Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

you are a rare exception, hold those same views, just as I used to. Never mind, I beg your pardon, but the fact is that it’s terrible, terrible, terrible!”

“What is terrible?” I asked.

“That abyss of error in which we live regarding women and our relations with them. No, I can’t speak calmly about it, not because of that ‘episode,’ as he called it, in my life, but because since that ‘episode’ occurred my eyes have been opened and I have seen everything in quite a different light. Everything reversed, everything reversed!”

He lit a cigarette and began to speak, leaning his elbows on his knees.

It was too dark to see his face, but, above the jolting of the train, I could hear his impressive and pleasant voice.

IV

“Yes, only after such torments as I have endured, only by their means, have I understood where the root of the matter lies⁠—understood what ought to be, and therefore seen all the horror of what is.

“So you will see how and when that which led up to my ‘episode’ began. It began when I was not quite sixteen. It happened when I still went to the grammar school and my elder brother was a first-year student at the university. I had not yet known any woman, but, like all the unfortunate children of our class, I was no longer an innocent boy. I had been depraved two years before that by other boys. Already woman, not some particular woman but woman as something to be desired, woman, every woman, woman’s nudity, tormented me. My solitude was not pure. I was tormented, as ninety-nine percent of our boys are. I was horrified, I suffered, I prayed, and I fell. I was already depraved in imagination and in fact, but I had not yet laid hands on another human being. But one day a comrade of my brother’s, a jolly student, a so-called good fellow, that is, the worst kind of good-for-nothing, who had taught us to drink and to play cards, persuaded us after a carousal to go there. We went. My brother was also still innocent, and he fell that same night. And I, a fifteen-year-old boy, defiled myself and took part in defiling a woman, without at all understanding what I was doing. I had never heard from any of my elders that what I was doing was wrong, you know. And indeed no one hears it now. It is true it is in the Commandments but then the Commandments are only needed to answer the priest at Scripture examination, and even then they are not very necessary, not nearly as necessary as the commandment about the use of ut in conditional sentences in Latin.

“And so I never heard those older persons whose opinions I respected say that it was an evil. On the contrary, I heard people I respected say it was good. I had heard that my struggles and sufferings would be eased after that. I heard this and read it, and heard my elders say it would be good for my health, while from my comrades I heard that it was rather a fine, spirited thing to do. So in general I expected nothing but good from it. The risk of disease? But that too had been foreseen. A paternal government saw to that. It sees to the correct working of brothels,278 and makes profligacy safe for schoolboys. Doctors too deal with it for a consideration. That is proper. They assert that debauchery is good for the health, and they organize proper well-regulated debauchery. I know some mothers who attend to their sons’ health in that sense. And science sends them to the brothels.”

“Why do you say ‘science’?” I asked.

“Why, who are the doctors? The priests of science. Who deprave youths by maintaining that this is necessary for their health? They do.

“Yet if a one-hundredth part of the efforts devoted to the cure of syphilis were devoted to the eradication of debauchery there would long ago not have been a trace of syphilis left. But as it is, efforts are made not to eradicate debauchery but to encourage it and to make debauchery safe. That is not the point however. The point is that with me⁠—and with nine-tenths, if not more, not of our class only but of all classes, even the peasants⁠—this terrible thing happens that happened to me; I fell not because I succumbed to the natural temptation of a particular woman’s charm⁠—no, I was not seduced by a woman⁠—but I fell because, in the set around me, what was really a fall was regarded by some as a most legitimate function good for one’s health, and by others as a very natural and not only excusable but even innocent amusement for a young man. I did not understand that it was a fall, but simply indulged in that half-pleasure, half-need, which, as was suggested to me, was natural at a certain age. I began to indulge in debauchery as I began to drink and to smoke. Yet in that first fall there was something special and pathetic. I remember that at once, on the spot before I left the room, I felt sad, so sad that I wanted to cry⁠—to cry for the loss of my innocence and for my relationship with women, now sullied forever. Yes, my natural, simple relationship with women was spoilt forever. From that time I have not had, and could not have, pure relations with women. I had become what is called a libertine. To be a libertine is a physical condition like that of a morphinist, a drunkard, or a smoker. As a morphinist, a drunkard, or a smoker is no longer normal, so too a man who has known several women for his pleasure is not normal but is a man perverted forever, a libertine. As a drunkard or a morphinist can be recognized at once by his face and manner, so