He had no dreams of another world to comfort and inspire him: his act, as Carl Nötzel said, was an architecture of the depths, not of the heights.

The dramatis personae of Childhood, Boyhood, Youth are a mélange of real people and imagined characters of whom perhaps the most deeply felt portrait is that of the old housekeeper, who ‘accomplished the best and greatest thing in life – she died without regret or fear’. (The older he grew the more Tolstoy was to turn to the common people for sincerity and wisdom – and to the end of his life he himself retained much that was Orthodox.)

The searchlight of Tolstoy’s eye falls with like penetration on the world of nature, which for him is equally divine (in the Homeric sense) with human beings. We are caught up in the violence of the storm, we feel the ‘sublime moment of silence’ before the thunder-clap; we smell the damp smell of rotting leaf-mould in the orchard, hear the anxious twittering of the sparrows disturbed in the bush overhead and peer up and see the round green apples, ‘lustrous as bone’, hanging high on the old apple-tree, close to the burning sun.

Tolstoy was always an ardent admirer of Rousseau and Childhood reveals their kinship – but Tolstoy is a more profound, more radical thinker than Rousseau. He has the Russian consciousness of guilt, absent in Rousseau, and a dual nature to contend with: a vegetarian without the vegetarian temperament, a man full of earthly passions and lust for life, proud and given to black rages, yet with a persistent hunger after asceticism. ‘The arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I,’ and even in childhood his heart gave him no peace.

In 1857, when the third part of this trilogy was published, Druzhinin, the critic and translator of Shakespeare, wrote to Tolstoy:

You have an inclination to super-refinement of analysis. Each of your defects has its share of strength and beauty, and almost every one of your qualities bears with it the seed of a defect.

Your style quite accords with that conclusion: you are most ungrammatical, sometimes with the lack of grammar of a reformer and powerful poet reshaping a language his own way and for ever, but sometimes with the lack of grammar of an officer sitting in a casemate and writing to his chum. One can say with assurance that all the pages you have written with love are admirable – but as soon as you grow cold your words get entangled and diabolical forms of speech appear… Above all avoid long sentences. Cut them up into two or three; do not be sparing of full-stops…Do not stand on ceremony with the particles, and strike out by dozens the words which, who, and that.

There are very few passages in Childhood, Boyhood, Youth where Tolstoy might be suspected of having grown cold; and certainly no later self-portrait is quite so expressive as this first one, which he wrote in order to learn to know himself, not to instruct or convert. Tolstoy possessed the rare quality of empathy: he stirred the very foundations of the human conscience and his characters belong to any and every age. Reading him, our own life-experience is widened and intensified.

London, 1961

ROSEMARY EDMONDS

Except in one instance (on page 28) the footnotes have been added by the translator.

CHILDHOOD

1 • OUR TUTOR, KARL IVANYCH

On the 12th of August 18-, exactly three days after my tenth birthday, for which I had received such wonderful presents, Karl Ivanych woke meat seven in the morning by hitting at a fly just over my head with a flap made of sugar-bag paper fastened to a stick. His action was so clumsy that he caught the little ikon of my patron-saint, which hung on the headboard of my oak bedstead, and the dead fly fell right on my head. I put my nose out from under the bedclothes, steadied with my hand the ikon which was still wobbling, flicked the dead fly on to the floor, and looked at Karl Ivanych with wrathful if sleepy eyes. He, however, in his bright-coloured quilted dressing-gown, with a belt of the same material round the waist, a red knitted skull-cap with a tassel on his head and soft goat-skin boots on his feet, continued to walk round the room, taking aim and smacking at the flies on the walls.

‘Of course I am only a small boy,’ I thought, ‘but still he ought not to disturb me. Why doesn’t he go killing flies round Volodya’s bed? There are heaps of them there. But no, Volodya is older than me: I am the youngest of all – that is why I am tormented. All he thinks of every day of his life is how to be nasty to me,’ I muttered. ‘He is perfectly well aware that he woke me up and startled me, but he pretends not to notice it… disgusting man! And his dressing-gown and the skull-cap and the tassel too – they’re all disgusting!’

While I was thus mentally expressing my vexation with Karl Ivanych he went up to his own bed, looked at his watch which was suspended above it in a little shoe embroidered with glass beads, hung the fly-swat on a nail and turned to us, obviously in the best of moods.

‘Auf, Kinder, auf!…’s ist Zeit. Die Mutter ist schon im Saal!’1 he cried in his kindly German voice. Then he came over to me, sat down at the foot of my bed and took his snuff-box from his pocket. I pretended to be asleep. Karl Ivanych first took a pinch of snuff, wiped his nose, snapped his fingers, and only then began on me. With a chuckle he started tickling my heels. ‘Nun, nun, Faulenzer!’2

Much as I dreaded being tickled, I did not jump out of bed or answer him but merely hid my head deeper under the pillow and kicked out with all my might, doing my utmost to keep from laughing.

‘How nice he is, and how fond of us!’ I said to myself. ‘How could I have had such horrid thoughts about him just now?’

I was annoyed with myself and with Karl Ivanych; I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. I was all upset.

‘Ach, lassen Sie,1 Karl Ivanych!’ I cried with tears in my eyes, thrusting my head from under the pillows.

Karl Ivanych was taken aback. He stopped tickling my feet and began to ask anxiously what was the matter with me? Had I had a bad dream? His kind German face and the solicitude with which he tried to discover the cause of my tears made them flow all the faster. I felt ashamed and could not understand how only a moment before I had hated Karl Ivanych and thought his dressing-gown, skull-cap and the tassel repulsive. Now, on the contrary, I liked them all very much indeed and even the tassel seemed to be a clear testimony to his goodness. I told him I was crying because of a bad dream: I had dreamt that mamma was dead and they were taking her away to bury her. I invented all this, for I really could not remember what I had been dreaming that night; but when Karl Ivanych, affected by my story, tried to comfort and soothe me it seemed to me that I actually had dreamt that awful dream and I now shed tears for a different reason.

When Karl Ivanych left me and sitting up in bed I began pulling my stockings on my little legs my tears ceased somewhat but the melancholy thoughts occasioned by the dream I had invented still haunted me.