Book jot from January 2022:

I just finished reading Youth by Leo Tolstoy (1857), translated by Judson Rosengrant. This is the third and final part of a series of autobiographical novels Tolstoy published early in his writing life.

In Youth, the narrator enters university life and becomes “grown up”. As he enters this phase of life, the concept of “comme il faut” (proper and respectable) becomes a guiding principle in his changing world. He uses it both to judge and sort those he encounters, as well as an end for which to strive. As he comes into contact with an increasing number of people outside his social circle and changes happen within his family, he begins to doubt the wisdom of using this as a governing precept.

The narrator is extremely self-conscious and it is easy to see oneself in his moments of petty vanity and anxieties. Even though it was written more than 150 years ago, I was often reminded of scenes and thoughts from my own youth. Combined with the other two novels, Tolstoy has rendered a vivid depiction of the early life of a single individual in a specific time and place that manages to transcend those particularities.

“And although I was alone, it would still seem to me that the mystery and majesty of nature, and the bright, alluring circle of the moon, stopped for some reason at a single high, indefinite point in the pale-blue sky, yet shining everywhere as if filling the immensity of space with itself, and I an insignificant worm soiled by every petty, wretched human passion, yet with all the immense, mighty power of imagination and love – it would still seem to me in those moments that nature and the moon and I were one and the same.”