and had such a warm affection for everything relating to his own
childhood, that it is hard to believe that he would have raised
his hand against the house in which he had been born and brought
up and in which his mother had spent her whole life.

Knowing my father as I do, I think it is highly possible
that he wrote to his relative from the Caucasus, "Sell
something," not in the least expecting that he would sell the
house, and that he afterward took the blame for it on himself.
Is that not the reason why he was always so unwilling to talk
about it?

In 1871, when I was five years old, the zala [4]
and study were built on the house.

[4] The zala is the chief room of a house,
corresponding to the English drawing-room, but on a grand scale.
The gostinaya--literally guest-room, usually translated as
drawing-room--is a place for more intimate receptions. At
Yasnaya Polyana meals were taken in the
zala, but this is not the general Russian custom, houses
being provided also with a stolovaya, or dining-
room.


The walls of the zala were hung with old portraits of
ancestors. They were rather alarming, and I was afraid of them
at first; but we got used to them after a time, and I grew fond
of one of them, of my great-grandfather, Ilya
Andreyevitch Tolstoy, because I was told that I was like