Word: tolstoys
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...police station held the telephone several inches from his ear. A Russian-it sounded as if the caller were being flayed with a dull cabbage scraper-was on the other end of the line. The Russian was speaking from Reed Farm, a 70-acre estate operated by Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, youngest daughter of famed Russian Author Leo Tolstoy. A woman, the Russian cried, had been stolen...
Kerosene & Garbage. For many years after the marriage, Tatyana visited her sister and brother-in-law at Tolstoy's estate, where she saw the still unchanneled "creative enthusiasm of a genius" sprouting wildly in all directions. Sometimes it was cabbages and bees; then it was Japanese pigs ("What snouts, what eccentricity of breed!" cried Tolstoy rapturously) -and so it went, taking in fir trees, coffee, chicory, homemade vodka, homemade butter...
...Tolstoy edited and published a household magazine, wrote a play for the family, and once, during his courtship, even an opera ("You have to invent [the words] yourselves," he told the household gravely: "only see ... that they sound Italian, and, most important, that nobody understands them"). He loved his school, where he personally taught the children of his farm hands; but most other forms of "progress" horrified him-e.g., the novelty of using kerosene in lamps instead of good old fat, the creation of a Russian parliament ("perfectly absurd"), colleges and careers for women (except where "help is needed...
...Small Beginning. A happy, prosperous father and farmer, Tolstoy at 35 seemed destined to end up merely as an eccentric squire. But, increasingly, wrote Tatyana, "the question 'What is all this for?' began to torment him." Spells of rage and self-reproach interrupted "an almost bourgeois happiness." He had already published several short stories and novelettes (The Cossacks) and a book of reminiscences (Childhood, Boyhood & Youth); now he yearned for what he called "leisurely work de longue haleine [of a long-winded kind...
...something immodest" in hearing them. In the winter of 1864 he nervously read the beginning of the novel, War and Peace, aloud to a few friends; soon after, the first section appeared in the magazine Russky Vestnik, under the title 1805. "[It] still seems a little weak," said Author Tolstoy apologetically. "It will probably go unnoticed...