Youth

By LEO TOLSTOY
Translated by CJ HOGARTH
E-Text prepared by Martin Adamson
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I
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.
II
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 for the ordeal.
Following upon wet snow (the kind of stuff which Karl Ivanitch used to
describe as "a child following, its father"), the weather had for three
days been bright and mild and still. Not a clot of snow was now to be
seen in the streets, and the dirty slush had given place to wet, shining
pavements and coursing rivulets. The last icicles on the roofs were fast
melting in the sunshine, buds were swelling on the trees in the little
garden, the path leading across the courtyard to the stables was soft
instead of being a frozen ridge of mud, and mossy grass was showing
green between the stones around the entrance-steps. It was just that
particular time in spring when the season exercises the strongest

influence upon the human soul--when clear sunlight illuminates
everything, yet sheds no warmth, when rivulets run trickling under
one's feet, when the air is charged with an odorous freshness, and when
the bright blue sky is streaked with long, transparent clouds.
For some reason or another the influence of this early stage in the birth
of spring always seems to me more perceptible and more impressive in
a great town than in the country. One sees less, but one feels more. I
was standing near the window--through the double frames of which the
morning sun was throwing its mote- flecked beams upon the floor of
what seemed to me my intolerably wearisome schoolroom--and
working out a long algebraical equation on the blackboard. In one hand