[One] is pitiful and loathsome because she has lied all her life, and lies when on the point of death.... [Another] dies peacefully just because he is not a Christian. His religion is different, even though by force of habit he has observed the Christian ritual: his religion is nature, which he has lived with.... [The third] dies peacefully, honestly, and beautifully. Beautifully—because it doesn’t lie, doesn’t put on airs, isn’t afraid, and has no regrets. There you have my idea, and of course you don’t agree with it; but it can’t be disputed—it is in my soul, and in yours too.6

The other, “The Three Hermits,” from almost three decades later, is one of a group of stories Tolstoy took from folk tales. A decade or so later, in What Is Art? (1897), he gave his opinion that such folk art—tales or jokes that might delight millions of people—was much more valuable than novels written for the bored delectation of the leisured classes. According to his son Ilya, Tolstoy heard many such tales from a wandering minstrel named Shchegolenkov, who stayed with them in the summer of 1879:

His endless stories delighted me and I loved to sit and gaze at his long gray beard, which hung in twisted locks. These tales were imbued with remote antiquity, and one felt in them the accumulation of centuries of sound wisdom. Papa used to listen to him with great interest, every day making him recite something new, and Petrovich never failed to comply. He was inexhaustible. Later Father borrowed several of these subjects for his popular tales.7

So “The Three Hermits” might be called “found art.” What makes it Tolstoy’s is its neat illustration of one of his core beliefs: that the poor and the unlearned are the natural children of God. Most of the stories in this book are enriched by that philosophy.

T. N. R. ROGERS

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Family Happiness
Three Deaths
The Three Hermits
The Devil
Father Sergius
Master and Man

Family Happiness

PART I

Chapter I

WE were in mourning for my mother, who had died in the autumn, and I spent all that winter alone in the country with Katya and Sonya.

Katya was an old friend of the family, our governess who had brought us all up, and I had known and loved her since my earliest recollections. Sonya was my younger sister. It was a dark and sad winter which we spent in our old house of Pokrovskoye. The weather was cold and so windy that the snowdrifts came higher than the windows; the panes were almost always dimmed by frost, and we seldom walked or drove anywhere throughout the winter. Our visitors were few, and those who came brought no addition of cheerfulness or happiness to the household. They all wore sad faces and spoke low, as if they were afraid of waking someone; they never laughed, but sighed and often shed tears as they looked at me and especially at little Sonya in her black frock. The feeling of death clung to the house; the air was still filled with the grief and horror of death. My mother’s room was kept locked; and whenever I passed it on my way to bed, I felt a strange uncomfortable impulse to look into that cold empty room.

I was then seventeen; and in the very year of her death my mother was intending to move to Petersburg, in order to take me into society. The loss of my mother was a great grief to me; but I must confess to another feeling behind that grief—a feeling that though I was young and pretty (so everybody told me), I was wasting a second winter in the solitude of the country. Before the winter ended, this sense of dejection, solitude, and simple boredom increased to such an extent that I refused to leave my room or open the piano or take up a book. When Katya urged me to find some occupation, I said that I did not feel able for it; but in my heart I said, “What is the good of it? What is the good of doing anything, when the best part of my life is being wasted like this?” And to this question, tears were my only answer.

I was told that I was growing thin and losing my looks; but even this failed to interest me. What did it matter? For whom? I felt that my whole life was bound to go on in the same solitude and helpless dreariness, from which I had myself no strength and even no wish to escape. Towards the end of winter Katya became anxious about me and determined to make an effort to take me abroad. But money was needed for this, and we hardly knew how our affairs stood after my mother’s death. Our guardian, who was to come and clear up our position, was expected every day.

In March he arrived.

“Well, thank God!” Katya said to me one day, when I was walking up and down the room like a shadow, without occupation, without a thought, and without a wish.