MY father and mother had a large family, and I was their second daughter.{10} My father had, besides his government posts, a very large medical practice and often overworked. He tried to give us the best education and surrounded us with all the comforts of life. My mother did the same, but she also instilled into us the idea that, as we had no fortune at all, and the family was large, we must prepare ourselves in order to earn our own livings. Besides learning our own lessons we had to teach our younger brothers, do sewing, embroidering, and housekeeping, and later on prepare for the examination of a private teacher.

Our first governesses were German; we were taught French first by mother, then by governesses, and later by the French lecturer of the university. We were taught the Russian language and science by university students. One of them tried in his own way to develop my mind and to make me a believer in extreme materialism; he used to lend me BlÜchner and Feuerbach, suggested that there was no God and that religion was an obsolete superstition. At first I was fascinated by the simplicity of the atomic explanation and the reduction of everything in the world to the correlations of atoms, but I soon felt the want of the ordinary orthodox faith and church, and I gave up materialism for ever.

Up to the time of the examinations we daughters were educated at home. At the age of sixteen I went in for the private teacher's examination at the Moscow university, taking Russian and French as my principal subjects. The examiners were the well-known professors, Tikhonravov, Ilovaiskii, Davidov,{11} Father Sergievskii,{12} and M. Paquaut. It was an interesting time. I was working with a friend, the daughter of the Inspector of the University, and therefore moved in university circles, among intelligent professors and students. It was the beginning of the 'sixties, a time of intellectual ferment. The abolition of serfdom had just been announced; every one was discussing it, and we young people were enthusiastic for the great event. We used to meet, discuss, and enjoy ourselves.

At that time a new type had just appeared in life and in literature; there was the new breath of nihilism among the young. I remember how at a large party, when professors and students were present, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons was read aloud, and Bazarov seemed to us to represent a strange type, something new, something which contained a promise for the future.

I was not a good student, always concentrating exclusively upon the subject which I liked. For instance, I liked literature very much. I was carried away by Russian literature and read a great many books, getting the oldest books and manuscripts from the university library, beginning with the chronicles and ending with the latest Russian writers. I was fascinated and surprised that the Russian tongue should have developed out of the feeble beginnings in monastic writings into the language of Pushkin. It was like the growth of a living creature.

In my youth Tolstoy's Childhood and Dickens's David Copperfield made the greatest impression on me. I copied out and learnt by heart passages in Childhood which I particularly liked, for instance: "Will one ever get back the freshness, the freedom from care, the desire for love, and the power of belief which one possessed in childhood?—" When I finished David Copperfield, I cried as though I were being separated from a close friend. I did not like studying history from the text-books; in mathematics I only liked algebra, and that, owing to a complete lack of mathematical gifts, I soon forgot.

I was successful in the university examinations; in both Russian and French I received the mark "excellent," and I was given a diploma of which I was very proud. Later, I remember, I was pleased at hearing Professor Tikhonravov praise my essay on "Music" to my husband; he added: "That is just the wife you need. She has a great flair for literature; in the examination her essay was the best of the year."

Soon after the examination I began writing a story, taking as the heroines myself and my sister Tanya, and calling her Natasha. Leo Tolstoy also called the heroine in his War and Peace Natasha.{13} He read my story{14} some time before our marriage and wrote of it in his diary: "What force of truth and simplicity." Before my marriage I burnt the story and also my diaries, written since my eleventh year, and other youthful writings, which I much regret.

Of music and drawing I learnt little; I did not have enough time, though throughout my life I have loved all the arts and have more than once returned to them, using the little leisure left to me from a life which, in my girlhood and particularly during my marriage, was always busy and hardworking.