Alexandra Tolstoy died in 1979. Except for Vanechka, who died in 1895 when he was seven, she was Tolstoy's youngest child. She was also his close companion and secretary in the last years of his life. 'The first and best period of my life was with my father. It lasted 26 years - perhaps only six or eight conscious years, and perhaps then not fully conscious, for it was not an easy period.' So she wrote in 1977, in her foreword to these memoirs. But the memoirs themselves, written mainly between 1929 and 1939, open on a grimmer note: 'Only now as I near the end do I remember my childhood without any bitterness.' The shadow over her childhood was the knowledge that her mother did not love her. 'She had given all her affection to my little brother Vanechka, beautiful as an angel.'

LRB 1 April 1982 | PDF Download