[257] Countess Maria Nicholaievna Tolstoi (1830–1912), Tolstoi’s only sister. As a young girl, she married her second cousin, Count V. P. Tolstoi; some time later she separated from him and soon after she became a widow. When her daughters were married (Mme. V. V. Nagornov, Princess E. V. Obolensky and Mme. E. S. Denisenko) Countess Tolstoi, under the influence of the well-known Father Ambrose, of the Optina Desert, entered the convent of Shamordino (in the province of Kaluga) and later took the veil. In this convent she spent the rest of her life. [258] Monk Ambrose, the celebrated holy man of the Optina Desert, died in 1891, at the age of 80. About Tolstoi’s visits to the Optina Desert see fragment of notes made by S. A. Tolstoi under the title _My Life_ (_Tolstoi Annual_, 1913, Petrograd, 1914). [259] Dushan Petrovich Makovitsky, then editor in Hungary (in Ruzhomberg), of the Slavic publication which corresponded to the publication _Posrednik_ issued in Moscow, in which Tolstoi and some of his friends took a most active interest. [260] In this place, in the original Journal, a page had been entered in Tolstoi’s hand; evidently the beginning of a letter. This was its contents: “You ask me a question which I now for twenty years have been trying to solve. “It always seems to us--when the simple truth is that we ought to lead a Christian life, and when it is disclosed to us how terribly far from that life is the life we lead--it always seems to us that we for the moment find ourselves in an exceptionally disadvantageous condition for beginning that new life, which opens itself to us: To one, it is a mother, to another a wife, to a third, children, to a fourth, business; this one bought a bull, or the other has a wedding which interferes from his going to the feast. And we usually say to ourselves, ‘Oh, if it were not so,’--looking at it as on an accidental hindrance and not as on the unavoidable conditions of Christian life, as on the law of gravitation in problems of activity. “Beauty which discloses to us the kingdom of God blinds us so, that we immediately want to enter it and we forget that this is not the programme of life, but the ideal; and that the programme of life consists in struggle and in effort to attain the kingdom of God, to approach it. “And when you understand this, then the attitude towards activity is changed....” [261] The village of Dolgoe, province of Tula, district of Krapevensk, nineteen versts from Yasnaya Polyana. The Yasnaya Polyana house in which Tolstoi was born stands there. In the fifties this house was sold to a neighbouring landlord, Gorobov, who took it from Yasnaya Polyana to Dolgoe, where it remained until 1913, when it was destroyed. [262] Nicholai Ilich Storozhenko (1836–1906), professor in the Moscow University, author of numerous books and articles on Russian history and general literature. [263] Tolstoi probably asked N. A. Kasatkin for examples of true art in painting.