Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Penguin ed.)

by Leo Tolstoy

  ‘And I’m telling you it isn’t.’

  ‘And I’m telling you it is, because I recognize it in myself,’ I answered with the heat of pent-up vexation, but still hoping to disarm him with that frank admission. ‘I’ve told you before, and I’ll repeat that it always seems to me that I’m fond of people who say pleasant things to me, but then when I take a good look at it, I see that there’s no real affection, after all.’

  ‘No,’ Dmitry continued, adjusting his cravat with an angry movement of his chin, ‘when I like someone, neither praise nor abuse can change the way I feel.’

  ‘That’s not true! When I admitted to you that after Papa called me trash, I hated him for it for a time and wished he were dead, in exactly the same way that you –’

  ‘Speak for yourself. It’s a pity if you’re such a –’

  ‘On the contrary!’ I cried, jumping up from the chair and looking him in the eye with desperate pluck. ‘What you’re saying isn’t good; did you really not say about my brother – I won’t remind you what it was, because that would be unfair – but did you really not say to me … ? I’ll tell you exactly how I understand you now.’

  And trying to hurt him more painfully than he had hurt me, I started to prove to him that he didn’t care about anyone, and said all the things with which I felt I had the right to reproach him. I was quite satisfied that I had said it all to him, completely forgetting that the only possible purpose for doing so – his admitting the flaws I had exposed – couldn’t be achieved when he was angry. But when he was calm and might have acknowledged them, I never would have said anything.

  The argument was already turning into a quarrel, when Dmitry suddenly fell silent and walked away from me into the other room. Continuing to speak, I started after him, but he ignored me. I knew that a quick temper was in his column of vices, and that he was now trying to get a hold of himself. I cursed all his lists.

  So that’s what our rule about ‘telling each other everything we felt, and never telling anyone else about each other’ had led to. In our enthusiasm for candour we had sometimes made the most disgraceful admissions, shamefully passing off an assumption or daydream as a desire or feeling – for example, what I had just said to him then. And those admissions not only failed to strengthen the bond between us, but dried up our feeling for each other and pushed us apart, and now pride had suddenly kept him from making the most trivial admission, and in the heat of our argument we had made use of weapons that we ourselves had given each other, and that inflicted terrific pain.

  FORTY-TWO

  Our Stepmother

  Although Papa hadn’t meant to bring his wife to Moscow until the new year, he came in October, in the autumn, when there was still excellent riding to be had with the dogs. He had changed his mind, he said, because a case of his was supposed to be heard in the Senate,82 but Mimi’s version was that Avdotya Vasilyevna had been so bored in the country, had talked so much about Moscow and had pretended to be so unwell that Papa had decided to carry out her wish.

  ‘Because she never loved him, but only buzzed about her love in everyone’s ears, so she could marry a rich man,’ Mimi added with a wistful sigh, as if to say, ‘Not what some people would have done for him, had he been able to appreciate them.’

  Some people were unfair to Avdotya Vasilyevna. Her love for Papa, a passionate, devoted, self-immolating love, was apparent in her every word, gesture and glance. But that love didn’t at all keep her, along with her desire not to be separated from her beloved husband, from wanting an extraordinary bonnet from Madame Annette’s, or a hat with an extraordinary light-blue ostrich feather, or a dark-blue dress of Venetian velvet that would artfully display her graceful white bosom and arms, till then revealed to no one but her husband and the chambermaids. Katenka took her mother’s side, obviously, whereas strange, facetious relations were immediately established between us and our stepmother from the day of her arrival. No sooner had she stepped from the coach than Volodya shambled over to her with a solemn face and vacant look and said with a bow and a scrape, as if he were introducing someone, ‘I have the honour to welcome our sweet mama and kiss her hand.’

  ‘Ah, dear little son!’ Avdotya Vasilyevna said, smiling her beautiful, unchanging smile.

  ‘Don’t forget your second little son,’ I said, going over to her, too, and trying, in spite of myself, to imitate Volodya’s voice and demeanour.

  If we and our stepmother had been confident of our mutual attachment, that demeanour might have meant casualness about showing signs of affection; if we had been ill-disposed towards each other, it might have meant irony, a contempt for dissembling or a desire to hide our real attitude from Papa, who was standing nearby; or it might have meant any number of other thoughts and feelings. But in the present instance that expression, which was very much in keeping with Avdotya Vasilyevna’s own spirit, meant exactly nothing and served only to conceal the absence of any relations at all. Afterwards, I often noticed falsely jovial relations of the kind in other families, where the members had a premonition that the true relations might not be very good, but between us and Avdotya Vasilyevna those relations were established involuntarily. We almost never departed from them, and were invariably affectedly courteous with her, spoke French, bowed and scraped and called her chère maman, to which she always replied with jokes of the same kind and her beautiful, unchanging smile. The tearful Lyubochka, with her bandy legs and guileless conversation, was the only one who came to love our stepmother, and she tried quite naïvely and sometimes awkwardly to bring her into closer relations with the rest of us; in return, the only one in the whole world for whom, besides her passionate love for Papa, Avdotya Vasilyevna had even a drop of affection was Lyubochka. Avdotya Vasilyevna even treated her with a kind of delighted wonder and deferential respect that quite astonished me.

  In the beginning, Avdotya Vasilyevna often liked to refer, while identifying herself as a stepmother, to how children and other household members always regard such a person badly and unjustly, and how difficult her own position was as a result. Yet even though she foresaw all the unpleasantness of that position, she did nothing to avoid it: to be affectionate with one, to give gifts to another, not to be peevish, all of which would have been quite easy for her, since she was by nature undemanding and very kind. Not only did she not do any of that, however, but on the contrary, in anticipation of the unpleasantness of her position, although without any provocation, she mounted her defence and, in assuming that the whole household wanted to do nasty things to her and insult her in every way, she saw design in everything and concluded that the most dignified thing would be for her to endure it all in silence, by her inaction obviously not gaining any love, but not provoking any hostility either. There was, moreover, so little capacity in her for that ‘understanding’ of which I’ve already spoken, and which was developed to the highest degree in our family, and her habits were so at odds with those that had taken root among us, that she was for those reasons alone already at a disadvantage. In our orderly home with its regular routine she continued to live as if she had just moved in: she got up and went to bed sometimes early and sometimes late, she came out for dinner or she didn’t, she had supper or she didn’t. When there wasn’t any company, she almost always went around half-dressed and wasn’t embarrassed to be seen by us and even the servants in a white underskirt with a shawl thrown over her bare arms. At first I liked that simplicity, but then, because of it, I quickly lost the remaining respect I had for her. Even stranger to us was that she was two completely different women with company and without: the first, in its presence, was a youthful, healthy, cold beauty, superbly dressed, neither clever nor stupid, but gay; the second, in its absence, was a worn-out, melancholy, no longer young woman, sloppy and bored, although loving. Seeing her flushed from the cold, smiling and happy in the awareness of her beauty as she came back from calls and, after removing her hat, went to look at herself in the mirror; or em
barrassed yet proud before the servants as she went out to the coach with a rustle of her magnificent low-cut ball gown; or at the little soirées at home in a high-necked silk dress with exquisite lace next to her tender skin as she beamed her beautiful, unchanging smile in every direction – seeing her like that, I would often wonder what those who were delighted with her would have said, had they seen her as I did when, spending the evening at home waiting for her husband to come back from the club after midnight, she would walk around the dimly lit rooms like a wraith in some house wrap with her hair uncombed. She would go over to the piano and, frowning with effort, play on it the only waltz she knew, or pick up a novel and, after reading a few lines from the middle, throw it down, or, not wanting to disturb the servants, go into the pantry by herself to get a pickle or some cold veal and eat it while standing next to the little pantry window, or, tired and depressed again, aimlessly wander from room to room. But what estranged her and us most was the lack of ‘understanding’, which was mainly expressed in her characteristic manner of gracious attention, whenever others spoke to her of things beyond her grasp. It wasn’t her fault that it had become an unconscious habit to smile slightly with just her lips and to tip her head to the side whenever she was told things that were of little interest to her (and besides herself and her husband, nothing interested her), but that smile and tipping of her head, constantly repeated, became unbearable. Her merriment, as if laughing at itself, at you and at all of society, was awkward, too, and failed to communicate itself to anyone, and her sensitivity was much too affected. But the chief thing was that she wasn’t ashamed to talk constantly to any and all about her love for Papa. Although she was certainly telling the truth when she said that her love for her husband was her whole life, and although she proved it with her whole life, the incessant, unselfconscious repetition of it was, to our way of thinking, offensive, and we were embarrassed for her whenever she spoke of it in front of strangers – even more embarrassed than we were about her mistakes in French.

  She loved her husband more than anything in the world, and her husband loved her, especially in the beginning when he saw that he wasn’t the only one who was pleased with her. Her one purpose in life had been to obtain her husband’s love, yet she seemed to do on purpose what could only be unpleasant for him, and all of it with the goal of proving to him the whole power of her love and her readiness for self-sacrifice.

  She loved finery, and my father enjoyed seeing her in society as a beauty who elicited astonishment and praise, yet she sacrificed her passion for finery for his sake, and got more and more used to staying home in a grey smock. Papa, who had always considered freedom and equality essential conditions of family relations, hoped that his favourite Lyubochka and his good young wife would become sincere friends, but Avdotya Vasilyevna sacrificed herself, and felt it necessary to treat the ‘real mistress of the house’, as she called Lyubochka, with unseemly deference, which painfully offended Papa. He gambled a lot that winter, towards the end losing a great deal, and not wishing, as ever, to mix his gambling and his family life, he kept his gambling affairs to himself. Avdotya Vasilyevna sacrificed herself, and although sometimes unwell and towards the end of the winter even pregnant, she considered it her duty to totter out to meet Papa in her grey smock with her hair uncombed, even at four or five in the morning, when he, sometimes worn out and ashamed of his losses, came back from the club after the eighth fine.83 She would absently ask him if his luck had been good, and then listen with gracious attention and a smile and a nod to what he told her about his activities at the club, and to his asking her for the hundredth time never to wait up for him. Yet although the losses and gains, on which, according to his play, Papa’s whole fortune depended, didn’t interest her in the least, she would once again be the first every night to meet him when he came back from the club. Besides her passion for self-sacrifice, she was impelled to those meetings by the still hidden jealousy from which she suffered to an intense degree. No one in the world could have convinced her that Papa was coming back from the club and not from a lover. She tried to detect in his face his amorous secrets and, finding nothing there, would sigh with a certain pleasure in her sorrow, and indulge in the contemplation of her unhappiness.

  As a result of those and many other unceasing sacrifices, there was in Papa’s treatment of his wife in the last months of that winter, during which he lost a great deal and was out of sorts most of the time, an intermittent feeling of ‘quiet loathing’ – a sort of stifled aversion to the object of his affection that was manifest in an unconscious urge to inflict on it every kind of petty mental distress.

  FORTY-THREE

  New Comrades

  The winter had passed imperceptibly, the thaw had come and the examination schedule had already been posted, when I suddenly remembered that I would have to answer about the eighteen subjects for which I had gone to lectures without listening, taking notes or preparing a single one. It’s strange that a question as obvious as how I would pass my examinations never occurred to me. But I was in such a fog that whole winter from my delight at being grown-up and comme il faut that when the question of how I would pass finally did occur to me, I compared myself to my classmates and thought, ‘Well, they’ll have to take examinations, too, and most of them aren’t comme il faut, which means that I’ll have another advantage over them and will certainly pass.’ The only reason I even attended the lectures was because I had got used to it, and because Papa ordered me out of the house. I also had many acquaintances at the university and often enjoyed myself there. I liked the noise and talk and laughter in the lecture halls, and sitting on the rear bench during lectures and daydreaming and observing my classmates with the drone of the professor’s voice in the background, or running off from time to time to Materne’s84 for vodka and a snack with someone, and then, aware that I could be rebuked for it, entering the lecture room after the professor with a cautious squeak of the door. I also liked taking part in pranks as one boisterous class after another filled the hallways. It was all great fun.

  When everyone started coming to lectures more regularly, and the physics professor had concluded his course and taken leave of us until the examination, and the students had collected their copybooks and begun to study in small groups, I sensed that I, too, should be studying. Operov, with whom I remained on bowing terms, even though our relations had been very cool, not only offered to share his copybooks but also invited me to study with him and some other students, as I’ve mentioned. I expressed my thanks and agreed to do so, hoping by that honour to smooth over our earlier rift completely, and asking only that they be sure to come each time to my house, since I had good rooms.

  Their answer was that we would take turns, studying first at one person’s place and then at another’s, and wherever was closer. The first time was at Zukhin’s, a little room behind a partition in a large building on Trubnoy Boulevard.85 I arrived late that first day after they had already begun to read. The little room was filled with smoke, and not even from decent tobacco, but from the cheap shag Zukhin was using. On the table were a decanter of vodka, a wineglass, bread, salt and a mutton bone.

  Without getting up, Zukhin invited me to help myself to some vodka and take off my frock coat.

  ‘You aren’t used to such fare, I think,’ he added.

  They were all wearing dirty calico shirts and dickies. Trying not to show my disdain, I removed my coat and lay down on the sofa in a ‘comradely’ way. Only occasionally consulting the copybooks, Zukhin recited, while the others broke in with questions, which he answered concisely, cleverly and exactly. I started to listen and, not understanding much, since I didn’t know what had preceded it, I asked a question.

  ‘You shouldn’t even listen, old man, if you don’t know that,’ Zukhin said. ‘I’ll give you the copybooks and you can go over it for tomorrow; otherwise, there’s no use explaining.’

  I started to feel ashamed of my ignorance, but feeling, too, t
hat Zukhin’s comment was fair, I stopped listening and occupied myself with observing those new comrades. In the subdivision of people into comme il faut and not comme il faut they belonged, obviously, to the second category, and as a result provoked not only disdain in me but also a certain resentment, since even though they weren’t comme il faut, they still seemed to regard me as an equal and even to patronize me in a good-natured way. The disdain was in reaction to their feet and dirty hands and chewed fingernails, the long nail Operov had let grow on his little finger, their pink shirts and dickies, the abuse which they affectionately directed at each other, the filthy room, Zukhin’s habit of constantly blowing his nose while pressing one nostril with his finger, but especially their speech, their way of using and stressing certain words. For instance, they would say ‘cretin’ instead of ‘fool’, ‘as though’ instead of ‘as if’, ‘magnificent’ instead of ‘excellent’, ‘propulsive’ instead of ‘driving’, and the like, which seemed uncouth and bookish to me. But that comme if faut resentment was provoked even more by the stress they gave to certain Russian and especially foreign words: they said ‘máchine’ and not ‘machíne’, ‘enterprísing’ and not ‘énterprising’, ‘íntentionally’ and not ‘inténtionally’, ‘firepláce’ and not ‘fíreplace’, ‘Shakespéare’ and not ‘Shákespeare’, and so on and so forth.

  However, despite their insurmountably repellent appearance for me then, I did have a sense of something good in those people and, envying the merry camaraderie that united them, I was drawn to them and wanted to be closer to them, as hard as it was for me. The meek, honest Operov I already knew, but I now took an extraordinary liking to the lively, exceptionally clever Zukhin, who was evidently the leader of the circle. He was a short, stocky brunet with a slightly plump and always shiny but extraordinarily clever, animated and independent face, whose expression came mainly from the not high but prominent brow that extended over his deep-set dark eyes, his short bristly hair and his heavy dark beard, which always looked unshaven. He appeared not to think about himself (which I’ve always especially liked in people), but it was clear that his mind was always engaged. He had one of those expressive faces that a few hours after you’ve first seen them will all of a sudden take on a completely different cast. That happened to me with Zukhin towards the end of the evening. New lines appeared in his face, his eyes sank deeper, his smile changed and his whole aspect was so altered that it was hard for me to recognize him as the same person.