The Project Gutenberg EBook of Youth, by Leo Tolstoy

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Title: Youth

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Translator: C. J. Hogarth

Posting Date: January 10, 2009 [EBook #2637]
Release Date: May, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUTH ***

Produced by Martin Adamson

YOUTH

By Leo Tolstoy/Tolstoi

Translated by C. J. Hogarth

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