“His was a very interesting house where authors and the most interesting men of their time used to meet. I remember that I read there for the first time my _Two Hussars_. Bludov was once intimate with the Decembrists and sympathized in his soul with every progressive movement. And he kept on serving under Nicolas I.” Mikhail Sergeevich Sukhotin asked whether Bludov was a Russian, and why was he a Count? Tolstoi said: “The Bludovs were a purely Russian family, to whom the title of Count was granted. I remember, when I gathered the peasants to read to them the Ukase of their liberation, at the bottom were the names of the signatories and it finished with the words: Countersigned by Count Bludov. An elderly peasant, Eremey, shook his head all the while and said: ‘That Blud, he must be a brainy fellow!’ Evidently he took it to mean that Bludov was at the head of the whole affair.” The conversation was about medicine. Tolstoi said: “Medicine cannot possibly be called an ‘experimental’ science, for in medicine experiment in the strict sense is impossible. With experiments in chemistry a repetition of the more or less same conditions is possible, and so there can be approximately an exact conclusion as to the results. But in medicine there is no exact experiment nor can there be, for it is never possible to repeat the conditions that existed previously; if only because the individuality of the patient changes, and nearly, if not quite, everything changes in sympathy with that.” Tolstoi related this episode from his childhood: “We had a distant relation--an old woman Yakovlev. She lived in her own house in the Staro-Konyushenna Street in Moscow. She was a great miser, and, when she went to the country in the summer, she sent her children ahead in the luggage van. Once, when I was quite a small child, old Yakovlev came to pay us a visit. She sat with the grown-up people, and my brother Nikolenka got a box, put dolls into it, and began dragging it across the rooms. When he dragged it into the room where old Yakovlev sat, she asked him: ‘Nicolas, what have you got there?’ and he replied, ‘It is old Yakovlev going into the country, and her children are being sent ahead in the luggage van.’” ... During the two days (the 6th and 7th August) of my stay in Yasnaya, Tolstoi wrote a perfectly new and very powerful story called _Father and Daughter_,[5] which, he said, “will stay as it is for the time being.” Tolstoi himself seems to be very well pleased with the story, and he thinks he may not have to alter it. Tolstoi recalled the folk-story of “Vanka Kliushnik,” who asked before his execution to be allowed to sing a song; and Tolstoi was in raptures over the beauty of it.