by Leo Tolstoy
Now, on the brink of the grave, at the age of seventy-two, having understood the vanity of my former life and the significance of the life I have lived and am living as a wanderer, I will try to tell the story of my former life.
MY LIFE
12th December, 1849. Siberian Forest-swamp near Krasnorechinsk
TO-DAY is my birthday, I am seventy-two. Seventy-two years ago I was born in Petersburg in the Winter Palace, in the apartments of my mother the Empress, then the Grand Duchess Mária Fëdorovna.
I slept pretty well last night. After yesterday’s indisposition I feel rather better again. The chief thing is that the spiritual torpor I was in has passed, and I can again communicate with God with my whole soul. Last night I prayed in the dark. I was clearly conscious of my position in the world. My whole life is something required by Him who sent me here, and I can do what He requires or not just as I please. By doing what He requires I conduce towards the welfare of the whole world. By not doing it I deprive myself of welfare – not of all welfare, but of the welfare that might be mine; but I do not deprive the world of the welfare destined for it. What I ought to have done will be done by others, so that His will may be accomplished. That is what my free will consists in. But if He knows what will be, if everything is ordained by Him, is there any freedom? I don’t know. Here thought reaches its limits and prayer begins, the simple prayer of childhood and old age. ‘Father, not my will but Thine be done.’ Simply: ‘Lord forgive and have mercy. Yes, Lord forgive and have mercy, and forgive and have mercy. I cannot express it in words but Thou knowest the heart. Thou Thyself dwellest therein.’
I fell soundly asleep. As usual, from the weakness of old age, I woke five or six times and dreamt I was bathing in the sea and swimming. The water was greenish and beautiful, and I was surprised that it held me up so high that I did not sink at all. Some men and women were on the shore hindering me from getting out, for I was naked. The meaning of this dream is that the vigour of my body still hinders me, but that the exit is near at hand.
I rose before daybreak and struck a flint, but for a long time could not light the tinder. I put on my elk-skin dressing-gown and went out. Behind the snow-clad larches and pines glowed a rosy-orange sky. I brought in the firewood I chopped yesterday, lit the stove, and chopped some more wood. It grew lighter. I ate some moistened rusks. The stove had grown hot and I closed the damper and sat down to write.
I was born just seventy-two years ago, on the 12th of December, 1777, in Petersburg, in the Winter Palace. By my grandmother’s wish I was named Alexander, to betoken, as she told me herself, my becoming as great a man as Alexander the Great and as holy as Alexander Névski. I was christened a week later in the large Palace Church. I was carried on a brocade pillow by the Duchess of Courland. My coverlet was held up by officials of the highest rank. The Empress was my godmother, and the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia were my godfathers. The room allotted to me had been arranged to my grandmother’s plan. (I don’t remember it at all, but know of it from hearsay.) In the middle of that spacious room with its three large windows between four pillars, a velvet canopy was fastened to the ceiling with silk hangings descending to the ground. Under the canopy was placed an iron cot with a leather mattress, a small pillow, and a light English blanket. Beyond the hangings was a railing nearly five feet high, to prevent visitors from approaching too near. There was no other furniture in the room, except a bed behind the canopy for my wet-nurse. Every detail of my physical nurture was thought out by my grandmother. Rocking me to sleep was forbidden; I was swaddled in a special way; I wore no socks; was bathed first in warm and then in cold water, and had special clothing without seams or ribbons, but which could all be put on at once. As soon as I could crawl I was placed on the carpet and left to my own devices. I have been told that at first my grandmother herself used often to come and sit on the carpet to play with me. I don’t remember anything of this, nor do I remember my wet-nurse at that time.
She was Avdótya Petróvna, the wife of an assistant gardener from Tsárskoe Seló. I did not remember her then. But I met her once when I was eighteen and she came up to me in the garden at Tsárskoe Seló. That was the good period of my life, the early days of my friendship with Adam Czartorýski, when I was sincerely disgusted at what was going on at both the courts – that of my unfortunate father and of my grandmother, who had then become hateful to me. I was still a human being then, and not even a bad one, having good intentions. I was walking in the park with Adam when a well-dressed woman with an unusually kind, pleasant, smiling, and excited face came down a side-path. She approached me quickly, fell on her knees, seized my hand, and began kissing it.
‘My dear, your Highness! Now, God has granted—’
‘Who are you?’
‘Your nurse, Avdótya – Dunyásha – I nursed you eleven months. God grants me to see you again.’
I raised her with difficulty, asked where she lived, and promised to go to see her. The delightful home life in her clean little house, her sweet daughter, my foster-sister – a genuine Russian beauty engaged to one of the Court grooms – my nurse’s husband, the gardener, just as smiling as his wife, and their crowd of smiling children seemed to light up the darkness around me. ‘Here is true life, real happiness!’ thought I. ‘It is all so simple, so clear. No intrigues, jealousies, or quarrels.’
It was this amiable Dunyásha who nursed me. My head nurse was Sophia Ivánovna Benkendorf, a German; and the second nurse was an Englishwoman named Hessler. Sophia Ivánovna Benkendorf was a stout, white-skinned, straight-nosed woman, of majestic appearance when giving orders in the nursery but surprisingly servile in grandmother’s presence – bowing and curtseying low to her who was a head shorter than herself. She was very obsequious to me and yet severe. Sometimes she was a queen, in her broad skirts and with her majestic straight-nosed face, and then suddenly she became an affected young hussy.
Praskóvya Ivánovna Hessler,17 my English nurse, was a long-faced, red-haired, serious Englishwoman; but when she smiled her whole face beamed so that one could not help smiling with her. I liked her tidiness, her equanimity, her cleanliness, and her gentle firmness. It seemed as if she knew something nobody else knew – neither my mother, nor my father, nor even my grandmother herself.
My mother I first recollect as a strange, sad, supernatural and charming vision. Handsome, elegant, glittering with diamonds, silks, and laces, and with her round, white arms bare, she would enter my room, and with a strange, melancholy expression on her face, alien to me and having no reference to me, would caress me, take me up in her strong beautiful arms, lift me to her still more beautiful face, and shaking back her thick, scented hair, would kiss me and cry, and once she even let me slip from her arms and fell down in a faint.
It is strange, but whether by my grandmother’s influence, or as a result of my mother’s behaviour to me, or because with a child’s quick instinct I was aware of the intrigues that centred around me, it so happened that I had no simple feeling, or indeed any feeling, of love for my mother. I felt something strained in her treatment of me. She seemed to be parading herself through me, oblivious of me, and I felt it. So it really was. My grandmother took me from my parents entirely into her own hands, in order to pass the crown on to me and to disinherit her son, my unfortunate father, whom she hated. Of course I knew nothing about this till long after; but from my earliest consciousness, without understanding the reason, I was aware of being the object of some enmity and competition – a tool in some intrigue – and I was sensible of a coldness and indifference to myself, to my childish soul which desired no crown, but only simple love which was lacking. There was my mother, always sad in my presence. Once when she was speaking German to Sophia Ivánovna about something, she burst out crying and almost ran out of the room on hearing grandmother’s footsteps. There was my father, who sometimes came to our room, and to whom, later on, my brother and I used to be taken; but at the sight of me my unfortunate father expressed his d
issatisfaction and suppressed anger to a greater extent and more decidedly than my mother.
I remember being taken with my brother Constantine to his part of the palace. This was when he was starting on his journey abroad in 1781. He suddenly pushed me aside with his hand and jumped up from his arm-chair with a terrible look in his eyes, and in a choking voice said something about me and my grandmother. I did not understand what it was, but remember the words, Aprés ’62 tout est possible.18 I became frightened and began to cry. My mother took me on her arm and began kissing me, and then carried me to him. He hurriedly gave me his blessing and ran out of the room clattering with his high heels. Long afterwards I came to understand the meaning of that outburst. He and my mother were starting to travel as Comte et Comtesse du Nord – my grandmother wished them to do so – and he was afraid that during their absence he would be deprived of his right to the throne and I should be appointed heir.… Oh, my God, my God! He prized what ruined both him and me physically and spiritually – and I, unfortunate that I was, also prized it!
Someone has come knocking, saying: ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son.’ I have answered ‘Amen’. I will now put my writing away and go and open the door. God willing, I will continue to-morrow.
13th December –
I slept little and had bad dreams. Some unpleasant and weak woman was clinging to me, and though I was not afraid of her or of sinning, I was afraid my wife would see it and reproach me again. Seventy-two, and I am not free yet. When awake one can deceive oneself, but a dream gives a true valuation of the state one has attained to. I also dreamt – and this again shows the low level of morality on which I stand – that someone had brought me here some sweetmeats wrapped in moss – some unusual kind of sweetmeats – and we picked them out of the moss and divided them. But after the division some sweetmeats were left over and I began picking them out for myself; and just then a black-eyed and unpleasant boy, something like the Sultan of Turkey’s son, stretched out towards the sweets and took them in his hand, and I pushed him away, though I knew that it is much more natural for a child to eat sweets than for me to do so. I did not let him have them, and knowing that this was wrong felt ill will towards him.
And strangely enough a similar thing really happened to me to-day. Márya Martemyánovna came. Yesterday a messenger from her had knocked at my door asking if she might call. I said she might. These visits are trying to me, but I knew that a refusal would hurt her. So she came to-day. The runners of her sledge could be heard in the distance squeaking over the snow. And when she entered in her fur cloak and several shawls, she brought in some bags of eatables (dumplings, Lenten oil, and apples), and so much cold air that I had to put on my dressing-gown. She came to ask my advice: whether to let her daughter marry a rich widower who is wooing her. Their belief in my sagacity is very trying to me, and all I say to correct it is attributed to my humility. I said what I always say: that chastity is better than marriage, but, as St Paul says, it is better to marry than to burn. With her came her son-in-law Nikanór Ivánovich – the one who invited me to come and live in his house and who has since unceasingly pestered me with his visits.
Nikanór Ivánovich is a great trial to me. I cannot overcome my antipathy and aversion for him. ‘O Lord, grant me to see my own iniquities and not to judge my brother-man.’ But I see all his faults, discern them with the penetration of malignity, see all his weaknesses, and cannot conquer my antipathy for him – my brother-man, who like myself proceeds from God.
What do such feelings mean? I have experienced them more than once in my long life. My two strongest aversions were for Louis XVIII, with his big stomach, hooked nose, repulsive white hands, and his self-confidence, insolence, and obtuseness – there, I cannot keep from abusing him – and the other antipathy is for this Nikanór Ivánovich who tormented me for two hours yesterday. Everything about him, from the sound of his voice to his hair and his nails, evokes repulsion in me, and to explain my gloominess to Márya Martemyánovna I told her a lie, saying that I was not well. After they had gone I prayed, and after the prayer I grew calm. I thank Thee, O Lord, that the one and only thing I need is in my own power. I remembered that Nikanór Ivánovich had been an infant and that he would die. I recalled the same with reference to Louis XVIII, knowing him to be already dead, and I regretted that Nikanór Ivánovich was no longer here that I might express my goodwill to him.
Márya Martemyánovna brought me some candles so that I can write in the evenings. I went out. To the left the bright stars have disappeared in a wonderful aurora borealis. How beautiful, how beautiful! But now I will continue.
My father and mother had gone abroad, and I and my brother Constantine, born two years after me, were in our grandmother’s complete control for the whole of their absence. My brother had been named Constantine to denote that he was to become Emperor of Constantinople.
Children love everybody and especially those who love and caress them. My grandmother caressed and praised me, and I loved her in spite of the smell, repulsive to me, which always hung about her, notwithstanding her perfumes, and was especially noticeable when she took me on her lap. Her hands too were unpleasant to me – clean, yellowish, shrivelled, slippery, and shiny, with fingers bent inwards and with long nails from which the skin had been pushed back unnaturally far. Her eyes were dull, weary, almost lifeless, and this together with her smiling, toothless mouth, created a painful though not exactly repulsive impression. I attributed that expression of her eyes – which I now remember with loathing – to her exertions on behalf of her people, as it was explained to me, and I pitied her for that languid expression. Once or twice I saw Potëmkin19 – a one-eyed, squinting, enormous, dark, perspiring, and dirty man who was terrible. He seemed to me particularly terrible because he alone was not afraid of grandmother, but spoke loud in her presence in his bellowing voice, and boldly caressed and teased me, though addressing me as ‘your Highness’.
Among those I saw with her in my early childhood was Lanskóy.20 He was always with her and everybody noticed him and paid court to him. My grandmother especially looked at him continually. Of course I did not then understand what it meant, and Lanskóy pleased me very much. I liked his curls, his handsome thighs in tightly stretched elk-skin breeches, his well-shaped calves, his merry careless smile, and the diamonds that glittered all over him.
It was a very merry time. We were taken to Tsárskoe Seló, where we boated, dug in the garden, went for walks, and rode on horseback. Constantine, plump, red-haired, un petit Bacchus, as grandmother called him, amused everybody by his tricks, his boldness, and his devices. He mimicked everybody, including Sophia Ivánovna and even grandmother herself.
The most important event of that time was Sophia Ivánovna Bénkendorf’s death. It happened one evening at Tsárskoe Seló, in grandmother’s presence. Sophia Ivánovna had just brought us in after dinner and was smilingly saying something, when her face suddenly became grave, she reeled, leant against the door, slipped, and fell heavily. People came running in and we were taken away. But next day we learnt that she was dead. I cried for a long time and was depressed and not myself. Everybody thought I was crying about Sophia Ivánovna, but it was not for her that I cried, but that people should die – that death should exist. I could not understand and could not believe that it was the fate of everybody. I remember that in my childish, five-year-old soul the questions, What is death? and, What is life which ends in death? then arose in their full significance – those chief questions which confront all mankind and to which the wise seek and find replies, and which the frivolous try to thrust aside and forget. I did what was natural for a child, especially in the world in which I lived: I put the question aside, forgot about death, lived as if it did not exist, and have now lived till it has become terrible to me.
Another important event connected with Sophia Ivánovna’s death was our being transferred to the charge of a man, and Nicholas Ivánovich Saltykóv being appointed our tutor – not the Saltykóv w
ho in all probability was our grandfather, but Nicholas Ivánovich who was in service at my father’s court; a little man with a huge head and a stupid face with a continual grimace, which my little brother Constantine imitated wonderfully. Being entrusted to a man grieved me, because it meant parting from my nurse, dear Praskóvya Ivánovna.
Those who have not the misfortune to be born in a royal family must, I think, find it difficult to realize how distorted is the view of people and of our relation towards them which is instilled into us and was instilled into me. Instead of the feeling of dependence on grown-up and older persons natural to a child, instead of gratitude for all the blessings which we enjoyed, we were led to believe that we were some kind of exceptional beings who not only ought to be supplied with all the good things a human being can have, but by a word or a smile could not only more than pay for all those blessings, but could also reward people and make them happy. It is true that we were expected to treat people politely, but with my childish instinct I realized that this was only for show, and was done not for the sake of the people to whom we had to be polite but for our own sake, so that our grandeur should be still more noticeable.
One fěte-day we were driving along the Névski Prospect in an enormous landau: we two brothers and Nicholas Ivánovich Saltykóv. We sat in the chief seats. Two powdered footmen in red liveries stood behind. It was a bright spring day. I wore an unbuttoned uniform with a white waistcoat and the blue St Andrew’s ribbon across it. Constantine was dressed in the same way; on our heads we wore plumed hats which we continually raised as we bowed. The people everywhere stopped and bowed; some of them ran after us. ‘On vous salue,’21 Nicholas Ivánovich kept repeating. ‘A droite.’22