The text of A Christmas Night is incomplete, with two chapter headings indicated but not fleshed out, and the surviving manuscript is a mixture of a first rough draft, and a second ‘fair copy’ draft which extends almost to the end of Chapter III. As a result there are some incoherences in the treatment and the development of the minor characters, as well as a hesitation about the name of the hero – initially Alexandre, but in the second draft Seriozha Ivin. (In this translation ‘Seriozha’ is used throughout.) As in A History of Yesterday, the ms. contains a number of deleted but still decipherable passages, indicated in the present edition of both stories by pointed brackets.
Despite these imperfections, A Christmas Night is a complete and coherent story as it stands. It has a clear plot line, plenty of observation of human behaviour at carefully contrasted different social levels (an echo perhaps of the literary physiologies which came into fashion in the mid-1840s in imitation of French models), some passages of lyrical nature description which would be equally at home in Youth, and the perennial Tolstoyan theme of the moral superiority of the country over the city. The only undigested element (which Tolstoy would surely have excised, had he ever prepared this piece for publication) is the digression on gypsy music towards the end, which may be of some historical and even musicological interest but radically disrupts the narrative flow. This apart, if A History of Yesterday shows the young Tolstoy’s mastery of the Sternean sentimental manner, A Christmas Night, coming only two years later, demonstrates that he was also capable of producing a convincing Russian equivalent of the French romantic fiction of the 1830s and 1840s.
A HISTORY OF
YESTERDAY
I AM writing a history of yesterday, not because yesterday was in any way remarkable, or could even be called remarkable, but because I have long desired to tell the story of the intimate side of a single day. God alone knows how many varied and interesting impressions, and thoughts aroused by those impressions (obscure and ill-defined but nonetheless intelligible to our own soul) occur in the course of a single day. If it were possible to recount them in such a way as to make it easy for me to read my own self, and for others to read me as I really am, the result would be a really instructive and absorbing book – a book indeed for which the world could not provide enough ink for the writing, or printers for the publishing of it. <From whatever angle you look into the human soul, you find everywhere the same boundlessness, and speculations arise to which there is no end, from which there is no way out, and which I find alarming.>—But to business.—
Yesterday I got up late, at a quarter to ten, and that was simply because I had gone to bed after midnight the night before. (I long ago set myself the rule of not going to bed later than twelve o’clock, but all the same I find myself doing so some three times each week); however there are certain circumstances in which I would class this not as a crime but rather as a minor lapse: such circumstances are of many kinds, and how it was yesterday I shall now explain.
Here I must beg your indulgence for recounting things which occurred the day before yesterday, but as you are well aware, novelists are given to writing whole histories about their heroes’ immediate forebears.
I was playing cards, but certainly not from any passionate liking for cards, however it may appear. As regards the love of card-playing, it is rather like the case of those people who dance the polka just because they enjoy the exercise. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among the many suggestions he made which no one agreed with, advocated playing with a cup-and-ball [bilboquet] in society in order to give one’s hands something to do; but that does not go far enough, for in society the head too needs to be occupied, or at least it needs some sort of activity about which people can either talk or remain silent.—In our country such an activity has in fact been devised – card-playing.—Persons born in the last century complain that ‘there is no conversation whatever to be had nowadays’. I do not know what people were like in the last century (it seems to me, though, that they have always been pretty much the same); however, genuine conversation is never a real possibility. Conversation merely as a pastime is the stupidest of inventions. It is not because of intellectual inadequacy that there is no conversation, but because of egoism. Everyone wants to speak about himself or about what concerns him; and if one person talks and the other listens, that is not conversation, but lecturing. And even if two people agree to concentrate on the same topic, it only takes the addition of a third person for the whole thing to be ruined: he intervenes, they must do their best to accommodate him, and the conversation goes to the devil.
There are also conversations where two people are interested in the same thing and nobody interferes with them, yet here the situation is even worse. Each of them talks about the same thing, but from his own point of view, measuring everything by his own yardstick, and the longer the conversation goes on, the farther each of them gets from the other, until each realizes that he has ceased to converse, but is preaching with a freedom no one else could equal, setting himself up as an example, and the other person is not really listening, but doing likewise. Have you ever engaged in rolling Easter eggs during Holy Week? You set in motion two identical hard-boiled eggs along the same strip of bast matting, but each egg has in fact a slight irregularity in its side. They may start rolling in the same direction, but then each egg begins to roll in a direction dictated by its own tiny irregularity. In conversation, as in egg-rolling, there are the shlyupiks1 which roll noisily and not very far, and there are the sharp-ended ones which get carried away goodness knows where; but there are no two eggs, shlyupiks apart, which are likely to roll in exactly the same direction. Each one has its own particular irregularity.
I am not referring to those conversations which occur because it would be improper not to say something, in the same way that it would be improper not to wear a necktie. One party is thinking: ‘You realize of course that it is no matter to me what I talk about, but I have to do so’; and the other is thinking: ‘Talk on, talk on, you poor fellow, – I accept that it is necessary.’ This is not conversation, but rather – like black tail-coats, visiting cards and gloves – a matter of propriety.
That is why I say that card-playing is an excellent invention. During the game it is possible to converse a little and flatter one’s self-esteem, to let fall some charming little mot, without being obliged to continue in the same vein, as one would have to do in a society where there was nothing but conversation available.
It is essential to keep back your final volley of wit for the last circle of acquaintances you encounter that evening, just as you are taking your hat: this is the moment to squander all the reserves you have been holding on to. Like a horse in the final straight going all out to win. Otherwise you will appear feeble and colourless; and I have noticed that people who are not merely clever, but capable of shining in society, have failed because they have misjudged the level of their remarks. If you say something in the heat of the moment before anyone has had time to get tired of you, and then, feeling bored, you do not wish to converse further, that is how you will be seen as you depart: the final impression is the one which will stick, and people will say ‘How difficult he is …’ But when a card-game is going on no such thing can happen. One is allowed to remain silent without being censured for it.