Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Penguin ed.)

by Leo Tolstoy

  After we had finished reading, Zukhin, the other students and I each drank a glass of vodka in proof of our wish to become comrades, and almost completely emptied the decanter. Zukhin asked if anyone had a twenty-five kopek piece, so the old woman who looked after him could go out for more. I offered my own money, but Zukhin, as if not hearing me, turned to Operov, who got out a beaded coin purse and gave him the required sum.

  ‘Watch out you don’t start drinking,’ said Operov, who hadn’t drunk anything himself.

  ‘Have no fear,’ Zukhin answered, sucking the marrow from the mutton bone. I remember thinking then, ‘The reason he’s so clever is that he eats a lot of marrow.’86 ‘Have no fear,’ Zukhin said again with a little smile, and his smile was the kind that you involuntarily notice and are grateful for, ‘although if I should, it won’t be a disaster. But now we’ll see, brother, who gets the better of whom, he or I. It’s all in here, brother,’ he added, boastfully tapping himself on the forehead. ‘Semyonov’s the one who ought to worry, since he’s been drinking pretty hard.’

  It was, in fact, the same Semyonov with the grey hair who had cheered me at the first examination by looking worse than I did, and who had been ranked second in the entrance examinations. In the first month of his studenthood he had faithfully come to all the lectures, but then just before the beginning of the review period he had started to drink, and by the end of the term he was no longer to be seen at the university at all.

  ‘Where is he?’ someone asked.

  ‘I’ve lost track, ‘Zukhin replied. ‘The last I saw of him was when he and I tore up the Lisbon87 together. That was a magnificent thing! And then there was some incident, apparently. What a brain! What fire in the fellow! What an intellect! It will be a pity if he fails. But fail he certainly will, since with his urges he’s not the kind to stick around the university.’

  After talking a while longer and agreeing to meet the following days at Zukhin’s, since his place was the closest for everyone, we went our separate ways. When we were outside, it embarrassed me a little that the rest of them were walking, while I alone had a droshky, so I sheepishly offered Operov a ride. Zukhin had come outside with us and, after borrowing a silver rouble from Operov, went off somewhere by himself to spend the night. As we were driving, Operov told me a lot about Zukhin’s character and way of life, and after I got home I lay awake a long time thinking about my new acquaintances. Before falling asleep, I wavered a long time between, on the one hand, the respect to which their knowledge, simplicity, honesty and the poetry of their youth and daring inclined me, and on the other, their uncouth appearance, which repelled me. For all my desire to do so, it was at the time simply impossible for me to be close to them. We had a completely different understanding of things. There were numerous nuances that constituted the whole charm and meaning of life for me, but that were completely unintelligible to them, and vice versa. The main reason for the impossibility of intimacy, however, was the twenty-rouble cloth of my frock coat, my droshky and my fine linen shirt. That reason was especially important to me: it seemed to me that I was involuntarily insulting them with the signs of my wealth. I felt guilty around them and, first abasing myself and then chafing at the unfairness of it and shifting to arrogance, I couldn’t in any way enter into equal, sincere relations with them. And the rough, profligate side of Zukhin’s character was at the time so muffled for me by the strong poetry of daring I sensed in him that it didn’t affect me unpleasantly at all.

  For the next two weeks I went almost every evening to Zukhin’s to study with them. I studied very little, because, as I’ve already said, I had fallen behind and, not having the strength to work by myself to catch up with them, I only pretended to listen to and understand what they were reading. I think they saw through my dissembling, since I noticed that they often left out the parts they themselves already knew and never asked me any questions.

  Drawn into their way of life and finding so much in it that was poetic, I became more tolerant of the uncouthness of that circle with each passing day. Only my word of honour to Dmitry not to go drinking with them kept me from taking part in their pleasures.

  Once I wanted to boast to them of my knowledge of literature, especially French literature, and started a conversation on the topic. To my surprise, it turned out that although they used the Russian titles of the foreign works, they had read a great deal more than I had, and knew and appreciated English and even Spanish authors and Lesage,88 whom I hadn’t even heard of before that. Pushkin and Zhukovsky89 were literature for them and not, as they were for me, books in yellow bindings read and learned in childhood. They held Dumas, Sue and Féval90 in equally low regard, and judged literature much better and more clearly than I did, especially Zukhin, as I couldn’t help admitting. I had no advantage over them in my knowledge of music, either. To my even greater surprise, Operov played the violin, another student studying with us played the cello and the piano, and both of them were members of the university orchestra and had a respectable knowledge and appreciation of good music. In a word, except for my pronunciation of French and German, everything that I had intended to boast to them about they knew better than I, and weren’t conceited about at all. I might have boasted of my position in society, but unlike Volodya I had none. So what was the pinnacle from which I regarded them? My acquaintance with Prince Ivan Ivanych? My pronunciation of French? My droshky? My fine linen shirt? My fingernails? Wasn’t it all just rubbish? Or so it would sometimes dimly begin to seem to me under the influence of my envy of the camaraderie and good-natured youthful merriment I saw before me. They were all on familiar terms. The simplicity of their treatment of each other verged on rudeness, yet always apparent beneath that rough exterior was a fear of offending each other even a little. ‘Scoundrel’ or ‘swine’, although used by them in an affectionate way, only grated on me and gave me a pretext for inward scoffing, but the words didn’t offend them or keep them from being on the friendliest and most sincere footing. They were very tactful and circumspect in their treatment of each other, as only happens with the very poor and the very young. But the main thing was the sense I had of something generous and wild in Zukhin’s character, and in his adventures at the Lisbon. I had an intimation that those bouts had been quite different from the humbug with the flaming rum and champagne that I had witnessed at Baron Z.’s.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Zukhin and Semyonov

  I don’t know which caste Zukhin belonged to, but I do know that he was from the S. gymnasium, had no means at all, and seemed not to be a nobleman. He was at the time around eighteen, although he looked much older. He was exceptionally clever and quick: it was easier for him to take in an entire complex subject at once, anticipating all its components and corollaries, than arrive by conscious deliberation at the laws from which those corollaries had been deduced. He knew he was clever and was proud of it, and as a result of that pride he treated everyone in the same straightforward, good-natured way. He had very likely experienced a great deal in his life. Love, friendship, business and money were already reflected in his passionate, receptive nature. Whether in small measure or in the lowest strata of society, there was nothing, once he had experienced it, that he wouldn’t have regarded either with contempt or with a kind of indifference and lack of concern produced by the too great ease with which everything came to him. It seemed that he undertook everything new with such ardour merely to be able, after he had achieved his goal, to scorn whatever it was he had achieved, and his capable nature always achieved the goal and thus obtained the right to scorn it. It was the same with his studies: working little, taking no notes, he knew mathematics superbly, and wasn’t boasting when he said he would get the better of the professor. It seemed to him there was a lot of nonsense in what he was taught, but with the unconscious practical cunning characteristic of his nature, he immediately went along with whatever the professors required, and they all liked him. He was direct in his relations with the
authorities, and the authorities respected him. He not only didn’t like and respect his own field, but even regarded with contempt anyone who seriously studied what had come so easily to him. The sciences, as he understood them, didn’t engage a tenth part of his ability; life in his student’s position offered him nothing to which he might have completely devoted himself, but his ardent, ‘enterprísing’ (as he would have said) nature demanded life, and he gave himself up to whatever drinking his means permitted, surrendering to it with passionate fervour and a desire to use himself up to ‘the limit of my strength’. And then, just before the examinations, Operov’s prediction came true. Zukhin disappeared for a couple of weeks, so that towards the end we studied at another student’s. But then pale, dissipated, with trembling hands, he arrived in the auditorium for his first examination and passed on to the second year in brilliant form.

  At the beginning of the year there had been eight or so in Zukhin’s band of revellers. Among them were Ikonin and Semyonov, but the first withdrew because he couldn’t tolerate the frantic revelry to which they devoted themselves, while the second left because it seemed insufficient to him. Everyone regarded them with something like awe and told each other stories about their escapades.

  The escapades’ main heroes were Zukhin and, towards the end of the year, Semyonov. Everyone eventually came to look on the latter even with a kind of horror, and when he turned up at the lectures, which happened infrequently enough, there was excitement in the room.

  Semyonov ended his drinking career just before the examinations in a most energetic and original way, as I myself witnessed, thanks to my acquaintance with Zukhin. Here’s what happened. One evening just after we had all gathered at Zukhin’s, and Operov had placed a tallow candle in a bottle next to himself to go with the one already there in a candlestick, and then lowered his head over the minuscule handwriting in his physics copybook and begun to read in his thin little voice, the landlady came in to tell Zukhin that someone was there with a message for him.

  Zukhin went out and quickly returned with a thoughtful expression on his face and two ten-rouble notes in his hand, along with the opened message written on grey wrapping paper.

  ‘Gentlemen! An extraordinary event!’ he said, raising his head and looking at us with something like a triumphantly serious gaze.

  ‘Did you get some tutoring money?’ Operov asked as he leafed through his copybook.

  ‘Let’s get on with the reading,’ someone else said.

  ‘No, gentlemen! No more reading for me,’ Zukhin continued in the same tone. ‘I tell you, it’s an inconceivable event! Semyonov has sent a soldier with twenty roubles he borrowed from me once, and written that if I want to see him, I had better come to the barracks. Do you realize what this means?’ he added, looking at each of us in turn. We were all silent. ‘I’m going over to see him right now,’ Zukhin continued. ‘Anyone who wants to can come along.’

  We immediately put our frock coats back on and got ready to visit Semyonov.

  ‘Won’t it be awkward,’ Operov asked in his thin little voice, ‘if we all barge in and stare at him like some curiosity?’

  I completely agreed with Operov’s observation, especially as it concerned me, since I was barely acquainted with Semyonov, but it was such a pleasure to know that I was taking part in a shared comradely activity, and I so wanted to see Semyonov himself, that I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Rubbish!’ Zukhin said. ‘What’s so awkward about going to say goodbye to a comrade, wherever he might be? It’s nothing. Anyone who wants to can come.’

  We hired cabs, put the soldier in with us, and set off. The duty non-commissioned officer didn’t want to let us in, but Zukhin somehow persuaded him, and the soldier who had brought the message led us to a large room, dark except for the faint illumination of a few night lamps, with bunks along either side on which new recruits with shaven foreheads were sitting or lying in grey overcoats. I had been struck on entering the barracks by a particularly oppressive smell and by the sound of several hundred people snoring, and, as we crossed the room between the bunks behind our guide and Zukhin, who with a firm stride went on ahead, I peered anxiously at each recruit, applying what remained in my memory of the hardy, solidly built figure of Semyonov with his long, tousled, almost grey hair, white teeth and sombre, gleaming eyes. In the farthest corner of the barracks near the last little clay pot filled with dark oil in which a charred and twisted wick dimly smoked, Zukhin quickened his pace and then suddenly stopped.

  ‘Hello, Semyonov,’ he said to a recruit with a shaven forehead like the others, who was sitting in heavy soldier’s long underwear with a grey overcoat over his shoulders and his feet on the bunk, while talking to another recruit and eating something. It was him with his grey hair cropped short and his forehead shaved blue, yet with the same sombre, energetic expression that his face always had. Afraid that my staring might offend him, I looked away. Operov, seeming to share my opinion, stood behind everyone else, but the sound of Semyonov’s voice and of his customary clipped speech as he greeted Zukhin and the others put us completely at ease, and we hurried forward to extend – I my hand, and Operov his ‘little board’, but as we were doing that, Semyonov reached out with his own large, dark hand, thereby sparing us the unpleasant feeling of seeming to do him an honour. He spoke reluctantly and calmly, as always.

  ‘Hello, Zukhin. Thanks for coming. Sit down, gentlemen! Let them, Kudryashka,’ he said to the recruit with whom he had been having supper and talking. ‘You and I will finish our conversation later. Go ahead and sit down. So, were you surprised, Zukhin? Eh?’

  ‘Nothing you’ve ever done has surprised me,’ Zukhin answered, sitting beside him on the bunk with an expression rather like that of a doctor sitting down on the bed of a patient, ‘although I would have been if you had turned up for the examinations – that I can say. Well, tell us where you went off to, and how this all came about.’

  ‘Where did I go off to?’ Semyonov answered in his deep, strong voice. ‘I went off to taverns, pot-houses and inns, for the most part. Sit down, gentlemen, all of you, there’s plenty of room. Pull your legs up there, you!’ he yelled commandingly, revealing his white teeth for an instant, at a recruit who was lying on the bunk to his left and watching us with idle curiosity, his hands behind his head. ‘Well, I was on a spree. A bad one. But good,’ he continued, with each clipped sentence changing the expression on his energetic face. ‘You know about the incident with the merchant. The rascal died. They wanted to kick me out. What little money I had, I squandered. But all that would have been nothing. A huge pile of debts remained – and nasty ones. I had no way to pay them. Well, that’s it.’

  ‘How did you ever come up with such an idea?’ Zukhin asked.

  ‘This way: I was on a spree at the Yaroslavl, you know, on Stozhenka,91 with some merchant gent. He was a recruit supplier.92 I said, “Give me a thousand roubles and I’ll go.” And I did.’

  ‘But how could that be? – you’re a nobleman,’ Zukhin said.

  ‘That was nothing! Kirill Ivanov made all the arrangements.’

  ‘Who’s Kirill Ivanov?’

  ‘The one who bought me,’ he said with a strange, amused, mocking glint in his eyes, and what looked like a smile. ‘They got permission from the Senate.93 I had another spree, paid off my debts and went. That’s all there is to it. After all, they can’t flog me94 … I’ve got five roubles left … Perhaps there’ll be a war …’

  And then with a sombre gleam in his eyes and a constantly changing expression on his energetic face, he started to tell Zukhin about his strange, incomprehensible adventures.

  When they wouldn’t let us stay in the barracks any longer, we began to say our goodbyes. He shook all our hands with a firm grip and without getting up to see us out he said, ‘Come again sometime, gentlemen. They say they won’t move us out until next month,’ he added, once more seeming to smile.

  Zukhi
n moved a few steps away, then turned back. Wanting to see their parting, I stopped, too, and saw Zukhin take some money out of his pocket and offer it, but Semyonov pushed his hand away. Then I saw them embrace and heard Zukhin say quite loudly as he came back towards us, ‘Farewell, Wizard! It’s certain I won’t finish the year, but you’ll be an officer.’

  Semyonov, who never laughed, responded with loud, ringing laughter that struck me extraordinarily painfully. We left.

  The whole way home, which we walked, Zukhin remained silent and kept lightly blowing his nose, putting his finger first to one nostril and then to the other. When we arrived at his place he immediately left us, and drank from that day until the examinations began.

  FORTY-FIVE

  I Fail

  At last it was time for the first examination, on differential and integral calculus, but I was still in a strange fog with no clear account to myself of what awaited me. The idea would occur to me in the evenings after the society of Zukhin and my other classmates that I needed to change something about my convictions, that something about them was wrong and not good, but the next morning in the light of day I would be comme il faut again and quite satisfied with that, and not want to make any changes in myself at all.