Bright Young Man

TOLSTOY As I KNEW HIM (439 pp.)--Tatyana A. Kuzminskaya--Macmillan ($5).

"The powerful means for achieving true happiness," noted candid young Leo Tolstoy in his diary, "[is] to spread out from oneself, in every direction, like a spider, a whole spider's web of love, and to catch in it everything that comes along--whether it is an old woman or a child, a girl or a policeman."

Tatyana Bers Kuzminskaya, who was born in 1846 and died in 1925, was no more than a child when she and her elder sisters, Liza and Sonya, were caught in Tolstoy's love-web. Sister Liza fell madly in love with young Tolstoy--only to find that he was in love with sister Sonya, who became his wife. Tatyana herself got the next best break: her brother-in-law admired her so much that he made her the model for his heroine, Natasha Rostova, in War and Peace.

Most of the recent books about Tolstoy have emphasized his old age--as dean of Russian letters, Christian pacifist, anti-patriot and abysmally unhappy husband. Tolstoy As I Knew Him, published in Russia in 1926 and now fully translated into English for the first time, has the charm and importance of showing him in the full flush of youth, when he most delighted in the very things which he later renounced. A glimpse of the Czar, "sitting so handsomely on his horse," could make him feel "clogged with tears"; and " [life's] greatest happiness," he still believed then, "Iies in . . . riding on horseback by one's artillery platoon . . . lighting up a cigarette . . . and thinking, 'If they all only knew what a fine fellow I am!' "

In the eyes of the world, Tolstoy was no more than a Count who was regarded as a promising young author. But when he began to visit the Bers in their Moscow home, the whole household felt that "he did not resemble an ordinary guest." Tolstoy roamed all over the house, talked to adults, children and servants with such impartial eagerness and sympathy that "wherever he was, life became interesting and significant." He never knew how much they all loved him because, as he often told Tatyana, he "was convinced that he was repulsively ugly."

The Bers took his eccentricities for granted; they knew that all the Tolstoys were mildly mad. (Devout Brother Dimitry Tolstoy attended divine service every saint's day--in the chapel of a local prison.) One of young Leo's favorite whims was to let chance decide important questions. "If she takes that final high note well," he said to himself one evening when Tatyana was singing, "then I shall deliver my letter today" (a proposal of marriage to sister Sonya). Tatyana took her note superbly; Tolstoy instantly delivered his.

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 in large families"), the cleaning up of years of weeds and garbage from around his mansion ("I don't understand . . . We were getting on very well without this").

A 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]."

He began to dictate a novel to Tatyana, speaking the words so "unevenly and hurriedly" that she felt she was "doing 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 . . ."

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