Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Penguin ed.)

by Leo Tolstoy

  35. Piquet: ‘Picket’, a French game for two players dating at least to the seventeenth century and very popular in France and Russia in the nineteenth. The purpose is to take tricks, which are given a point value, with the first player to reach 100 in a hand declared the winner, and the loser obliged, in the gambling version, to pay the difference between his own score and that of his opponent if both reach 100, or the total of both scores plus 100, if he does not. Volodya’s debt to Dubkov may thus have been quite large.

  36. Gaudeamus igitur: A Latin song in ten exhausting stanzas dating from the late Middle Ages that celebrates youth but acknowledges its brevity, and is traditionally sung by university students, usually at graduation: Gaudeamus igitur / Juvenes dum sumus. / Post jucundam juventutem / Post molestam senectutem / Nos habebit humus … ‘Let us rejoice then / While we are young. / After a merry youth, / After a troubled old age, / The earth will have us …’

  37. Sokolniki: A large park in central Moscow first laid out in the time of Peter the Great with lawns, flowerbeds, ponds and tree-lined avenues.

  38. Orestes and Pylades: An allusion to the proverbial friendship in Greek mythology between Orestes – son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and the title character of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy – and Pylades, the younger cousin with whom Orestes was raised and who became his adviser and eventual brother-in-law after marrying Orestes’ sister Elektra.

  39. civilian general: A civil servant of the fourth grade or higher in the Petrine Table of Ranks.

  40. Corps of Pages (Corps des Pages): An elite military school for the nobility established (or reorganized) in St Petersburg in 1802 by Alexander I. Admission, usually at the age of fifteen, required not only high noble status but also the passing of difficult examinations with an emphasis on mathematics and foreign languages. Graduates had the right to join the regiment of their choice and often went on to distinguished military and sometimes civil careers.

  41. smallpox: Perhaps an allusion to Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or the New Eloise, 1761) by Tolstoy’s favourite Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78).

  42. homme d’affaires: ‘personal secretary’.

  43. bel étage: In a large home or building, the first floor (or piano nobile) above the ground floor containing the salon, drawing room and other reception rooms, as well as the bedrooms.

  44. Cadet School (Yunkerskaya shkola): Founded in 1823 in St Petersburg on the initiative of the future Tsar Nicholas I (1796–1855) to train children of the nobility for military service, it was reorganized in 1838 as a ‘self-paying’ secondary institution to supply officers for the cuirassiers (heavy cavalry), uhlans (lancers) and hussars (light cavalry).

  45. issus de germains: ‘second cousins’ or relatives who share a great-grandparent or a pair of them.

  46. Kuntsevo: A suburb south-east of Moscow, but today a district within the city limits.

  47. dacha: ‘suburban’ or ‘country home’.

  48. Ivan Yakovlevich: Ivan Yakovlevich Koreysha (1783–1861) was a holy fool revered even today by some Russian Orthodox Christians and described by Tolstoy in a note to the second edition of Youth as ‘a famous madman who lived in Moscow a long time and enjoyed among the Moscow ladies the reputation of a seer’. The argument between Dmitry and his mother, resumed in the next chapter between Dmitry and his sister, may thus be seen to echo, in its ostensible meaning, the argument in Childhood between Papa and maman in regard to Grisha.

  49. Bolognese (or Bichon Bolonais): A fluffy white lapdog not much larger than a cat. The breed dates from thirteenth-century Italy, if not from Roman times, and would in Tolstoy’s Russia very likely have evoked much the same associations of cuteness and privilege as it does today.

  50. Rob Roy: An enormously popular novel by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), first published in 1817, whose subject is the early eighteenth-century Scottish rebellion by Robert Roy McGregor (1671–1734). It was translated into French in 1822 and into Russian in 1829. Varenka could thus have been reading from either translation.

  51. c’est vous qui êtes un petit monstre de perfection: ‘it’s you who are a little monster of perfection.’

  52. Merci, mon cher: ‘Thank you, my dear.’

  53. A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country: The common saying comes from Matthew 13:57.

  54. si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait: ‘if youth only knew, if age only could.’ Lyubov Sergeyevna’s characteristic non sequitur is a French bromide dating from at least the sixteenth century, if not from Horace.

  55. Then one or the other of us would be unable to do so: A double marriage between two sets of siblings of the kind Nikolenka is imagining was forbidden as a matter of law on the pedantic ground that either couple would be marrying ‘blood relatives’, even if there had been no prior consanguinity.

  56. May I join us?: ‘Us’ is not a typographical error or a solecism, but an expression of Lyubochka’s social tact and nice sense of language (and of Tolstoy’s ear for dialogue and its undercurrents and nuances): she badly wants to take part in the activities of ‘our’ family (a ‘we’), since she’s a member of it, too.

  57. com si tri joli: That is, comme c’est très joli or ‘how very pretty it is’.

  58. Beethoven sonatas … the Pathétique and the Moonlight: The sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) are the No. 8 in C minor, opus 13 (1798), named Pathétique in 1799, and the No. 14 in C-sharp minor, opus 27, No. 2 (1801), named Moonlight in 1832.

  59. ‘Le fou’: ‘The Madman’, opus 136 (1837), a ‘dramatic scene’ for piano by the German Romantic pianist and composer Friedrich Wilhelm Kalkbrenner (1785–1849).

  60. Liszt: Franz Liszt (1811–86) was a prolific and influential Hungarian composer and wildly popular piano virtuoso. Kalkbrenner: See note 59 above.

  61. Sue, Dumas and Paul de Kock: Eugène Sue (1804–57) was a French writer of socialist sympathies who published his popular ten-volume roman-feuilleton or serialized novel Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris, 1842–3) in the weekly Journal des débats (Journal of Debates). The story’s hero is a nobleman of admirable moral, intellectual and physical qualities, who with his almost equally admirable companions helps a variety of people while disguised as a French worker. Alexandre Dumas (1802–70) was a widely read author of historical novels of high adventure, including Les Trois mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers, 1844) and the rest of the now classic D’Artagnan series, and Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte-Cristo, 1845–6), still beloved today. Paul de Kock (1793–1871) was the prolific author of novels depicting scenes of bourgeois Parisian life that were extremely popular in the first half of the nineteenth century, especially outside France.

  62. nobel … ehrlich: The French adjective noble, like the German nobel, differed at the time from the German ehrlich and the Russian blagorodny in its connotation of generosity of spirit and nobility of character, as opposed to honesty or honourability or nobility of birth alone.

  63. Je fus un homme très comme il faut: ‘I was a very well-bred (or respectable) man.’

  64. Mytishchi: The name means ‘customs duties’ or ‘tolls’.

  65. Messalina: Valeria Messalina (c. ad 17–48) was the third wife of the Roman emperor Claudius and an epitome of dissoluteness, immorality and extreme ruthlessness.

  66. tarantass: A light, closed carriage mounted on two parallel poles extending from front to rear, which allowed the replacement of its wheels with runners in the winter – just the sort of vehicle that would appeal to a man of Pyotr Vasilyevich’s smug practicality.

  67. belle-mère: ‘stepmother’.

  68. poissarde: ‘fishwife’.

  69. rowen (otava): The early autumn regrowth after the last mowing. The Russian word is, like the English, an unusual one, but as such a reflection of Tolstoy’s wide knowledge and terminological precision.

  70. 1812: The year of Napoleon’s disastrous inva
sion of Russia.

  71. Parnassus: Mount Parnassus in central Greece was, in Greek mythology, sacred to Apollo and the abode of the three muses of poetry, music and learning.

  72. Ce n’est pas français: ‘That isn’t French.’

  73. ce ne sont pas des gens comme il faut: ‘they aren’t respectable [or well-bred] people.’

  74. manants: ‘churls’ or ‘yokels’.

  75. ‘Demon’ (1839): A narrative poem by the Romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov (1815–41), begun while he was at the Cadet School and not published in complete form until 1860, although it did appear in a censored version in 1842 and was circulated in hand copies before that. It is the story of the tragic love of a fallen angel, an ‘exile from heaven’, for a mortal woman, and is told in sensuous verse with voluptuous images of seduction and of the lush alpine Caucasus landscape where the story takes place.

  76. Comme c’est gracieux: ‘How graceful.’

  77. Dorpat University: The university of the Estonian city of Dorpat, or Tartu as it is called today, was founded in 1632 and is one of the oldest and finest in Eastern Europe.

  78. O, ja: ‘Oh, yes.’

  79. Löschen Sie die Lichter aus, Frost!: ‘Put out the lights, Frost!’

  80. juchhe!: ‘Hurrah!’

  81. Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive … : The French poet Nicolas Joseph Laurent Gilbert (1751–80) wrote his widely popular ‘Adieux à la vie’ (‘Farewell to Life’) on his deathbed. The seventh stanza reads, ‘Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive, / J’apparus un jour, et je meurs; / Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, où lentement j’arrive, / Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs’: ‘At life’s gay banquet placed, a poor unhappy guest, / One day I pass, then disappear; / I die, and on the tomb where I at length shall rest / No friend will come to shed a tear’ (trans. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, 1858).

  82. Senate: The principal legislative, judicial and administrative arm of the Russian monarchy, and as such the country’s court of last resort.

  83. eighth fine: It was the practice at the venerable Moscow English Club – of which Tolstoy would become a member in the 1860s, and to which Papa presumably belongs – to impose incremental fines on any who remained after the club’s official closing time of 1 a.m.

  84. Materne’s: Philippe Materne’s delicatessen and café, located in the 1830s and 1840s near the university building on Mokhovaya Street, was one of the best in the city.

  85. Trubnoy Boulevard: Sretensky Boulevard in central Moscow today.

  86. marrow: A pun in Russian, where the word for ‘marrow’ also means ‘brain’.

  87. Lisbon: A well-known Moscow tavern.

  88. Lesage: Alain-René Lesage (1668–1747) was a French novelist and playwright, and the author of the classic picaresque tale L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35).

  89. Zhukovsky: Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852) was a leading Russian poet and influential translator of English and German Sentimental and Romantic verse.

  90. Féval: Paul Féval (1816–87) was a French novelist and dramatist known for swashbuckling fiction and, under the pseudonym Sir Francis Trolopp, for his immensely popular, Sue-like Les Mystères de Londres (The Mysteries of London, 1844).

  91. Stozhenka (or Ostozhenka): A street in central Moscow.

  92. recruit supplier: A speculator who, after paying Semyonov to enlist in the army (Semyonov may exaggerate the sum), will receive a voucher or receipt from the state, which he will then sell to someone else, who will use it to avoid the catastrophe of conscription, which at the time entailed twenty years of service in the ranks for those castes subject to it by law.

  93. permission from the Senate: Nobles as a caste not only had no military obligation but were prohibited from volunteering for service in the ranks, except with permission of the Senate, which through its Department of Heraldry was responsible for all matters pertaining to changes in estate affiliation and function.

  94. flog me: Nobles were exempt from corporal punishment as a matter of law.

  95. I’ll tell in the next, happier part of youth: Tolstoy never wrote the last part – to be called Young Manhood (Molodost) – of his projected Four Periods of Growth (Chetyre epokhi razvitiya).

  96. Yasnaya Polyana (Clear Glade): Tolstoy’s ancestral estate, about 125 miles south of Moscow, near the city of Tula.

  Notes

  1 . In the Russian army until 1864, a cadet-volunteer (yunker or volontër) was an irregular non-commissioned officer from the nobility promotable to regular status and a commission after a short term of active service (two years or less) and the passing of a set of examinations.

  2. L. N. Tolstoy, Perepiska s russkimi pisateliami (Correspondence with Russian Writers), ed. S. A. Rozanova, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Moscow, 1978), 1: 49–50. This and all subsequent translations are my own and may differ in detail from the available English versions mentioned in the Further Reading section, below.

  3. Perepiska, 1: 50–51. The term rendered here and in the translation as ‘outlook’ (napravlenie), in the sense of ‘a mental attitude or point of view’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary), had for liberals like Nekrasov the further meaning of ‘progressive orientation’ or even ‘commitment’, as Sir Isaiah Berlin has rendered it in his Sense of Reality (New York, 1997), 208–9. Nekrasov was thus acknowledging what he took to be the story’s social engagement, just as Tolstoy had chosen The Contemporary not only for its literary pedigree (it had been founded by Pushkin in 1836 and published the very best writers of the day) but also for its enlightened social views, which, as they grew more strident, would eventually lead to the closing of the magazine and the brief arrest of its staff.

  4. ‘Istoriia moego detstva’, Sovremennik (The Contemporary) 9 (1852). Perepiska, 1: 55.

  5. Perepiska, 1: 57.

  6. Perhaps feeling that he had taken the subject and its somewhat restrictive first-person method as far as he could, Tolstoy never returned to the series, although he did publish what might be taken as a kind of variation on the projected fourth part, the 1856 long story, ‘A Landowner’s Morning’.

  7. Despite Nekrasov’s increasingly insistent pleas (he was required by Russian law to know who his contributors were), Tolstoy, perhaps still unsure that the quality of his effort had matched the scale of his ambition, stubbornly refused for a time to identify himself, leaving the exasperated editor to publish not only Childhood but several other pieces virtually anonymously with the private conjecture that they had been written by Tolstoy’s brother.

  8. Perepiska, 1: 51.

  9. Sovremennik 9 (1854). The Russian title, Otrochestvo, has, in a tradition going back to the first translation by Isabel Hapgood in the late nineteenth century, always been rendered in English as Boyhood, but it could as easily and, given the developmental stage depicted in the story, perhaps even more accurately be rendered as Adolescence.

  10. Perepiska, 1: 61–2. The allusions are to Chapters 1, 2 and 15–16, respectively.

  11. The public debate about Russia’s true character and appropriate future famously coalesced into the two camps of the so-called Slavophiles and Westernizers and entailed a variety of ancillary issues, many of them addressed, in very different ways to be sure, in the great topical fiction of Turgenev and Dostoevsky, as well as in numerous other minor works. Tolstoy, however, was, at least at this early stage in his career, opposed in principle to that kind of direct engagement with public intellectual life, as he eloquently argued in 1859 in a speech to the Society of the Lovers of Russian Literature after his induction along with Turgenev: ‘… however great the significance of a political literature reflecting the temporary interests of a society, however necessary it may be for a nation’s development, there is another literature reflecting eternal, broadly human interests and the most precious, intimate feelings of a people, a literature accessible to any person of any nation and time, and one without which no nation of strength and vitality has ev
er developed’ (L. N. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works], ed. M. B. Khrapchenko et al., 20 vols [Moscow, 1983], 15: 8).

  12. See, for example, the blend of discriminating insight and blank incomprehension in the long, frank letter of the editor and minor novelist Alexander Druzhinin, a close friend to whom Tolstoy had sent Youth in manuscript (Perepiska, 1: 266–9). Druzhinin’s remarks on Tolstoy’s style are especially interesting: ‘Every one of your defects has its part of strength and beauty, and nearly every one of your merits contains within it the kernel of your defects. Your style fits that conclusion perfectly. You’re dreadfully illiterate, sometimes with the illiteracy of the innovator and strong poet who’s remaking the language in his own way and forever, and sometimes with that of an army officer scribbling to a comrade while squatting in some blindage’ (1: 267).

  13. As, for example, Ernest J. Simmons did in his very well documented scholarly account by blithely interpolating into his own narrative long unmarked sections of the trilogy as if they were autobiography or historical fact. Another approach to the issue is that of the brilliant critic and literary historian Lydia Ginzburg, who characterized the trilogy as ‘autopsychological’ rather than ‘autobiographical’. Her approach does not really resolve the issue, however, since all psychological analysis in all fiction, and indeed all human experience, is at base ‘autopsychological’ – is derived or extrapolated from self-perception: we know others in large part through our knowledge of ourselves. If, however, Ginzburg meant that Tolstoy had changed the external facts yet retained the internal mechanisms and processes of his own particular psyche, then that too will tend to discount the achievement of empathic imagination that is the hallmark of the trilogy, as it is indeed of all of Tolstoy’s fiction; that is, it will discount both the power of his insight and the degree of his conscious, calculated artistry.

  14. Although one should not ignore the importance of Émile for Tolstoy, the example of David Copperfield (1849–50) is perhaps especially pertinent here. According to his diary, Tolstoy was reading Dickens’s novel in 1852 as he worked on Childhood, most likely in the loose translation of Irinarkh Vvedensky published in Patriotic Annals (Otechestvennye zapiski) in 1851, since in November 1853, evidently wishing to reread the book in English, he asked his brother Sergey to obtain a copy for him and send it to the Caucasus along with an English-French dictionary. Be that as it may, we know that Tolstoy held David Copperfield in high regard throughout his life and reread it often in English as a special favourite, and that, as he indicated in a letter of 1891, it made an ‘enormous’ impression on him the first time he read it. Nonetheless, given the very great, indeed fundamental, differences between Dickens’s treatment of childhood, boyhood and youth and Tolstoy’s, not to mention their very different ways of representing character (Dickens tends to operate from schemata, while Tolstoy proceeds as it were inductively), it would be much more accurate to say that David Copperfield was a kind of sanction or inspiration in the use of first-person narration rather than a direct influence on the trilogy’s structure and stance.