Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Penguin ed.)

by Leo Tolstoy

  THIRTY-TWO

  Youth

  Despite the tangle of ideas in my mind that summer, I was young, innocent, free, and therefore almost happy.

  Sometimes, or even quite often, I would get up early. (I slept on the terrace in the open air and the oblique rays of the bright morning sun would wake me.) I would quickly dress, put a towel and a French novel under my arm, and go for a swim in the river in the shade of a birch grove less than half a mile from the house. I would lie down on the grass in the shade and read, from time to time looking up from my book to gaze at the surface of the river, violet in the shade and riffled by a morning breeze, or at the field of yellowing rye on the opposite bank, or at the pale-red rays of morning light tinting, lower and lower, the white trunks of the birches as one after another they moved away from me into the depths of the virgin wood, and enjoy the awareness in myself of exactly the same fresh, young power of life that nature was emanating everywhere around me. When grey wisps of morning cloud appeared in the sky and I got chilly from my swim, I would often set out directly through the fields and woods, taking pleasure in soaking my boots in the fresh dew. I would vividly daydream about the heroes of the last novel I had read, and imagine myself a commander or a government minister or a man of great strength or a passionate man, and continually look around in a kind of eager hope of suddenly finding her in a little clearing or behind a tree. Whenever on those walks I came upon peasant men or women at their work, I always felt a strong instinctive embarrassment and would try not to be seen, even though ‘simple folk’ didn’t exist for me. When it was already getting hot, but our ladies still hadn’t come out for tea, I would often go to the garden or the orchard to eat the ripe vegetables and fruit. That activity gave me one of my chief pleasures. You make your way to the apple orchard and the centre of a tall, dense raspberry bush. Above you is the bright, hot sky and all around, the prickly pale-green of raspberry canes entangled with an undergrowth of weeds. A dark-green nettle with a delicate flowering crown reaches gracefully upwards, while a leggy burdock with unnaturally bristly purple flowers rudely pushes through the canes and higher than your head, here and there touching with the nettle the spreading pale-green boughs of an old apple tree, on top of which round, lustrous, still-green apples ripen in the hot sun. From below, a young cane, lacking leaves and nearly dry, twists upwards towards the sun, and needle-like blades of grass and a thistle break through last year’s leaves and, moist with the dew, gleam a lush green in the permanent shade, as if unaware of the bright sun playing in the leaves of the apple tree.

  It’s always musty in the thicket, and smells of heavy, continuous shade, cobwebs, fallen apples turning black on the mouldy ground, raspberries and sometimes even a forest bug, which you accidentally swallow with a berry, making you quickly pick another. As you move forward, you scare the sparrows that always live in the thicket and hear their hasty chirking and the beating of their rapid little wings against the canes, and you hear, too, the stationary buzzing of a plump bee and, somewhere along the path, the footsteps of the orchard boy, the half-wit Akim, and his endless humming to himself. You think to yourself, ‘No, not he nor anyone else in the world will find me here,’ and right and left with both hands you pull the juicy berries from their conical white plugs, and consume them one after another with gusto. Your legs are drenched even above your knees, in your mind is the most awful drivel (you silently repeat a thousand times in a row, ‘a-and t-imes twen-ty, a-and t-imes sev-en’), your arms are stung with nettles and so are your legs through your soaked trousers, your head is baking in the sunshine that has started to penetrate the thicket, you’ve long ceased wanting to eat, yet you remain in the thicket and look and listen and think and mechanically pull off the best berries and gulp them down.

  I would usually enter the drawing room before eleven, and more often than not after tea when the ladies were already busy at their work. Standing beside the first window with its unbleached canvas shade drawn against the sun, but letting in through the gaps bright sunshine that covers everything it touches with such brilliant, fiery rings that it hurts to look at them, is an embroidery frame with flies quietly crawling across its white linen. Mimi is sitting at the frame and constantly shakes her head in exasperation as she moves from one place to another out of the sunshine, which suddenly breaks through somewhere else and covers first her face and then her hands with a fiery band. Bright rectangles of light limned by the frames of the other three windows fall on the bare drawing-room floor, and lying by old habit in one of the rectangles is Milka, who stares with erect ears at the flies crawling within it. Katenka sits on the sofa knitting or reading out loud, and impatiently waves her little white hands, seemingly translucent in the bright sunshine, or shakes her head with a frown to shoo away a fly that has got in her thick, golden hair and is beating against it. Lyubochka is either walking back and forth in the room with her hands clasped behind her, waiting until they’ll all go out to the garden, or else is playing on the piano some piece of which I’ve long known every note. I sit down somewhere to listen to the music or the reading, and wait for the chance to take my own turn at the piano. After dinner I sometimes favour the girls with a horseback ride (going for walks with them I consider beneath my years and position in society), and those rides, in which I escort them to out-of-the-way places and ravines, are very pleasant. Sometimes adventures happen to us in which I show myself to be a brave fellow, and the ladies admire my riding skill and daring, and regard me as their protector. If we have no company, in the evening after tea on the shaded terrace, or a walk with Papa around the estate, I take my old place in the Voltaire armchair and, listening to Katenka or Lyubochka play, I read and daydream, just as I used to. Sometimes, when I’m alone in the drawing room and Lyubochka is playing some old melody, I involuntarily put down my book and gaze out through the open door of the balcony at the leafy branches hanging from the tall birches on which evening shadows have begun to fall, and at the clear sky in which, if you stare hard, what looks like a dusty yellow spot will suddenly appear and disappear, and then as I listen to the music from the salon, and the squeaking of the gate, and the voices of the peasant women, and the sound of the herd as it comes back to the village, I suddenly vividly recall Natalya Savishna and maman and Karl Ivanych and feel sad for a moment. But my heart is at the same time so full of life and hope that the memory merely brushes me with its wing and flies on.

  After supper and sometimes an evening stroll in the garden with someone else (I was afraid to walk down the dark avenues alone), I would go off by myself to sleep on the floor of the terrace, which was a great pleasure, despite the millions of mosquitoes that would try to devour me. If the moon was full, I would often spend the whole night sitting on my mattress, gazing at the light and the shadows, listening intently to the silence and the sounds, dreaming of various things, but primarily of a poetical, voluptuous happiness, which at the time seemed the greatest in life, and regretting that, so far, it was only something I could imagine. As soon as everyone had gone off to bed, and the lights had moved from the drawing room to the rooms upstairs, where female voices could be heard along with windows opening and closing, I would go out to the terrace and pace back and forth, eagerly listening to the sounds of the house as it fell asleep. As long as there was a hope, however small and baseless, for even partial happiness of the kind I dreamed, I couldn’t calmly construct an imaginary one for myself.

  At every sound of barefoot steps, every cough, sigh, movement of a window or rustle of a dress, I would jump up from my bed, look and listen like a thief, and for no apparent reason become agitated. But then the lights would go out in the upstairs windows, the sounds of footsteps and voices would be replaced by snoring, the night watchman would bang his cast-iron bar, the garden would become both gloomier and brighter as the bands of red light falling on it from the upstairs windows disappeared, the last light from the pantry would move towards the entryway, casting its band on the dewy gar
den, and through the window I would see the stooped figure of Foka in his quilted jacket, carrying a candle as he went to his own sleeping place. I often got a great pleasure and thrill from creeping across the wet grass in the dark shadow of the house to the entryway window to listen with bated breath to the snoring of the boy and the wheezing of Foka and his aged voice as he said his prayers a long, long time, supposing that no one else could hear him. Finally, he would put out the last candle, shut the window with a bang and leave me entirely alone, and I would timidly look around to see if somewhere by the flowers or my bed a fair-skinned woman wasn’t waiting, and then scamper back to the terrace. And then I would lie down on my bed facing the garden and, covering up as best I could against the mosquitoes and bats, I would gaze out into the garden and listen to the sounds of the night and dream of love and happiness.

  Everything would take on a different meaning for me then: the look of the old birches, on one side their leafy branches gleaming against the moonlit sky, and on the other glumly hiding the bushes and the road in their dark shadows; the pond’s placid, glittering brilliance gradually increasing like a sound; the moonlight glistening in the dewdrops on the flowers, which also cast their graceful shadows on the grey flower bed in front of the terrace; the chirp of a quail from beyond the pond; the voice of someone on the main road; the barely audible creak of two old birches rubbing against each other; the whine of a mosquito above my ear under the blanket; the fall onto dry leaves of an apple that had been caught on a branch; and the hopping of frogs that sometimes came up to the terrace steps, their greenish backs glimmering somehow mysteriously in the moonlight – all that would take on a strange new meaning for me, the meaning of overwhelming beauty and a kind of incomplete happiness. And then she would appear, always sad and beautiful, with a long dark plait and firm bosom, and with bare arms and voluptuous embraces. She would love me, and I would sacrifice my whole life for one minute of her love. But the moon would rise higher and higher in the sky and shine brighter and brighter, the pond’s glittering brilliance would continue to increase like a sound, growing ever more distinct, the shadows would become darker and darker, and the light more and more transparent, and as I looked at and listened to it all, something would tell me that even she with her bare arms and ardent embraces was still far, far from being all there was of happiness, that even love for her was still far, far from being all there was of goodness; and the longer I gazed at the high, full moon, the more exalted true beauty and goodness seemed to be, and the purer they became, and the closer they were to Him, the source of all that is beautiful and good, and tears of a kind of yearning joy would fill my eyes.

  And although I was alone, it would still seem to me that the mystery and majesty of nature, and the bright, alluring circle of the moon, stopped for some reason at a single high, indefinite point in the pale-blue sky, yet shining everywhere as if filling the immensity of space with itself, and I an insignificant worm soiled by every petty, wretched human passion, yet with all the immense, mighty power of imagination and love – it would still seem to me in those moments that nature and the moon and I were one and the same.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Our Neighbours

  I was quite surprised the day after our arrival to hear Papa call our neighbours the Yepifanovs splendid people, and even more surprised that he was going to see them. We had been involved in a protracted lawsuit with them about some land. As a child I had heard Papa lose his temper more than once over the suit, curse the Yepifanovs and summon various people in order, as I understood it, to enlist them in his defence; I had heard Yakov refer to them as our enemies and as ‘evil people’; and I remember maman asking that in her home and in her presence those people never even be mentioned.

  I had in keeping with those facts formed in childhood such a firm, clear idea of the Yepifanovs as ‘foes’ ready to stab or strangle not only Papa but any son of his, should they come across him, and as ‘evil people’ in the absolute sense, that on seeing Avdotya Vasilyevna Yepifanova, La belle Flamande, taking care of Mama before she died, it was hard for me to believe she was from the same evil family, and I continued to hold the lowest opinion of them. Although we saw them frequently that summer, I remained strangely prejudiced against them all. But here, in essence, is who the Yepifanovs were. The family consisted of the mother, a fifty-year-old widow still fresh and gay; her beautiful daughter, Avdotya Vasilyevna; and her son, the stutterer Pyotr Vasilyevich, a retired lieutenant and bachelor of quite serious character.

  Before her husband died, Anna Dmitriyevna Yepifanova had for some twenty years lived apart from him, sometimes in Petersburg, where she had relatives, but mostly in her own village of Mytishchi,64 which was no more than two miles from us. Such horrors were told in the district about her way of life that Messalina65 seemed like an innocent babe in comparison, which is why Mama had asked that not even Yepifanova’s name be mentioned in her home. But speaking without the least irony, it was impossible to believe a tenth of that most malicious of all forms of gossip, the gossip of country neighbours. Although the serf clerk Mityusha was living in her home when I came to know Anna Dmitriyevna, and although he stood behind her chair at dinner in a Circassian-style frock coat and was always pomaded and curled and had a handsome mouth and eyes that Anna Dmitriyevna would, in his presence but in French, often invite her guests to admire, there was nothing remotely like what rumour continued to hold. Anna Dmitriyevna had, I think, really changed her way of life completely some ten years before, when she had called her dutiful son Petrushka back home from the service. Her estate was small, just over a hundred serfs, and her expenditures during her life of merriment had been great, so that ten years earlier, obviously after being mortgaged and re-mortgaged, the estate was in arrears and would unavoidably have to be put up for auction. Assuming in those extreme circumstances that the trusteeship, property inventory, arrival of the court officer and other unpleasant events were happening not so much from her non-payment of the interest as from the fact that she was a woman, Anna Dmitriyevna wrote to her son at his regiment, asking him to come to her rescue. Even though Pyotr Vasilyevich’s career in the service was going so well that he soon hoped to have his own living, he gave it all up, retired and, as a dutiful son who regarded his first obligation to be the comfort of his mother in her old age (as he wrote to her in complete sincerity), he returned to the country.

  Despite his ugly face, awkwardness and stutter, Pyotr Vasilyevich was a man of exceptionally firm principles and uncommonly practical mind. One way or another, by means of small loans, deals, petitions and promises, he held on to the estate. Having turned himself into a landowner, Pyotr Vasilyevich put on his father’s fur-lined coat, which had been kept in the storeroom, sold his carriages and horses, discouraged company at Mytishchi, dug ponds, increased the cultivated share, reduced the peasant allotment, cut down his grove with his own people and sold it for a profit – and put his affairs in order. Pyotr Vasilyevich gave himself his word and kept it that until all his debts had been paid he would not wear anything but his father’s coat and another canvas affair he had sewn for himself, nor drive in anything but a cart behind peasant horses. He tried to extend that stoical way of life to the whole family, at least to the extent allowed by his deferential regard for his mother, which he took as his duty. In the drawing room he stutteringly fawned on Anna Dmitriyevna, carrying out her every wish and rebuking those who failed to follow her orders, but alone in his study and office he would strictly call to account anyone who brought a duck to the table without his approval, or sent a peasant at Anna Dmitriyevna’s order to ask about a neighbour’s health, or dispatched peasant girls to the woods to pick raspberries instead of weeding the garden.

  In four years or so all the debts were paid off and Pyotr Vasilyevich took a trip to Moscow, returning with new clothes and a tarantass.66 Yet despite the flourishing state of his affairs, he retained the same stoical inclinations, taking, it appeared, a grim pride in t
hem both with his family and with outsiders, and frequently stuttering that ‘anyone who really wants to see me will be glad to see me in a sheepskin coat and eat cabbage soup and porridge. It’s what I eat, too,’ he would add. Every word and gesture expressed his proud awareness of his sacrifice for his mother’s sake and his redemption of the estate, along with his contempt for others who had done nothing of the sort.

  The mother and daughter had completely different characters from Pyotr Vasilyevich’s and were in many respects unlike each other, too. The mother was a woman of the most pleasant sort, always merry with company in the same good-natured way. Everything merry and nice made her truly happy. She even had to the highest degree the ability to enjoy the sight of young people having fun – a quality met with in only the most good-natured older people. Her daughter, Avdotya Vasilyevna, was, on the contrary, a person of serious character, or rather of that special indifferently vague and, without any basis for it, haughty disposition often found in unmarried beauties. But when she wanted to be merry, then her merriment was rather strange – she would laugh at herself, or at the person she was talking to, or at all of society, none of which she probably meant to do. I was frequently surprised and wondered what she meant when she used phrases like ‘Yes, I’m terribly good-looking,’ ‘Well, of course, everyone’s in love with me,’ and so on. Anna Dmitriyevna was always active, with a passion for decorating her little house and garden, and for flowers, canaries and pretty knick-knacks. Her rooms and garden were small and modest, but everything was arranged so neatly and tidily, and it all had so much of that easy gaiety that a good waltz or polka conveys, that the expression ‘little toy’, often used in praise by her guests, in fact suited Anna Dmitriyevna’s garden and rooms exceptionally well. And she herself was a little toy – short, slim, with a fresh colour to her face and pretty little hands, and always merry and always becomingly dressed. Only the slightly too prominent purple veins of her hands diminished the general effect. Avdotya Vasilyevna, on the contrary, almost never did anything, and not only didn’t care for knick-knacks or flowers, but even spent too little time on herself, and was always running off to get dressed whenever company came. On returning to the room, however, she was extraordinarily attractive, except for the cold, unchanging expression of her eyes and smile that all very beautiful faces share. Her graceful figure and the strict regularity of her lovely face always seemed to be saying, ‘You may look at me, if you like.’