Note {68} — XI

The typewritten MS. has "whose powers were growing feeble." The words "and memory" were inserted in S. A. T.'s handwriting. This is clearly no exaggeration. Ilya Tolstoy also says that Tolstoy during his last year of life had several fainting fits and that after them he used for a short time to lose his memory to such an extent that he did not recognize his near relations, and once even asked about his brother who had been dead fifty years: "And how is Mitenka?" Bulgakov, who lived at Yasnaya Polyana in 1910, gives not a few similar instances. Tolstoy confirms it himself. In June 1910, when asked whether he had seen the Tula asylum, he replied: "I don't remember. I have forgotten. A phenomenon, like the weakening of memory, must interest you mental specialists. My memory has become very bad." See Ilya Tolstoy, My Reminiscences, pages 246-7 and 272; Bulgakov, Leo Tolstoy, pages 34-5, 267, 289, and 323.