Of this aunt, Tatyana Aleksandrovna, Tolstoy gives the following interesting information in his Memoirs:
"The third person, after my father and mother, as regards influence upon my life, was my `Aunty,' as we called her, Tatyana Aleksandrovna Yergolskaya. She was a very distant relation of my grandmother through the Gorchakovs. She and her sister Lisa, who afterward married Count Peter Ivanovich Tolstoy, remained poor little orphan girls after the death of their parents. There were also several brothers whom my parents managed to get adopted. But it was decided that one of the girls should be taken to be educated by Tatyana Semyonovna Skuratov, powerful, important, famous in her time and circle of the Chern district, and the other by my grandmother. Scraps of paper were folded and put under the icons, and after prayer they were chosen, when Lizenka fell to the lot of Tatyana Semyonovna, and the little dark one (Tanichka) to my grandmother. Tanichka, as we called her, was of the same age as my father. She was born in 1795, was brought up exactly in equal lines with my aunts, and was tenderly loved by all; and indeed it was impossible not to love her for her firm, resolute, energetic, and at the same time self-sacrificing character, a character very well displayed in an incident with a ruler, about which she used to tell us, showing the scar of a burn on her arm, almost as big as the palm of the hand, between the elbow and the wrist. The children had been reading the story of Mucius Scaevola, and they disputed as to whether any of them could make up his mind to do the same. `I will do it,' she said. `You will not,' said Yazikov, my godfather, and also characteristically to himself he burned a ruler on a candle, so that it became charred and smoked all over. `There, place this on your arm,' he said. She stretched out her white arm (at that time girls were always dressed decollete) and Yazikov applied the charred ruler. She frowned, but did not withdraw her arm; she groaned only when the ruler with the skin was torn away. When the older people saw her wound and asked how it was caused, she said she had done it herself, wishing to experience what Mucius Scaevola had done.
"So resolute and self-sacrificing was she in everything.
"She must have been very attractive, with her crisp, black, curling hair in its enormous plait, her jet black eyes, and vivacious, energetic expression. V. Yushkov, the husband of my Aunt Pelageya Ilyinishna, a great flirt, even when an old man, used often, when recalling her, to say with the feeling with which those who have been in love speak about the object of their previous affections: `Toinette, oh! elle etait charmante!'[4]
"When I remember her she was more than forty, and I never thought about her being pretty or not pretty. I simply loved her--loved her eyes, her smile, and her dusky, broad little hand with its energetic little cross vein.
"She probably loved my father and my father loved her, but she did not marry him in youth, in order that he might marry my rich mother, and later she did not marry him because she did not wish to spoil her pure poetic relations with him and us. In her papers, in a little beaded portfolio, there lies the following note, written in 1836, six years after my mother's death:
"`16th August, 1836.--Nicolas m'a fait aujourd'hui une etrange proposition--celle de l'epouser, de serivr de mere a ses enfants et de ne jamais les quitter. J'ai refuse la premiere proposition, j'ai promis de remplir l'autre tant que je vivrai.'[5]
"Thus she recorded, but she never spoke of this either to us or to any one. After my father's death she fulfilled his second desire. We had two aunts and a grandmother; they all had more right to us than Tatyana Aleksandrovna--whom we called aunt only by habit, for our kinship was so distant that I could never remember it--but she, by right of love to us, like Buddha with the wounded swan, took the first place in our bringing up. And this we felt.
"I had fits of passionately tender love for her.
"I remember how once on the sofa in the drawing-room, when I was about five, I squeezed in behind her, and she caressingly touched me with her hand. I caught this hand and began to kiss it and to cry from tender love toward her.
"She had been educated like a young lady of a rich house; she spoke and wrote French better than Russian, and played the piano admirably, but for thirty years she did not touch it. She resumed playing only when I had grown up and learned to play, and sometimes in playing duets she astonished me by the correctness and refinement of her performance. Toward the servants she was kind; she never spoke to them angrily and could not bear the idea of blows or flogging, yet she regarded serfs as serfs and treated them as their superior. Notwithstanding this, all the servants distinguished her from others and loved her. When she died and was being borne through the village, peasants came out from all the houses and paid for Te Deums. Her principal characteristic was love, but how I could wish that this had not been all for one person--for my father. Still, starting from this center her love spread on all around. We felt that she loved us for his sake, that through him she loved every one, because all her life was love.
"She, owing to her love for us, had the greatest right to us, but our aunts, especially Pelageya Ilyinishna, when the latter took us away to Kazan, had the external rights and `Auntie' submitted to them, but her love did not thereby diminish. She lived with her sister, the Countess L.A. Tolstaya, but in her soul she lived with us, and, whenever possible, she would return to us. The fact that the last years of her life, about twenty years, were passed me at Yasnaya Polyana was a great joy to me. But how incapable we were of appreciating our happiness, the more so that true happiness is never loud nor manifest! I appreciated it, but far from sufficiently. `Auntie' liked to keep sweets in her room in various little dishes--dried figs, gingerbread, dates; she liked to buy them and to treat me first to them. I cannot forget, and cannot call to mind without a cruel twinge of conscience, how several times I refused her money for the sweets, and how she, sadly sighing, desisted. It is true I was then in straitened circumstances, but now I cannot recall without remorse how I refused her!
"When I was already married and she had begun to fail, she once, having waited for the opportunity when I was in her room, turning her face away, said to me (I saw she was ready to shed tears): `Look here, mes chers amis, my room is a very good one and you will require it. But if I die in it,' she went on with a trembling voice, `the memory of that will be unpleasant, so move me to another that I may not die here.' Such she was from the earliest time of my childhood, when as yet I could not understand. …
"Her room was thus. In the left corner stood a worktable with innumerable little articles valuable only to her, in the right corner a glass cupbord with icons and one big one--that of the Saviour--in a silver setting; in the middle the couch on which she slept, in front of it a table. To the right a door for her maid.
"I have said that Aunty Tatyana Aleksandrovna had the greatest influence on my life. This influence consisted first, in that ever since childhood she taught me the spiritual delight of love. She taught me this, but not in words: by her whole being she filled me with love. I saw, I felt, how she enjoyed loving, and I understood the joy of love. This was the first thing.
"Secondly, she taught me the delights of an unhurried, lonely life.
"But about this we will speak later.
"Although this reminiscence is not of childhood but of adult life, I cannot refrain from recalling my bachelor life with her at Yasnaya Polyana."[6]
In the chapter dealing with Tolstoy's parents we have already mentioned that his novels, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, are not to be considered autobiographical; but this remark only applies to their external facts and scenery, created by the author to give greater completeness to his picture.
As to the description of the inner life of the child-hero, we can say with confidence