[10] _Childhood_, chap. xii. [11] He professes, in his autobiographical notes (dated 1878), to be able to recall the sensations of being swaddled as a baby, and of being bathed in a tub. See _First Memories._ [12] _First Memories._ CHAPTER II BOYHOOD AND YOUTH He studied at Kazan.[1] He was not a notable student. It used to be said of the three brothers[2]: "Sergius wants to, and can; Dmitri wants to, and can't; Leo can't, and doesn't want to." He passed through the period which he terms "the desert of adolescence"; a desert of sterile sands, blown upon by gales of the burning winds of folly. The pages of _Boyhood_, and in especial those of _Youth_[3] are rich in intimate confessions relating to these years. He was a solitary. His brain was in a condition of perpetual fever. For a year he was completely at sea; he roamed from one system of philosophy to another. As a Stoic, he indulged in self-inflicted physical tortures. As an Epicurean he debauched himself. Then came a faith in metempsychosis. Finally he fell into a condition of nihilism not far removed from insanity; he used to feel that if only he could turn round with sufficient rapidity he would find himself face to face with nothingness ... He analysed himself continually: "I no longer thought of a thing; I thought of what I thought of it."[4] This perpetual self-analysis, this mechanism of reason turning in the void, remained to him as a dangerous habit, which was "often," in his own words, "to be detrimental to me in life"; but by which his art has profited inexpressibly.[5] As another result of self-analysis, he had lost all his religious convictions; or such was his belief. At sixteen years of age ceased to pray; he went to church no longer;[6] but his faith was not extinguished; it was only smouldering. "Nevertheless, I did believe--in something. But in what? I could not say. I still believed in God; or rather I did not deny Him. But in what God? I did not know. Nor did I deny Christ and his teaching; but I could not have said precisely what that doctrine was."[7] From time to time he was obsessed by dreams of goodness. He wished to sell his carriage and give the money to the poor: to give them the tenth part of his fortune; to live without the help of servants, "for they were men like himself." During an illness[8] he wrote certain "Rules of Life." He naively assigned himself the duty of "studying everything, of mastering all subjects: law, medicine, languages, agriculture, history, geography, and mathematics; to attain the highest degree of perfection in music and painting," and so forth. I had "the conviction that the destiny of man was a process of incessant self-perfection."