by Leo Tolstoy
As I was starting to fall asleep while going over in my mind all the sins of which I had been cleansed, I suddenly remembered a shameful one that I had kept to myself during confession. The words of the prayer that had preceded confession came back to me and sounded unceasingly in my ears. My serenity was gone in an instant. I heard ‘but if you conceal anything, you will be committing a grievous sin’ over and over, and saw myself as a sinner so terrible that no punishment could be sufficient. I tossed and turned a long time, thinking about my situation and expecting divine retribution at any moment, or even instant death, an idea that filled me with indescribable terror. But then a happy thought suddenly came to me: when it was light to walk or drive to the confessor at the monastery and confess again. And I grew calm.
SEVEN
My Trip to the Monastery
Afraid I might oversleep, I awoke several times in the night, and then was out of bed before six. There was barely a glimmer in the windows. I put on my clothes and my boots, which lay in a dirty heap by the bed, since Nikolay hadn’t had a chance to collect them yet, and then, without saying my prayers or washing, I went out onto the street alone for the first time in my life.
The icy, misty dawn was turning red beyond the green roof of the big house across the street. A quite severe morning frost had frozen the mud and rivulets, and it stung my feet and nipped at my face and hands. I had been counting on a cab for a quick drive to the monastery and back, but there weren’t any on our lane yet, and on Arbat Street there were only some carts going by and a couple of bricklayers walking along the footpath in conversation. After a thousand paces or so, I started to come upon servant men and women with baskets on their way to market, a barrel wagon going for water, a pie-seller at a crossing, and an open bakery, and then at last, by the Arbat Gate, a driver, a little old man swaying back and forth asleep on the seat of his rickety, bluish, patchwork, low-sprung droshky. Probably not completely awake, he asked for only twenty kopeks to the monastery and back, but then he came to, and as I was about to get in, he struck his little horse with the ends of his reins and started to drive away without me. ‘I can’t, sir. I’ve got to feed the horse!’ he mumbled.
I finally convinced him to stop after offering him forty kopeks. He reined in the horse, carefully looked me over, and then said, ‘Get in, sir!’ I’ll admit I was a little afraid he might take me off to some remote lane and rob me. Grabbing hold of the collar of his ragged peasant coat and pitifully exposing as I did so his wrinkled neck above his severely hunched back, I climbed onto the bluish, bobbing, swaying seat and we set off down Vozdvizhenka Street. As we were driving I noticed that the rear of the droshky was upholstered with a piece of the same striped greenish material the driver’s peasant coat was made of, and for some reason that circumstance put me at ease, and I stopped being afraid that he would take me away and rob me.
The sun was already quite high when we got to the monastery, and it brightly gilded the cupolas of the churches. There was still frost in the shade, but the road was completely covered with swift, turbid rivulets, and the horse splashed through the thawed mud. Once inside the monastery wall, I asked the first person I saw where I could find the confessor.
‘That’s his cell over there,’ a passing young monk said, stopping for a moment and pointing to a little cottage with a porch.
‘I thank you kindly,’ I said.
But what could the other monks have been thinking as they came out of a church one after another and looked at me? I was neither grown-up nor child. My face wasn’t washed, my hair wasn’t combed, my clothes were flecked with down, and my boots hadn’t been cleaned and were still muddy. To what class of person were the monks mentally assigning me? For they were looking at me with care. I continued, however, in the direction indicated by the young monk.
A little old man in black with thick grey eyebrows met me on the narrow path leading to the cells and asked me what I wanted.
For a moment, I was going to say ‘nothing’ and run back to the cab and drive home, but despite his prominent eyebrows the old man’s face inspired trust. I said that I needed to see my confessor and gave his name.
‘Come with me, young master, I’ll show you the way,’ he said, evidently having guessed my standing at once and turning around. ‘The father’s at matins and will be back shortly.’
He opened the door and led me through a tidy vestibule and entryway across a clean linen floor mat to the cell.
‘Wait here,’ he said with a warm, reassuring expression and went out.
The room in which I found myself was very small and extraordinarily neat. The only items of furniture were an oilcloth-covered table standing between two small double-hinged windows with a pot of geraniums on each sill, a small stand with icons and a little lamp hanging in front, an armchair, and two other chairs. In one corner was a wall clock with little flowers painted on its face and brass weights suspended on chains. Two cassocks hung from nails in a partition (with the bed very likely behind) that was attached to the ceiling with whitewashed wooden posts.
The windows looked onto a white wall five feet away. Between them and the wall was a small lilac bush. No sound reached the room from the outside, and in the silence the pleasant, regular tick-tock of the pendulum seemed loud. No sooner was I by myself in that quiet corner than all my former thoughts and memories abruptly slipped away as if they had never been, and I fell into an inexpressibly pleasurable reverie. The yellowed nankeen cassocks with their worn linings, the scuffed black leather book bindings with their bronze hasps, the dull-green plants with their carefully watered soil and washed leaves, and especially the monotonously intermittent sound of the pendulum all spoke distinctly of a new life, one that until then had been unknown to me, a life of solitude, prayer and quiet, serene happiness.
‘The months pass, and then the years,’ I thought, ‘and he’s always alone, always serene, and always feels that his conscience is clear before God, and that his prayers have been heard.’ I sat in the chair about half an hour, trying to be still and breathe quietly, so I wouldn’t disturb the harmony of sound that was saying so much to me. And the pendulum continued to knock in the same way – harder to the left, softer to the right.
EIGHT
My Second Confession
The confessor’s footsteps roused me from my reverie.
‘Hello,’ he said, arranging his long grey hair with his hand. ‘What can I do for you?’
I asked him to bless me, and with special pleasure kissed his small sallow hand.
When I explained my request to him, he said nothing but went over to the icons and began the confession.
After it was over and I had overcome my shame and said everything that was in my heart, he placed his hands on my head and in his soft, resonant voice said, ‘May the blessing of our heavenly Father be upon you, my son, and may he preserve in you forever your faith, mildness and humility. Amen.’
I was utterly happy. Tears of happiness welled in my eyes, and I kissed a fold of the monk’s thin woollen cassock and lifted my head. His face was utterly serene.
Sensing my pleasure in that feeling of tenderness and afraid of somehow dispelling it, I quickly parted with the confessor and, staring straight ahead to avoid any distraction, came back outside the walls and took my place in the swaying droshky. But the jolting of the carriage and the variety of things flashing before my eyes quickly dispelled the feeling anyway, and I was already imagining that the confessor was most likely thinking that he had never in his life met such a beautiful young soul and never would again, since there were no others like it. I was convinced of that, and the conviction produced in me the sort of gaiety that has to be shared.
I felt a terrific urge to speak to someone, and since there wasn’t anyone there but the driver, I spoke to him.
‘Was I long, then?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, fairly long, but the horse should have been fed long ago. I work at night, yo
u see,’ the little old driver replied, apparently thanks to the sunshine now quite cheerful in comparison with before.
‘To me it seemed I was only gone a minute,’ I said. ‘You know why I went to the monastery?’ I added, moving to the hollowed part of the bench that was closer to the old driver.
‘What business is that of ours? Whatever the fare says, that’s where we go,’ he replied.
‘No, all the same, why do you think?’ I persisted.
‘Well, probably to bury someone, and you went to buy a plot,’ he said.
‘No, brother. You know why I went?’
‘I can’t know the answer to that, sir,’ he answered.
The driver’s voice seemed so kind to me that I decided for his edification to tell him the reason for my trip and even the feeling I had experienced.
‘You want me to tell you? Well, you see …’
And I told him everything and described all my beautiful feelings. Even now the memory of it makes me blush.
‘Right, sir,’ the driver dubiously replied.
After that he was silent a long time and sat without moving, except to adjust the skirt of his coat, which kept coming out from under his striped leg in its tall boot as the latter bounced along the droshky’s footboard. I had already decided that he was thinking the same thoughts about me as the confessor – that a beautiful young person like me was to be found nowhere else in the world – when he suddenly addressed me.
‘Well, sir, that’s a matter for gentlemen.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘That matter of yours, it’s a matter for gentlemen,’ he repeated in a toothless mumble.
‘No, he didn’t understand me,’ I thought, and said nothing more to him all the way home.
Although it wasn’t a feeling of tenderness and piety but rather of satisfaction with myself at having experienced them that stayed with me the whole way, despite the variety of people out and about in the brilliant sunshine, that feeling, too, vanished completely the moment I got home. I didn’t have the forty kopeks to pay the driver. The butler Gavrilo, to whom I was already in debt, wouldn’t lend me any more. Seeing me run across the yard twice as I tried to obtain the money, and probably guessing what I was up to, the driver got down from his droshky and, even though he had seemed kind to me, started to talk loudly about scoundrels who don’t pay their fares, obviously intending to sting me.
Everyone else was still asleep, so there was no one besides the servants from whom I could borrow the money. Finally, after the most solemn promise, which I could see in his eyes he didn’t believe, but accepted anyway since he liked me and remembered the good deed I had done him, Vasily paid the driver for me. The feeling was thus dispelled like smoke. When I started to get dressed for church in order to take Communion with everyone else, and it turned out that my clothes hadn’t been altered and no longer fitted, I committed a host of other sins. Putting on different clothes, I set out for Communion in a peculiar state of hurried thought and a complete lack of faith in my beautiful tendencies.
NINE
How I Prepared for My Examination
Papa, Lyubochka, Mimi and Katenka left for the country on Thursday of Bright week, with Volodya and me and St-Jérôme remaining behind in Grandmother’s big house. The mood I was in on confession day and during the trip to the monastery had completely passed, leaving only a vague, if pleasant, memory, which was gradually replaced by the new impressions of our life of freedom.
The booklet entitled Rules of Life was put away with my lesson copybooks. Although the idea of compiling rules for all the circumstances of life and always following them was one that attracted me as both extraordinarily simple and great, and one, moreover, that I intended to put into practice, I once again seemed to forget that it needed to be done at once, and kept postponing it for another time. I did, on the other hand, take comfort in the fact that every thought entering my mind would thenceforth fit under one of the subheadings of my rules and obligations, whether in relation to myself, or to my family, or to God. ‘So, I’ll assign that there, along with numerous other thoughts that will come to me later on the subject,’ I would say to myself. I often ask myself now when was I better and more right: then, when I believed in the omnipotence of the human intellect, or now when, having lost the strength of growth, I doubt the intellect’s power and significance. And I’m unable to give myself a definite answer.
The awareness of freedom, and the springtime feeling of anticipation about which I’ve already spoken, excited me to such an extent that I absolutely could not take myself in hand, and thus prepared for my examinations very poorly. I would be studying in the classroom in the morning, and know it was essential to work, since there was an examination the next day on a subject for which two whole questions remained to be read, when a spring fragrance would suddenly waft through the window, and it would seem quite necessary just then to recall something, and my hands would let go of the book by themselves, and my feet would start to move by themselves and walk back and forth, and in my mind, as if someone had tripped a spring and set a machine in motion – in my mind so many cheerful daydreams would begin to rush by so easily and naturally and with such speed that it was all I could do to note their splendour. And an hour and then two would pass by unnoticed. Or I would be sitting over a book again and somehow concentrating all my attention on what I was reading, but then suddenly hear female steps in the hallway and the rustle of a dress, and everything would slip from my mind and there would be no possibility of remaining in my seat, even though I knew very well that besides Gasha, Grandmother’s old chambermaid, there couldn’t be anyone else there. ‘But what if she has suddenly come?’ I would think. ‘What if it’s now about to begin and I miss it?’ and I would run out into the hallway and see that it was indeed Gasha. But for a long time afterwards I wouldn’t be able to concentrate again. The spring had been tripped and a terrific tumult let loose. Or in the evening I would be sitting alone in my room with a tallow candle and leave off reading for a moment to snip the candlewick or to adjust the way I was sitting in my chair, and I would notice that it was dark in the doorways and all the corners, and hear that it was silent all over the house, and again it would be impossible not to stop and listen to the silence, or gaze into a dark room through an open door, or remain sitting a long time in that motionless position, or go downstairs and walk around all the empty rooms. Often in the evening I would also sit unnoticed for a long time in the salon, listening to ‘The Nightingale’13 softly picked out with two fingers by Gasha alone at the piano in the light of a tallow candle. And if the moon was out, it was absolutely impossible not to get out of bed and sit on the windowsill facing the front garden and look out at the gleaming roof of Shaposhnikov’s house,14 and at the graceful belfry of our parish church, and at the dark shadows cast by the fence and a bush on the path in the garden, and remain there so long that it would be hard to get up even at ten the next morning.
So that if it hadn’t been for the teachers who continued to visit me, or St-Jérôme, who would reluctantly prick my pride from time to time, or – the main thing – my wish to seem like a capable fellow in my friend Nekhlyudov’s eyes by passing the examinations with distinction, a very important thing according to his notions – if it hadn’t been for those things, springtime and freedom would have made me forget even what I knew before, and I wouldn’t have been able to pass the examinations for anything.
TEN
The History Examination
I entered the large university hall for the first time on 16 April,15 escorted by St-Jérôme. We had driven there in our quite elegant phaeton. I was wearing a tailcoat, something I had never done before, and all my clothes, even my linen and stockings, were of the newest and finest. After the doorman had helped me off with my overcoat and I stood before him in the full beauty of my dress, I even started to feel a little ashamed that I was so dazzling. But no sooner did I step onto the bright parquet
floor of the crowded hall, and see hundreds of young men in tailcoats and gymnasium16 uniforms, a few of whom glanced indifferently at me, and at the far end of the hall, important professors casually walking about near the tables or sitting in big armchairs, than I was at once disappointed in my hope of attracting general attention to myself. The expression on my face, which at home and then in the foyer had indicated something like regret that I possessed, in spite of myself, such a noble and imposing appearance, was now replaced by one of the greatest timidity and a kind of dejection. I even fell to the other extreme and was very glad to see an exceptionally badly, even sloppily dressed gentleman, not yet old but almost completely grey, who was sitting at a rear bench apart from the others. I immediately sat down near him and began to inspect those who had come for the examination and to draw my conclusions about them. There were many different faces and figures among them, but according to my ideas at the time, they could all be easily divided into three kinds.
There were those like me who had come to the examinations with their family tutors or parents, including the youngest Ivin with the familiar Herr Frost, and Ilenka Grap with his old father. They all had downy chins, wore their linen turned out, sat quietly without opening the books and copybooks they had brought with them, and gazed with obvious timidity at the professors and the examination tables. The second kind of examinee was the young men in gymnasium uniforms, of whom many already shaved. They were mostly acquainted with one other, talked loudly, referred to the professors by their first names and patronymics, prepared questions on the spot, passed their copybooks back and forth to each other, walked around among the benches, and brought in pasties and sandwiches from the foyer and ate them at once, lowering their heads to the level of the desktop only slightly to do so. The third and last kind of examinee, although there weren’t many of them, was the quite old ones in tailcoats but more often in frock coats without visible linen. They behaved with the utmost seriousness, sat by themselves and looked very sombre. The one who had given me comfort by undoubtedly being dressed worse than I was belonged to the last kind. Leaning on both arms with his tousled, partially grey hair sticking out between his fingers as he read a book, he glanced at me for an instant with his gleaming, not entirely charitable eyes, frowning gloomily and continuing to stick a shiny elbow in my direction, so I wouldn’t be able to come any closer. The gymnasium students, on the other hand, were too sociable, and I was a little intimidated by them. One of them thrust a book in my hand and said, ‘Pass it to him over there.’ Another going by me said, ‘Let me through, old chap.’ A third, climbing over the desktop, leaned on my shoulder as if it were a bench. All that seemed boorish and unpleasant to me: I regarded myself as far superior to those gymnasium students, and felt that they shouldn’t have allowed themselves to be so familiar with me. At last, they started to call out our names. The gymnasium students went up boldly, answered well for the the most part, and returned cheerfully. Our company was much more timid and answered less well, I think. Of the old ones, a few answered superbly, while others did so very poorly. When the name Semyonov was called, my neighbour with the grey hair and gleaming eyes climbed over my legs with a rude push and went up to the table. It was clear from the professors’ look that he had answered excellently and confidently. Returning to his place, he calmly picked up his copybooks and left without waiting to see what mark he had been given. There were several times when the sound of a voice calling a name made me tremble, but it wasn’t my turn in the alphabet yet, although they had reached the names starting with K.17 ‘Ikonin and Tenyev!’ someone suddenly shouted from the professors’ corner. A chill ran over my scalp and down my spine.