Family of a Genius

THE TOLSTOY HOME (352 pp.]--Diaries of Tatiana Sukhotln-Tolstoy--Columbia University ($4).

The big white house at Yasnaya Polyana was about as private as a goldfish bowl. From the '80s on, not a day passed but three or four total strangers dropped in to beg for money or advice, or simply to have a talk so they could say they had seen the great Leo Tolstoy.

Crank disciples who had bolted down Tolstoy's views on nonviolence, abolition of property, vegetarianism, etc., camped right on the premises. "Khokhlov is still here and getting terribly on one's nerves," daughter Tatiana Tolstoy noted testily. "First, he doesn't eat anything; because he says he has no right to eat potatoes obtained by the labor of others: then he eats dates, and honey in the comb."

Leo Tolstoy was the last man to discourage the Khokhlovs; he believed in soul-searching for everybody.

Temperature Chart. From the age of 13, daughter Tatiana (second of 13 children) took her father's precepts so seriously that she kept a moral temperature chart in the form of a diary. Tatiana made it a record of unsparing selfcriticism: "In my life--nothing; constant shame of my uselessness, and . . . whereas I profess Christianity in theory, in practice I so disgrace it . . ."

Tatiana's diaries add up to a good dea more than gloomy probings, however; they offer a warm and charmingly candid portrait of her family--and of her father's frequent distress at the family's frivolity and worldly ways. "Yesterday evening [Papa Tolstoy] asked Lev what he had in his hand. Lev was obliged to say it was a bracelet, which the ... boys were offering to Zankovetzki, the actress. Papa turned sadly away, then asked me what I was reading--a fashion journal! And what was Vera Tolstoy doing this evening? She had gone to the theater . . . Papa stood motionless for some time, all of us sitting there, hanging our heads; then he turned about and went out."

But Papa was no killjoy. He was often in the mood for pranks. "Once we were all going bathing, and we girls and Papa hurried on ahead and hid in the hollow, and when Mamma, Auntie and Strakhov were passing Papa set up a howl like a wolf, to frighten them, but spoiled it all because he said,'Now all howl,' so loudly."

The Tolstoys loved walks and picnics. For a snack, they would carry along cucumbers and milk, hollowing out the cucumbers, cup-fashion, to drink the milk. In haying season, the whole family would pitch in, mowing and stacking with the peasant boys. It led to temptations. "Last night I could not sleep for a long time. Before I went to bed Masha had told me a number of incidents of her affair with young Paul, the gardener's boy. How frightful... Of all the lofty, fine things Papa tells us she has taken just what suits her--namely, that all men are equal."

"End of the World." Tatiana was a shocking flirt herself, but stuck to her own class. At Moscow's fancy balls and masquerades, she waltzed away with many a nobleman's heart. Off ballroom floors, there were brief trysts in dim corridors. "He gave me his photo and I tucked it in my bodice, almost without looking at it, but as far as I could see I liked it."

At home, there were painting, music and the emotionally trigger-happy Tolstoys to keep things hopping. One night brother Ilia ran away after a fearful row with his mother, had to be traced through some gypsy singing-girls in a Moscow nightspot. Papa and Mamma staged cruel tiffs over Papa's desire to relinquish his copyrights and give away the estate. Off in Paris, brother Lev turned fullfledged neurotic, started spending all day "looking at his tongue, feeling his belly and examining his excrement." In his despair, he sent for Tatiana.

Last Quarrel. Sniffing the moral atmosphere, she found Paris "dirty, with just the same bought slaves as in Russia, with oppressed workers, crazy luxury, and one might even say it is all done more brazenly, with greater sense of people's right to live like that, than in Russia." Impressionist paintings were "mere daubs ... a crazy, senseless search for something new . . . The end of the world has come."

Back at Yasnaya Polyana, too, a world was coming to an end. At 32, Tatiana found herself head over heels in love with Michael Sukhotin, a married man. She wed him in 1899, after his wife died. Sister Masha died, and Mamma became prone to hysteria. In 1910, after a bitter quarrel, Papa Tolstoy left her for good, caught pneumonia and died in a stationmaster's hut.

"I am living by Him. I think of Him ... and write of Him," Tatiana wrote six months after her father's death. In September 1950, she was a chipper old lady of 86, had just completed a biography of "Him," when death finally interrupted her life with father.

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