He was ever haunted by
an excessive dread of the "darkness of the grave," and in his essay,
"Childhood," he describes with that wonderful realism, which characterizes
all his works, the effect on a child's mind of seeing the face of his dead
mother. This may be taken in a sense as biographical, although it is not
probable that Tolstoi here alludes to the death of his own mother as she
died when he was too young to have remembered. He describes the scene in
the words of Irteniev:
"I could not believe that this was her face. I began to look at it more
closely, and gradually discovered in it the familiar and beloved features.
I shuddered with fear when I became sure that it was indeed she, but why
were the closed eyes so fallen in? Why was she so terribly pale, and why
was there a blackish mark under the clear skin on one cheek?"
A terror of death, and yet a haunting urge that compelled him to be forever
thinking upon the mystery of it, is the dominant note in every line of
Tolstoi's writings up to the time which he describes as "a change" that
came over him.
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