What power could compel him to yield in
the struggle in which he had held firmly and tenaciously for many
years? What was the last drop, the last grain of sand that turned
the scales, and sent him forth to search for a new life on the very
edge of the grave?
Could he really have fled from home because the wife that he
had lived with for forty-eight years had developed neurasthenia and
at one time showed certain abnormalities characteristic of that
malady? Was that like the man who so loved his fellows and so well
knew the human heart? Or did he suddenly desire, when he was
eighty-three, and weak and helpless, to realize the idea of a
pilgrim's life?
If so, why did he take my sister Sasha and Dr. Makowicki with
him? He could not but know that in their company he would be just
as well provided with all the necessaries of life as he would have
been at Yasnaya Polyana. It would have been the most
palpable self-deception.
Knowing my father as I did, I felt that the question of his
flight was not so simple as it seemed to others, and the problem
lay long unsolved before me until it was suddenly made clear by the
will that he left behind him.
I remember how, after N. S. Leskof's death, my father
read me his posthumous instructions with regard to a pauper
funeral, with no speeches at the grave, and so on, and how the
idea of writing his own will then came into his head for the
first time.
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