Leo Tolstoy: The Complete Novels and Novellas. Leo Tolstoy

Chapter 12 — My Examination in Latin

       Chapter 13 — I Become Grown-Up

       Chapter 14 — How Woloda and Dubkoff Amused Themselves

       Chapter 15 — I Am Feted at Dinner

       Chapter 16 — The Quarrel

       Chapter 17 — I Get Ready to Pay Some Calls

       Chapter 18 — The Valakhin Family

       Chapter 19 — The Kornakoffs

       Chapter 20 — The Iwins

       Chapter 21 — Prince Ivan Ivanovitch

       Chapter 22 — Intimate Conversation with My Friend

       Chapter 23 — The Nechludoffs

       Chapter 24 — Love

       Chapter 25 — I Become Better Acquainted with the Nechludoffs

       Chapter 26 — I Show Off

       Chapter 27 — Dimitri

       Chapter 28 — In the Country

       Chapter 29 — Relations Between the Girls and Ourselves

       Chapter 30 — How I Employed My Time

       Chapter 31 — “Comme il Faut”

       Chapter 32 — Youth

       Chapter 33 — Our Neighbours

       Chapter 34 — My Father’s Second Marriage

       Chapter 35 — How We Received the News

       Chapter 36 — The University

       Chapter 37 — Affairs of the Heart

       Chapter 38 — The World

       Chapter 39 — The Students’ Feast

       Chapter 40 — My Friendship with the Nechludoffs

       Chapter 41 — My Friendship with the Nechludoffs

       Chapter 42 — Our Stepmother

       Chapter 43 — New Comrades

       Chapter 44 — Zuchin and Semenoff

       Chapter 45 — I Come to Grief

Chapter 1 — What I Consider to have Been the Beginning of My Youth

      I have said that my friendship with Dimitri opened up for me a new view of my life and of its aim and relations. The essence of that view lay in the conviction that the destiny of man is to strive for moral improvement, and that such improvement is at once easy, possible, and lasting. Hitherto, however, I had found pleasure only in the new ideas which I discovered to arise from that conviction, and in the forming of brilliant plans for a moral, active future, while all the time my life had been continuing along its old petty, muddled, pleasure-seeking course, and the same virtuous thoughts which I and my adored friend Dimitri (“my own marvellous Mitia,” as I used to call him to myself in a whisper) had been wont to exchange with one another still pleased my intellect, but left my sensibility untouched. Nevertheless there came a moment when those thoughts swept into my head with a sudden freshness and force of moral revelation which left me aghast at the amount of time which I had been wasting, and made me feel as though I must at once — that very second — apply those thoughts to life, with the firm intention of never again changing them.

      It is from that moment that I date the beginning of my youth.

      I was then nearly sixteen. Tutors still attended to give me lessons, St. Jerome still acted as general supervisor of my education, and, willy-nilly, I was being prepared for the University. In addition to my studies, my occupations included certain vague dreamings and ponderings, a number of gymnastic exercises to make myself the finest athlete in the world, a good deal of aimless, thoughtless wandering through the rooms of the house (but more especially along the maidservants’ corridor), and much looking at myself in the mirror. From the latter, however, I always turned away with a vague feeling of depression, almost of repulsion. Not only did I feel sure that my exterior was ugly, but I could derive no comfort from any of the usual consolations under such circumstances. I could not say, for instance, that I had at least an expressive, clever, or refined face, for there was nothing whatever expressive about it. Its features were of the most humdrum, dull, and unbecoming type, with small grey eyes which seemed to me, whenever I regarded them in the mirror, to be stupid rather than clever. Of manly bearing I possessed even less, since, although I was not exactly small of stature, and had, moreover, plenty of strength for my years, every feature in my face was of the meek, sleepy-looking, indefinite type. Even refinement was lacking in it, since, on the contrary, it precisely resembled that of a simple-looking moujik, while I also had the same big hands and feet as he. At the time, all this seemed to me very shameful.

Chapter 2 — Springtime

      Easter of the year when I entered the University fell late in April, so that the examinations were fixed for St. Thomas’s Week, [Easter week.] and I had to spend Good Friday in fasting and finally getting myself ready