Polyana his steward coming to him in the morning for orders would frequently find his master hanging in flannels, head downwards, on a trapeze, in which position he would discuss the best modes of sowing and threshing, the steward accompanying his young master round and round the room as he turned somersaults without interrupting the conversation. Forty-five years later the habitual filling of a huge water-butt for domestic purposes was to be to him what the hewing down of trees used to be to Mr. Gladstone.
It was in 1856 that Tolstoi quitted the capital for the repose and seclusion of Yasnaya Polyana, dividing his time between agricultural pursuits (ploughing and sowing his own fields and labouring hard to better the condition of his serfs) and literature. To this period belong the novels and romances, “Yunost” (“Youth”), “Vstryecha v Otryadye” (“The Encounter in the Battalion”), “Metel’” (“The Snowstorm”), No. 1 of the present collection, “Zapiski Markera” (“The Memories of a Marker”), and “Dva Husara” (“Two Hussars”).
In 1857 Tolstoi went abroad for the first time, and was away for two years visiting Germany, in which he was very much interested, and France. At Paris he again encountered Turgenev, but the meeting was anything but felicitous. Writing to a friend as to his experiences on this occasion, Turgenev remarks: “I cannot get on with Tolstoi anyhow, our views are so utterly different.” Twelve months later Tolstoi went abroad again, but between his first and second foreign tour occurred what he always regarded as the
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