TOLSTOY REMEMBERED

Evening Star, Issue 23699, 5 October 1940, Page 4

TOLSTOY REMEMBERED

My earliest recollections of my grandmother before we moved to Moscow and lived there are three vivid ones. The first is the way in which she washed, making, with some special soap, wonderful bubbles on her hands which it seemed to me she alone could produce. . . I remember her white cap, her dressing jacket, her white old hands, and the immense bubbles that rose from them, and her white face with its satisfied smile. The second is of how she was drawn by my father’s footmen, without a horse, in a well-sprung yellow cabriolet (in which we used to go driving with our tutor, Fedor Ivanovich) to the Little Forest to gather nuts, of which there were a great many that year. I remember the thick, close-growing hazel bushes into the midst of which Petrushka and Matyusha_ (the footmen) drew the yellow cabriolet in which my grandmother was seated, and how they bent down to her the boughs with clusters of ripe nuts, some of which were already falling out of their husks. I remember how grandmother herself plucked them and put them into a bag, and how we children bent down some branches, as did Fedor Ivanovich, surprising us by his strength in bending down the thick ones. We gathered the nuts from all sides and when Fedor Ivanovich let go of them the bushes, slowly disentangling themselves, resumed their proper shape, and still others remained that we had overlooked. I remember how hot it was in the glades, how pleasant' was the coolness in the shade, and I remember the Eungent scent of the nut leaves and ow the maids who were with us cracked and ate_ the nuts, and how we ourselves unceasingly chewed the fresh, full, white kernels. We filled our pockets and skirts and the cabriolet, and grandmother took us in and praised us. How we returned home and what followed I do not at all remember.’ 1 only remember that grandmamma, the nut glade, the pungent scent of the leaves of the nut trees, the footmen, the yellow cabriolet, and the sun, all merged into one joyful impression. It seemed to me that as tne soap bubbles could only exist with grandmamma, so the thicket, the nuts, the sun, and the other things, could only be where grandmamma was, in the yellow cabriolet drawn by Petrushka and Matyusha. —From ‘ Recollections and Essays,’ by Leo Tolstoy.