by Leo Tolstoy
We went past the guard-house and the guards ran out. Those I always noticed, for I loved soldiers and military exercises from my childhood. We were told, especially by grandmother – the very one who believed it least of all – that all men are equal and that we ought to remember this, but I knew that those who said so did not believe it.
I remember once how Sásha Golítzin, who was playing with me at barricades, accidentally knocked me and hurt me.
‘How dare you!’
‘I did not mean to. What does it matter?’
I felt the blood rush to my heart with vexation and anger. I complained to Nicholas Ivánovich and was not ashamed when Golítzin begged my pardon.
That is enough for to-day. My candle has burnt low and I have yet to chop sticks, my axe is blunt and I have nothing to sharpen it on, besides which I don’t know how to.
16th December –
I have not written for three days. I was not well. I have been reading the Gospels but could not arouse in myself that understanding of them, that communion with God, which I experienced before. I used often to think that man cannot help having desires. I always had and still have desires. First I wished to conquer Napoleon, I wished to give peace to Europe, I wished to be released from my crown: and all my wishes were either fulfilled and as soon as that happened ceased to attract me, or became impossible of fulfilment and I ceased to wish for them. But while my wishes were being fulfilled or becoming impossible, new wishes arose, and so it went on and goes on to the end. I wished for the winter – it has come; I wished for solitude – and have almost attained it; now I wish to describe my life, and to do it in the best way possible, that it may be of use to others. And whether this wish is fulfilled or not, new wishes will awaken. Life consists in that. And it occurs to me that if the whole of life consists in the birth of wishes and the joy of life lies in their fulfilment, is there no wish which would be natural to man, to every human being, always, and would always be fulfilled or rather would be approaching fulfilment? And it has become clear to me that this would be so for a man who desired death. His whole life would be an approach to the fulfilment of that wish and the wish would certainly be fulfilled.
At first this seemed strange to me. But having considered it I suddenly saw that it really is so; that this alone, this approach to death, is the only reasonable wish a man can have. A wish not for death itself, but for the movement of life which leads to death. That movement consists in a release from passions and temptations of that spiritual element which dwells in every man. I feel this now, having freed myself from most of the things that used to hide from me what is essential in my soul – its oneness with God: used to hide God. I arrived at it unconsciously. But if I placed my welfare first (and this is not only possible, but is what ought to be) and considered my highest welfare to lie in liberation from passions and an approach towards God, then everything that brought me nearer to death – old age, and illness – would be a fulfilment of my one great desire. That is so, and I feel it when I am well. But when I have indigestion, as was the case yesterday and the day before, I cannot awaken that feeling, and though I do not resist death I am unable to wish to draw nearer to it.
Well, such a condition is one of spiritual sleep. One has to wait quietly. I will now go on from where I left off. What I write about my childhood I recount mainly from hearsay, and often what was told me about myself gets mixed up with what I experienced; so that I sometimes do not know what I myself experienced and what I heard from others.
My whole life from my birth to my present old age makes me think of a place enveloped in a thick mist, or even of the battlefield at Dresden: everything is hidden, nothing visible, and suddenly here and there little islands open out, des éclaircies23 in which one sees people and objects unconnected with anything else and surrounded on all sides by an impenetrable curtain. Such are my childish recollections. For the time of my childhood these éclaircies very very rarely open out amid the sea of mist or smoke, afterwards they occur more and more frequently; but even now I have times that leave no memories behind. In childhood there are very few memories, and the farther back the fewer there are.
I have spoken of the clearings that belong to my early life: Sophia Bénkendorf’s death, the good-bye to my parents, and Constantine’s mimicking, but several other memories of that period open out now as I think of the past. For instance, I don’t at all remember when Kóstya24 appeared and we began to live together; but I well remember how once when I was seven and he five we went to bed after service on Christmas eve and taking advantage of the fact that everybody had left our room, we got into one bed together. Kóstya in his little shirt climbed over to me and we began playing a merry game which consisted in slapping one another on our bare bodies; and we laughed till our stomachs ached and were very happy, when suddenly Nicholas Ivánovich, with his huge powdered head, entered wearing his embroidered coat and his orders, and rushed towards us with staring eyes, in horror which I could not at all explain to myself, and separated us and angrily promised to punish us and to tell our grandmother.
Another occurrence I well remember happened rather late – when I was about nine; it was an encounter in grandmother’s room, and almost in our presence, between Alexéy Grigóre-vich Orlóv25 and Potëmkin. It was not long before grandmother’s journey to the Crimea and our first journey to Moscow. Nicholas Ivánovich had taken us as usual to see grandmother. The large room, the ceiling of which was ornamented with stucco-work and paintings, was full of people. Grandmother’s hair had already been done. It was combed back from the forehead and very skilfully arranged on the temples. She sat at her dressing-table in a white powder-mantle. Her maid stood behind her adjusting her hair. She looked at us with a smile, continuing her conversation with a big, tall, and stout General decorated with the ribbon of St Andrew, who had a terrible scar across his cheek from mouth to ear. This was Orlóv, ‘Le balafré’.26 It was there I saw him for the first time. Grandmother’s Anderson hare-hounds were beside her, and my pet Mimi jumped up from her skirt and leaping at me put its feet on my shoulders and licked my face. We came up to grandmother and kissed her white, plump hand. She turned it round and her bent fingers caught my face and caressed me. In spite of her perfumes I was aware of her disagreeable smell. She went on looking at Balafré and speaking to him.
‘A fine fellow,’ she said, with her strong German accent, pointing to me, ‘you had not seen him before.’
‘They are both fine fellows,’ said the count, kissing my hand and Constantine’s.
‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ she said to her maid who was putting her cap on for her. That maid was Márya Stepánovna, painted red and white, a kind-hearted woman who always caressed me.
‘Où est ma tabatière?’27
Lanskóy came up and handed her an open snuff-box. Grandmother took a pinch and looked at her jester Matrëna Danílovna, who was approaching her.…
(The story breaks off here, and was left in this unfinished state when Tolstoy died.)
1 A trading port on the Sea of Azov.
2 Presumably standing for ‘Alexander Pávlovich’ (Alexander, son of Paul).
3 Iván Grigórevich Latýshev – a peasant of the village of Krasnorechínsk, whom Fëdor Kuzmích met and became acquainted with in 1839, and who, after the latter had lived in various places, built him a cell in a wood away from the road, on a hill above a cliff. In this cell Kuzmích began his diary. L. T.
4 ‘A fortunate accident.’
5 Fóti (1792–1838). An archimandrite who enjoyed much influence in court circles.
6 G. F. von Parrot (1767–1852), Member of the Russian Academy of Science. His letters to Alexander I were published in 1894–5.
7 Baroness B. J. Krüdener (1764–1824), pietist and authoress, at one time a friend of Alexander I.
8 The exceedingly harsh Minister to whom Alexander entrusted the government when he himself began to cease to exercise power.
9 The grandmother was Catherine the Gr
eat. The father was her half-mad son, afterwards the Emperor Paul, who was assassinated.
10 Márya Antónovna Narýshkina, at one time Alexander I’s mistress.
11 The Princes Gagárin are a famous Russian family.
12 Field-Marshal Prince P. M. Volkónski, Minister of the Palace.
13 General Count Diebitsch, a German by birth, Chief of the Russian General Staff. He constantly accompanied Alexander I.
14 The day of his patron-saint, which is kept like an English birthday.
15 9th November 1825 o.s. = 21st November, n.s.
16 Officially Alexander I died on 19th November, o.s. = 1st December, n.s. Whether Tolstoy had some reason for making it the 17th I do not know.
17 It was customary in Russia for people of other nationalities to adopt a Russian Christian name and patronymic, so in this case Miss Hessler assumed the names Praskóvya Ivánovna.
18 ‘After ’62 everything is possible.’ The Emperor Peter III, Catherine’s husband, had been dethroned by a conspiracy and murdered, in July 1762.
19 Field-Marshal Count G. A. Potëmkin (1739–91). For a long time the most influential of Catherine’s favourites.
20 Count A. D. Lanskóy (1754–84), a General and a favourite of Catherine II.
21 ‘They are bowing to you.’
22 ‘On the right.’
23 Clearings.
24 A pet name for Constantine.
25 Count Alexéy Grigórevich Orlóv, a General and Admiral. He had strangled Peter III with his own hands.
26 ‘The gash’.
27 ‘Where is my snuff-box?’
APPENDIX I
TWO EARLY STORIES
PREFACE
TOLSTOY was not only a prolific writer, but a writer given to producing numerous plot outlines, drafts and re-drafts, and unfinished sections of works which either never came to fruition or were re-absorbed into the making of other stories or novels. The ninety volumes of the Russian-language Jubilee Edition (1928–58) contain, as well as Tolstoy’s letters and diaries, a great quantity of this type of material, much of it of interest only to specialists. The two texts printed below, apparently not translated into English before, are included in the present edition both because they are documents of some biographical and literary value, and because readers of biographies and critical studies of Tolstoy in English may well come across references to them.
The first and much better-known of the two, A History of Yesterday, is a fragment written in a few days in late March 1851, some four weeks before Lev Tolstoy left with his brother Nikolai for the Caucasus, where (from November 1851 to July 1852) he was to write the fourth, final draft of his first published work, Childhood. Childhood looks like a thinly disguised autobiography, but is actually a complex blend of borrowed experiences, personal recollections and fiction. In A History of Yesterday, on the other hand, Tolstoy has, in Eikhenbaum’s words, ‘not yet severed the umbilical cord which connects the story to his diaries’. A History of Yesterday is much nearer to autobiography, or rather to Tolstoy’s diaries, of which there are surviving volumes for parts of 1847 and 1850, most of 1851 and nearly all of 1852.
A. N. Wilson points out the very close relationship between the opening section of the story and the diary’s record of the evening of 24 March 1851, which Tolstoy spent playing cards at the Moscow house of his cousin Alexander Volkonsky, and flirting with Alexander’s wife, Louisa Ivanovna. The story’s account of this social evening, with a minute dissection of the narrator’s thoughts and his conversation (spoken and implied) with his hostess, is followed by a description of his journey home. This includes a short essay on cab-drivers and their characteristics: the populist note and the details of verbal abuse and Russian nicknames are strongly reminiscent of Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842). Having brought his bachelor narrator home, Tolstoy plunges him into a long and typically heavy-footed disquisition on the diary or journal form itself, and its usefulness – or its futility – as a tool of moral self-improvement. This is the first in a long line of similar meditations in Tolstoy’s fiction, though by no means the first in his own diaries. It leads in turn to a detailed account of the processes of falling asleep, dreaming and waking up. The account of the experience is much more entertaining than the leaden analysis which follows: Proust’s treatment of very similar material sixty years later yielded a far more beautiful result. The text concludes with a much shorter fragment ‘written on another day’, a day which seems to bear no relation whatever to the Yesterday of the title, about the narrator’s projected journey down the Volga to Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea. Even this small fragment again partially reflects Tolstoy’s own life experience: he and Nikolai accomplished a three-week section of their journey to the Caucasus on a boat which took them down the Volga, not from Moscow but from Saratov to Astrakhan. (It is characteristic of Tolstoy’s endless and economical recycling of the raw material of experience that a similar journey down the Volga is undertaken by the Polish exiles escaping from Siberia in the late story What For?)
Important as the autobiographical element in A History of Yesterday is, scholars have emphasized the decisive literary influence which led Tolstoy to write it in the first place – his passionate enthusiasm for Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), which he read early in 1851 and partially translated into Russian. Some critics have enthused about the daring originality of Tolstoy’s early foray into ‘stream of consciousness’ writing: D. S. Mirsky invokes the names of Proust and Joyce. But a version of the ‘stream of consciousness’ convention is already present in Sterne, and A. N. Wilson argues that ‘far from being proto-Modernist, the fragment actually suggests (with its debts and allusions to Sterne and Rousseau) a world of literary modes and models which, by the standards of Western Europe, were at least half a century out of date’. R. F. Christian lists the many unmistakably Sternian fingerprints in this story – including frequent dashes (and parentheses) – and notes its paradoxical Shandean failure ever to get as far as telling us about what happened ‘yesterday’. He concludes: ‘The occasional diary-like entries and the passage on the subject of diaries are evidence also that Tolstoy’s own writing habits no less than his reading tastes are reflected in this early story which, like much of his juvenilia, is related less to contemporary life than to literature.’
The other early story included here for the first time in English is much less well-known. A Christmas Night dates from 1853, the year when Tolstoy’s second published story, The Raid, appeared, and in which he was working on Boyhood, the second part of his trilogy, while serving with the army in the Caucasus. Henri Troyat refers to this story (under the title A Holy Night) as the earliest of several texts, autobiographical as well as fictional, dealing with sexual initiation and sexual disgust. There is no suggestion, however, that A Christmas Night is a piece of barely-concealed journal writing in the manner of A History of Yesterday. A Christmas Night is a more conventionally literary piece, close to the mainstream of nineteenth-century novel fiction. This time the narrative is almost entirely in the ‘omniscient’ third person mode, and is far closer to Balzac than to Sterne, especially in its melodramatic treatment of romantic love and in the substantial ball scene which reads like an admiring pastiche of Le Père Goriot.
The text of A Christmas Night is incomplete, with two chapter headings indicated but not fleshed out, and the surviving manuscript is a mixture of a first rough draft, and a second ‘fair copy’ draft which extends almost to the end of Chapter III. As a result there are some incoherences in the treatment and the development of the minor characters, as well as a hesitation about the name of the hero – initially Alexandre, but in the second draft Seriozha Ivin. (In this translation ‘Seriozha’ is used throughout.) As in A History of Yesterday, the ms. contains a number of deleted but still decipherable passages, indicated in the present edition of both stories by pointed brackets.
Despite these imperfections, A Christmas Night is a complete and coherent story as it stands. It has a clear plot line, pl
enty of observation of human behaviour at carefully contrasted different social levels (an echo perhaps of the literary physiologies which came into fashion in the mid-1840s in imitation of French models), some passages of lyrical nature description which would be equally at home in Youth, and the perennial Tolstoyan theme of the moral superiority of the country over the city. The only undigested element (which Tolstoy would surely have excised, had he ever prepared this piece for publication) is the digression on gypsy music towards the end, which may be of some historical and even musicological interest but radically disrupts the narrative flow. This apart, if A History of Yesterday shows the young Tolstoy’s mastery of the Sternean sentimental manner, A Christmas Night, coming only two years later, demonstrates that he was also capable of producing a convincing Russian equivalent of the French romantic fiction of the 1830s and 1840s.
A HISTORY OF
YESTERDAY
I AM writing a history of yesterday, not because yesterday was in any way remarkable, or could even be called remarkable, but because I have long desired to tell the story of the intimate side of a single day. God alone knows how many varied and interesting impressions, and thoughts aroused by those impressions (obscure and ill-defined but nonetheless intelligible to our own soul) occur in the course of a single day. If it were possible to recount them in such a way as to make it easy for me to read my own self, and for others to read me as I really am, the result would be a really instructive and absorbing book – a book indeed for which the world could not provide enough ink for the writing, or printers for the publishing of it.
