by Leo Tolstoy
I didn’t belong to any party, and feeling isolated and incapable of overcoming it, I started to get angry. A student on the bench in front of me was chewing on his fingers, all red hangnails, and I was so disgusted by it that I even moved to another seat, farther away. But in my heart, as I remember, I was very sad that first day.
After the professor entered and everyone stopped fidgeting and was silent, I remember extending my satirical gaze to him, too, and it struck me that he had begun his lecture with an introductory sentence that in my opinion made no sense at all. I wanted the lecture to be so clever from beginning to end that it would be impossible to add or subtract a single word. Disappointed in that, under the heading ‘First Lecture’ in the handsomely bound copybook I had brought with me, I immediately drew eighteen profiles joined in a petal-shaped circle, only occasionally moving my hand across the paper, so the professor (who, I was confident, was very aware of me) would think I was taking notes. Having decided at that first lecture that writing down everything every professor said was not only unnecessary but would even be silly, I kept to that rule for the rest of the year.
I didn’t feel quite so isolated at the following lectures, and made many new acquaintances, shook hands and engaged in conversation, but even so a genuine intimacy for some reason never developed between me and my classmates, and it still often happened to me to feel sad in my heart and dissemble. With the party of Ivin and the aristocrats, as everyone called them, I couldn’t get any closer, because, as I recall now, I was unfriendly and rude to them and bowed only when they bowed to me, and they clearly had very little need of my friendship anyway. But with the majority it happened for a completely different reason. As soon as I sensed that a classmate had begun to favour me, I immediately let him know that I dined at Prince Ivan Ivanych’s and had my own droshky. I only said it to show myself to the greatest advantage, so the classmate would like me even more, but to my surprise the news about the droshky and my connection to Prince Ivan Ivanych resulted almost every time in the classmate suddenly becoming aloof and cold.
Among us was a state-supported student named Operov, a modest, very capable and diligent young man who always offered his hand like a board, without bending his fingers or making any movement at all, so that our wittier classmates sometimes gave him their own hands in the same way and called it shaking hands ‘little-board’ style. I almost always sat beside him and we often talked. I especially liked Operov’s unintimidated views of the professors. He defined very clearly and precisely the merits and defects of the teaching of each, and sometimes even made fun of them, which had an especially strange, startling effect on me coming from his tiny little mouth, and said in his quiet little voice. Despite that, however, he carefully copied down all the lectures without exception in his minuscule handwriting. He and I were becoming friends and had decided to study together, and his tiny grey, near-sighted eyes had begun to turn to me with pleasure whenever I came to sit down beside him. But I found it necessary once in conversation to explain to him that my mama, as she was dying, had asked my father never to put us in a state school, and that I was becoming convinced that all the state students might well know at lot, but that for me ‘they … they weren’t at all the thing, ce ne sont pas des gens comme il faut,’ I said, faltering and sensing that for some reason I was blushing. Operov said nothing, but at the following lectures he didn’t greet me first, didn’t offer me his little board, didn’t converse, and when I sat down he lowered his head a finger’s length from his copybooks, as if poring over them. I was surprised by his sudden coldness. But pour un jeune homme de bonne maison I considered it unbecoming to ingratiate myself with the ‘state student Operov’ and left him alone, although, I’ll admit, his coldness did sadden me. Once, I arrived before he did, and since the lecture was by a popular professor and attended by students who didn’t make coming to lectures a regular practice, so that almost all the seats were taken, I sat down in Operov’s place, put my copybooks on the writing stand and went back out. When I returned to the lecture hall I saw that my copybooks had been removed to the back bench, and that Operov was sitting in his usual place. I pointed out to him that I had already put my copybooks there.
‘I have no idea,’ he answered, suddenly turning red and not looking at me.
‘I’m telling you I put my copybooks there,’ I said, feigning anger in order to intimidate him with my pluck. ‘Everyone saw,’ I added, glancing around at the other students, but although many of them were looking at me with curiosity, none of them said anything.
‘Places aren’t hired out here, so whoever comes first can sit in them,’ Operov said, angrily rearranging himself in his seat and glancing indignantly at me for an instant.
‘That means you’re a boor,’ I said.
Operov appeared to mutter something. I think it may even have been, ‘And you’re a stupid boy,’ but I didn’t hear it clearly. And what would have been the good if I had? To quarrel like manants74 of some sort and no more? (I was quite pleased with the word manant, and it was my response and solution to a good many confused situations.) I might perhaps have said something else, but just then the door slammed and the professor, dressed in a blue frock coat, quickly mounted the dais after a bow and a scrape.
However, before the examinations when I needed his copybooks, Operov, remembering his promise, offered them to me and invited me to study with him.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Matters of the Heart
I was quite occupied with matters of the heart that winter. I fell in love three times. Once was a passion for a very buxom lady I had seen at Freitag’s riding hall and, as a result, I would go to watch her every Tuesday and Friday, the days she rode. But since I was always afraid that she might see me, I would stand so far away from her, and run so soon from the place where she was supposed to pass, and turn away so casually whenever she happened to gaze in my direction, that I never got a good look at her face, and to this day cannot say if she really was attractive or not.
Dubkov was acquainted with the lady, and after hearing about my passion from Dmitry, and catching me lurking in the hall behind the servants and the fur coats they were holding, he offered to introduce me to her, which so terrified me that I dashed headlong out of the place, and from the mere idea that he had told her about me, didn’t dare return, not even as far as the servants, lest I ran into her.
When I was infatuated with women I didn’t know, especially married ones, I was overcome with a shyness that was a thousand times greater than any I had felt with Sonyechka. More than anything in the world, I was afraid that the object might find out about my love and even my existence. I thought that if she did find out about my feelings for her, she would be so offended that she would never forgive me. And really if that rider had known in detail how, as I watched from behind the servants, I imagined carrying her off to live in the country, and what I imagined I would do with her there, she might justifiably have been very offended. I couldn’t grasp that without knowing me, she wouldn’t suddenly be able to divine all my thoughts about her, and that there was therefore nothing shameful about simply making her acquaintance.
The second time I fell in love was with Sonyechka again after seeing her when she visited my sister. My earlier infatuation with her had long since passed, but I fell in love once more as a result of Lyubochka’s giving me a copybook with some verses that Sonyechka had copied out, and in which a number of gloomily amorous passages from Lermontov’s ‘Demon’75 had been underlined in red ink and marked with pressed flowers. Recalling that Volodya had the year before kissed the coin purse of his young lady, I thought I would try the same, and after I was alone in my room and daydreaming while gazing at one of the flowers and touching it to my lips, I really did experience a sort of pleasantly tearful mood, and was in love again for several days, or so I supposed.
The third time I fell in love that winter was with a young lady with whom Volodya was also in love and who came to v
isit us. In the young lady, as I remember her now, there was nothing fine at all, certainly nothing of the sort that usually appealed to me. She was the daughter of a famously clever and learned Moscow lady, small, slender, with long chestnut English curls and a limpid profile. Everyone said that the young lady was even cleverer and more learned than her mother, but I couldn’t judge that at all, since feeling something like abject terror at the thought of her cleverness and learning, I had only talked to her once, and then with indescribable awe. But the delight expressed by Volodya, who was never shy about expressing it in the presence of others, communicated itself with such force that I, too, fell passionately in love. Sensing that Volodya wouldn’t be pleased by the news that ‘two little brothers were in love with the same young lady’, I didn’t tell him. For me, however, the greatest pleasure in the feeling came from the thought that our love was so pure that even if its object was the same charming creature, we were still friends and ready, if necessary, to sacrifice ourselves for each other. Actually, in regard to a readiness for sacrifice, Volodya did not, I think, entirely share my view, since he was so passionately in love with the young lady that he wanted to slap and call out to a duel a certain real diplomat, who, it was said, was planning to marry her. But it would have been a very pleasurable thing for me to sacrifice my own feeling, perhaps because it wouldn’t have taken much effort: I had only had one affected conversation with the young lady about the merits of classical music, and my love, however hard I tried to sustain it, was gone by the following week.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Society
The society amusements to which I had dreamed of devoting myself in imitation of my older brother after entering the university were a complete disappointment to me that winter. Volodya danced a great deal, and Papa also went to balls with his young wife, but I was evidently regarded as still too young or as ill-suited for such diversions, and so no one introduced me to the houses where the balls were given. Despite my vow of candour with Dmitry, I didn’t tell him or anyone else how much I wanted to go to balls, and how hurt and distressed I was to have been left out and, apparently, regarded as a sort of philosopher, which as a result is what I pretended to be.
There was, however, a soirée at Princess Kornakova’s that winter. She herself invited us all, including me, and I was to attend my first ball. Before we were to go, Volodya came to my room to see what I was wearing. That action greatly astonished and puzzled me. It seemed to me at that time that the desire to be well dressed was quite shameful and should be concealed; he, however, regarded it as so natural and necessary that he quite frankly told me that he was afraid I might embarrass myself. He directed me to put on patent-leather boots without fail, was horrified that I wanted to wear suede gloves, re-attached my watch in a certain distinctive way, and took me to a barber on Kuznetsky Most. They curled my hair. Volodya stepped back to look at me from a distance.
‘It’s all right now, but can the cowlicks really not be smoothed down?’ he asked the barber.
But however much Monsieur Charles lubricated my cowlicks with some sticky substance, they still stood up when I put on my hat, and in general my coiffed figure looked even worse to me than before. My one saving grace was an affectation of nonchalance. Only in that form did my appearance resemble anything.
Volodya was apparently of the same view, since he asked me to comb out the curls, and after I had done so and it still wasn’t any good, he didn’t look at me any more and was silent and dejected the whole way to the Kornakovs’.
Volodya and I entered their home boldly enough, but when Princess Kornakova invited me to join the dancing and I for some reason said that I didn’t dance, even though I had gone there with the express purpose of dancing a great deal, I lost heart and, keeping to myself among unfamiliar people, I fell into my usual unrelenting, insurmountable shyness. I stood in silence in the same spot all evening.
During a waltz one of the young princesses came over to me and, with the formal courtesy that she shared with the rest of her family, asked me why I wasn’t dancing. I remember being disconcerted by her question, but at the same time and completely involuntarily, a complacent smile spread across my face, and in the most florid French, replete with parentheses, I started to talk such rubbish that even now, many years later, I’m embarrassed to recall it. Very likely, it was the effect of the music, which stimulated my nerves and drowned out, as I supposed, the not wholly intelligible part of my speech. I said something about high society, about the shallowness of men and women, and in the end got so muddled that I stopped in the middle of a word of some sentence that there wasn’t any possibility of finishing.
Even the young princess with her well-bred poise was dismayed and gave me a reproachful glance. I smiled in reply. At that critical moment, Volodya, noticing that I was speaking with some vehemence, and very likely wanting to know just how I was making up in conversation for my failure to dance, came over with Dubkov. Seeing my grinning face and the princess’s startled expression, and hearing the terrible rubbish with which I ended, he blushed and turned away. The young princess left me standing where I was. Even though I continued to smile, I was at that moment so painfully aware of my stupidity I was ready to sink into the floor, and I realized that whatever it took, I needed to move from my spot and say something and somehow rescue my situation. I went over to Dubkov and asked him if he had managed to dance many waltzes with ‘her’. It was seemingly playful and merry, but essentially I was pleading for help from the same person at whom I had shouted ‘Silence!’ during our dinner at Yar’s. Dubkov pretended he hadn’t heard me and looked away. I then went over to Volodya and said with an effort, trying at the same time to give my voice a jocular tone, ‘Well, then, Volodya, have you quite worn yourself out?’ But he only looked at me as if to say, ‘You don’t talk to me that way when we’re alone,’ and walked off without a word, evidently afraid that I might somehow attach myself to him.
‘My goodness, even my brother is abandoning me!’ I thought.
For some reason, however, I didn’t have the strength to go. I stood morosely in the same spot until the end of the evening, and it was only when everyone was getting ready to leave and had crowded into the entry room, and a servant, while helping me with my overcoat, had caught the brim of my hat so that it tipped up, that I managed a rueful laugh through my tears and said to no one in particular, ‘Comme c’est gracieux.’76
THIRTY-NINE
A Carousal
Although, thanks to Dmitry, I still hadn’t abandoned myself to the traditional student amusements known as ‘carousals’, I did happen to take part in one such entertainment that winter, and the feeling I got from it wasn’t entirely pleasant. Here’s how it was. Once at a lecture at the beginning of the year, Baron Z., a tall blond young man with a regular face of utterly serious mien, invited us all to his home for a comradely evening. ‘Us all’ meant those of his classmates who were more or less comme il faut, which obviously didn’t include Grap, Semyonov, Operov or any other gentlemen of that sort. Volodya smiled with disdain when he heard that I was going to a carousal with the first-year students, but I anticipated great and exceptional pleasure from that, to me, still completely unknown pastime, and I arrived at Baron Z.’s punctually at eight, the appointed time.
Baron Z., in an unbuttoned frock coat and white waistcoat, received his guests in the brightly lit salon and drawing room of the small house in which he lived with his parents, who had turned the front rooms over to him for the evening’s festivities. Visible in the hallway were the dresses and heads of curious chambermaids, and glimpsed once in the pantry was the gown of a lady whom I took to be the baroness herself. There were around twenty guests, all of them students, except for Herr Frost, who had come with Ivin, and a certain tall, ruddy civilian gentleman, who was in charge of the revels and had been introduced to everyone as a relative of the baron’s and a former student of Dorpat University.77 The excessively bright lighting and dully for
mal arrangement of the front rooms at first had such a chilling effect on the young company that everyone involuntarily stood back against the walls, except for a few bold spirits and the Dorpat student, who, with his waistcoat already unbuttoned, seemed to be in both rooms at once and in every corner of each room, and to fill them with his pleasant, resonant, unceasing tenor. But the rest of the company remained silent for the most part, or else talked modestly about professors, studies, examinations and other serious but uninteresting topics. Although they tried not to show it, all without exception were watching the door of the pantry with expressions that said, ‘Isn’t it time we began?’ I, too, felt it was time and awaited the beginning with happy impatience.
