| Chapter 1: | Life |
|
|
fondly from his early childhood. The eldest brother told his siblings that he had discovered a secret that would end anger, disease, and misery. Once the secret was known, all of humankind would be happy and would love one another. The secret, he told them, was written on a green twig buried in the nearby Zakaz forest. The children delightedly made their own little world from chairs and shawls in which to huddle together, awaiting the revelation. They called the game, Muraveinye bratya (“ant brothers”), a mishearing of “Moravskiye bratya” or Moravian Brethren, the pacifist sect with roots in the fifteenth century that emphasized how one lived, rather than what one believed, and that placed no limits on the modes of inspiration the Almighty may choose to use. In his later years, Tolstoy was to look back at this time:
At the age of eight, he was moved to Moscow to begin his education. The trip by coach over roads of packed snow took four days. His father died five months later, and the orphan came into the care of his father's sister, his Aunt Aline, the pious but impractical Countess Alexandra Osten-Saken. (The Count had tried to kill her shortly after their wedding and, while she was recovering in bed from the bullet wound, had tried to cut out her tongue with a razor. He was removed to an asylum and she gave birth to a stillborn baby, thereafter seeking consolation in prayer). 2 Eleven private tutors and a dancing master were employed to instruct the Tolstoy children. Less than a year after his father's death, economy dictated the return of the younger children to Yasnaya Polyana in four coaches, each pulled by three horses. Clear in these early years was young Leo's fierce independence of mind and his ardent search for