The Birch, Fall 2005

Reliving Tolstoy's Childhood
A reflection on memories, mothers, and maturity

Abby Roserock

Leo Tolstoy’s Childhood is part of a trilogy that chronicles Nikolai's growing up. Childhood is followed by Boyhood and Youth; all three works are included in a Penguin Classics edition, translated by Rosemary Edmonds and published in 1964.

Every once in a while I come across a passage in literature that reminds me so much of my own experience that it shocks me. Never has anything struck me so powerfully in this way as two paragraphs I recently encountered in Tolstoy's coming-ofage novella, Childhood.

Reading the passage, I felt as if as if Tolstoy were taunting, almost violating me with his impossible knowledge of my history, that record of inner thoughts to which only I am supposed to have access. The episode in which a young Nikolai confronts the scene of his mother's death forced me to relive one of those moments buried in the shadows of my past, a moment that I, rather foolishly, had considered so ghastly as to preclude verbal explanation.

My mother died on July 19th, 2000, but she had lost consciousness a few days before then. I was thirteen and the last person to see her when her heart was still beating. It was difficult to acknowledge that she had, in Tolstoy's words, "died in dreadful agony," but I could not ignore the toll that her illness had taken on her body, framed by twisted vines of medical tubing and withered enough to disintegrate at one's touch. How was it that Nikolai's mother, a character of fiction, looked exactly like mine at the time of her death, with an icy visage, "closed eyes so sunken," and pools of blackness on her yellowed skin? Do all dead people look the same? I cannot answer that for certain; fortunately, I have only seen one.

There was something bewildering about seeing the woman who raised me shed every sign of maternity from her body. Skeletal arms cannot embrace; limp and shriveled hands cannot fix hair; frozen lips cannot discharge any stream of wisdom to the ears of a child. Instinctively, the mind struggles to make sense of such a startling image. Here is the last great Southern matriarch propped up on her throne, I thought, wishing her hospital bed were more dignified. And what followed was a barrage of good memories - my brain's attempt to counter the effects of that hideous spectacle.

She and I would lie on the sofa watching talk shows or reading novels, and I would rest my head on one of her legs, rubbing my cheek against the invisible stubble and wondering when I would be initiated into womanhood with razors and bottles of foam. She would sing country music in the early mornings to wake us for school or during long car trips to North Carolina or Tennessee. Sensing her children were annoyed, she would say to my older brother and me, "One day I'll be dead [DAY-ihd, with the South Carolina diphthong] and you will miss my singing and wish that I'd sung more." Like Natalya Nikolayevna, who taunted her son Nikolai with hypothetical questions about how he would feel if she left him, my mother was forecasting her departure and testing our devotion. On the verge of tears, I would respond by joining in "Stand by Your Man" or "Mammas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys" as if to say, like Nikolai did one evening, "No! Oh don't even talk like that, darling mamma, my own darling mamma!" My brother thought the whole ritual was downright cruel, but I was too overcome with its poignancy to feel exploited.

"[T]hen suddenly some feature in the pale face before my eyes arrested my attention and I remembered the dreadful reality." The image of my mother, like Nikolai's, swung in my brain like a pendulum from her last, grisly apparition to those pearly old memories and back again. Even today, in my daydreams, she is either glowing or decaying, but never quite real. My perceptions of her are consistently inaccurate, all glossed over with the rose-colored enamel of childhood myopia or stained with the bitter tears that must follow from death. She has become an icon of my imagination, a character in my repertoire of stories, suburban tragedy personified, an abstraction, a mirage. No matter how lifelike the reveries, there is always a sense of intractable distance between us - I, a human, and she, a memory. What I regret most is that this person in whom I had once sensed more humanity and depth than in anyone else has become a mere component of my intellect, as flat as her wedding picture on my bedside table.

The closest I have come to grasping again the lovely, primordial energy that used to seep from her pores has been in my dreams. Sometimes she visits New York or throws together a casserole in our old kitchen, and, in vain, I lapse into hopes of recovering the joy I took for granted as a little girl, too ignorant to appreciate the goddess in my midst. We shop for throw pillows or sunbathe beside the hydrangeas, and I beg her to speak, saying anything that may provoke her to laugh with me or sing to me, but she is usually silent and reserved. In all of these dreams she rarely deigns to speak, excepting an occasional rebuke for sleeping with my boyfriend - did I think she couldn't see all that filth from Heaven, and didn't she raise me to be a decent Protestant girl, and hell if her daughter was going to be the town hussy - or for never writing thank-you notes or for going to church with wet hair (and in front of all the cousins!). But more often than not, she says nothing, and, worse, we never touch. In all my dreams, she is either too ethereal and perfect a creature for the likes of my flesh-and-blood self or too coarse an apparition, with only patches of hair left on her head and all the black splotches on body parts starved of circulating blood, to forgo all dignity by letting me touch what's become of her.

Death somehow enables unfathomable beauty and acute devastation to reside within a single legacy. Nikolai's similar inability to reconcile his mother "alive, gay and smiling" with the "pale-yellow translucent object" to which she has amounted may be the source of some insurmountable disillusionment, a case of cognitive dissonance incapable of resolving itself, that leads him to forever abandon his childlike perspective. He recalls, "The thought that the face that but a few days ago had been so full of beauty and tenderness, the face of the person I loved most in the world, could inspire horror, as it were for the first time revealed the bitter truth to me and overwhelmed my soul with despair." What bitter truth could be more jarring to the soul than the realization that a perfect era has irrevocably ended?

Reacting to the sight of his mother's death, Nikolai recalls the "incomprehensible, irresistible power that attracted my eyes to her lifeless face." His mother becomes something like a terrible car accident, a circus freak, impossible to ignore but difficult to stomach. Nikolai must confront the reality he sees before him and accept the permanent disruption of his social and spiritual life: the person who was once his chief source of warmth and stability has come to signify exactly the opposite. After the death of his mother, "the happy period of childhood" is sealed off in the annals of Nikolai's memory, and "the epoch of boyhood" begins. As he grows older, Nikolai increasingly yields to the inevitable social and professional pressures of civilized living, and, by the advent of his youth, life becomes a succession of engagements and obligations. Even his close friendship with Dmitri, in Nikolai's words, "appealed to my mind only and left my feelings untouched." The vulnerability and visceral emotion with which he confronted daily life in younger years has dissipated. Nikolai's particular case of grown-up complacency - the decline in his compassion for others, his obsession with becoming enlightened only so far as it renders him eligible for comme il faut status - casts a poignant light on the ephemeral, unaffected innocence of his childhood, especially the moments he shared with his mother.

Is it simply the work of genetics that prods so many of us from the teeming realm of childhood vitality to the droning machinery of selfinvolved upward-mobility? Or are external factors to blame? Whatever the cause, the results can be dreadful. As a little girl, I noticed this shift from life to the imitation of life in some older relatives approaching their twenties. I conjectured that it was driven by the onset of adulthood's inevitable responsibilities. But this is not necessarily the case, as I have since met a handful of adults who have maintained a noble, childlike energy and avoided the drudgery of convention despite their various obligations.

I suppose now that my own loss of this energy results from a feeling of awareness that life will never match what it once was. This lifelong dream of New York City residence, of nesting in the womb of an urban apartment, so opposite of what I had known in the country suburbs, has fallen mockingly short of its promise to charge me with volts of youthful electricity, to expunge my resigned hypothesis that the best life had to offer is no longer available, not even in dreams. Better to forget, I have concluded, about all the songs and adventures and sunbathing; best to live sensibly according to logical principles, taking pains to make myself respectable in a grownup society that operates predictably. The ecstasy of human connection is a fantasy of childhood, incompatible with the demands of adult civilization.

The spectacle of a rotting mother is an unforgettable paradox. Such a shock to the soul demands a reordering of the intellect, making it possible to devote one's mind to tedious subjects that have never appealed to the imagination; to treat the lower classes with disdain when inborn compassion has been replaced with a rationally ordered catalogue of social obligations; to cloister oneself in a library on the perfect afternoon for sunbathing. The desperate need for order and resolution after the loss of a mother necessitates a rite of passage into some pattern of living more comprehensible but far less euphoric than the “happy, happy, never-to-berecalled days of childhood."

- Sincerest gratitude to Professor Liza Knapp for introducing me to Tolstoy's work and for encouraging me to write about it –

Works Cited

Tolstoy, Leo. Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. Translated by Edmonds, Rosemary. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1964.