Childhood, Boyhood and Youth

by Leo Tolstoy, Andrew O'Hagan

Genres: Classics; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Blending fact and fiction, this trilogy by a very young Tolstoy centres on the inner life of Nikolai as he navigates the universal challenge of growing up. In relating his thoughts and feelings, his self-awareness and embarrassing mistakes, the work is timeless: regardless of era, location and environment, we are given an unvarnished portrait of one boy – both self-important and self-deprecating – as he tries to find his place in the world. The sense of nostalgia, with its strange blend of sadness and solace, is tangible as the years pass and the child becomes a young man. In his old age Tolstoy dismissed this first substantial work of fiction from his early twenties, yet it continues to absorb and touch its readers, who find that his deep understanding of the human condition was already in evidence here.

Release date: November 12, 2020

Publisher: RiverRun

Print pages: 464

Sample

Preface

The infant Tolstoy was a busy and wide-eyed creature, an empathizer, a watcher, obsessed with storms and family saints. He wept daily, and his siblings called him Lëva-Rëva, ‘Leo Cry-baby’. From an early age, he saw agency in all living things, in a hare, a tree or a blade of grass, and he pitied them. Childhood isn’t a magical domain for every writer, but Tolstoy couldn’t help seeing it that way. For him, inexperience was a sort of poetry, and his Recollections are both a pantomime of babyish frights and an elegy to lost innocence. Before Proust made it his own, Tolstoy was a connoisseur of first sensations, and nothing about his nursery or his classroom is free from his transfiguring imagination. ‘He tells us,’ wrote his biographer Aylmer Maude, ‘that the impressions of early childhood, preserved in one’s memory, grow in some unfathomable depth of the soul like seeds thrown on good ground, till after many years they thrust their bright, green shoots into God’s world.’

In a biographical fragment from 1878, Tolstoy wrote of his very first memory. It is like an item from Freud’s notebook. He remembers lying ‘bound’, swaddled tightly with bands as Russian babies often were, and wishing to stretch out his arms but not being able to manage it. ‘I scream and cry,’ he wrote, ‘and my screams are disagreeable to myself but I cannot stop. Someone – I do not remember who – bends over me. This all happens in semi-darkness. I only know there were two people there . . . And what remains on my memory is not my cries nor my suffering, but the complexity and contradictoriness of the impressions. I desire freedom, it would harm no one, but I who need strength am weak, while they are strong.’ I suppose it’s a memory of trying to breathe, a drama of gasping and not being heard. But it is also a vision of one’s home as an early prison, and of power­lessness as a kind of nightmare. Like many artists, Tolstoy was interested in paying tribute to his own creative personality, of marking its pre-existence, and establishing the manner in which his independent spirit and his talent came bursting out. But he never viewed his early years, the byways of childhood, merely as biographical material: he took its essence and made a pillow of it, a soft place on which to dream when reality was heavy, and he wrote fictions that are projections of fantasy as much as they are distillations of memory. Tolstoy, as a journalist, a historian, a philosopher, a scientist of human-existence-in-time, manipulated everything he came upon, carefully revolving it in his mind until it formed a new standard of truth.

We live in a daily Sturm und Drang about reality. The news cycle performs 24-hour contortions, and what constitutes ‘the truth’, here and now, is often a hackneyed argument in which people broadcast fake news about people’s fake news. Writing about one’s childhood, no less one’s adulthood, can be reduced to ‘auto-fiction’. Yet Tolstoy wished to preserve a declared margin between his own childhood and the novel he chose to call Childhood. One may light on facts, whilst reversing others; one may echo real people, whilst inventing them; and one may cover a lot of recognizable ground in a layer of fresh snow. If God were a novelist, Isaac Babel suggested, then he would resemble Tolstoy: a conductor of weather, a maker and breaker of human hearts who is never sure of his own. ‘Actuality’ will take its place in the long queue of things to be expressed, places to be visited, movements to be scored and wonders to be animated.

Tolstoy, the critics say, ‘had no prejudices’. He saw things ‘as they are’. One does not read his books, ‘one lives them’. Readers and commentators have always asked how much of his actual life was in his fictions, and the question persists. Childhood, a work of twenty-eight short chapters, was published in 1852, when Tolstoy was twenty-four. We quickly find ourselves in the company of a Russian storyteller with a fierce gift for intimate address. The narrator, Nikólya, a young boy from a bourgeois family, shows us the new patterns and sounds of life in the period just after the defeat of Napoleon. We meet Karl Iványch, his German tutor, in his quilted dressing-gown and red skull-cap. Mamma smiles, and brings the first vivid flushing and a premonition of death. ‘So many past memories arise when one tries to recall the features of a beloved being,’ Tolstoy writes, ‘that one sees those features dimly through the memories as if through tears. They are the tears of imagination.’

Nikólya has two sisters, Lyúba and Natálya, and an elder brother, Volódya. And there is Papa in his study, arguing about money. The estate they live on is called Petróvsk. As well as the tutor and the mad ‘saint’ Grisha with his pockmarked face, the novel is full of characters coming and going through the tear-stained world of Nikólya’s imagination. Worries about etiquette, education, love, morality and faith, mingle with great events, such as a family hunt that takes place in a ‘tall, bluish forest’, where, with the hum of insects and the odour of wormwood, we see the first real flowering of Tolstoy’s reportorial style. We smell the tallow on the heads of the servants – they greased their hair with it – as the family says goodbye to them on departing for Moscow. Tolstoy summons the needs of childhood, the sounds and smells, but also the illusion of wholeness it brings to a life.

At the time he wrote these books, Tolstoy was in the Caucasus, at Tiflis, trying to enter military service as a cadet. (It was one of Tolstoy’s sudden decisions: his brother Nikolai was already an officer there.) After some trouble involving his passport, he was taken on as a cadet in the artillery and was engaged in fierce fighting near Starogládov. A letter to his aunt Tatiána in 1851 contains the first intimations of the book he was already writing. ‘Do you remember, dear Aunt, the advice you once gave me – to write novels? Well, I am following your advice, and the occupation I mentioned to you consists in producing literature. I do not know if what I am writing will ever be published, but it is work that amuses me and in which I have persevered too long to abandon it.’ By the following spring he had rewritten the book three times, and was beginning a fourth. He was reading Rousseau. (‘How far higher he stands in culture and talent than I, though lower in self-respect, firmness, and judgement.’) The finished Childhood was sent to the editor of the St Petersburg journal, The Contemporary, who was happy to accept it. Tolstoy was then dismayed that the journal, in publishing the novel, gave it the title, ‘The History of my Childhood’. The problem was the word ‘my’. Regardless of how closely related he was to the author, Nikólya was a creation.

The beautiful illusion, when reading Tolstoy, is that one is looking directly at the world, as opposed to a depiction. The difference between Tolstoy and Henry James, William Lyon Phelps wrote, ‘is the difference between plate and stained glass . . . The Golden Bowl parades a style so ornate, so complex, so ingeni­ous, that one looks at it instead of through it; and one admires the style so much that one cannot see always clearly either the plot or the characters; the style is gorgeous, but opaque. In this sense Tolstoy has no style, no mannerism.’ This has led some to believe that Tolstoy is merely a prose cinematographer, or, like the world’s secretary, busily taking notes. But this is to miss the brilliant marshalling of experience in his books, the development of his characters in relation to one another. Tolstoy’s zeal for the particular can restore one’s sense of life’s organizing principles. If Chekhov shows people in themselves, Tolstoy shows their social being. The historian Perry Anderson recently wrote that Tolstoy’s great novels had ‘a basic lack of subtlety’. Yet beneath the still waters lies a huge variety of human feeling, both subtle and strange. To read him is to enter an uncanny theatre that amplifies your sense of unknown things. ‘He gives us, after all,’ Lionel Trilling wrote, ‘not reality itself but a sort of idyll of reality.’

Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, his first trilogy of novels, are more psychological, more concentrated, than anything else Tolstoy ever wrote. In his Life, Aylmer Maude puts his finger on it: ‘He was gradually perfecting an instrument of analysis which allowed him to go far deeper,’ he writes, ‘than anyone before him into the deeper layers of the consciousness. He goes to the original fact, and by a new combination of these divided particles of reality creates a new concrete reality.’ Both Turgenev and Dostoevsky were immediately and powerfully struck by the talent and vision on display. In fact, Turgenev bored his friends by reading the work aloud everywhere he went. Tolstoy was outrageously modern, a new voice to meet the new age and an unquestioned master.

During his two and a half years in the Caucasus, Tolstoy finished composing Boyhood, whilst also writing Reminiscences of a Billiard-Marker, The Cossacks, and beginning the stories ‘The Landlord’s Morning’ and ‘The Wood-Felling: A Cadet’s Story’. He wrote in his diary, ‘a brilliant literary career is open to me.’ He was gambling and writing; he read David Copperfield; he slept with girls; he fought at the siege of Sevastopol and was ‘the soul of the battery’. At the close of Childhood, with his mother dead, the speaker claims that his imagination is worn out, yet the writing that announces this is beautifully detailed and mature, almost pointillist in its regard for the grain and the splashes of physical life, and most tender when confronted with the puzzle of existence. ‘I gazed, and felt that an incomprehensible, irresistible power drew my eyes to that lifeless face,’ he writes. ‘I did not take my eyes off it, yet my fancy drew pictures of blooming life and happiness. I kept forgetting that the dead body which lay before me, and at which I gazed unreasoningly as at an object that had nothing in common with my memories, was she.’

In Boyhood, our hero finds that there is a world beyond his family. In Moscow, he and his siblings change: they now have secrets. His brother, Volódya, also has passions, for painting and novels. Nikólya becomes self-conscious, lonely; he realizes he is unattractive. We see his humiliations at school, his nervousness at home, and the eclipse of his innocence. Tolstoy can travel under the skin of his characters’ worries and misfortunes, animating their privations and entering into their desires. Nikólya’s boyhood is a search for truth – and, for Tolstoy, a search for style – and, as he enters Youth, he comes to understand friendship and loyalty as a moral adventure, the great adolescent battle for approval. In this final volume, the natural world seems to take Nikólya into itself: what is new and beautiful and persistent in nature seems suddenly to touch and include him. He goes into the streets alone for the first time, among other young men with their ‘fluffy chins’, ready to take on the world or be defeated by it, ready to experience or die.

Nikólya begins to understand social connections and we feel a society up ahead, the society, perhaps, of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. When Nikólya visits Petróvsk, where his mother died, he feels ‘the dear old house . . . caressing me’, and we see the young literary artist in the process of constructing a sense of bliss for himself and us. The early works build a romantic view of the self, one that prefigures Freud and modernism, and they show the rise of such thinking as a social and intellectual reality. The stories carry traces of Young Werther and even younger David Copperfield, in a tradition that will continue through Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and beyond.

We look to great translators to meet the promise of a literary work, at no remove from accuracy and at no expense to the book’s spirit. Aylmer and Louise Maude knew Tolstoy well and often stayed with him at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, 120 kilometres south of Moscow. ‘Better translators,’ Tolstoy wrote, ‘both for knowledge of the two languages and for penetration into the very meaning of the matter translated, could not be invented.’ The Maude translations of Tolstoy’s books are, for many readers, the bountiful ones, but also the ones that best marry the tactility of Tolstoy’s Russian with the economy of English. Michael Wood, reviewing a new War and Peace (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) in 2008, discussed the scene where the body of the old general, Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky, or ‘what had been he’, is prepared for burial. ‘What had been he’ is how Pevear and Volokhonsky render ‘to chto bylo on’. Wood compared their decision to that of Anthony Briggs several years earlier: ‘Surely Briggs’s “what was left of the prince” is better.’

After the review appeared, Pevear wrote from Paris to say that his own phrase was clunky but that it preserved an oddness in Tolstoy’s view of death. Turning it into something that sounded more natural in English (and Russian) was wrong, he implied. ‘We chose to keep the strangeness where the original is strange.’ Janet Malcolm weighed in. ‘Pevear is right to say that Briggs’s translation of “to chto bylo on” as “what was left of him” does not accurately render Tolstoy’s description of the corpse of the old prince Bolkonsky,’ she wrote. ‘But he is wrong to say that his own awkward “the women washed what had been he” is the solution to the problem . . . Louise and Aylmer Maude solve it with “the women washed what had been the prince”.’

I remembered this nod to their felicity. It was the Maudes who, in my mind, had made Tolstoy so alive and so penetrating, so vital and so wonderful in his vision of what makes a human being a human being, and nowhere better than in these early novels, which were mistaken, in the author’s own day, for confessions. The Maudes took Tolstoy’s first instalments of human growth and materiality and made them masterpieces in English. They are stories that throw a kind of eternal light on the troubles we have with reality, a light that Russian writers – Tolstoy most of all – have made distinguished.

Andrew O’Hagan

TO MY READERS

I YIELD TO the common weakness of authors – an inclination to address the reader.

For the most part such addresses are written to obtain the reader’s benevolence and indulgence. I too wish to say a few words to you, my reader; but to what end? I really do not know – judge for yourself.

Every author – in the widest sense of that word, whatever he writes – inevitably imagines to himself what effect his writing will have. To form an idea of the impression my work will produce, I must have some one particular sort of reader in view.

How can I know whether my work will or will not please, unless I have a particular type of reader in view? One part may please one and another part another, or what pleases one may even be disliked by someone else. Every frankly stated thought however complex, every clearly expressed fancy however absurd – cannot fail to find sympathy in some soul. If they can be born in one brain they will certainly find another which will respond. Therefore every such composition must please, but the whole of every such composition may not please even one person.

When a whole composition pleases somebody, then that composition is to my mind perfect of its kind. To attain that perfection – and every author hopes for perfection – I can find but one means, that of forming a clear and definite concept of the mind, the qualities, and the tendencies, of the expected reader.

So I will begin my address to you, reader, by describing you. If you find that you don’t resemble the description, then don’t read my story – you will find other stories to suit your own character. But if you are just as I imagine you to be, I am firmly convinced that you will read me with pleasure, especially as at every good passage the thought that inspired me and restrained me from the stupidities I might have written, will also please you.

To be accepted as one of my chosen readers very little is demanded of you: only that you should be sensitive, that is, able sometimes to pity with your whole soul and even to shed a few tears when recalling a character you have loved from your heart, that you should rejoice in him without being ashamed of it, that you should love your memories, should be a religious man, should read my tale looking for parts that grip your heart and not for such as make you laugh, that you should not, out of jealousy, despise a good circle even if you do not belong to it, but should regard it calmly and dispassionately – and I will accept you among the number of my elect. Above all, you should be an understanding person – one who, when I get to know him, need not have my feelings and inclinations explained, but who I see understands me and in whom every note of my soul finds a response. It is difficult, and I think even impossible, to divide people into the intelligent and the stupid, or the good and the bad; but between the understanding and the non-understanding there is for me such a sharp line, that I cannot help drawing it between all whom I know. The chief distinctive mark of understanding people is the pleasure in intercourse with them – one need not explain or expound anything to them but may with full confidence pass on to them ideas very vaguely expressed. There are delicate intangible relations between feelings for which no clear expressions exist, but which are very clearly understood. One may boldly suggest such feelings and relations to such people. So that my first demand is understanding. And now I address myself to you, my reader, with an excuse for the roughness, and in some places lack of ease, in my style. I am convinced in advance that when I explain to you the reason of this, you will not be exacting. One may sing in two ways: from the throat or from the chest. Is it not true that a voice from the throat is much more flexible than one from the chest, but then, on the other hand, it does not act on your soul? A chest voice, on the contrary, even if coarser touches you to the quick. As for me, if even in the most trivial air I hear a note taken from the depths of the chest, tears involuntarily come into my eyes. It is the same in literature: one may write from the head or from the heart. When you write from the head the words arrange themselves obediently and fluently on paper; but when you write from the heart, so many thoughts crowd into your mind, so many images into your imagination, so many memories into your heart, that the expressions become inexact, inadequate, intractable and rough.

It may be a mistake, but I always checked myself when I began to write from my head, and tried to write only from my heart.

I must also confess one strange prejudice to you.

In my opinion the personality of an author, a writer, one who composes, is almost a poetic personality; as I was writing in autobiographical form and wished to interest you in my hero as much as possible, I did not want any sign of authorship to be left, and therefore avoided all the mannerisms of authorship, such as learned expressions and formal periods.

I

OUR TUTOR, KARL IVÁNYCH

ON THE 12th of August 18—, exactly three days after my tenth birthday, on which I had received such wonderful presents, Karl Iványch woke me up at seven in the morning by hitting at a fly just above my head with a flap of blue sugar-bag paper fastened to a stick. He did this so awkwardly that he caught the little picture of my patron-saint, which hung from the top of my oak bedstead, and the dead fly fell right on my head. I pushed my nose from under the bed-clothes, put out my hand to steady the little picture which was still swinging, threw the dead fly on the floor, and looked at Karl Iványch with angry though sleepy eyes. He however, in his variegated, quilted dressing-gown, girdled with a belt of the same material, and with a red tasselled smoking-cap on his head, continued to walk round the room in his soft leather boots, aiming at and hitting the flies.

‘Of course I am small,’ I thought, ‘but why should he disturb me? Why does he not kill the flies round Volódya’s bed? See what a lot of them there are! No, Volódya is older than I. I am the youngest of all – that’s why he torments me. He thinks of nothing all his life long but how to make things unpleasant for me,’ I whispered. ‘He sees perfectly well that he has waked me up and frightened me, but he pretends not to notice it. Disgusting fellow! His dressing-gown and cap and tassel are all disgusting!’

While in my own mind I was thus expressing my vexation with Karl Iványch, he went up to his bed, looked at his watch which hung above it in a small beaded slipper, hung the flap on a nail in the wall and, evidently in the best of spirits, turned to us.

‘Auf, Kinder, auf! . . . ’s ist Zeit. Die Mutter ist schon im Saal!’1 exclaimed he in his kind, German voice. Then he came up to me, sat down at the foot of my bed, and took his snuff-box from his pocket. I pretended to be asleep. Karl Iványch first took a pinch of snuff, wiped his nose, snapped his fingers, and only then turned on me. He began, laughingly, to tickle my heels.

‘Nun, nun, Faulenzer!’2 he said.

Much as I dreaded being tickled, I did not jump up or answer him, but only hid my head deeper under the pillow and kicked with all my strength to keep from laughing.

‘How kind he is and how fond of us! How could I think so badly of him?’

I was vexed with myself and with Karl Iványch and wanted to laugh and to cry: my nerves were upset.

‘Ach, lassen Sie, Karl Iványch!’3 I shouted with tears in my eyes, thrusting my head out from under the pillow.

Karl Iványch was surprised, left the soles of my feet in peace, and anxiously began to inquire what was the matter, and whether I had had a bad dream . . . His kindly German face, and the solici­tude with which he tried to discover the cause of my tears, made them flow the faster. I was ashamed, and could not understand how, but a moment before, I had been able to dislike him, and consider his dressing-gown, cap, and tassel, disgusting. Now, on the contrary, all these things appeared extremely pleasing, and even the tassel seemed clear evidence of his goodness. I said that I was crying because of a bad dream – that mamma had died and was being carried to her funeral. I invented all this, for I could not at all remember what I had dreamt that night; but when Karl Iványch, touched by my words, began to console and calm me, it seemed to me that I had really had that dreadful dream and I now shed tears for another reason.

When Karl Iványch left me, and having sat up in bed I began drawing the stockings on to my small feet, my tears flowed more gently, but the gloomy thoughts of my invented dream did not leave me. Nicholas, our attendant, a clean little man, always serious, neat, respectful, and great friends with Karl Iványch, came in. He brought our clothes; for Volódya a pair of boots and for me those detestable shoes with bows which I still wore. I was ashamed to let him see me cry, besides which the morning sun shone gaily into the room, and Volódya, standing at the wash-stand and mimicking Márya Ivánovna (our sister’s governess), was laughing so merrily and so ringingly that even the serious Nicholas, with a towel over his shoulder, a piece of soap in one hand and a jug of water in the other, said with a smile:

‘Have done, Vladímir Petróvich. Please wash now.’

I grew quite cheerful.

‘Sind Sie bald fertig?’4 came Karl Iványch’s voice from the schoolroom.

His voice sounded severe and no longer had that kindly tone which had moved me to tears. In the schoolroom Karl Iványch was quite a different man: he was the instructor. I dressed and washed quickly, and with the brush still in my hand smoothing down my wet hair, obeyed his call.

Karl Iványch, spectacles on nose and book in hand, sat in his usual place between the door and the window. To the left of the door were two shelves, one of them ours – the children’s – the other Karl Iványch’s own. On ours were all sorts of books – lesson-books and others: some standing, others lying down. Only two volumes of Histoire des Voyages in red bindings stood decorously against the wall, and then came long, thick, big and little books – bindings without books and books without bindings. We used to jam and shove everything there when told, before recreation, to tidy up the ‘library’, as Karl Iványch pompously called that shelf. The collection of books on his own shelf, if not so large as ours was yet more varied. I remember three of them: an unbound German pamphlet on the manuring of cabbage plots, one volume of a History of the Seven Years War, bound in parchment and burnt at one corner, and a full course of hydrostatics. Karl Iványch spent most of his time reading, and had even injured his eyes at it, yet he never read anything but these books and the Northern Bee.

Among the things that lay on his shelf, the one chiefly connected in my memory with Karl Iványch was a cardboard disk attached to a wooden stand on which it could be moved by means of pegs. A caricature of a lady and a hairdresser was pasted on the disk. Karl Iványch, who was very clever at that sort of thing, had made the disk to protect his weak eyes from too bright a light.

I can still see before me his long figure in the quilted dressing-gown and red skull-cap, from beneath which one saw his thin grey hair. He sits beside a small table on which stands the disk with the hairdresser, throwing a shadow on his face; a book is in one hand and the other rests on the arm of his chair; before him lies his watch with the figure of a hunter on its face, a chequered handkerchief, a round, black snuff-box, his green spectacle-case, and a pair of snuffers on their tray. All this lies so precisely, so tidily in its place, that by this orderliness alone one can feel sure that Karl Iványch’s conscience is clear and his soul at peace.

When one had had enough running about in the dancing-room downstairs, one would creep upstairs on tiptoe to the classroom and see Karl Iványch sitting in his armchair all alone and reading one or other of his favourite books with a calmly dignified expression on his face. Sometimes I caught him when he was not reading: his spectacles hung low on his large aquiline nose, his half-closed blue eyes had a peculiar expression in them, and there was a sad smile on his lips. All was quiet in the room; the only sounds to be heard were his regular breathing and the ticking of the watch with the hunter on its face.

Sometimes he did not notice me and I stood by the door thinking: ‘Poor, poor, old man! There are many of us; we play, we are merry, and he is all alone, and no one caresses him. He says truly that he is an orphan. The story of his life is such a dreadful one! I remember how he told it to Nicholas. It is dreadful to be in his position!’ And I felt so sorry for him that I would go up and take his hand and say, ‘lieber Karl Iványch!’5 He liked me to speak so, and would always pet me and was evidently touched.

On the other wall hung maps, nearly all of them torn but skilfully repaired by Karl Iványch. On the third wall, in the middle of which was a door leading to the stairs, hung, on one side, two rulers; one of them, ours, all cut about, and the other, a new one, his own, used by him more for incitement than for ruling lines: on the other side was a blackboard, on which our serious misdeeds were marked with circles and our little ones with crosses. To the left was the corner, where we were put on our knees.

How well I remember that corner! I remember the door of the stove, the ventilator in that door and the noise it made when turned. One used to kneel and kneel in the corner until one’s knees and back ached, and used to think, ‘Karl Iványch has forgotten me; he no doubt is comfortable sitting in his soft armchair and reading his hydrostatics, but what of me?’ And to remind him of oneself one would begin softly to open and shut the stove door, or to pick bits of plaster off the wall, but if too big a piece of plaster fell noisily on the floor the fright alone was, truly, worse than any punishment. One would turn to look at Karl Iványch, and there he sat, book in hand, as if he noticed nothing.

In the middle of the room stood a table covered with torn black oilcloth under which in many places one saw the edges of the table all cut with penknives. Round the table stood several wooden stools, unpainted, but polished by long use. The last wall was taken up by three windows. The view from those windows was this: just in front of them was a road, every hole, every stone, every rut of which had long been familiar and dear to me; beyond the road was a clipped lime-tree avenue, behind which here and there a wattle-fence was visible; across the avenue one could see the meadow, on one side of which was a threshing-floor, and opposite to this a wood. Deep in the wood one could see the watchman’s hut. From the window to the right, part of the verandah was visible on which the grown-up people generally sat before dinner. Sometimes while Karl Iványch was correcting a page of dictation one would glance that way and see mamma’s dark head, somebody’s back, and f