The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: inexplicable sort of fainting fits, from which he used to recover
the next day, but completely lost his memory for a time.
Seeing my brother Andréi's children, who were staying
at Yásnaya, in the zala one day, he asked with some
surprise, "Whose children are these?" Meeting my wife, he said,
"Don't be offended, my dear; I know that I am very fond of you, but
I have quite forgotten who you are"; and when he went up to the
zala after one of these fainting fits, he looked round with
an astonished air and said, "Where's my brother Nítenka."
Nítenka had died fifty years before.
The day following all traces of the attack would disappear.
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