Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Penguin ed.)

by Leo Tolstoy

  ‘Who’s that? Which one’s Bartenyev?’ they started to say around me.

  ‘Ikonin, go ahead, they’re calling you. But who this Bartenyev-Mordenyev18 is, I have no idea. Own up,’ said a tall, rosy-cheeked gymnasium student behind me.

  ‘That’s you,’ St-Jérôme said.

  ‘My name’s Irtenyev,’ I explained to the rosy-cheeked student. ‘Did they really call Irtenyev?’

  ‘Why, yes. What’s keeping you? Look at this dandy!’ he added just audibly enough for me to hear as I came out from behind the bench. Ahead of me walked Ikonin, a tall young man of about twenty-five who belonged to the third kind, the old ones. He was wearing a tight-fitting olive tailcoat and a dark-blue satin cravat, over which his long blond hair was carefully combed à la moujik.19 I had noticed his appearance, even on the benches. He was garrulous and not bad-looking, although I was struck by the strange red hair that he had allowed to grow on his throat and by his even stranger habit of constantly unbuttoning his waistcoat and scratching his chest under his shirt.

  Ikonin and I went up to a table at which three professors were sitting. Not one of them responded to our bows. A young professor was shuffling the questions like a deck of cards, another with a star on his tailcoat20 was gazing at a gymnasium student, who was saying something very rapidly about Charlemagne, adding ‘finally’ after each word, while the third professor, a little old man in spectacles, dipped his head, glanced up at us over his spectacles and pointed to the questions. I sensed that his gaze was directed at both Ikonin and me jointly, and that there was something about us he didn’t like (perhaps it was Ikonin’s throat hair), since after looking at the two of us again, he made an impatient movement with his head for us to hurry up and take our questions. I was annoyed and offended; first, that none of them had responded to our bows and, second, that they had apparently combined Ikonin and me in a single concept of ‘examinees’, and were already prejudiced against me on account of his throat hair. I took a question without being shy about it and was preparing to answer, but the professor indicated Ikonin with his eyes. I read over my question. It was one I knew the answer to and, calmly waiting my turn, I observed what was taking place in front of me. Ikonin wasn’t abashed in the least and even took his question too boldly, moving the whole side of his body to do so, shook his hair, and briskly read what was written on the card. He was, I think, about to open his mouth to answer, when the professor with the star, after letting the gymnasium student go with praise, suddenly looked at him. Ikonin stopped as if he had just remembered something. The general silence lasted about two minutes.

  ‘Well?’ the spectacled professor said.

  Ikonin opened his mouth and then fell silent again.

  ‘You’re not the only one here. Do you intend to answer or not?’ the young professor said, but Ikonin didn’t even look at him. He stared at the question and said nothing at all. The spectacled professor looked at him through his spectacles and then over them and then without them, since he had managed during that time to take them off, carefully wipe the lenses, and put them back on. Ikonin said nothing at all. Suddenly a little smile flickered on his face. He shook his hair, moved his whole body towards the table again, put the question back, looked at all the professors one after another and then at me, turned around, and strode jauntily back to the benches. The professors stared at each other.

  ‘Well, there’s a good one for you!’ the young professor said. ‘He’s self-paying!’21

  I moved closer to the table, but the professors continued to talk among themselves almost in a whisper, as if none of them even suspected I was there. I was quite convinced at the time that all three of them were extraordinarily interested in whether I would pass the examination and pass it well, and that it was only from self-importance that they pretended to be completely indifferent and not to notice me.

  When the spectacled professor indifferently addressed me, inviting me to answer the question, I looked straight at him, feeling a little ashamed of him for being so hypocritical with me, and faltered slightly at the beginning of my answer. But then it got easier and easier, and since the question was about Russian history, of which I had an excellent knowledge, I ended brilliantly and even got so carried away by my desire to impress on the professors that I was no Ikonin and shouldn’t be confused with him, that I offered to take another question. But, nodding his head, the professor said, ‘Fine, sir,’ and entered something in his register. Returning to the benches, I immediately learned from the gymasium students, who, goodness knows how, were aware of everything, that I had received a five.

  ELEVEN

  The Mathematics Examination

  Besides Grap, whom I considered beneath my friendship, and Ivin, who for some reason kept avoiding me, I made many new acquaintances at the following examinations, and a few of them had started to greet me. Ikonin was even glad to see me, and informed me that he would be re-examined in history, and that the history professor had had it in for him since last year’s examination, when he had supposedly also ‘flustered’ him. Semyonov, who hoped to enter the mathematics department, just as I did, and who remained aloof from everyone to the end of the examinations, sat in silence by himself, leaning on his elbows with his fingers stuck in his grey hair, while passing his sessions with distinction. He was ranked second, while first was a student from Gymnasium No. 1, a tall, skinny, very pale brunet with his cheek wrapped in a black cravat and his forehead covered with pimples. His hands, however, were slender and beautiful, with unusually long fingers and nails so badly bitten that the ends appeared to be bound with threads. All that seemed very fine to me, and, just as it should have been with the ‘first gymnasium student’. He talked with everyone the same way all the others did, and made his acquaintance, but even so there was, as it seemed to me, something exceptional and magnetic22 about his walk and the movement of his lips and dark eyes.

  I had arrived for the mathematics examination earlier than usual. I had a decent knowledge of the subject, although there were two questions in algebra that I had somehow hidden from my teacher, and that were a complete mystery to me. They were, as I recall now, the theory of combinations and Newton’s binomial theorem. I sat down on a rear bench and started to look them over. But the noisy room, which I wasn’t used to, and my awareness that there wasn’t enough time kept me from reading with any insight.

  ‘There he is. Over here, Nekhlyudov,’ I heard Volodya’s familiar voice.

  I turned around and saw him and Dmitry in unbuttoned frock coats waving their hands as they came towards me between the benches. It was immediately apparent that they were second-year students who were at home at the university. The look of their unbuttoned frock coats alone expressed scorn for our matriculating brother and inspired in him both envy and respect. It was extremely flattering to think that everyone around could see that I was acquainted with two second-year students, and I quickly stood up to greet them.

  Volodya couldn’t help expressing his sense of superiority.

  ‘Ah, you poor wretch!’ he said. ‘You still haven’t been called up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you reading? Did you actually not prepare?’

  ‘Not completely on two questions. This is what I don’t understand.’

  ‘What? That?’ Volodya said and started to explain Newton’s binomial to me, but he did it in such a haphazard, unclear way that after seeing the doubt about his knowledge in my eyes, he looked at Dmitry, and obviously seeing the same thing in his eyes, too, he turned red, but continued to say something I was unable to follow.

  ‘No, stop, Volodya. Let me go over it with him, if there’s time,’ Dmitry said, and after a glance in the professors’ direction, he sat down beside me.

  I noticed at once that my friend was in the complacently mild mood that always came over him when he was happy with himself, and that I was especially fond of in him. Since he knew mathematics well and expressed himself clea
rly, he went over the question with me so splendidly that I remember the answer to this day. But hardly had he finished than St-Jérôme said in a loud whisper, ‘À vous, Nicolas!’23 and, following Ikonin, I stepped out from behind the desk without looking at the second question. I went over to the table where two professors were sitting and next to which a gymnasium student was standing by the blackboard. Noisily breaking the chalk on it, he was briskly deriving some formula, and continued to write even after the professor said ‘That’s enough’ and told us to take our own questions. ‘What if it’s the theory of combinations?’ I thought, picking a question from the soft stack of cards with trembling fingers. Instead of choosing, Ikonin reached in the same way as before with the whole side of his body, took the top card with the same bold gesture, looked at it, and angrily frowned.

  ‘I always get the fiendish ones!’ he muttered.

  I looked at my own.

  A disaster! It was the theory of combinations!

  ‘What did you get?’ Ikonin asked.

  I showed him.

  ‘That one I know,’ he said.

  ‘You want to trade?’

  ‘No, all the same, I’m just not in the mood,’ Ikonin barely managed to whisper before the professor asked us to go to the blackboard.

  ‘Well, that’s it,’ I thought. ‘Instead of the brilliant examination I had meant to do, I’ll be covered with shame forever, worse than Ikonin.’ But suddenly Ikonin turned to me right in front of the professor, grabbed my question out of my hand, and gave me his own. I looked at the card. It was Newton’s binomial.

  The professor wasn’t old and had a pleasant, clever expression that mostly came from his uncommonly prominent brow.

  ‘What’s this, gentlemen, are you trading questions?’ he said.

  ‘No, he was just showing me his, Mr Professor,’ Ikonin deftly replied, and the words ‘Mr Professor’ were again the last ones that he spoke in that place, for once more he glanced at the professors and at me as he walked by, smiled, and then shrugged with an expression that said, ‘It doesn’t matter, brother!’ I later learned that it was the third year Ikonin had come for the examinations.

  My answer to the question I had just gone over with Dmitry was excellent, and the professor even told me that it was better than anyone could have expected and gave me a five.

  TWELVE

  The Latin Examination

  Everything went superbly until the Latin examination. The gymnasium student with the wrapped cheek was first, Semyonov was second and I was third. I had even begun to take pride in it and to seriously think that, despite my youth, I wasn’t a joke at all.

  There had been nervous talk as early as the first examination about the Latin professor, who was supposed to be a monster who enjoyed seeing young people fail, especially if they were self-paying, and who apparently spoke only Latin or Greek. St-Jérôme, who had been my Latin teacher, was encouraging, and it seemed to me, too, that since I could translate Cicero and several odes of Horace24 without a dictionary and had an excellent knowledge of Zumpt,25 I was as well prepared as anyone, but it turned out to be otherwise. The only thing heard all morning was the downfall of those who had gone before: one had received a zero, another a one, a third had been berated and threatened with ejection, and so on and so forth. Only Semyonov and the first gymnasium student calmly went up and, as usual, came back with fives. I could already see disaster looming when Ikonin and I were called to the little table behind which the terrifying professor was seated all by himself. He was a small, thin, sallow man with long greasy hair and an extremely pensive physiognomy.

  He gave Ikonin a book of Cicero’s speeches and made him translate one.

  To my great surprise, Ikonin not only read it but even translated several lines with help from the professor, who gave him hints. Sensing my superiority to such a feeble rival, I couldn’t help smiling, and even did so a bit derisively when it came to parsing and Ikonin had lapsed as before into obviously hopeless silence. I had meant to please the professor with that clever, slightly mocking grin, but it had the opposite effect.

  ‘You probably know better, since you’re smiling,’ the professor said to me in bad Russian. ‘We’ll see. You tell me, then.’

  I learned afterwards that the Latin professor had taken Ikonin under his wing, and that Ikonin even lodged with him. I at once answered the question about syntax that had been posed to Ikonin, but the professor made a long face and looked away.

  ‘All right, sir, your turn will come and then we’ll see what you know,’ he said without looking at me, and then started to explain to Ikonin what he had been asking about.

  ‘You can go,’ he added, and I saw him enter a four for Ikonin in his register. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘he’s not at all as strict as they’ve been saying.’ After Ikonin’s departure, the professor, for a full five minutes that seemed like five hours to me, rearranged his books and questions, blew his nose, adjusted his armchair, sat back in it, looked along the sides of the hall and then all around it – just not at me. All that simulation wasn’t enough for him, however, so he opened a book and pretended to read it as if I weren’t there at all. I stepped closer and coughed.

  ‘Ah, yes! You still here? Well, translate something,’ he said, handing me a book.

  ‘No, wait, this one’s better.’ He leafed through a volume of Horace and opened it at a passage that I thought no one would ever be able to translate.

  ‘I haven’t prepared that,’ I said.

  ‘So you want to answer what you’ve already memorized? That’s good! No, you translate this.’

  Somehow I started to make sense of it, but at every one of my enquiring glances the professor only shook his head with a sigh and said, ‘No.’ Finally, he shut the book with such nervous haste that he slammed it on his finger. Angrily removing the latter, he gave me a question about grammar and, leaning back in his armchair, fell silent in the most ominous way. I was about to answer, but the expression on his face hobbled my tongue and whatever I said seemed wrong to me.

  ‘That’s wrong, wrong, completely wrong!’ he suddenly said in his vile accent, quickly changing his position and resting his elbows on the table, while fiddling with the gold ring that sat loosely on a thin finger of his left hand. ‘That’s no way to prepare for an institution of higher learning, gentlemen. You just want to wear the student jacket and blue collar. You pick up some superficial knowledge and think that you can be students. No, gentlemen, you have to learn the subject thoroughly,’ and so on and so forth.

  The whole time he was delivering that speech in broken Russian, I stared dully at his lowered eyes. First I was overwhelmed by disappointment at not being third, then by the fear that I hadn’t passed the examination at all, and finally by a sense of injustice, wounded pride and undeserved humiliation, feelings that were further inflamed and made venomous by my contempt for the professor, who, according to my ideas, was not comme il faut, as I realized looking at his short, thick, round fingernails. Watching me and seeing my trembling lips and tear-filled eyes, he very likely interpreted my agitation as a plea to raise my mark, and as if taking pity on me (but also in the presence of another professor, who had come over in the meantime) he said, ‘All right, sir. Even though you don’t deserve it, I’ll give you a passing mark (meaning a two) out of consideration for your young age and in the hope that once you’re at the university you won’t be so flippant.’

  That last sentence, delivered in the presence of the other professor, who looked at me as if he, too, were saying, ‘Yes, that’s right, young man!’ completely undid me. There was a moment when my eyes clouded over and the terrifying professor seemed to be sitting at his table somewhere off in the distance, and the wild idea entered my mind with terrible one-sided clarity, ‘What if … ? What would happen if … ?’ But for some reason I didn’t do anything, but only bowed automatically to both professors with particular courtesy, smiled, I think, the same littl
e smile as Ikonin, and stepped away from the table.