Other friends, the two Zybin brothers, temporarily communicated to him their passion for music. With his customary single-minded zcal- ousness, Tolstoy practiced scales on the piano, tried to loosen up his "big fingers" by keeping them constantly in motion, on his knees at the dinner table, or on his pillow in bed, and in the end, he even wrote a waltz.f While engaged in these artistic pursuits, he was not above joining his fellow students in one of their shabby "carouses" in an atmosphere of smoke, sweat and pommaded hair. He banged his glass against theirs, laughed, sang and felt his mounting fatigue and disgust, and was convinced that the others were having no more fun than he, but that a rule of honor required them all to pretend they were wildly gay. He came home with a heavy conscience and a woolly mouth. In those days he stared at women and talked about them with a lack of restraint that made a poor cover for his inexperience. His passion suddenly settled upon a ladies' maid at the Yushkovs', big Matryona, who was twenty-five years old, had a pretty round face, a quantity of white skin and provocative manners. He had noticcd one of the footmen in the house pursuing her assiduously; then he surprised his own brother Sergey scuffling with her on the stairs. She pushed the young gentleman away with a laugh and whispered, "Really, watch where you're putting your hands, you should be ashamed of yourself."13 At first he was terrified by Sergey's boldness; then Leo dreamed of usurping his place in the girl's favors. A hundred times he crouched in the corridor listening to the flutter in the women-servants' room and erecting foolproof schemes for conqucst, but he never had the courage to push open the door. "What would I say, with my cabbage nose and my tufts of hair sticking up in the air, if she asked me what I wanted?""
It was not long afterward, no doubt, that he lost his virginity, in the most commonplace and tawdry way; barely sixteen years old, a liquor- sodden girl, a brothel bedroom. Later, he told his secretary, N. N. Gusev: "The first time my brothers dragged me to a brothel and I performed that act, I sat down afterward at the foot of the woman's bed and cried."15 The hero of his short story, Memoirs of a Billiard-marker, also weeps and rages at his friends after they have forced him to sleep with a prostitute. "You think it's funny, but I am sad," he says. "Why did I do it? I won't forgive you for it and I won't forgive myself as long as I live."! The memory of this distasteful body-to-body skirmish with a
\ He never forgot it, and played it at Yasnaya Polyana in 1906. lie himself admitted that he had only sketched out the melody, arid one of the Zybin brothers did the arrangement.
J The hero of the talc A Holy Night (1853) also cries a baV in the same circumstances.
total stranger long prevented Leo Tolstoy from taking another woman in his arms. He preferred poetic elucubrations and solitary relief to tire sordid pleasures of possession.
The end-of-term examinations found him unprepared. His marks were so poor that the board of examiners would not allow him to sit for the year-end examinations. Their decision, dated April 26, 1845, was accompanied by the following commentary: "Insufficient attendance in class and total failure in history." Mortified by this censure, Tolstoy blamed it on the hatred of Ivanov, his history professor, who had quarreled with his family a short time before. He shut himself up in his room and indulged in a three-day bout of tears, rage and curses. He envied his brother Nicholas, who was going to enlist in the army the following month. He dreamed of going with him, fighting in the Caucasus, dying a hero, or possibly committing suicide. Then, picking up the notebook in which he had first written his "Rules of Life," he opened it and felt a momentary rush of remorse and nostalgia. "When I recovered, I decided to revise my rules of life," he wrote, "convinced that this time I would never do anything wrong again, would never spend one sccond in idleness and would never violate the principles I had laid down for myself."16
Filled with these noble resolutions, he set off out for Yasnaya Polyana with his brothers. Aunt Toinette was there, with her warm eyes and little blue-veined hands. The moment he entered the drawing room he felt "the gentle caress of the old house." "How," he wondered, "have the house and I managed to live so long without each other?"17 The windowpanes rcflcctcd memories of his childhood, he ran to bathe in the swift, merry water of the Voronka, stretched out in the shade of a birch grove, opened a book, read a few lines, drank in the shimmering, layered transparence of the leaves and felt coursing through him "the same force of life, fresh and young, that filled Nature around me."18 Then, closing his book, he went to pick apples in the orchard or plunged into the dark, moist forest, filled with the smell of rotting fruit, moss and raspberries. In the evening, after supper, he settled himself to sleep on the terrace, heedless of the clouds of mosquitoes that vibrated in the shadows. One by one the last lamps emigrated from the ground floor to the rooms above, voiccs were lowered, the lights went out, the whole house sank into sleep and the night watchman began his rounds, stumping down the avenue striking his iron plate.
Then everything took on a different meaning for Leo Tolstoy: the silver-frosted sprays of poplar, the soft creaking of two birches against each other, the leaping frogs "which sometimes climbed up the steps of die terrace, their backs gleaming greenish in the moonlight . .
Surrounded by shadows and the eerie phosphorescence, he dreamed of the ideal woman, with one black braid lying over her shoulder and provocative breasts. "But," he wrote, "something told me that SHE, with her bare arms and scaring embrace, was by no means all the happiness in the world and that even my love for HER was by no means the only good. The longer I stared up at the moon, high in the sky, the more it seemed to me that true beauty and true happiness Were still higher, more pure, closer to Him, the source of all that is good and beautiful, and tears of joy, an unfulfilled, straining sort of joy, came to my eyes. . . . It seemed to me then that Nature, the moon and I were one and the same."20