n. [5]

This Volkonsky built all the buildings of Yasnaya Polyana. He was a
model squire, intelligent and proud, and enjoyed the great respect of
all the neighborhood.

On the ground floor, under the drawing-room, next to the entrance-hall,
my father built his study. He had a semi-circular niche made in the
wall, and stood a marble bust of his favorite dead brother Nikolai in
it. This bust was made abroad from a death-mask, and my father told us
that it was very like, because it was done by a good sculptor, according
to his own directions.

He had a kind and rather plaintive face. The hair was brushed smooth
like a child's, with the parting on one side. He had no beard or
mustache, and his head was white and very, very clean. My father's
study was divided in two by a partition of big bookshelves, containing
a multitude of all sorts of books. In order to support them, the
shelves were connected by big wooden beams, and between them was a thin
birch-wood door, behind which stood my father's writing-table and his
old-fashioned semicircular arm-chair.

There are portraits of Dickens and Schopenhauer and Fet [6] as a young
man on the walls, too, and the well-known group of writers of the
Sovremennik [7] circle in 1856, with Turgenieff, Ostrovsky, Gontcharof,
Grigorovitch, Druzhinin, and my father, quite young still, without a
beard, and in uniform.

My father used to come out of his bedroom of a morning--it was in a
corner on the top floor--in his dressing-gown, with his beard uncombed
and tumbled together, and go down to dress.

Soon after he would issue from his study fresh and vigorous, in a gray
smock-frock, and would go up into the zala for breakfast. That was our
dejeuner.

When there was nobody staying in the house, he would not stop long in
the drawing-room, but would take his tumbler of tea and carry it off to
his study with him.

But if there were friends and guests with us, he would get into
conversation, become interested, and could not tear himself away.

At last he would go off to his work, and we would disperse, in winter to
the different school-rooms, in summer to the croquet-lawn or somewhere
about the garden. My mother would settle down in the drawing-room to
make some garment for the babies, or to copy out something she had not
finished overnight; and till three or four in the afternoon silence
would reign in the house.

Then my father would come out of his study and go off for his
afternoon'