Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Penguin ed.)

by Leo Tolstoy

  It was in that mood that I arrived for the first examination. I sat down on a bench on the side where the princes, counts and barons were sitting and started to speak to them in French, and, strange as it is to say, the thought never entered my mind that I would soon have to answer on a subject about which I knew nothing. I casually watched those going up to be examined and even allowed myself to taunt a few of them.

  ‘Well, then Grap,’ I said to Ilenka as he came back from the table, ‘were you scared to death?’

  ‘Let’s see how you do,’ he replied. Since entering the university, Ilenka had completely rebelled against my influence, didn’t smile when I spoke to him and was ill disposed towards me.

  I smiled scornfully at Ilenka’s reply, although the doubt he expressed did scare me for a moment. But the fog covered up the feeling again, and I remained disengaged and indifferent, even promising to go for a snack at Materne’s with Baron Z. as soon as I had been examined – as if the latter were the most trivial thing. When I was called up with Ikonin, I straightened the skirts of my uniform and coolly went up to the examination table.

  A slight shiver of fear ran down my spine only when the young professor, the same one who had given me the entrance examination, looked directly at me as I reached for the postal paper on which the questions had been written. Ikonin, although he took his question with the same swing of his body as at the previous examinations, did answer something, if very poorly, while I did what he had done at the entrance examinations, but did it even worse, since I took another question and had no answer for that one either. The professor looked at me with regret and then said in a quiet but firm voice, ‘You won’t pass into the second year, Mr Irtenyev. Don’t bother to come to the other examinations. The department needs to be weeded out. The same goes for you, Mr Ikonin,’ he added.

  Ikonin begged as if for alms for permission to be re-examined, but the professor replied that he couldn’t do in two days what he had failed to do in the course of a year, and there was no way he would pass on. Ikonin implored him again, mournfully, abjectly, but the professor again refused.

  ‘You may go, gentlemen,’ he said in the same quiet but firm voice.

  It was only then that I decided to step away from the table, ashamed that by my presence I had seemed to be a party to Ikonin’s demeaning pleas. I don’t remember crossing the hall past the other students, or what I replied to their questions, or going out to the foyer, or how I got home. I was insulted, humiliated and truly unhappy.

  I didn’t come out of my room for three days, saw no one, found pleasure in tears, just as I had in childhood, and cried a great deal. I looked for pistols with which to shoot myself, should I really want to. I thought that Ilenka Grap would spit in my face if he ran into me, and would be right to do so, that Operov would be glad of my disaster and tell everyone about it, that Kolpikov had been absolutely right to disgrace me at Yar’s, that my inane chatter with the young Princess Kornakova couldn’t have ended any differently, and so on and so forth. All the painful, humiliating moments in my life came back to me one after another, and I tried to find someone else to blame for my unhappiness: I decided it had all been done on purpose, and invented a whole intrigue to thwart me, and muttered against my professors, my classmates, Volodya, Dmitry and Papa, too, for having sent me to the university, and against Providence for having let me live to see such a disgrace. Finally, sensing my utter downfall in the eyes of everyone who knew me, I asked Papa to let me join the hussars or go to the Caucasus. He was displeased with me, but seeing my anguish, he consoled me by saying that however bad it might be, it could all still be made right if I transferred to another department. Volodya, who didn’t see anything so awful in my misfortune either, said that at least in another department I wouldn’t be ashamed in front of my new classmates.

  Our ladies didn’t understand at all, and either didn’t want to or were unable to grasp what an examination was, and what to pass one meant, and were only sorry for me because they could see my grief.

  Dmitry came by every day and was extraordinarily affectionate and mild the whole time, although it did for that very reason seem to me that his feelings for me had cooled. It was painful and insulting that on coming up to my room, he would sit down beside me without a word but with a little of the demeanour of a doctor at the bedside of a gravely ill patient. Sofya Ivanovna and Varenka sent books with him that I had wanted, and asked me to come and see them, although in their solicitude I saw proud – and for me insulting – condescension to someone who had already slipped too far. After three days I grew somewhat calmer, although I still didn’t go out anywhere until we left for the country, but instead wandered aimlessly from room to room brooding about my calamity and trying to avoid the rest of the household.

  I brooded and brooded, and finally late one night as I was sitting downstairs by myself listening to Avdotya Vasilyevna play her waltz, I suddenly jumped to my feet, ran upstairs, got out the booklet in which I had written my Rules of Life, opened it and was overcome with remorse and a sense of moral urgency. I began to weep, but no longer tears of despair. Recovering, I resolved to rewrite my rules of life, quite certain that I would never do anything bad, nor spend a single moment in idleness, nor ever betray my rules again.

  Whether that urgency would last, what it consisted of and what new foundations it laid for my spiritual development, I’ll tell in the next, happier part of youth.95

  24 September 1856

  Yasnaya Polyana96

  Notes

  CHILDHOOD

  1. Auf, Kinder, auf: ‘Up, children, up.’ ’S ist Zeit: ‘It’s time.’ Die Mutter ist schon im Saal: ‘Mother’s already in the salon.’

  2. Nu, nun, Faulenzer: ‘Well, then, lazybones.’

  3. Ach, lassen Sie: ‘Oh, leave me alone.’

  4. Sind Sie bald fertig?: ‘Will you be ready soon?’

  5. Histoire des voyages (History of Travels, Paris, 1746–52): The two volumes are from the fifteen-volume Histoire générale des voyages, ou nouvelle collection de toutes les relations des voyages par mer et par terre (General History of Travels, or New Collection of All Accounts of Travel by Land and Sea) by the Abbé Prévost (1697–1763). The presence on the shelf of even a remnant of that monumental series may be taken as a sign of the broad European culture of the Irtenyev family and milieu, and perhaps of their Enlightenment sympathies.

  6. Seven Years War (1756–63): Fought in Europe, India and North America between France, Austria, Russia, Saxony and Sweden on the one side, and Prussia, England and Hanover on the other.

  7. Northern Bee (Severnaya pchela): An influential newspaper of patriotic stamp published in St Petersburg from 1825 to 1864 by the journalist and novelist Faddey Bulgarin (1789–1859). The country’s first privately owned periodical, it was addressed to the emergent middle class and offered political news and literary reviews, as well as works by the leading writers of the day, beginning with the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837).

  8. Lieber Karl Ivanych: ‘Dear Karl Ivanych.’

  9. dinner (obed): The principal meal of the day, served early to mid-afternoon and consisting of at least three courses, starting with soup. As Tolstoy makes clear here and elsewhere, the meal had an important social as well as nutritional function, being the only time during the day when the entire family came together.

  10. études by Clementi: The études or exercises of the distinguished Italian composer, piano virtuoso, conductor, music publisher, piano manufacturer, piano teacher and long-time London resident Muzio Clementi (1752–1832) remain standard works of musical pedagogy.

  11. Ich danke: ‘I thank you.’

  12. trustee bank (sokhrannaya kazna): The large-scale financial arm of the Trustee Council (Sovet opekunsky), which offered the nobility and other landowners long-term, low-interest mortgages secured by ‘stone’ buildings, factories and estates, including the serfs residing thereon. It is implied that Papa is expecting
the disbursement of new loans to help pay off an older one, and that the family’s properties are of substantial size, given the sums in question.

  13. Wo kommen sie her?: ‘Where are you coming from?’ Ich komme vom Kaffeehaus: ‘I’m coming from the coffee house.’ Haben Sie die Zeitung nicht gelesen?: ‘Haven’t you read the paper?’

  14. Nikolay nodded affirmatively: The energy of his descriptive impulse bursting a structural seam, Tolstoy shifts here and in the rest of the account of the conversation in Nikolay’s room from the limited, first-person mode generally employed in the trilogy (whereby the narrator recounts only what he himself has witnessed or been told) to an omniscient mode, since with the door closed (and moreover closed twice) the eavesdropping Nikolenka could not have seen Karl Ivanych and Nikolay’s gestures and postures, or what Nikolay was doing with his hands. The logical lapse is brief and of little importance, but it reminds us that for all the young author’s extraordinary insight and skill, his narrative technique, at least in this early episode, was not yet under perfect control.

  15. Von al-len Lei-den-schaf-ten die grau-samste ist … Haben sie geschrieben?: ‘Of all pas-sions the cru-el-lest … Have you written that?’ Die grausamste ist die Un-dank-bar-keit … Ein grosses U: ‘The cruellist is In-grat-i-tude … A capital I.’

  16. Punctum: ‘Period’ or ‘full stop’.

  17. holy fool (yurodivy): A phenomenon of Russian Orthodox Christian culture from as early as the fourteenth century, holy fools were adherents of a radical asceticism (imitation of the sufferings of Christ), who engaged in self-mortification and were believed by many to have prophetic powers. Feigning mental debility, perhaps to combat the sin of pride in themselves, holy fools commonly lived as wandering mendicants relying on the generosity of any who would give them shelter. Although discouraged by the church after the sixteenth century due to concerns about imposture, deception and even genuine insanity, the practice survived into the nineteenth. The image of Grisha involves many of these issues – issues of light and dark, of authenticity and the nature and power of faith.

  18. Parlez donc français: ‘Speak French.’

  19. Mangez donc avec du pain: ‘Eat that with some bread.’ Comment est-ce que vous tenez votre fourchette?: ‘Is that the way to hold your fork?’

  20. boss (bolshak, literally, ‘big one’) is what he called all males without distinction. (Tolstoy’s note.)

  21. je suis payée pour y croire: ‘I have reason to believe it.’

  22. Klepper: A small, pony-like breed of Finnish or Baltic origin.

  23. treat: It was (and is) a common practice to reward Borzois (Russian wolfhounds) for proper hunting discipline with an occasional treat. Milka’s behaviour is thus a mark of her experience, alert intelligence and confidence in her master.

  24. The wood had acquired a voice and the hounds were in full pursuit: The sentence set apart here by Tolstoy has, like the chapter itself, strong affinities with the poem ‘Hunting with Hounds’ (Psovaya okhota, 1846) by Nikolay Nekrasov (1821–77), the influential editor who accepted Childhood for publication in his magazine, The Contemporary, and who did much to foster the young Tolstoy’s career (see the Introduction). Be that as it may, the hunting terms used by Tolstoy in this chapter were well established. As elsewhere in the narrative, his language is scrupulously exact in its representation of the particulars of social and material life, even as he responds to a variety of literary antecedents and influences, while developing his own distinctive forms and themes.

  25. Robinson Suisse: Isabelle de Montolieu’s widely read French adaptation (Paris, 1814) of Der Schweizerische Robinson (Zurich, 1812–13) by Johann David Wyss (1743–1818). The book is, of course, also well known in English as The Swiss Family Robinson (London, 1814). The children’s game is thus pan-European in the broadest sense.

  26. C’est un geste de femme de chambre: ‘That is the gesture of a chambermaid.’

  27. caste (soslovie): Although there may be some conceptual overlap, the term used here and elsewhere in the text refers not to class in the modern, post-Marxian sense, but to the largely hereditary social categories or ‘estates’ established with various privileges and obligations as a matter of Russian law: nobles, clergy, honoured citizens, merchants, miscellaneous ranks (raznochintsy), town residents, Cossacks and peasants. The Irtenyevs and their circle belong, like Tolstoy himself, to the highest caste or estate, that of the nobility.

  28. à bonnes fortunes: ‘successful’.

  29. ‘Do Not Wake Me, a Bride’ and ‘Not Alone’: Russian folk songs. N. S. Semyonova (1787–1876) was a well-known Russian opera singer who performed from 1809 into the 1830s.

  30. John Field (1782–1837): A celebrated Irish composer and piano virtuoso, who invented the nocturne form and who, after an apprenticeship with Muzio Clementi and a series of successful European tours, lived in Russia from 1804 to 1837, first in St Petersburg and then in Moscow, performing in the country’s finest halls and giving private lessons in the homes of the wealthy. His Concerto No. 2 in A-flat Major dates from 1816.

  31. britzka: A long, open Russian carriage similar to a phaeton, with a folding top over the rear seat and a front seat facing the rear.

  32. et puis au fond c’est un très bon diable: ‘and besides, at bottom he’s a very decent devil.’

  33. Church Slavonic: The Russian variant of the liturgical language used by Orthodox Slavs, much as Latin was once used instead of the vernacular in the Roman Catholic church.

  34. take out a pastille … Ochakov incense … marched against the Turks: The Russo-Turkish Wars were waged intermittently from the late seventeenth to the second half of the nineteenth century. The episode meant here is the war of 1787–91, successfully fought by Marshal Alexander Suvorov for Tsarina Catherine II, the Great (1729–96). Ochakov: a city in the Ukraine occupied by the Ottoman Turks and captured in 1788 by Russian forces under the command of Catherine’s favourite, Grigory Potemkin (or Potyomkin). pastille: Natalya Savishna seems to have lit the incense for the humblest of reasons: to perfume the air in a house without indoor plumbing after Nikolenka’s use of a commode or ‘necessary’.

  35. everyone had gathered … a last few minutes together: It is a Russian custom to sit briefly in silence before starting a journey.

  36. kisses on the shoulder: It was the custom of serfs to kiss their masters on the shoulder as a mark of affection and respect, but also in acknowledgement of their dependent status.

  37. coupon: At the end of each lesson private teachers were given coupons or tickets, which they would then present to their employers at the end of the month for the total due for their services.

  38. Dmitriev nor Derzhavin: Ivan Dmitriev (1760–1837) was a minor poet of the Sentimentalist school. Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816) was perhaps the most important Russian poet of the late eighteenth century. Both figures were out of fashion by the time of the narrative (the late 1830s to mid-1840s), which is perhaps why Tolstoy has included them here: to further locate the late eighteenth-century culture of the Irtenyevs and their milieu.

  39. office (moleben in Russian or Paraklesis in Greek Orthodox terminology): A brief service of supplication or thanksgiving to the Theotokos (Mother of God) or for the intercession of a saint, offered on special occasions in church or wherever such occasions may warrant.

  40. ma bonne tante: ‘my good aunt.’

  41. un garçon qui promet: ‘a promising boy.’

  42. je vous demande un peu: ‘I simply ask you.’

  43. Racine, Corneille, Boileau, Molière and Fénelon: Jean Racine (1639–99), Pierre Corneille (1606–84) and Molière (1622–73) were leading dramatists, the first two known for their tragedies and the last, for his comedies; Nicolas Boileau (1636–1711) was a poet and influential neoclassical critic; François Fénelon (1651–1715) was a poet and Quietist theologian of somewhat liberal tendency.

  44. Ségur: Louis Philippe, comte de Ségur (1753–1830),
was a French diplomat, historian and memoirist of revolutionary and later Bonapartist sympathies, who from 1785 to 1789 served in St Petersburg, where he was a member of Catherine the Great’s inner circle.

  45. Goethe, Schiller and Byron: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) a German poet, novelist, dramatist and polymath, is regarded as the supreme master of German literature. Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) a German poet, dramatist, historian and philosopher, who is generally considered to be one of the most important representatives of German classicism. George Gordon, sixth Baron Byron, or more simply, Lord Byron (1788–1824), was an English poet and perhaps the most influential member of the Romantic movement.

  46. ma bonne amie: ‘my good friend.’

  47. un parfait honnête homme: ‘a perfectly decent man.’

  48. lexicons: These may, as some suppose, be the partial 1786 translation of the so-called Lexicon of the French Academy by the diplomat Ivan Tatishchev (1743–1802), or, in a more probable and interesting link, they may be the three large volumes of the unfinished Russian Historical, Geographic, Political and Civil Lexicon of the historian, geographer and ethnologist Vasily Tatishchev (1686–1750), published in 1793 by the great bibliophile Alexey Musin-Pushkin (1744–1817), whose grandson Alexander Musin-Pushkin (1827–1903) was a childhood friend of Tolstoy’s and the likely model for Seryozha. Tolstoy would, in that case, be turning Seryozha upside down on a pedestal of words in more ways than one.

  49. Quelle charmante enfant!: ‘What a delightful child!’

  50. Voyez, ma chère … Voyez comme ce jeune homme s’est fait élégant pour danser avec votre fille: ‘Look, my dear … Look how elegant this young man has made himself to dance with your daughter.’

  51. Danube Maiden: Das Donauweibchen (1798), a Romantic opera by the Viennese composer Ferdinand Kauer (1751–1831), was very popular in Moscow and St Petersburg in the first decades of the nineteenth century.