This is from Tolstoy’s autobiography Childhood, written when he was 23, a book which is infamously fictionalized—but the portrayal of Karl has been described as accurate by people who knew Tolstoy’s real-life tutor, Friedrich Rössel.
Nitpick: Childhood is not an autobiography, it’s a novel inspired by Tolstoy’s childhood.
Leo Tolstoy’s tutor, for example, seems a rather stereotypical teacher of the older stripe[.]
I’m not sure that’s true, Troyat writes that he was “the most good-natured and soft-hearted man alive”. And:
His German accent, when he spoke Russian, was utterly comical; sometimes he lost his temper, shouted and struck his pupils with a ruler or a pair of braces, but his tantrums inspired laughter more than tears. [...] The morning hours in the classroom with the tutor passed quickly, and afterward they could go outdoors to play. The grounds were so vast that the children found some new corner to explore every day. During the warm weather they fished for crayfish in the Voronka, tore their skin chasing each other through the brambles, went to visit the horses in the stable and the dogs in the kennel, picked mushrooms and blackberries, chattered with the ragged serf-children, tanned and shy; and in the winter there were skating parties and snowball fights.
Nitpick: Childhood is not an autobiography, it’s a novel inspired by Tolstoy’s childhood.
I’m not sure that’s true, Troyat writes that he was “the most good-natured and soft-hearted man alive”. And:
Thank you for that correction!