Alexandra Tolstaya

"The youngest daughter, Alexandra, was getting older. Dedicating herself completely to her father, she was an effective moral support and helper in his writing labors. She even learned stenography."

"Tanya strove to reconcile her parents. She was very fond of her mother, but she sympathized with her fathers views and she pleaded with her mother to make some concessions. Sergei tried to get away from it all. Ilya was absorbed in his own material cares and family. Lev was inclined to his mothers side. Masha was on bad terms with her mother; wholeheartedly devoted to her father, she suffered more than anyone else on his account."

"How difficult it is to recognize spiritual illness in a person close to you, especially if the habit of years has established that persons power and authority. Had I realized that my mother was ill, my whole attitude toward her would have been different. But people far more experienced than I were equally blind. With every day Mother grew more nervous. Everything irritated her, made her weep, have hysterics, outbursts of temper."

"There was one characteristic which Tolstoy kept until late in life—a childlike, spontaneous gaiety, an unaffected, almost passionate enthusiasm for sports, games, all sorts of pastimes. “A game is a serious matter”—this was a saying of Tatiana A. Behrs-Kuzminskaya which Tolstoy loved to repeat. When he was playing, wrestling, hunting, chasing his children, he did it in earnest, he threw himself into it with all his being and enjoyed it as much as his children. The school children were infected with his gaiety."

"Masha died quietly, conscious to the last. Father and Kolya were sitting by her bed. They raised her on her pillow. An hour before she died she opened her eyes wide, saw Father and laid his hand on her breast. Father leaned over her and raised her thin, transparent hand to his lips. “I am dying,” she whispered almost inaudibly."

"Seryozha was different from all the other Tolstoys because of his great shyness and reserve. He often concealed his emotions, his outbursts of tenderness or passion, under a cloak of deliberate rudeness, or brusqueness. The most serious-minded and industrious of all the Tolstoy brothers, he had his own separate existence; he did not lean toward either his mother, or his father, and he rarely confided his thoughts to the members of his family. It was only when he sat down to the piano and for hours played his beloved Chopin, Beethoven, Bach, Grieg, or attempted to compose something himself, that everyone listened to him."