every leader, and Leo of course, carries, and I acknowledge it to be the light. But I cannot go faster; I am held by the crowd and by my surroundings and habits.”