Reminiscences of Tolstoy, by His Son






FOOTNOTES:

1 (return)
[ The name we gave to the stone annex.]

2 (return)
[ 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.]

3 (return)
[ About $3000.]

4 (return)
[ 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.]

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

6 (return)
[ Afanasyi Shenshin, 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.]

7 (return)
[ "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.]

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

9 (return)
[ Pazanki, tracks of a hare, name given to the last joint of the hind legs.]

10 (return)
[ 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.]

11 (return)
[ Dmitry. My father's brother Dmitry died in 1856; Nikolai died September 20, 1860.]

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

13 (return)
[ Khamsvniki, a street in Moscow.]

14 (return)
[ Maria Mikhailovna, his wife.]

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

16 (return)
[ Tolstoy was in the artillery, and commanded a battery in the Crimea.]

17 (return)
[ 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.]

18 (return)
[ Turgenieff was ten years older than Tolstoy.]

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

20 (return)
[ 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?"]

21 (return)
[ Be loved by them.]

22 (return)
[ His wife's.]

23 (return)
[ A novelist, died 1895.]

24 (return)
[ One of the authors of "Junker Schmidt."]

25 (return)
[ 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.]

26 (return)
[ Tolstoy's private secretary, arrested and banished in 1908.]

27 (return)
[ Five weeks after Leskof's death.]

28 (return)
[ The Countess Tolstoy.]



All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg