We would say a lingering good night, on the lookout for any
chance for delay, and at last would go down-stairs through the
arches, annoyed at the thought that we were children still and
had to go to bed while the grown-ups could stay up as long as
ever they liked.



A JOURNEY TO THE STEPPES

WHEN I was still a child and had not yet read "War and Peace," I
was told that NATASHA ROSTOF was Aunt
Tanya. When my father was asked whether that was true,
and whether DMITRY ROSTOF was such and such a
person and LEVIN such and such another, he never gave a
definite answer, and one could not but feel that he disliked such
questions and was rather offended by them.

In those remote days about which I am talking, my father was
very keen about the management of his estate, and devoted a lot
of energy to it. I can remember his planting the huge apple
orchard at Yasnaya and several hundred acres of birch and
pine forest, and at the beginning of the seventies, for a number
of years, he was interested in buying up land cheap in the
province of Samara, and breeding droves of steppe horses and
flocks of sheep.

I still have pretty clear, though rather fragmentary and
inconsequent, recollections of our three summer excursions to the