Biography Ilya Nikolaevich Tolstoy

Geography Interactive map Ilya Lvovich Tolstoy when Ilya was only six years old, Lev Nikolayevich discovered with the rare insight of dignity and the shortcomings of his son and even the difficulties that he will meet in life. Here is what he wrote to his relative in the year: “Ilya, the third. I have never been sick. Shirokost, Bel, Blue, Shine. Learns badly. He always thinks about what he is not ordered to think about.

Games invents himself. Gently, surviving, “mine” is very important to him. Hot and Violent1, now fight; But it is also gentle and sensitive. Sensual - loves to eat and lie down calmly when it cries, it is angry and unpleasant, and when it laughs, then everyone laughs. Everything unreasonable has a charm for him even with a baby, he overheard that the pregnant wife felt the movement of the child.

For a long time his favorite game was to put something round under a jacket and stroke with a tense hand and whisper smiling: "This is a BEBICH." He also stroked all the hillocks in the broken spring furniture, saying: “Babychka”. Ilya will die, ”his father concludes,“ if he does not have a strict and beloved leader. ” Tolstoy's fear for the future of his son was justified.

Ilya’s life was difficult, erratic, non -impedic. The character traits marked by the father were aggravated with age. This talented sybarite, which is not able to realize what his rich nature promised, sprayed in numerous hobbies. Dragged in the whirlpool of the pleasures of life, he made many mistakes, fell more than once, but did not die morally. His father, a “strict and beloved leader”, accompanied his entire long life, trying, sometimes unsuccessfully, to help him avoid hazard.

But only by the end of his life the son found his father, only then did he really understand how much his moral principles were in many ways. I met Uncle Ilya in Paris in Paris. He came from the United States, where he lived since the year. The preferential conditions for the participants of the colonial exhibition, organized at the initiative of Marshal Lyotea1, gave him the opportunity to meet with relatives whom he had not seen for more than twenty years.

After a long separation, saturated with so many important events, a meeting with her first wife, daughter Vera, sister Tatyana, brothers Lev and Mikhail was very joyful. Ilya was surprisingly similar to her father. Tall, broad -shouldered, slightly stooped; The eyebrows are wide, large white beard, gray-blue eyes. He was not averse to emphasizing this similarity. It was so amazing that one lady, seeing him in the courtyard of the church after the wost on the street Daru, fainted.

She thought that it was Leo Tolstoy returned to the ground: a long white beard, a legendary blouse, a large straw hat on her head. Uncle Ilya settled in a hotel located opposite the "bachelor" apartment of my father. They did not part during his stay in Paris. They met with Bunin, Kuprin, as well as with all friends who have long gone out of sight. In the night cabaret, where they went to listen to gypsy music, Uncle Ilya met Alexander Vertinsky, an author of romances in a few decadent and pushing style, which enjoy great success.

They were familiar in their youth, before Vertinsky became a favorite of Moscow and St. Petersburg youth. In the year, Uncle Ilya invited him to play in the film based on Tolstoy’s story “How people are alive” The role of a guilty angel. With a cold winter night, a poor shoemaker, having drank the last pennies, returned to Hops home. Approaching the chapel, he saw a naked beautiful young man leaning against the wall.

The shoemaker gave him his short fur coat, brought him home and, despite his wife’s grunt, shared his last piece of bread with him. The silent wanderer smiled after that for the first time. Having lived for six years with a shoemaker, he became the best master-servant in the district, and a prosperity appeared in the shoemaker’s house. When the wanderer found out what people were alive, God forgave him, returned his wings to him, and he flew to heaven.

During the filming of the film, Vertinsky stubbornly endured the cold, standing naked in the snow. Uncle Ilya stood nearby and waited for a fur coat to throw him on him so that the artist would not catch a cold. But most of all I remembered the evenings spent in my father’s “bachelor” apartment. Close friends, including V. Maklakov3, the former ambassador of Russia in France, joined us.

It was an amazing world for us, for young people, completely unfamiliar and wonderful. Vera, daughter of Uncle Ilya, had a magnificent voice, she sang gypsy romances and Russian folk songs to the accompaniment of my father. And after that, one by one we recited poems by Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Fet, a large friend of the Tolstoy family. Aunt Tanya, imitating the poet’s voice, read his poems dedicated to Leo Nikolaevich and Sofya Andreevna, and poems about the nature of Yasnaya Polyana, soft and charming.

Aunt Tanya, Uncle Ilya and Uncle Leva recalled their happy childhood, and my father, like us, his children, listened to their stories without missing a single word. My father knew about this in -browned happiness only from Uncle Ilya’s book “My Memories”.This talentedly written book was published in the year. It was translated into many languages, complemented and corrected during subsequent publications.

This was the first book about the unknown Tolstoy: about the thick house, intimate. In the first chapter with inspired lyricism, the nature of the Yasnaya Polyana is described. The clear meadow “looks all for days on the sun and revels in it” - “Let there be fogs, thunderstorms and storms”, but in the author’s memoirs she will forever remain clear, radiant, sunny, like a fairy tale.

The childhood of older children, in fact, was a poetic fairy tale in the house of parents who lived in harmony and love. And then “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” were created. The life of the family after the religious spiritual crisis of the writer, which began in the year of the year of the birth of my father, a life, consecrated by the traditions of many generations, gradually began to collapse, but there were still bright and happy days in Yasnaya Polyana.

In the memoirs, Ilya spoke about his confused "gloomy adolescence", about his misunderstanding of his father's views. He only stated bitterly that his father was more and more moved away from his family. Ilya, despite his giftedness, did not finish the gymnasium. Before admission, to the great chagrin of his father, for military service in the Sumy Dragoon Regiment, he spent summer in Yasnaya Polyana.

That summer, he dreamed of marrying Sofya Nikolaevna Philosopher, “glorious, simple, healthy, pure girl” and start a new life corresponding to his father's views. That summer, not knowing where to put his strength, he, on the advice of his father, plowed the field of a peasant woman, whose husband went to work in Moscow. Then he experienced a new “feeling of useful work, pleasant and sedative for him.” In the evening, without waiting for dinner, he in a human, sitting between a coachman and a laundry, ate a “cold kvass with crushed onions and potatoes”.

The time of mowing began to Petrov Day. The whole family: father, brothers Sergey, Leo, Alcide, the son of a French governess, sisters, cousins ​​and several men went to mowing at the morning dawn, when the grass covered with dew was still tender. Even Sofya Andreevna, having become infected with this passion, went to the mowing in the sundress. Some belonged to the work of “ideologically”, others who did not share the beliefs of the father, considered this as a kind of sport.

Having served a year in the regiment, Ilya was about to marry, the parents of the bride agreed. Tolstoy believed that “out of chances 99, that, except for misfortune, nothing would come of marriage”, so he wrote so to his son in October in a big letter. Of all the children, Ilya married the first, “to put his main one, replacing everything else, the goal of marriage - a connection with someone you love - there is a big mistake.

Well, got married, and then what? If the goals of life was not different before marriage, then then, together, it is terribly difficult, almost impossible to find it. Even, probably, if there was no common goal before marrying, then you will never come together, but always disappear. The marriage only then gives happiness when the goal is one - people met along the road and say: “Let's go together” - “Come on,” and give each other to each other, and not when they, attracted to each other, both turned off the road.

All this is because the equally false concept, separated by many, is that life is the newly crying, as well as the concept separated by a huge majority, the concept to which youth, health, and wealth include you that life is a place of amusement. Life is a place of ministry, in which sometimes you have to endure a lot of hard things, but more often to experience a lot of joys. Only real joys can be only when people themselves understand their life as a service: they have a certain, their personal happiness, the purpose of life.

Using usually worse people completely forget this. There are so many joyful events of marriage, the birth of children, which it seems that these events make up the life itself, but this is a dangerous deception. If parents take care of and give birth to children, without a goal in life, then they will only postpone the question of the purpose of life, and the punishment that people living, not knowing why, will not know this, but they will not avoid, because they will have to educate, lead the children, and there is nothing to lead.

And then parents lose their human properties and happiness, associated with them, and are made by a tribal cattle. So I say: people who are going to marry this is why their life seems full to them, they need to think more than someday and understand for themselves, in the name of which each of them lives. And in order to understand this, you must think, think about the conditions in which you live, your past, to regard in life everything that you consider important, find out what you believe, that is, that you consider the always undoubted truth and what you will be guided by in life.

And not only to find out, to understand for yourself, but to experience in practice, to conduct or spend in your life, because until you do what you believe in, you yourself do not know whether you believe or not. I know your faith and this faith or those sides of it that are expressed in business, you need, more than ever, exactly now to clarify it, leading it into business.The belief is that the good is to love people and be loved by them.

To achieve this, I know three activities in which I constantly exercise, in which you can’t exercise enough and which you are now especially needed. The first - in order to be able to love people and be loved by them, you need to accustom yourself as little as possible from them, because if I demand a lot, and I have a lot of deprivation, I include not to love, but to reproach, there is a lot of work.

Second - in order to love people not in a word, but in deed, you need to learn yourself to make useful people. There is even more work, especially for you in your years, when it is common for a person to study.