Count Ilya Tolstoy's memoir opens a window onto Yasnaya Polyana as both a family home and a living moral world, shaped by his mother's practical authority and his father Leo Tolstoy's restless brilliance. Through affectionate, sharply observed recollections, the household emerges in all its warmth and complexity: teasing children, exacting routines, lively meals, servants with vivid personalities, and rooms heavy with memory and lineage. Tolstoy himself appears as a playful but penetrating parent, impossible to deceive, yet deeply attentive to the hidden poetry of ordinary lives. The memoir broadens from domestic scenes to the family's unusual education of village children, Tolstoy's agricultural work and summer life on the Samara steppes, and the creative discipline behind his writing, where imagination, mood, and revision are constantly in tension. Hunting, dogs, and rural labor are rendered with affectionate detail, while a solemn thread runs through the account of Uncle Seryozha's death and the family's struggle over faith and communion. The book also sketches Tolstoy's friendships with Fet, Strakhov, and Gay, and his complicated bond with Turgenev, revealing a world of artistic kinship, moral searching, and enduring human contradiction. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.