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Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
CHILDHOOD, BOYHOOD, YOUTH
COUNT LEO NIKOLAYEVICH TOLSTOY was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana in the Tula province, and educated privately. He studied Oriental languages and law at the University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until 1851 when he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean war and after the defence of Sevastopol he wrote The Sevastopol Stories, which established his reputation. After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, where he studied educational methods for use in his school for peasant children in Yasnaya, he married Sophie Andreyevna Behrs in 1862. The next fifteen years was a period of great happiness; they had thirteen children, and Tolstoy managed his vast estates in the Volga Steppes, continued his educational projects, cared for his peasants and wrote War and Peace (1865–68) and Anna Karenin (1874–76). A Confession (1879–82) marked an outward change in his life and works; he became an extreme rationalist, and in a series of pamphlets after 1880 he expressed theories such as rejection of the state and church, indictment of the demands of the flesh, and denunciation of private property. His teaching earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad, but also much opposition, and in 1901 he was excommunicated by the Russian holy synod. He died in 1910 in the course of a dramatic flight from home, at the small railway station of Astapovo.
ROSEMARY EDMONDS was born in London and studied English, Russian, French, Italian and Old Church Slavonic at universities in England, France and Italy. During the war she was translator to General de Gaulle at Fighting France Headquarters in London and, after the liberation, in Paris. She went on to study Russian Orthodox Spirituality, and translated Archimandrite Sophrony’s The Undistorted Image (since published in two volumes as The Monk of Mount Athos and The Wisdom from Mount Athos), His Life Is Mine, We Shall See Him As He Is, Saint Silovan the Athonite and other works. She also researched and translated Old Church Slavonic texts. Among the many translations she made for Penguin Classics are Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Anna Karenin, Resurrection, The Death of Ivan Ilyich/The Cossacks/Happy Ever After and Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades and Other Stories; and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. She also translated works by Gogol and Leskov.
Rosemary Edmonds died in 1998, aged 92.
L. N. TOLSTOY
CHILDHOOD
BOYHOOD
YOUTH
TRANSLATED AND
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
ROSEMARY EDMONDS
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This translation first published 1964
28
Translation and Introduction copyright © Rosemary Edmonds, 1964
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196106-4
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
LEV NIKOLAYEVICH TOLSTOY was twenty-three and convalescing in Tiflis after mercury treatment for ‘the venereal sickness’ when he completed the first part of Childhood, which appeared in a Petersburg monthly in September 1852, above the initials L.N. It created an immediate sensation, one reviewer writing: ‘If this is the first production of L.N. Russian literature must be congratulated on the appearance of a new and remarkable talent.’ It was Tolstoy’s first published work and first attempt at fiction. The original plan comprised a great novel (with the general title of Four Epochs of Growth) founded – but only founded – on the reminiscences and traditions of his family, so that Tolstoy was displeased when the magazine altered his Childhood to The History of My Childhood. ‘The alteration is especially disagreeable,’ he complained to the editor, ‘because, as I wrote to you, I meant Childhood to form the first part of a novel.’
Childhood is fiction but fiction rooted in reality (for Tolstoy ‘l’ art égale la vie’) and in autobiography – Tolstoy produced no work which did not contain a portrait of himself. When still only a boy of nineteen he confided to his Diary that he wanted to know himself through and through, and from then until his death at the age of eighty-two he observed and described the morphology of his own soul. He is little interested in invention: his concern is with the experienced and the perceived; and half a century later, when he was planning a ‘perfectly truthful account’ of his life and, anxious not to repeat himself, re-read Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, he regretted the book ‘so ill and (in a literary sense) insincerely is it written. But it could not have been otherwise, in the first place because my intention was to relate not my own story but that of my childhood friends, and this resulted in an incoherent jumble of events from their childhood and my own, and secondly because at the time of writing it I was far from being independent in my forms of expression but was strongly under the influence of two writers: Sterne (his Sentimental Journey) and Töpffer (La Bibliothèque de mon oncle).’
Incidentally, Tolstoy disliked the last two parts, Boyhood and Youth, even more, not only because they contained fewer autobiographical elements and seemed to him an ‘awkward mixture of fact and fiction’ – but for their insincerity: their ‘desire to put forward as good and important what I did not then consider good and important, namely, my democratic turn of mind’.
But the child is father of the man, and the prototype is here. It does not take overmuch hindsight to discern in this semi-autobiographical story the man and the writer Tolstoy was to become. We have Tolstoy the moralist who regarded life from beginning to end as a ‘serious matter’ to be lived accordingly; Tolstoy the fanatical seeker after God and justice among men, though an early period of scepticism had brought him to ‘the verge of insanity’. The boy with his RULES OF LIFE foreshadows the man whose search for the meaning of life – how to live in relation to God, to one’s fellows and to oneself – was eventually to preoccupy him to the total exclusion of his literary work. Unrestrained by any Anglo-Saxon mauvaise honte, Tolstoy constantly reveals his spiritual condition and gives us ‘the whole diapason of joy and sorrow’ – and shame. With the sixteen-year-old who retires to the box-room to scourge his bare back in order to harden himself to physical pain, and then – suddenly remembering that death may come for us mortals at any moment – casts his lesson-books aside and for three days lies on his bed, enjoying a novel and eating honey-cakes bought with the last of his pocket-money, we live the conflict in Tolstoy between Puritan and Epicurean. At a very early age he recognized that his ‘tendency to philosophize’ was to do him ‘a great deal of harm’, the weary mental struggle yielding nothing save an artful elasticity of mind which weakened his will-power, and a habit of perpetually dissecting and analysing, which destroyed spontaneity of feeling and clarity of reason. It was not intellectual curiosity, nor hunger after wisdom through knowledge, that drove Tolstoy to spend his life from first to last in observing and recording: it was despair and the fear of death, of nothingness. ‘Wherefore live, seeing that life is so horrible?’ he asks with Ecclesiastes.
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