Tolstoy’s early years were passed in the country on the old-fashioned Russian estate, which resembled somewhat in patriarchal habits, aristocratic manners, democratic familiarity, shiftlessness, and superstition, a Southern Plantation in the days of slavery. After the death of his father in 1837 the family was taken charge of by an aunt, the Countess Alexandra Osten-Saken, and three years later by relatives of his mother who lived at Kazan. In 1843 Tolstoy entered the University of Kazan, where “Impervious to the ambitions of scholarship and research, unimpressed by the provincial aristocracy, too nice to enjoy the rough revels of the students, and repelled alike from aristocrats, professors, and students by an unsocial and what, with our English emphasis on government, we should call an unregulated disposition, he seems to have had during these two or three years a thoroughly unhappy and unprofitable experience.”[1] Having left the University in 1846 without graduating he returned to the old country home. Yasnaya Polyana descended to Tolstoy from his mother. The estate, which covers an area of some 2,500 acres, partly arable and partly wooded, lies a hundred miles due south of Moscow. It was at one time Tolstoy’s intention to dispossess himself entirely of his property and live as a peasant. Instead of this, however, he has made over the whole of the land to his wife and children, and lives in the house nominally as a guest. [1] “Leo Tolstoy,” by G. H. Perris. [Sidenote: =The Gateway to Yasnaya Polyana= _see page_ 5] At the entrance to the park are two towers, medieval in style, which were erected by Tolstoy’s maternal grandfather. From them the road runs through the park, rising as it approaches the house, and becomes merged in a level avenue of birch trees. Glimpses of a pond are caught through the dense foliage and of a square smoothly rolled space used as a tennis-ground, the game being one in which Count Tolstoy participates with great enjoyment. It will be noticed that in the photograph on page 31 he is holding a tennis racket in his hand. [Sidenote: =The Approach to the Park= _see page_ 4] [Sidenote: =“The Tree of the Poor”= _see page_ 7]