some fault. In those
distant times of which I am speaking my father was bound to Fet by a
common interest in agriculture as well as literature.

Some of my father's letters of the sixties are curious in this respect.

For instance, in 1860, he wrote a long dissertation on Turgenieff's
novel "On the Eve," which had just come out, and at the end added
a postscript: "What is the price of a set of the best quality of
veterinary instruments? And what is the price of a set of lancets and
bleeding-cups for human use?"

In another letter there is a postscript:

"When you are next in Oryol, buy me six-hundred weight of various ropes,
reins, and traces," and on the same page: "'Tender art thou,' and the
whole thing is charming. You have never done anything better; it is all
charming." The quotation is from Fet's poem:

The lingering clouds' last throng flies over us.

But it was not only community of interests that brought my father and
Afanasyi Afanasyevitch together. The reason of their intimacy lay in
the fact that, as my father expressed it, they "thought alike with their
heart's mind."

I also remember Nikolai Nikolayevitch Strakhof's visits. He was a
remarkably quiet and modest man. He appeared at Yasnaya Polyana in the
beginning of the seventies, and from that time on came and stayed with
us almost every summer till he died.

He had big, gray eyes, wide open, as if in astonishment; a long beard
with a touch of gray in it; and when he spoke, at the end of every
sentence he gave a shy laugh.

When he addressed my father, he always said "Lef Nikolayevitch" instead
of Lyoff Nikolaievich, like other people.

He always stayed down-stairs in my father's study, and spent his whole
day there reading or writing, with a thick cigarette, which he rolled
himself, in his mouth.

Strakhof and my father came together originally on a purely business
footing. When the first part of my father's "Alphabet and Reading-Book"
was printed, Strakhof had charge of the proof-reading. This led to a
correspondence between him and my father, of a business character at
first, later developing into a philosophical and friendly one. While he
was writing "Anna Karenina," my father set great store by his opinion
and valued his critical instinct very highly.

"It is enough for me that that is your opinion," he writes in a letter
of 1872, probably apropos of the "Alphabet."

In 1876, apropos of "Anna Karenina" this time, my father wrote: