urgenieff was unwilling to confine himself to "merely friendly
relations," so my father also felt too warmly toward Ivan Sergeyevitch,
and that was the very reason why they could never meet without
disagreeing and quarreling. In confirmation of what I say here is
a passage from a letter written by V. Botkin, a close friend of my
father's and of Ivan Sergeyevitch's, to A. A. Fet, written immediately
after their quarrel:

I think that Tolstoy really has a passionately affectionate nature
and he would like to love Turgenieff in the warmest way possible; but
unfortunately his impulsive feeling encounters nothing but a kindly,
good-natured indifference, and he can by no means reconcile himself to
that.

Turgenieff himself said that when they first came to know each other my
father dogged his heels "like a woman in love," and at one time he used
to avoid him, because he was afraid of his spirit of opposition.

My father was perhaps irritated by the slightly patronizing tone which
Turgenieff adopted from the very outset of their acquaintance; and
Turgenieff was irritated by my father's "crankiness," which distracted
him from "his proper metier, literature."

In 1870, before the date of the quarrel, Turgenieff wrote to Fet:

"Lyoff Tolstoy continues to play the crank. It was evidently written in
his stars. When will he turn his last somersault and stand on his feet
at last?"

Turgenieff was just the same about my father's "Confession," which he
read not long before his death. Having promised to read it, "to try to
understand it," and "not to lose my temper," he "started to write a long
letter in answer to the 'Confession,' but never finished it... for fear
of becoming disputatious."

In a letter to D. V. Grigorevitch he called the book, which was based,
in his opinion, on false premises, "a denial of all live human life" and
"a new sort of Nihilism."

It is evident that even then Turgenieff did not understand what a
mastery my father's new philosophy of life had obtained over him, and he
was inclined to attribute his enthusiasm along with the rest to the
same perpetual "crankinesses" and "somersaults" to which he had formerly
attributed his interest in school-teaching, agriculture, the publication
of a paper, and so forth.

IVAN SERGEYEVITCH three times visited Yasnaya Polyana within my memory,
in: August and September, 1878, and the third and last time at the
beginning of May, 1880. I can remember all these vi