Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

as others did, and what was the result? I made a round of visits last year, to all my children except Peter. Well, what did I find? Were they happy? Still it was not possible to alter everything as he wanted. It was not for nothing that the first man fell and that sin came into the world.”

That was our last talk. “I have done a great deal of thinking in my loneliness,” she said; “indeed, I have done more than thinking; I have done some writing,” and she smiled at me with an air of embarrassment that gave her aged face a sweet, wistful expression. “I have put down my thoughts about all these things, or rather, the outcome of my experiences. I kept a diary before I was married, and afterwards too, for a time. But I gave it up later, when it all began, about ten years ago.” She did not say what had begun, but I knew that she meant the strained relations with her older children, the misunderstandings, and the contentions. She had had the entire control of the family estate after her husband’s death. “In looking through my possessions here I found my old diaries and reread them. There is a good deal in them that is silly, but there is a good deal that is good, and”⁠—again the same smile⁠—“instructive, too. I could not make up my mind at first whether to burn them or not, so I asked Father Nicodim, and he said, ‘Burn them.’ But that was all nonsense, you know. He could not understand. So I didn’t burn them.” How well I recognised her characteristic illogical consistency. She was obedient to Father Nicodim in most things, and had settled near the monastery to be under his guidance; but when she thought that his judgment was irrational, she did what seemed best to her.

“Not only did I not burn them, I wrote two more volumes. There is nothing to do here, so I wrote what I thought about it all, and when I die⁠—I don’t mean to die yet: my mother lived to be seventy, and my father eighty⁠—but when I do die these books are to be sent to you. You are to read them and to decide whether there is anything of real value in them, and if there is, you will let others share it. For no one seems to know. We go on suffering incessantly for our children, from before their birth until the time comes when they begin to insist on their rights. Think of the sleepless nights, the anxiety, the pain and the despair we go through. It would not matter if they really loved us, or even if they were happy. But they don’t, and they aren’t. I don’t care what you say, there is something wrong somewhere. That is what I have written about. You will read it when I am dead. But I have said enough about it.”

I promised, though I assured her that I did not expect to outlive her. We parted, and a month later I received the news of her death. Feeling faint at vespers, she had sat down on a little folding stool she carried with her, leaned her head against the wall, and died. It was some sort of heart trouble. I went to the funeral. All the children were there except Helen, who was abroad, and Mitia⁠—the one who had had scarlatina⁠—who could not go because he was in the Caucasus undergoing a cure for a serious illness.

It was an ostentatious funeral, and its display inspired the monks with more respect for her than they had felt while she was alive. Her belongings were divided up rather as keepsakes than with a view to any intrinsic value. In memory of our friendship, I received her malachite paperweight as well as six old leather-bound diaries and four new ordinary manuscript books in which, as she had said, she had written “about it all” while living near the monastery.

The book contains this remarkable woman’s touching and instructive story.

As I knew her and her husband throughout their life together, and watched the growth and development of her children from the time of their birth to the time of their marriage, I have been able to fill in any omission in her memoirs from my own reminiscences whenever it has seemed necessary to make the story more clear.

It is the 3rd of May 1857, and I begin a new diary. My old one covers a long period, but I did not write it properly; there was too much introspection, too much sentimentality and nonsense⁠—about being in love with Ivan Zakharovich⁠—the desire to be famous, or to enter a convent. I have just read over a good deal that was nice, written when I was fifteen or sixteen. But now it is quite different. I am twenty, and I really am in love and in a state of ecstasy. I do not worry myself with fears as to whether it is real, or whether this is what true love should be, or whether my love is inadequate; on the contrary, I am afraid that this is the real thing, fate; that I love far, far too much, and cannot help loving, and I am afraid. There is something serious and dignified about him⁠—his face, the sound of his voice, his cheery word⁠—in spite of the fact that he is always bright and laughing, and can turn everything round so that it becomes graceful, clever, and humorous. Everyone is amused, and so am I; yet there is something solemn about it. Our eyes meet; they pierce deep, deep down into the other’s, and go farther and farther. I am frightened, and I see that he is too.

But I will describe it all in order. He is the son of Anna Pavlovna Lutkovsky, and is related to the Obolenskys and the Mikashins; his eldest brother is the Lutkovsky who distinguished himself at the