(January 1877)
Do you remember Count Tolstoy’s Childhood and Youth? It has a young boy in it, the hero of the whole poem. But he is not just a boy like the other children and like his brother Volodia. He’s only about twelve, and his head and heart are already visited by thoughts and feelings unlike those of other children his age. He passionately abandons himself to his dreams and feelings, already aware that it is better to keep them to himself. His shy disposition to purity and his lofty pride prevent him from revealing them. He envies his brother and considers him incomparably higher than he, especially as regards adroitness and good looks; and yet he secretly senses that his brother is far beneath him in all respects; but he drives away this thought, which he considers mean.
Too often he regards himself in the mirror and decides that he is repulsively ugly. Through his mind flashes the notion that no one loves him, that people despise him . . . In short, he is a rather unusual boy, and yet he belongs to that type of upper-middle landowning family that found its poet and historian, fully and completely – and in accordance with Pushkin’s behest – in Count Leo Tolstoy. And so some guests arrive at their house – a large, Moscow, family house; it is the saint’s day of the boy’s sister. Along with the adults arrive children – both boys and girls. Games and dancing begin. Our hero is awkward; he is the poorest dancer of all; he wants to show off his wit, but he fails – and in front of so many pretty girls; he has his perennial notion, his perennial suspicion that he is inferior to all of them.
In despair he resolves to do something rash so as to impress them all. In front of all the girls and all those haughty older boys who take no account of him, he, like one possessed, with the feeling of one who hurls himself into a chasm that has suddenly opened before him, sticks his tongue out at his tutor and strikes him with all his might! ‘Now everyone knows what sort of fellow he is! Now he’s made a mark!’ He is removed in disgrace and shut up in a storeroom. Feeling that he is ruined forever, the boy begins to dream: now he’s run away from home; he’s joined the army, and in battle he kills a host of Turks and falls from his wounds. ‘Victory! Where is our saviour?’ everyone cries, as they embrace and kiss him.
And now he’s in Moscow, walking along Tverskoi Boulevard with a bandaged arm; he meets the Emperor . . . And suddenly the thought that the door will open and his tutor will come in with a bundle of switches makes these dreams fly away like so much dust. New dreams begin. Suddenly he thinks up a reason why ‘everyone so dislikes him’: very likely he is a foundling, and they’ve never told him. His thoughts grow into a whirlwind: now he’s dying; they come into the storeroom and find his body: ‘The poor boy!’ says everyone, pitying him.
‘He was a good boy! You’re the one who ruined his life,’ says his father to the tutor and now the dreamer is choked with tears . . . This whole episode ends with the boy falling ill with fever and delirium. It is a remarkably important psychological study of the soul of a child, beautifully written.
I had a reason for bringing up this study in such detail. I had a letter from K——v that described the death of a child, also a twelve-year-old boy; and it is quite possible that there was something similar here. However, I shall quote portions of the letter without changing a single word. The topic is interesting.
On the 8th of November, after dinner, the news went round the city that there had been a suicide: a twelve- or thirteen-year-old lad, a student in a junior high school, had hanged himself. It happened this way. The teacher, whose lesson the victim had not studied that day, punished him by making him stay after school until five o’clock. The boy kept pacing the floor of the room; he happened to see the cord on a pulley; he untied it, fastened it to a nail on which the honour roll usually hung and which, for some reason, had not been put up that day, and he hanged himself. The janitor, who was washing floors in the other classrooms, spotted the unfortunate boy and ran to get the inspector. The inspector rushed in and pulled the boy from the noose, but they were unable to revive him . . .
What is the reason for this suicide? The boy had never been rowdy and had shown no signs of vicious behavior; on the whole, he had been a good student, but in the period before the suicide he had received a few unsatisfactory marks from his teacher, for which he had been punished . . . People say that both the boy’s father, who was very strict, and the boy were celebrating that day their common saint’s day. Perhaps the young lad was dreaming with childish delight of how his mother, father, and little brothers and sisters would greet him at home . . . But here he is, having to sit all alone and hungry in an empty building thinking about his father’s terrible wrath that he will have to face, and about the shame, humiliation and, perhaps, also the punishment he will have to bear.
He knew of suicide as an alternative (and in our day what child does not?). One feels terrible pity for the deceased lad, and pity for the inspector, an excellent person and pedagogue who is adored by his pupils; one fears for the school that sees such things happen within its walls. What were the feelings of the classmates of the deceased when they learned of what had happened? And what of the other children who study there, some of whom are only tiny little things in the preparatory classes? Is such training not too stringent? Is there not too much significance given to grades – to ‘Ds’ and ‘Fs’ and to honour rolls from whose nails pupils hang themselves? Is there not too much formalism and arid lack of feeling when we deal with education?
Of course, one feels terribly sorry for the poor young lad who was celebrating his saint’s day; but I shall not enter into a detailed commentary on the probable causes for this heartbreaking incident, and particularly not on the topic of ‘grades’, ‘Ds,’ ‘excessive severity,’ and so on. All those things existed formerly, without suicides, and so evidently the reason does not lie here. I chose the episode from Tolstoy’s Boyhood because of the similarity between both cases, but there is also an enormous difference. There is no doubt that the young lad, Misha, who was celebrating his saint’s day, killed himself not from anger and fear alone. Both these feelings – anger and morbid dread – are too simple and would most likely have been a result in themselves.
However, the fear of punishment could also really have had an influence, especially given a state of morbid anxiety. But still, even with that, the feeling must have been much more complex, and again, it is very possible that what occurred was something akin to what Count Tolstoy described: that is, suppressed and still unconscious childish questions, a powerful sense of some oppressive injustice, an anguished, precocious and tormenting sense of one’s own insignificance, a morbidly intensified question: ‘Why do they all dislike me so?’ There is the passionate longing to compel people to pity, which is the same as a passionate longing for love from them all – there are these things, and a great host of other complications and subtleties.
The fact is that some or other of these subtleties certainly were involved; but there are also features of a new sort of reality quite different from that of the placid, middle-stratum Moscow landowning family whose way of life had long been solidly established and whose historian is our Count Leo Tolstoy, who, it seems, appeared just at the time when the former structure of the Russian nobility, established on the basis of old landowners’ ways, had arrived at some new, still unknown but radical crisis, or at least at a point when it was to be totally recast into new, not yet manifest, almost entirely unknown forms.
In the incident here, of the boy whose saint’s day it was, one particular feature comes entirely from our time. Count Tolstoy’s boy could dream, with bitter tears of enervated emotion in his heart, of how they would come in, find his dead body, and begin to love and pity him and blame themselves. He could even dream of killing himself, but only dream: the strict order of the historically configured noble family would have made its mark even in a twelve-year-old child and would not have allowed his dream to become actuality; the other child dreamed it, and then he did it. In pointing this out, however, I have in mind not only the current epidemic of suicides. One senses that something is not right here, that an enormous part of the Russian order of life has remained entirely without any observer and without any historian.
At least it is clear that the life of the upper-middle level of our nobility, so vividly described by our writers, is already an
