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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: In order to explain the relations between Masha and my father
I must turn back a considerable way. There was one distinguishing
and, at first sight, peculiar trait in my father's character, due
perhaps to the fact that he grew up without a mother, and that was
that all exhibitions of tenderness were entirely foreign to him.
I say "tenderness" in contradistinction to heartiness.
Heartiness he had and in a very high degree.
His description of the death of my Uncle Nikolái is
characteristic in this connection. In a letter to his other
brother, Sergéi Nikoláyevitch, in which he described
the last day of his brother's life, my father tells how he helped
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