Important as the autobiographical element in A History of Yesterday is, scholars have emphasized the decisive literary influence which led Tolstoy to write it in the first place – his passionate enthusiasm for Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), which he read early in 1851 and partially translated into Russian. Some critics have enthused about the daring originality of Tolstoy’s early foray into ‘stream of consciousness’ writing: D. S. Mirsky invokes the names of Proust and Joyce. But a version of the ‘stream of consciousness’ convention is already present in Sterne, and A. N. Wilson argues that ‘far from being proto-Modernist, the fragment actually suggests (with its debts and allusions to Sterne and Rousseau) a world of literary modes and models which, by the standards of Western Europe, were at least half a century out of date’. R. F. Christian lists the many unmistakably Sternian fingerprints in this story – including frequent dashes (and parentheses) – and notes its paradoxical Shandean failure ever to get as far as telling us about what happened ‘yesterday’. He concludes: ‘The occasional diary-like entries and the passage on the subject of diaries are evidence also that Tolstoy’s own writing habits no less than his reading tastes are reflected in this early story which, like much of his juvenilia, is related less to contemporary life than to literature.’
The other early story included here for the first time in English is much less well-known. A Christmas Night dates from 1853, the year when Tolstoy’s second published story, The Raid, appeared, and in which he was working on Boyhood, the second part of his trilogy, while serving with the army in the Caucasus. Henri Troyat refers to this story (under the title A Holy Night) as the earliest of several texts, autobiographical as well as fictional, dealing with sexual initiation and sexual disgust. There is no suggestion, however, that A Christmas Night is a piece of barely-concealed journal writing in the manner of A History of Yesterday. A Christmas Night is a more conventionally literary piece, close to the mainstream of nineteenth-century novel fiction. This time the narrative is almost entirely in the ‘omniscient’ third person mode, and is far closer to Balzac than to Sterne, especially in its melodramatic treatment of romantic love and in the substantial ball scene which reads like an admiring pastiche of Le Père Goriot.
The text of A Christmas Night is incomplete, with two chapter headings indicated but not fleshed out, and the surviving manuscript is a mixture of a first rough draft, and a second ‘fair copy’ draft which extends almost to the end of Chapter III. As a result there are some incoherences in the treatment and the development of the minor characters, as well as a hesitation about the name of the hero – initially Alexandre, but in the second draft Seriozha Ivin. (In this translation ‘Seriozha’ is used throughout.) As in A History of Yesterday, the ms. contains a number of deleted but still decipherable passages, indicated in the present edition of both stories by pointed brackets.
Despite these imperfections, A Christmas Night is a complete and coherent story as it stands. It has a clear plot line, plenty of observation of human behaviour at carefully contrasted different social levels (an echo perhaps of the literary physiologies which came into fashion in the mid-1840s in imitation of French models), some passages of lyrical nature description which would be equally at home in Youth, and the perennial Tolstoyan theme of the moral superiority of the country over the city. The only undigested element (which Tolstoy would surely have excised, had he ever prepared this piece for publication) is the digression on gypsy music towards the end, which may be of some historical and even musicological interest but radically disrupts the narrative flow. This apart, if A History of Yesterday shows the young Tolstoy’s mastery of the Sternean sentimental manner, A Christmas Night, coming only two years later, demonstrates that he was also capable of producing a convincing Russian equivalent of the French romantic fiction of the 1830s and 1840s.
A HISTORY OF
YESTERDAY
