Summary Youth Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Youth
There is the sixteenth spring of Nikolay Irtenyev. He is preparing for the examinations to the university, overflowing with dreams and reflections on his future destiny. To clarify the purpose of life, Nikolai starts a separate notebook where he writes down the duties and rules necessary for moral improvement. In a passionate environment, a gray-haired monk, a confessor, comes to the house. After the confession, Nicholas feels clean and new. But at night he suddenly remembers one of his shameful sin, which he concealed in confession. He hardly sleeps until morning and at six o’clock rushes to the monastery in a cab to confess again. Joyful, Nicholas goes back, it seems to him that the best and purest of him there is no man in the world. He does not hold back and talks about his confession to the cabman. And he answers: “And what, sir, is your business masterful.”
Nikolay successfully passes the exams and enlisted in the university.
The next day, on the orders of his father, Nikolenka is sent, as an adult, to make visits. He visits the Valakhins, Kornakovs, Ivin, Prince Ivan Ivanych, with difficulty enduring long hours of forced conversations. Nikolay feels free and easy only in the company of Dmitry Nekhlyudov, who invites him to visit his mother in Kuntsevo. On the way, friends talk on different topics, Nikolai admits that recently he was completely confused in the variety of new impressions. He likes quiet tranquility in Dmitrov without a touch of edification, a free and noble mind, he likes that Nekhlyudov forgave the shameful history in the restaurant, as if not giving it special significance. Through conversations with Dmitry, Nikolai begins to understand that growing up is not a simple change in time, but a slow formation of the soul.
The next day Nikolay goes to the post office to the village, where memories of his childhood, of his mother, come to life with renewed vigor. He thinks a lot, thinks about his future place in the world, about the notion of good manners, which requires enormous inner labor over oneself. Enjoying the village life, Nikolai with joy realizes in himself the ability to see and feel the most subtle shades of the beauty of nature.
My father is married for the second time in forty-eight years. Children do not like their stepmother, their father and his new wife develop relationships of “quiet hatred” in a few months.
Since the beginning of his studies at the University, Nikolay seems that he dissolves in the mass of the same students and is largely disappointed with the new life. He rushes from talking with Nekhlyudov to participating in student carousals, which are condemned by his friend. Irtenieva is irritated by the conventions of secular society, which seem to be for the most part a pretense of insignificant people. Among the students, Nikolai has new acquaintances, and he notes that the main concern of these people is to receive from life primarily pleasure. Under the influence of new acquaintances, he unconsciously follows the same principle. Negligence in school is bearing fruit: in the first exam Nicholas fails. For three days he does not leave the room, feels truly unhappy and has lost all the former joy of life. Dmitry visits him, but because of the cooling that comes in their friendship,
One evening, late at night, Nikolai takes out a notebook on which it says: “Rules of life.” From the flooded feelings associated with youthful dreams, he cries, but already with tears not of despair, but of repentance and moral impulse. He decides to write the rules of life again and never change them again. The first half of youth ends in anticipation of the next, happier.
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