Youth

by Leo Tolstoy/Tolstoi

Translated by C. J. Hogarth




I

WHAT I CONSIDER TO HAVE BEEN THE BEGINNING OF MY YOUTH

I have said that my friendship with Dimitri opened up for me a
new view of my life and of its aim and relations. The essence of
that view lay in the conviction that the destiny of man is to
strive for moral improvement, and that such improvement is at
once easy, possible, and lasting. Hitherto, however, I had found
pleasure only in the new ideas which I discovered to arise from
that conviction, and in the forming of brilliant plans for a
moral, active future, while all the time my life had been
continuing along its old petty, muddled, pleasure-seeking course,
and the same virtuous thoughts which I and my adored friend
Dimitri ("my own marvellous Mitia," as I used to call him to
myself in a whisper) had been wont to exchange with one another
still pleased my intellect, but left my sensibility untouched.
Nevertheless there came a moment when those thoughts swept into
my head with a sudden freshness and force of moral revelation
which left me aghast at the amount of time which I had been
wasting, and made me feel as though I must at once--that very