Youth

Every spring, the narrator says, he made rules for himself and wrote them in a book, and every spring he broke them. He is at university now, with a droshky and a pipe and a theory about what it means to be comme il faut, and the theory is that people can be sorted by their French pronunciation and the shape of their fingernails. Tolstoy lets him have it at full length, then walks him into a room where it stops working. The failed examination at the end is one of the truest things in Russian literature about being nineteen: not tragedy, just the sudden cold understanding that you have been performing a self nobody else was convinced by. It closes the three books that began with a fly above a child's bed, and it closes them on someone who has finally run out of alibis.