WHEN children began to appear upon the scene, I could no longer devote myself entirely to my husband's service and to the constant sympathy with his work. We had many children: I bore thirteen. Ten of them I nursed myself, on principle and because I wanted to do so. I did not want to have wet-nurses. Owing to difficulties, I had to give up the principle on three occasions.

The children were growing up, and at that time we were of one mind with regard to their education. Leo Nikolaevich always himself engaged or found teachers and governesses for them. We parents taught them a great deal ourselves. Their father wanted to give them a most refined education, and to the boys an exclusively classical one. He learnt Greek himself with great labour in order to teach our eldest son, Serge, whom Leo Nikolaevich wanted to go to the university. "By that time Tanya will be grown up," he would say, "and we shall have to bring her out." I had to teach the children those subjects for which at the time there were no teachers, French, German, music, drawing, Russian literature, and even dancing. I knew very little English. Leo Nikolaevich, who also at that time had a poor knowledge of the language, began teaching it to me, and the first book which we read together in English was Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White.{38} Later on I easily acquired the language from the English governess whom we had for the children.

What we were chiefly concerned for in the education of the elder children, we obtained in 1881 when we moved to Moscow for the winter. Our eldest son, Serge, entered the university; our two other sons, Ilya and Leo, were sent by Leo Nikolaevich to L. I. Polivanov's classical school. He sent our daughter, Tanya, to the School of Painting and Sculpture, and he took her out to her first fancy-dress ball at the Olsufevs, as I was expecting my eighth child, Alesha, born on 31 October, and did not go out anywhere.

The move to Moscow and our life in the town turned out for both of us to be much more difficult than we could have anticipated. It is true that Leo Nikolaevich wrote to me from the Samara steppes, where he had gone for a kumiss cure: "If God will, I shall come and help you in your Moscow affairs willingly—you have only to give me the order"; but he was unable to carry out his word and he suddenly fell into despondency. Now that he was away from the country and nature, the impressions of town life, which he had forgotten, but which now came fresh to him, with its poverty on the one side and its luxury on the other, threw him into despondency, so that it often made me cry to see his moods which became much worse after he took part in the Moscow census. City life was for the first time presented, as it were, to his impressionable mind. But a return to our previous life was impossible, as the children's education had just been begun and had become the principal problem in our life. With sadness I had to look back and recognize that the nineteen years which we had spent continuously at Yasnaya Polyana were the happiest time of our lives. Besides the family and the copying for Leo Nikolaevich, what a number of good occupations I had in the country! Sick peasants used to come to me and, as far as I could, I used to treat them, and I was fond of the work. We planted apple trees and other trees and took pleasure in watching them grow. Once we had a school in the house and the village children were taught with ours as they grew up. But this did not last long, because we had to have our own children educated and we wanted to make their life as varied as possible. In the winter the whole family, including us parents, the tutors, and governesses, skated on the ice or tobogganed on the hills, and we cleared the snow from the pond ourselves. Every summer, for twenty years, the family of my sister, T. A. Kuzminskii, came to Yasnaya Polyana, and our life was so merry that the summer with us was a continuous holiday. There were various games like croquet and tennis, amateur theatricals, and other amusements like bathing, gathering mushrooms, boating, and driving, and besides these, the summer was devoted to music, and concerts arranged by the children and grown-ups, with piano, violin, and singing.

One summer all the young people worked on the land, and with Leo Nikolaevich gathered in the crops for the poor peasant women. Already at the same time, i. e. at the end of the 'seventies and beginning of the 'eighties, he felt in him that inner crisis, that desire for a different, more simple and spiritual, life which never left him until the end of his life. But there also came an end to the undisturbed happiness with which we had lived so many years. At the beginning of his spiritual crisis Leo Nikolaevich, as is well known, gave himself ardently to the orthodox faith and church. He saw himself united in it with the people. But gradually he left it, as his later writings show. It is difficult to trace the steps of this crisis in Leo Nikolaevich, and when it was exactly that I, with my intensely hardworking life and maternity, could no longer live so completely in my husband's intellectual interests, and he began to go further and further away from family life. We had already nine children, and the older they grew, the more complicated became the problem of their education and our relations to them. But their father was withdrawing himself more and more from them, and at last he refused altogether to have anything to do with the education of his children, on the plea that they were being taught according to principles and a religion which he considered harmful for them.

I was too weak to be able to solve the dilemma, and I was often driven to despair; I became ill, but saw no way out. What could be done? Go back to the country and give up everything? But Leo Nikolaevich did not seem to want that either. Against my will he bought a house in Moscow, and thus seemed to fix our life in the town.{39}

The difference between my husband and myself came about, not because I in my heart went away from him. I and my life remained the same as before. It was he who went away, not in his everyday life, but in his writings and his teachings as to how people should live. I felt myself unable to follow his teachings myself. But our personal relations were unaltered: we loved each other just as much, we found it just as difficult to be parted even temporarily, and, as an old and respected friend of our family expressed it in a letter to me: "Not a jot could be added to or taken from either of you without disturbing the wonderful harmony of your private spiritual life in the midst of the multitude of people surrounding you...."

Only rarely was our happiness clouded and the harmony broken by flashes of mutual jealousy, which had no ground at all. We were both hot-tempered and passionate; we could not bear the thought that anyone should alienate us. It was just this jealousy which woke up in me with terrible force when, towards the end of our life, I realized that my husband's soul, which had been open to me for so many years, had suddenly been closed to me irrevocably and without cause, while it was opened to an outsider, a stranger.{40}