If Tolstoi’s mother had some of the characteristics of a saint, as much cannot be said of his aunt and guardian, Polina Yushkovaya. She appears, from all accounts, to have been a good-natured, worldly minded woman, very proud of her great connexions, and considering wealth and position as the sole means to happiness. One of her favourite maxims was, nothing licks a young man into shape so much as a carefully contrived liaison with a woman comme il faut. Nor were matters made much better when, in the early forties, young Tolstoi went to Kazan to complete his education. It was usual in those days for the Russian youths to go direct to the University from their homes, where the teaching they got was, at best, very impecfect and perfunctory, instead of, as now, using the Gymnasium as a stepping-stone to the University. Moreover, the University curriculum of the period was not of a very superior character. Those were the iron days of Nicholas I, when an artfully organized system of repression dominated all things—education included. Every lecture and every examination-paper was carefully censured beforehand, and “even to Archbishops,” as the Tsar himself expressed it, “the whole book could not possibly be given.” Add to this that the University of Kazan itself was very much below the level of the Universities of St. Petersburg and Moscow. The life of the students at the old Volgan city is described by contemporaries as extremely stormy and scandalous. Princely students kept whole streets in a state of siege for weeks together by incessantly discharging
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