Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Penguin ed.)

by Leo Tolstoy

  ‘Lyubochka! Katenka!’ I cry, holding out several sprays of bird cherry to them. ‘See how fine it is!’

  The girls gasp and squeal, and Mimi shouts at me to get away, lest I surely be crushed.

  ‘Just smell how fragrant it is!’ I cry.

  THREE

  A New View

  Katenka was sitting beside me in the britzka, her pretty little head inclined in thought as she watched the dusty road running away from under our wheels. I gazed at her silently, surprised by the expression of grown-up sadness that I was seeing on her rosy face for the first time.

  ‘We’ll soon be in Moscow,’ I said to her. ‘What do you suppose it’s like?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ she answered reluctantly.

  ‘Well, even so, what do you think? Is it bigger than Serpukhov, or not?’1

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  But by the instinctive feeling that allows one person to divine the thoughts of another, and that serves as the guiding thread of conversation, Katenka realized that her indifference was painful to me. She raised her head and asked, ‘Did Papa say that we’ll be living at your grandmother’s?’

  ‘He did say that. Grandmother wants us to move in with her.’

  ‘Will we all live there?’

  ‘That goes without saying. We’ll live upstairs in one half, you’ll occupy the other, Papa will be in the guest house, and we’ll all dine downstairs together with Grandmother.’

  ‘Maman says that your grandmother’s very proud. Is she grumpy?’

  ‘No-o! She only seems that way at first. She’s proud, but she isn’t grumpy at all; on the contrary, she’s very kind and jolly. If you had only seen what a ball there was on her name-day!’

  ‘All the same, she scares me, and anyway, goodness knows whether we’ll …’

  Katenka broke off and lapsed into thought again.

  ‘Wha-at?’ I asked uneasily.

  ‘Nothing, I was just thinking.’

  ‘No, you said something: “Goodness knows …”’

  ‘You were saying what a ball there was at your grandmother’s.’

  ‘What a pity you all weren’t there! There was a tremendous number of guests, about a thousand people, and music and generals, and I danced … Katenka,’ I suddenly asked, stopping in the middle of my description, ‘are you listening?’

  ‘No, I heard you. You said you danced.’

  ‘Why are you in such a dull mood?’

  ‘One can’t always be gay.’

  ‘No, you’ve changed a lot since we came back from Moscow. Tell me the truth,’ I added with a determined look, turning towards her, ‘why have you been so strange?’

  ‘Have I really been so strange?’ Katenka answered with animation, indicating that my comment had piqued her interest. ‘I’m not strange at all.’

  ‘No, you’re different than you were,’ I went on. ‘Before, it was clear that you were with us in everything, that you saw us as your family and loved us the same way we love you, but now you’ve become so serious and have been avoiding us.’

  ‘That’s not true at all –’

  ‘No, let me finish,’ I interrupted, already beginning to feel the slight tingling in my nose that always preceded the tears that would start to well in my eyes whenever I expressed some heartfelt thought long held in check. ‘You’ve been avoiding us and talking only to Mimi, as if you didn’t want to have anything to do with us.’

  ‘Well, we can’t be the same forever, can we? Sometimes you have to change,’ Katenka replied. It was her habit to explain everything as a necessity of fate whenever she didn’t know what to say.

  I remember once when Lyubochka called her a ‘stupid girl’ in an argument and she replied that not everyone could be clever, that some had to be stupid. But I wasn’t satisfied with the reply that sometimes you have to change and continued to question her.

  ‘But why do you have to?’

  ‘Well, we won’t always live together,’ Katenka replied, blushing slightly and staring intently at Filipp’s back. ‘Mama could stay in the home of your late mama, who was her friend, but goodness knows if she’ll ever be friends with the countess, who’s supposed to be so grumpy. Besides, we’ll still have to part someday: you’re rich – you have Petrovskoye – whereas we’re poor – Mama has nothing.’

  ‘You’re rich and we’re poor’: those words and the ideas connected with them seemed quite strange to me. According to my notion at the time, only beggars and peasants could be poor, and there was no way my imagination could combine that idea of poverty with the graceful, pretty Katenka. It seemed to me that if Mimi and Katenka had always lived with us, then they always would, sharing equally in everything. It couldn’t be otherwise. But now a myriad of vague new thoughts concerning their lonely position poured into my mind, and I became so ashamed that we were rich while they were poor that I turned red and couldn’t bring myself to look at Katenka.

  ‘What if we are rich and they’re poor?’ I thought. ‘How does having to part follow from that? Why can’t we share half of what we have?’ But I understood that it wouldn’t do to talk to Katenka about that, and a sort of practical instinct opposed to those logical reflections was already telling me that she was right, and that it wouldn’t be appropriate to share my thought with her.

  ‘Are you really going to leave us?’ I said. ‘How will we live apart?’

  ‘What else can we do? It hurts me, too. Only if it does happen, I know what I’ll do …’

  ‘Become an actress … How silly!’ I took up her thought, knowing that being an actress had always been her favourite dream.

  ‘No, that’s what I said when I was little …’

  ‘What will you do, then?’

  ‘I’ll enter a convent and live there. I’ll go around in a little black robe and a velvet cap.’

  Katenka started to cry.

  Has it ever happened to you, reader, suddenly to realize at a certain time in your life that your view of things was undergoing a complete change, as if everything you had known before had suddenly turned a different, unknown side towards you? That kind of mental change took place in me for the first time during our trip, which I also consider the beginning of my boyhood.

  I clearly realized for the first time that we – that is, our family – weren’t the only ones in the world, that not all interests revolved around us, that another life existed of people who had nothing in common with us, who didn’t care about us and who had no idea we even existed. Certainly, I had known all that previously, but I didn’t know it the way I came to know it then: I wasn’t conscious of it and I didn’t feel it.

  A thought becomes a conviction only by following a certain path, one that is often completely unexpected and that may be different from the paths other minds take to reach the same conviction. My conversation with Katenka, which touched me deeply and forced me to think about her future position, was such a path for me. When I looked at the villages and towns we drove through, in each home of which there lived at least one family like ours, and at the women and children who gazed with momentary curiosity at our carriage and then passed from view forever, and at the shopkeepers and peasants, who not only didn’t bow as I was used to at Petrovskoye, but didn’t even look at us, for the first time the question occurred to me: just what was it that occupied them if they didn’t care anything about us? And from that question arose others: how and by what did they live, how did they raise their children, did they teach them, did they let them play, how did they punish them? and so on.

  FOUR

  In Moscow

  The change in my view of people and things and in my attitude towards them was even more palpable after our arrival in Moscow.

  When on our first meeting with her I saw Grandmother’s thin, wrinkled face and dull eyes, the feeling of servile respect and fear I had felt before was replaced by compassion; and when she
pressed her face against Lyubochka’s head and began to sob, as if the corpse of her own beloved daughter were standing before her, that compassion was even replaced by a feeling of love. It was awkward for me to see her sorrow when we were with her. I realized that we ourselves were nothing in her eyes, that we were dear to her only as a memory. I sensed that in every one of the kisses with which she covered my cheeks a single thought was expressed: ‘She’s gone, she’s dead and I won’t see her any more!’

  Papa, who had virtually nothing to do with us in Moscow, only joining us for dinner in a black frock coat or tailcoat with a constantly worried expression on his face, lost a great deal in my eyes, as did his large turned-out collars, dressing gowns, village elders, stewards, strolls to the barn and hunting. Karl Ivanych, whom Grandmother referred to as our ‘tutor’ and who, goodness knows why, had suddenly taken a notion to substitute for his venerable bald head a light-brown wig with a stitched parting almost in the centre, seemed so strange and ridiculous to me that I was amazed I hadn’t noticed it before.

  A sort of invisible barrier also emerged between us and the girls. They had their secrets, and we had ours; they took pride in their skirts, which were longer, and we in our trousers with foot straps. And Mimi appeared for our first Sunday dinner in such a gorgeous dress and with such ribbons in her hair that it was clear we weren’t in the country any more and everything would now be different.

  FIVE

  My Older Brother

  I was only a year and a few months younger than Volodya, and we had grown up and always studied and played together, making no distinction in age. But then around the time of which I’m speaking I began to realize that he wasn’t my comrade in years, inclinations or abilities. It even seemed to me that he was aware of his primacy and proud of it. As wrong as that belief may have been, it inspired in me a pride of my own that chafed at every encounter with him. He was ahead of me in everything – in amusements, in studies, in quarrels, in knowing how to behave – and that created a barrier between us and produced mental sufferings I didn’t understand. I’m sure that if the first time fine linen shirts with pleats were made for him, I had immediately said that I resented not having them made for me, too, it would have been easier for me and not have seemed that whenever he adjusted his collar he was only doing it to offend me.

  What tormented me most was that it sometimes seemed to me that Volodya understood how I felt, but was trying to hide it.

  Who hasn’t noticed the secret, wordless relations that reveal themselves in the imperceptible smiles, movements or glances that pass between people who are constantly together – between brothers, friends, a husband and wife, a master and servant – especially when they aren’t open with each other about everything. How many unspoken desires, thoughts and fears – of being understood – are expressed in one casual look when your eyes make timid, hesitant contact!

  But perhaps I was deceived in that by my inordinate impressionability and penchant for analysis. Perhaps Volodya wasn’t feeling the same thing I was at all. He was passionate and outspoken in his enthusiasms, but changeable. Drawn to a great variety of things, he would devote himself to each with all his heart.

  Once he was suddenly seized with a passion for pictures: he started to draw, spent all his money on paintings and wheedled them from the drawing teacher, Papa and Grandmother. Or there was his passion for decorating his desk with knick-knacks, which he gathered from all over the house; or for novels, which he quietly obtained and read day and night … I was involuntarily drawn to his passions, but too proud to follow after him, and too young and lacking in independence to choose a new path for myself. But there was nothing I envied so much as Volodya’s happy, nobly forthright character, which expressed itself with particular clarity in our quarrels. I sensed that he was behaving well, but I was unable to do the same.

  Once, at the height of his passion for knick-knacks, I accidentally broke an empty little multicoloured bottle on his desk.

  ‘Who asked you to touch my things?’ Volodya said on coming into the room and noticing the disorder I had introduced into the symmetry of the knick-knacks on his desk. ‘And where’s the bottle? You’ve definitely –’

  ‘I accidentally dropped it and it broke. Is that really a disaster?’

  ‘Kindly never dare touch my things again,’ he said, fitting the pieces of the broken bottle together and staring at them in dismay.

  ‘Kindly don’t order me,’ I replied. ‘I broke it. What else is there to say?’

  And I smiled, even though I didn’t feel like smiling at all.

  ‘Yes, it’s nothing to you, but it is something to me,’ Volodya continued with the shrug of his shoulder he had inherited from Papa. ‘He broke it and now he thinks it’s funny. You’re such an insufferable little brat!’

  ‘I’m a little brat, but you’re a big one, and stupid, too.’

  ‘I have no intention of engaging in name-calling with you,’ Volodya said, lightly pushing me away. ‘Get out.’

  ‘Don’t push me!’

  ‘Out!’

  ‘I said, don’t push me!’

  Volodya grabbed my arm, intending to pull me away from the desk, but I was at that point as irritated as I could be. I caught the desk with my foot and tipped it over. ‘How do you like it!’ – and all the porcelain and crystal ornaments were thrown to the floor with a crash.

  ‘You disgusting little brat!’ Volodya yelled, trying to catch the things as they fell.

  ‘Well, it’s all over between us,’ I thought as I left the room. ‘We’ve quarrelled for good.’

  We didn’t speak to each other until evening. I felt guilty and was afraid to look at him, and couldn’t work on anything all day. Volodya, however, studied hard and laughed and chatted with the girls after dinner, just as he always did.

  As soon as our teacher ended the afternoon lesson, I went out of the room: I was afraid of being left alone with my brother and felt awkward and ashamed. After the evening lesson in history, I picked up my copybook and headed for the door. Walking past Volodya, I puffed myself up and tried to put on an angry face, even though I wanted to go to him and make peace. Volodya lifted his head and looked boldly at me with a barely perceptible, gently mocking little smile. Our eyes met, and I understood that he understood me and knew that I understood that he had, but a feeling I couldn’t overcome made me look away.

  ‘Nikolenka!’ he said to me in the simplest, most moderate way, ‘enough anger. Forgive me if I offended you.’

  And he offered me his hand.

  It was as if, after rising higher and higher, something had suddenly begun to push against my chest and affect my breathing, if only for a moment, and then tears welled in my eyes and everything got easier.

  ‘Forgi … ve … me, Volo … dya!’ I said, taking his hand.

  Volodya looked at me, but as if he didn’t understand at all why there were tears in my eyes …

  SIX

  Masha

  None of the changes that took place in my view of things was more striking, however, than the one that resulted in my seeing in one of our chambermaids no longer merely a servant of the female sex, but a woman on whom, to a certain extent, my own peace and happiness might depend.

  From as early as I remember myself, I remember Masha in our home, but not until the event that completely altered my view of her, and about which I’m about to speak, did I ever pay the slightest attention to her. Masha was about twenty-five when I was fourteen. She was very pretty, although I’m afraid to describe her, lest my imagination fail to reproduce the enchanting and beguiling image formed in it at the time of my infatuation. To avoid any mistake, I’ll say only that she was exceptionally fair, voluptuously developed, and a woman, whereas I was fourteen.

  At one of those moments when you’re going around the room with a lesson book in your hand and trying to step only along the cracks between the floorboards, or singing some inane tune, or s
mearing ink along the edge of the desk, or mindlessly repeating some expression or other – in short, at one of those moments when your mind refuses to work and your imagination takes the upper hand and starts to look for impressions, I stepped out of the classroom and idly wandered down to the landing.

  Someone in clogs was coming up around another bend in the stairway.

  Obviously, I wanted to know who it was, but then the footsteps suddenly came to a stop and I heard Masha say, ‘So, you’re up to your tricks again, but what if Marya Ivanovna comes along? How will that look?’

  ‘She won’t,’ Volodya’s voice replied in a whisper, and then there was a rustling sound, as if he were trying to restrain her.

  ‘Where are you putting your hands? You are shameless!’ And then Masha ran past me, her kerchief pulled to the side, revealing her plump white neck.