My Life--- Trotsky's Autobiography

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Features: Childhood is often considered the happiest time of 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 well-educated, wealthy families blessed by ancestors, children lived a life of abundance, carefree, full of love, and endless play. In people's memories, such a life is like a sunlit forest glade at the start of life's journey. The aristocrats in those literary descriptions and their followers in the common class glorified this pure aristocratic childhood as the typical model of 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 punishes the weak. 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 newly prosperous family that had just escaped poverty and could not afford to stagnate. Every muscle was tense, all thoughts were focused on labor and saving money. The situation of children in such a family could only be described as 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, oppression, and lack of brightness experienced by most. My childhood was a gray childhood, spent in a small, newly prosperous 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 vastly different from the conscious spiritual world I later engaged in. The gap between these two worlds was not only bridged by decades of time and the twists and turns of my wandering life 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 started writing these memories, I felt as if I was not writing about my own childhood but describing a 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 had to avoid at all costs. Although these are two vastly different worlds, the consistency of personality opens several potential channels to bridge the gap and communicate between them. This is also why people are often interested in the biographies or autobiographies of those who have held important positions in society for various reasons. Therefore, I decided to describe my childhood and student years in more detail here, without any assumptions or omissions 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 might be entirely because of the association I made when I saw a baby nursing. I seem to faintly recall playing under an apple tree in the garden when I was one and a half years old. Like the memory of nursing, this is also 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 playing as grooms and girls as brides. Later, the girl ran away, and the boy stood alone beside a cabinet, staring blankly as if in a dream. Mother and the hostess entered the room. 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 water stain, as if it had nothing to do with him. The hostess said, "It's okay, it's okay, children get so absorbed in playing." The boy felt neither ashamed nor angry. How old was he then? Probably two or maybe three. Around that age, there was a time when I was walking in the garden with my nanny and came across 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, grabbed me, and ran away. 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 get so excited that I could barely breathe. P3-5