Morning) (1852); a remarkable novel, whose hero, Prince Nekhludov[1] is Tolstoy in disguise.
Nekhludov is twenty years old. He has left the University to devote himself to his peasants. He has been labouring for a year to do them good. In the course of a visit to the village we see him striving against jeering indifference, rooted distrust, routine, apathy, vice, and ingratitude. All his efforts are in vain. He returns indoors discouraged, and muses on his dreams of a year ago; his generous enthusiasm, his “idea that love and goodness were one with happiness and truth: the only happiness and the only truth possible in this world.” He feels himself defeated. He is weary and ashamed.
“Seated before the piano, his hand unconsciously moved upon the keys. A chord sounded; then a second, then a third. … He began to play. The chords were not always perfect in rhythm; they were often obvious to the point of banality; they did not reveal any talent for music; but they gave him a melancholy, indefinable sense of pleasure. At each change of key he awaited, with a flutter of the heart, for what was about to follow;
- ↑ Nekhludov figures also in Boyhood and Youth (1854), in A Brush with the Enemy (1856); the Diary of a Sportsman (1856); Lucerne (1857); and Resurrection (1899). We must remember that different characters appear under this one name. Tolstoy has not always given Nekhludov the same physical aspect; and the latter commits suicide at the end of the Diary of a Sportsman. These different Nekhludovs are various aspects of Tolstoy, endowed with his worst and his best characteristics.
