Tolstoy’s “The Hunt” from Childhood, Boyhood, Youth is a memoir episode of picnicking with his father during a hunt in which he remembers the sights, sounds, and smells of the forest: the chatter of the peasants, rumbling of horses, cries of quails, a hum of insects, and the smell of the soil, grain, and steam from the horses.
When the party arrives at the Kalinovo, a wagonette is waiting with “a tea-urn, some apparatus for making ices, and many other attractive boxes and bundles, all packed in straw! “There was no mistaking these signs, for they meant we would have tea, fruit, and ice in the open air. This afforded us intense delight since to drink tea in a wood and on the grass and where no one else had ever drunk tea before seemed to us a treat beyond expressing.” Shooting an animal is a less joyous story.
Featured Image: Tolstoy, age 28, served as Bombardier, 4th Class, in the 4th Battery of the Russian Army’s 20th Artillery Brigade during the Crimean War.
See Leo Tolstoy. Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. Translated by C.J. Hogarth. New York: Collier, 1899