It was not until October 31, 1852 that Tolstoy received the issue of The Contemporary containing his story. After the thrill of seeing his prose printed in black on white, like a real author, he flew into a rage because Nekrasov had made a few cuts and even changed the title (Childhood, instead of Story of My Childhood). He expressed his displeasure in a letter which, after reading it over, he did not dare to send. The tone of the second, which he signed and sealed, was still surprisingly peremptory for a novice: "I shall ask you to promise, Sir, with regard to my future writings—should you continue to wish to publish them in your review—that you will make absolutely 110 changes in the text."54
When he began Childhood, Tolstoy intended to write about his playfellows—Vladimir, Michael and Konstantin Islenyev—and their father, whom he had known in Moscow, but not about himself. The personality of the father, "gallant, bold, self-confident, affable, libertine ... a connoisseur of everything that can procure comfort and pleasure," was scrupulously transcribed by the author. The mother, on the other hand, was purely fictional. It was inevitable that in his efforts to describe the life of this family, Tolstoy should be tempted to incorporate his personal reminiscences. Little by little, his own memories crept into the outline he had drawn. 'The result," he later wrote, "was a deformed mixture of events drawn from the childhood of the Islcnyevs and my own."55 To portray Volodya, the narrator's brother, he borrowed the features of his brother Sergey; the Lyubochka of the novel was copied from his sister Marya; Grandmother was taken over bodily into the book; Karl Ivanovich, the tutor, was none other than Fyodor
Ivanovich Rossel, and St. J&rdme was Prosper dc St. Thomas; Natalya Savishna's flcsh-and-blood counterpart lived at Yasnaya Poly-ana under the name of Prascovya Isayevna; Prince Ivan Ivanovich was strongly reminiscent of Prince Gorchakov; Sonya Valakhin was a faitliful image of Sonya Koloshin—the author's childhood sweetheart; the Ivin brothers had more than one point in common with the Musin-Pushkin brothers; as to the narrator himself, Nikolenka Irtenyev—his feelings about those close to him, about nature, animals and servants, were exactly those of Leo Tolstoy at the age of his first discoveries. Thus this first work, which he wanted to be as detached from himself as possible, was unconsciously nourished with all his affection for the warm years of his childhood. Fifty years later he wrote that the book, which he no longer liked, had been written under the influence of Sterne (Sentimental Journey) and 'lopffer (La Bibliotlieque de mon oncle). lie might as well have added Rousseau, Dickens, Gogol and— why not?—Stendhal.
In fact, Tolstoy's originality was apparent in those very first pages. He instinctively refused to see people and things in terms of others before him. lie looked at the world with the eyes of a man who has read nothing and learned nothing, who is discovering everything for himself. "When I wrote Childhood" he later told Bulgakov, "I had the impression that nobody before me had ever felt or expressed the wonderful poetry of that age." He applied this constant concern for sincerity and probity to technique as well as to thought. He was not writing to please, but to translate the different aspects of life as faithfully as he could. By divesting his language of threadbare metaphor, he sought the shortest road from the object to the heart. The grandiloquent comparisons of a Lamartinc drove him wild with anger. What a heap of rubbish, all those tears that resembled pearls and eyes sparkling like diamonds! "I never saw lips of coral," he wrote in one draft of Childhood, "but I have seen them the color of brick; nor turquoise eyes, but I have seen them the color of laundry blueing." "The French," he also said, "have a strange propensity for translating their impressions into tableaux. A face? 'It is like the statue of . . .' Nature? 'It reminds one of such-and-such a painting.' A comely group? 'One might say a setting from an opera or ballet.' But a handsome facc, or a scene in nature or a group of live people will always be more beautiful than any statue, panorama, painting or stage setting."
Armed with these principles, Tolstoy vowed from the outset to use the right word every time, even if it was crudc, trivial or inaesthetic; to put it down on the paper without fear of being repetitious, and never to sacrifice the truth for clegance or poetry. He had the same mistrust of traditional forms of construction. In his opinion one should not begin by describing the characters, and then setting the scene, and then opening the action; instead, one should familiarize the reader with the characters by little touches scattered about as the action progressed. In short, he intended to write simply and be read by simple people.
In his campaign of demystifi cation, he was aided by a Dionysiac sensuousncss. He strode through the world with his eyes wide open, ears pricked and nostrils flaring. The shuddering of the leaves, smell of plowed earth, chill of a pane of glass under the hand, taste of a fruit melting 011 his tongue, barking of a dog in the country—all his perceptions coursed through his body in sharp waves, collided together and muddled his brain deliciously. He was perfectly attuned to the rhythm of nature, and it was no effort for him to imagine what beings very different from himself might feci. With equal truthfulness he could be lord, muzhik, woman, child, girl, horse and bird in turn. And he showed as much concern for the truth in his psychological notations as in his descriptions of the world: "In the course of my life," he wrote in one draft of Childhood, "I have never met a man who was all bad, all pride, all good or all intelligence. In modesty I can always find a repressed urge toward pride, I see stupidity in the most intelligent book, intelligent things in the conversation of the greatest fool alive, ctc." At the age of twenty-three, lie had already rejected one-sided characters, figures that were all shadow or all light. He decomposed the individual into an infinity of tiny spots, in the manner of the Impressionists. And out of the juxtaposition of this multitude of apparently disconnected lines, a unique character was born. After a dance, little Nikolenka looks at himself in a mirror—ugly, perspiring, his hair mussed, "but the overall expression on my facc was so gay, so good and healthy that I was pleased with myself."56 At his mother's death he was sad, to be sure, but a curious feeling of self-importance mingled with his sorrow: "Sometimes it was the desire to show that I was more deeply afflicted than the others, sometimes concern for the effect I was producing. . . Seeing his father in a black redingotc, pale, pensive and handsome during the funeral, he was angry with him "for looking so dashing at such a moment." It even seemed to him (in an early draft of Childhood) that his grief-stricken father was not insensitive to the bare white arm of a neighbor who had come to nurse Maman.