Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/344



, only by having gone through all the torment, only thanks to this, did I comprehend where the root of it all was, did I comprehend what ought to be, and therefore did I see the terror of all that which is.

"So you see how and when all that began which led me up to my episode. It began when I was not quite sixteen years old. It happened when I was still in the gymnasium, while my elder brother was a first year student at the university. I did not yet know women, but, like all unfortunate children of our circle, I was no longer an innocent boy: I had been debauched by boys for two years already woman, not any kind of a woman, but woman as a sweet being, woman, every woman, the nakedness of woman, had been tormenting me. My withdrawments were impure. I suffered as suffer ninety-nine hundredths of our boys. I was horrified, I was tormented, I prayed, and I fell. I was already debauched in imagination and in fact, but the last step had not yet been taken. I was perishing myself, but I had not yet laid hands on another human being. But my brother's comrade, a jolly student, a so-called good fellow, that is, the worst kind of a good-for-nothing, who had taught us to drink and play cards, persuaded me after a carousal to drive to that place. We went. My brother, too, was innocent still, and he fell that night. And I, a fifteen-year-old boy, desecrated myself and was instrumental in the desecration of a woman, without comprehending what I was doing. I had never heard from my elders that that which I was doing was bad. And even now they