by Leo Tolstoy
I remember one evening when Lyubochka was practising on the piano for the hundredth time some passage of which we were all sick and tired, and Volodya was dozing on the sofa in the drawing room and from time to time muttering with a sort of malicious sarcasm addressed to no one in particular, ‘Ah, there she goes … A music lady … Beetkhoven!’ (He pronounced the name with particular sarcasm.) ‘Smartly, now … And once again … That’s right … ,’ and so on. Katenka and I were still sitting at the tea table, and I don’t remember quite how, but she started to talk about her favourite subject: love. I was in a philosophical mood and condescendingly started to define it as a desire to acquire in another what you lack in yourself, and so on. But Katenka replied that, on the contrary, it wasn’t love any more if the young woman was thinking about marrying a rich man, that in her opinion wealth was the most superficial thing, and that the only true love was the one that could survive separation (which I understood to be an allusion to her love for Dubkov). Volodya, who had apparently been listening to our conversation, suddenly propped himself up on his elbow and yelled questioningly, ‘Katenka! Russians?’
‘Perpetual nonsense!’ Katenka said.
‘Into a pepperbox?’ Volodya continued, stressing each syllable. And I couldn’t help thinking that he was absolutely right.
Besides the general abilities of intellect, sensibility and artistic feeling that are more or less highly developed in individuals, there’s a particular ability that’s more or less highly developed in various social circles, but especially in families, that I’ll call ‘understanding’. Its essence is a shared sense of proportion and a common view of things. Two members of the same circle or family who share that ability will always allow the expression of feeling up to a certain point, beyond which both will see empty phrases, and both will see at the same time where praise ends and irony begins, or where enthusiasm ends and affectation begins – all of which may have a quite different appearance to people with another understanding. For two people of the same understanding, every object will in the same way for both present mainly its ridiculous, beautiful or sordid aspect. To facilitate that identical understanding, members of the same circle or family will establish their own language, their own turns of phrase, even their own words to define nuances of concepts that don’t exist for other people. In our family, that understanding was developed to the utmost degree between Papa and us brothers. Dubkov, too, somehow fitted into our circle and ‘understood’, but Dmitry, even though he was much cleverer than Dubkov, was deaf to it. But with no one else did Volodya and I, who had grown up in identical conditions, refine that ability to the extent we did with each other. Even Papa had long since lagged behind, and a great deal was beyond his comprehension that was as clear to us as two times two. For example, the following words and corresponding ideas had, goodness knows how, established themselves for Volodya and me: ‘raisins’ meant a boastful desire to show that you had money; ‘shipshape’ (here you had to hold the tips of your fingers together and give particular stress to the ‘sh’ sounds) meant anything fresh, wholesome, elegant, yet not extravagant; a noun used in the plural meant an unjustified partiality for that thing, and so on and so forth. The meaning, however, really depended more on facial expressions and the general sense of the conversation, so that whatever expression for a new nuance one of us might come up with, the other with just a hint would already understand it in exactly the same way. The girls didn’t have our understanding, and that was the main reason for our mental estrangement and the scorn we felt for them.
It may be they had their own ‘understanding’, but it had so diverged from ours that where we saw empty words they saw feeling, while our irony was for them truth, and so on. At the time, however, I didn’t realize that it wasn’t their fault, and that the lack of understanding didn’t keep them from being fine, clever girls, and so I regarded them with scorn. Moreover, once I had hit upon the idea of candour and carried its application to an extreme in myself, I ascribed secretiveness and dissimulation to the tranquil, trusting nature of Lyubochka, who saw no need at all to dig out and examine all her thoughts and inclinations. For example, that Lyubochka made the sign of the cross over Papa every night before going to bed, that she and Katenka wept in the chapel when they went to celebrate Mama’s memorial service, and that Katenka sighed and rolled her eyes while playing the piano all seemed extraordinarily affected to me, and I wondered where they had learned how to dissemble like grown-ups and why they weren’t ashamed to do so.
THIRTY
My Occupations
All the same, I was closer to our young ladies that summer than in other years, thanks to the emergence in me of a passion for music. A neighbour had come by that spring to introduce himself, a young man who, as soon as he entered the drawing room, kept looking at the piano and imperceptibly moving his chair towards it as he conversed with Mimi and Katenka. After talking for a while about the weather and the pleasures of country life, he deftly turned the conversation to piano tuners, music and pianos, in the end announcing that he played and quickly demonstrating it with three waltzes, while Lyubochka, Mimi and Katenka stood beside the piano and watched. The young man never returned, but I was much taken by his playing – the way he sat at the piano, the way he shook his hair, and especially the way he had of playing octaves with his left hand, quickly extending his little finger and thumb the width of the octave, slowly drawing them together, and then rapidly extending them again. That graceful gesture, his casual posture, the shaking of his hair, and the attention his talent received from our ladies gave me the idea of playing the piano too. Convincing myself, as a result of that idea, that I had a talent and passion for music, I began to study. In that respect, I acted the same way that millions of the male and especially female sex do who study without a good teacher, a genuine vocation or the least idea of what art may provide and how it should be undertaken so that it will provide something. For me, music, or rather playing the piano, was a way of captivating young ladies with my feeling. After learning with Katenka’s help to read music and limbering my thick fingers – a task, by the way, to which I devoted two months of such diligent effort that I even exercised my unruly ring finger at dinner on my knee and in bed on a pillow – I immediately started to play ‘pieces’ and to do so, obviously, with feeling, avec âme, as even Katenka admitted, although with a complete lack of measure.
The choice of pieces was the familiar one – waltzes, galops, romances (arrangés) and the like – everything by those nice composers of whom anyone with a little sound taste will make a small pile from the stack of excellent things in a sheet-music shop and say, ‘Here’s what not to play, for nothing worse, more tasteless and inane has ever been put down on paper,’ and whom, probably for that reason, you’ll find on the piano of every Russian young lady. True, we also had the unfortunate Beethoven sonatas, forever mangled by young ladies, the Pathétique and the Moonlight,58 which Lyubochka played in memory of maman, and some other good things that Lyubochka’s Moscow teacher had given her, but there were also others that he himself had composed, the most absurd marches and galops, which she also played. Katenka and I, however, didn’t care for serious things, but preferred ‘Le fou’59 and ‘The Nightingale’, which she played so rapidly you couldn’t see her fingers, and which I had already begun to play fairly loudly and fluently. I adopted the young man’s gestures and often regretted that there wasn’t anyone around to see me play. But Liszt and Kalkbrenner60 quickly proved beyond my strength, and I saw the impossibility of ever catching Katenka. As a result, imagining that classical music would be easier, and also partly for the sake of originality, I suddenly decided that I liked the learned German variety, and even though the Pathétique had, to tell the truth, long been loathsome to me in the extreme, I began to express my delight whenever Lyubochka played it, and started to play Beethoven myself and to pronounce it ‘Beeetkhoven’. For all that confusion and affectation, however, I did, as I remember
now, have something like talent, since music often made a strong impression on me to the point of tears, and I was somehow able to pick out the things I liked on the piano by ear, so that if someone at the time had taught me to regard music as an end and a pleasure in itself rather than a way of captivating young ladies with the speed and sensitivity of my playing, I might, perhaps, really have made a decent musician of myself.
Reading French novels, a large number of which Volodya had brought with him, was my other activity that summer. The Monte-Cristos and various Mystères had just begun to come out, and I read my fill of Sue, Dumas and Paul de Kock.61 The most artificial characters and events were as vivid as reality to me, and not only did I not suspect the author of making it up, but he didn’t even exist for me, while real, living people and events appeared before me from the printed page. If I hadn’t met people anywhere like the characters I was reading about, I never for a moment doubted that I would.
Just as a hypochondriac reading a medical book finds the symptoms of every disease in himself, so I found in myself all the passions described in each novel and a resemblance to all the characters – heroes and villains alike. I liked the cunning ideas in those novels and the ardent feelings and magical events and uncomplicated characters – if good, then completely good, or if bad, then completely bad, just as I myself imagined people to be in the early years of my youth. I also liked it very, very much that it was all in French, and that I could memorize the noble words the noble heroes spoke for my own later use in a noble cause. How many different French phrases did I invent with the help of those novels for Kolpikov, should I ever meet him again, or for her, when at last I should meet her and declare my love for her? I was prepared to say such things to them that they would simply perish on hearing me. I even derived from the novels new ideals of moral virtue I might strive for. Above all, I wanted in all my pursuits and actions to be noble (I use the French word, since it has a distinct meaning, as the Germans understood in adopting the word nobel without confusing it with the idea of ehrlich),62 and then to be passionate, and finally something to which I was already inclined – to be as comme il faut as possible. I even tried in my appearance and habits to imitate the heroes possessing those virtues. I remember in one of the many novels I read that summer an extraordinarily passionate hero with thick eyebrows, and I so much wanted to look like him (mentally, I felt myself to be exactly the same) that as I was examining my own eyebrows in the mirror, I got the idea of trimming them a little so they would grow back thicker. But once I started, I realized that I was trimming them more in one place than in the other and kept having to even them out, with the result that I very soon had no eyebrows at all and looked quite ugly. I took comfort, however, in the hope that thick eyebrows like those of the passionate man would quickly grow back, so that my only concern was what to tell everyone when they saw me without any eyebrows. I got some gunpowder from Volodya’s room, rubbed eyebrows on with it, and lit it. Although the gunpowder fortunately didn’t explode, I did look sufficiently like a singed person that no one detected my ruse, and after I had forgotton all about the passionate man, my eyebrows really did grow back in much thicker.
THIRTY-ONE
Comme il faut
I’ve alluded several times in the course of this story to the idea behind this French phrase, and I now feel the need to devote an entire chapter to it, for it was one of the most pernicious and false ideas instilled in me by my upbringing and milieu.
The human race may be divided up in many ways – rich and poor, good and evil, military and civilian, clever and stupid, and so on and so forth – but everyone is sure to have his own favourite main subdivision to which he unconsciously refers every new person. Mine at the time I’m writing about was between those who were comme il faut and those who were not. The second kind were further subdivided into the not comme il faut proper and simple folk. I respected people who were comme il faut and regarded them as worthy of equal relations; the second kind I pretended to scorn but in essence loathed, taking something like a personal affront at them; while the third didn’t exist for me at all, and were held in complete contempt. My own comme il faut consisted, first and foremost, of excellent French, especially in pronunciation. Anyone who pronounced French badly at once aroused a feeling of antipathy in me. ‘Why do you want to talk as we do when you don’t know how?’ I would ask mentally with a venomous sneer. The second condition of comme il faut was fingernails – long, pared and clean; the third was knowing how to bow, dance and converse; and the fourth, and very important, was indifference to everything and a constant expression of elegant, supercilious boredom. Besides that, I had certain general signs by which I could, without talking to him, decide to which category a person belonged. Besides his room furnishings, signet, handwriting and carriage, a main one was his feet. The relation of his boots and trousers immediately determined a person’s position in my eyes. Someone in boots without heels but with a square toe, and in trousers that were tapered at the bottom without straps, was ‘simple’, while someone in boots with heels and a narrow round toe, and trousers that had straps and were tapered at the bottom and covered the feet, or that had straps and hung like a valance over the toe, was mauvais genre, and so on.
It’s strange that the idea of comme il faut was instilled to such a degree in me, someone with absolutely no capacity for it. Perhaps it became so firmly rooted because of the great effort I had put into acquiring it. It’s terrible to remember how much precious sixteen-year-old time, the best in life, was wasted in doing so. Everyone I imitated – Volodya, Dubkov and most of my acquaintances – seemed to have come by it easily. I regarded them with envy and quietly worked on my French, on the technique of bowing without looking at the person you’re bowing to, on conversing and dancing, on the cultivation in myself of indifference to and boredom with everything, and on my fingernails, which I cut back to the quick with scissors – all the while feeling that a great deal of effort still remained to reach my goal. And my room and my desk and my carriage – I didn’t know how to arrange any of them so they would be comme il faut, although I tried hard, despite my aversion for practical matters. With other people it all seemed to go superbly without any effort, as if it couldn’t have been otherwise. Once after intensive but useless work on my nails, I remember asking Dubkov, whose own nails were remarkably fine, if he had had them for a long time, and how he had got them that way. He replied, ‘For as long as I can remember I’ve never done anything to make them that way, and I don’t see how a decent person could have nails of any other kind.’ That answer greatly distressed me. I didn’t know at the time that one of the main conditions of comme il faut is hiding the effort by which it is achieved. Comme il faut was for me not merely an important virtue, a fine quality, a perfection that I wished to attain, but also an essential condition of life, without which there could be neither happiness nor reputation, nor anything good in the world. I couldn’t respect a famous actor or a learned man or a benefactor of the human race if he wasn’t comme il faut. The comme il faut person stood higher and was beyond comparison with the rest; he left it to them to paint their pictures, write their music and books, and do good – he even praised them for it, for why not praise whatever is fine in whomever it is found? – but they weren’t on the same level as he was; he was comme il faut and they weren’t, and that was sufficient. It even seems to me that if we had had a brother, a mother or a father who wasn’t comme il faut, I would have said it was unfortunate, but that between that person and myself there could be no common ground. But neither the loss of precious time employed in constant worry about observing the – for me – difficult conditions of comme il faut at the cost of every other serious activity, nor the antipathy to and contempt for nine tenths of the human race, nor the indifference to anything excellent achieved outside the circle of comme il faut – none of that was the principal harm inflicted on me by that idea. The principal harm was the belief that comme il faut was an indepen
dent position in society, that one didn’t have to make the effort to be an official or a carriage maker or a soldier or a learned man, if one was comme il faut; that in attaining that quality, one had already fulfilled one’s purpose and even stood higher than most.
After many missteps and enthusiasms, most people come at a certain point in youth to the necessity of active involvement in social life, and choose some area of endeavour and devote themselves to it. With the comme il faut person, however, that rarely happens. I’ve known a great many people who are old, proud, self-assured and strict in their judgements, and who, if they should be asked in the next world, ‘Who are you and what did you do there?’ would be unable to answer in any other way than to say, ‘Je fus un homme très comme il faut.’63
That fate awaited me, too.
