Tolstóy — Childhood and Boyhood

More than half a century ago, i.e. in 1852, the first story of Tolstóy, Childhood, soon followed by Boyhood, made its appearance in the monthly review, The Contemporary, with the modest signature, “L.N.T.” The little story was a great success. It was imbued with such a charm; it had such freshness, and was so free of all the mannerism of the literary trade, that the unknown author at once became a favourite, and was placed by the side of Turguéneff and Gontcharóff.

There are excellent children stories in all languages. Childhood is the period of life with which many authors have best succeeded in dealing. And yet no one, perhaps, has so well described the life of children from within, from their own point of view, as Tolstóy did. With him, it is the child itself which expresses its childish feelings, and it does this so as to compel the reader to judge full-grown people with the child ‘s point of view. Such is the realism of Childhood and Boyhood — that is, their richness in facts caught from real life — that a Russian critic, Písareff, developed quite a theory of education chiefly on the basis of the data contained in these two stories of Tolstóy’s.

It is related somewhere that one day, during their rambles in the country, Turguéneff and Tolstóy came across an old hack of a horse which was finishing its days in a lonely field. Tolstóy entered at once into the. feelings of the horse and began to describe its sad reflections so vividly, that Turguéneff, alluding to the then new ideas of Darwinism, could not help exclaiming, “I am sure, Lyov Nikoláevitch, that you must have had horses among your ancestors!” In the capacity of entirely identifying himself with the feelings and the thoughts of the beings of whom he speaks, Tolstéy has but few rivals; but with children this power of identification attains its highest degree. The moment he speaks of children, Tolstóy becomes himself a child.

Childhood and Boyhood are, it is now known, autobiographical stories, in which only small details are altered, and in the boy Irténeff we have a glimpse of what L.N. Tolstóy was in his childhood, He was born in 1828, in the estate of Yásnaya Polyána, which now enjoys universal fame, and for the first fifteen years of his life he remained, almost without interruption, an inhabitant of the country. His father and grandfather — so we are told by the Russian critic, S. Vengueroft — are described in War and Peace, in Nicholas Róstoff and the old Count Róstoff respectively; while his mother, who was born a Princess Volkhónskaya, is represented as Mary Bolkónskaya. Leo Tolstóy lost his mother at the age of two, and his father at the age of nine, and after that time his education was taken care of by a woman relative, T.A. Ergólskaya, in Yásnaya Polyána, and after 1840, at Kazáñ, by his aunt P.I. Yúshkova, whose house, we are told, must have been very much the same as the house of the Róstoffs’ in War and Peace.

Leo Tolstóy was only fifteen when he entered the Kazáñ University, where he spent two years in the Oriental faculty and two years in the faculty of Law. However, the teaching-staff of both faculties was so feeble at that time that only a single professor was able to awaken in the young man some passing interest in his subject. Four years later, that is in 1847, when he was only nineteen, Leo Tolstóy had already left the University and was making at Yásnaya Polyána some attempts at improving the conditions of his peasant serfs, of which attempts he has told us later on, with such a striking sincerity, in The Morning of a Landlord.

The next four years of his life he spent, externally, like most young men of his aristocratic circle, but internally, in a continual reaction against the life he was leading. An insight into what he was then — slightly exaggerated, of course, and dramatised — we can get from the Notes of a Billiard Marker. Happily he could not put up with such paltry surroundings and in 1851, he suddenly renounced the life he had hitherto led — that of an idle aristocratic youth — and following his brother Nicholas, he went to the Caucasus, in order to enter military service. There he stayed first at Pyatigórsk — the place so full of reminiscences of Lérmontoff — until, having passed the necessary examinations, he was received as a non-commissioned officer (yunker) in the artillery and went to serve in a Cossack village on the banks of the Térek.

His experiences and reflections in these new surroundings, we know from his Cossacks. But it was there also that in the face of the beautiful nature which had so powerfully inspired Púshkin and Lérmontoff he found his true vocation. He sent to the Contemporary his first literary experiment, Childhood, and this first story, as he soon learned from a letter of the poet Nekrásoff, editor of the review, and from the critical notes of Grigórieff, Annenkoff, Druzhínin, and Tchernyshévskiy (they belonged to four different aesthetical schools), proved to be a chef d’aeuvre.