My Life — Trotsky's Autobiography

Author: Leon Trotsky (China)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-12-12
Features: The childhood of Chana Yanovka is often considered the happiest time in one's life. But is it always so? No, only a few people have had a happy childhood. That idealized childhood comes from the depiction of the old aristocratic literature. In those wealthy families blessed by ancestors with good education, children lived a life of abundance, carefree, full of love, and indulging in games. In people's memories, such a life is like a sunlit forest glade at the starting point of life's journey. Those aristocrats and their followers in the common class would promote this pure aristocratic childhood as the typical model of people's childhood. In reality, most people, when looking back on their childhood, see a completely different picture: dim, hungry, and oppressed. Fate always favors the strong, and who is weaker than a child? I did not have to endure hunger and cold in my childhood. I was born into a family that was already gradually getting wealthier. But the family's financial situation at that time could only meet the basic needs of life and was not particularly affluent. It was a small family that had just escaped poverty and whose circumstances were beginning to improve but could not stop. Every muscle was tense, and all thoughts were focused on labor and saving money. The situation of children in such a family could only be considered decent at best. We did not feel hardship, but we also did not enjoy the abundance and tenderness of life. For me, childhood was neither like the sunlit forest glade enjoyed by a few, nor like the hunger and oppression experienced by most. My childhood was a gray childhood, spent in a small affluent family in a remote village. In that remote, isolated, and ignorant village, nature was vast and boundless, while the customs, perspectives, and tastes of the people were so narrow and confined. The spiritual atmosphere I was in early on was entirely different from the conscious life I later experienced, and the two worlds were separated not only by decades of time and the twists and turns of my travels but also by the towering mountains of major historical events and the dramatic changes in a person's inner world, which were not as noticeable but equally significant. When I first began writing these memories, I felt as if I was not writing about my own childhood but describing a distant foreign journey from years ago. I even tried to narrate my own story in the third person, but this approach would be closer to the narrative style of literary fiction, which I was determined to avoid at all costs. Although these are two entirely different worlds, the consistency of personality opens several potential channels to cross the barriers and communicate between them. This is also why people are often interested in the biographies or self-narratives of those who hold important positions in social life for various reasons. Therefore, I decided to describe my childhood and student years in more detail here, without any assumptions and without selecting or omitting anything to achieve a certain purpose, but simply recording the events that remain in my memory. Sometimes, I seem to vaguely remember nursing at my mother's breast. This may be entirely because of the association I had when I saw an infant nursing. I seem to faintly recall playing under an apple tree in the garden when I was one and a half years old. This memory, like the one of nursing, is not very clear. I remember more clearly another incident: my mother took me to visit a family in Bobrynets, where there was a little girl of two or three years old. We played house in the painted floor of the living room, with boys acting as grooms and girls as brides. Later, the girl ran away, and the boy stood alone by a cabinet, staring blankly as if in a dream. My mother and the hostess entered the room. My mother noticed a small patch of water on the boy's back and kept looking at him, saying, "How can you not feel ashamed?" The boy looked at his mother, then at himself, and then at the patch of water, as if it had nothing to do with him. The hostess said, "It's okay, it's okay, children get so engrossed in playing." The boy neither felt ashamed nor angry. How old was he at that time? Probably two or maybe three years old. Around that age, there was a time when I was walking with my nanny in the garden and encountered a venomous snake. "Look, Lёva," the nanny shouted, pointing to a shiny object in the grass, "There's a snuffbox buried in the ground over there." The nanny, who was about sixteen at the time, picked up a small stick and started digging for the snuffbox. Suddenly, the "snuffbox" uncoiled and turned into a hissing snake, writhing in the grass. "Oh! Oh!" the nanny screamed and grabbed me, running away as fast as she could. I was so scared that my legs didn't seem to work. Later, whenever I told others about the story of mistaking a snake for a snuffbox in the grass, I would become breathless with excitement. P3-5