Sergei Yakovlevich Efron

My first childhood memories relate to an old mansion in one of the quiet lanes of the Arbat, where we moved after the death of my grandfather P.A. Durnovo, a retired guardsman of the Nikolai era. It was a real manor estate. Hall with two rows of windows, columns, and choirs; glass gallery; green house; portrait room filled with portraits and daguerreotypes in black and gold oval frames; a room with mahogany furniture; a cramped and cozy mezzanine, connected to the first floor by a steep and narrow ladder; painted ceilings; semicircular windows - all this belonged to a sweet, magical, now distant past.

There was a garden with lush lilac and jasmine bushes, an artificial grotto, and an arbor, through the multi-colored windows of which the sun shone merrily. As soon as the grass began to turn green, I ran away into the wild, taking with me either Andersen's fairy tales, or “Childhood of Bagrov the grandson”, and later some volume of Pushkin in an old leather cover. I remember a huge effect from the poem “To the Sea”. The never-before-seen sea rose before me from the poet’s beautiful words, either quiet and blue, or stormy. I raved over it, and with all my being I longed to finally know “its crags and waves, its bays and coves, and shine, and shade, and murmuring blue”.

My mother oversaw my reading. She often read aloud to me in the evenings. So, I first got acquainted with “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka”, “The Tales of Belkin”, “The Captain's Daughter”, “A Sportsman's Sketches” and other exemplary works of Russian literature amenable to my age.

At the age of ten I entered the first class of Polivanov's private gymnasium - this ends my early childhood. The fabulous, somewhat closed, life was replaced by a new, more real one. School interests appeared, comrades and new acquaintances, but reading remained my favorite pastime. Easily aroused and morbid, I was so tired from sitting in class for long periods that I could hardly study at home. Frequent fever, headaches, severe anemia - all this taxed a lot of strength. Selfishness kept me sleepless. “Be first in class!” Every newcomer dreamed of this! I knew no less than my comrades, but I walked unevenly. I had to catch up a lot, and as soon as I began to feel on solid ground, a new attack of weakness immediately deprived me of everything I had achieved.

I spent five years at Polivanov's gymnasium, during which time I had almost all childhood illnesses. The sudden and almost simultaneous loss of my parents completely undermined my health. The house was sold, the old life collapsed. I left for St. Petersburg broken and tired. My whole subsequent life was continuous treatment. Pulmonary tuberculosis discovered by doctors from St. Petersburg required an immediate and strict sanatorium regimen. I began my wanderings through Russian and foreign sanatoriums.

All day long on the chaise lonque, I read, thought, and, most importantly, remembered. Faces flashed, voices rang out, phrases were composed from individual words, whole conversations were resurrected, scenes of the recent sweet past arose. Little by little I began to write them down. From these memoirs put in order, a book of stories “Childhood” was compiled, which was published when I was 18 years old.

During the four years of my sickness, I read and re-read Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, L. Tolstoy, and foreign classics. Of the Russian poets, Pushkin remained my favorite – “Russia's first love”, as Tyutchev said about him. Of the prose writers, I was most excited by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, connected to each other by the most precious virtues - intensity and complete sincerity.

From the age of 17, I began to prepare for the matriculation exams bit at a time, which I thought to pass last spring at the Moscow Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages. A month before the exams, however, due to illness I had to leave for the Crimea. After a course of treatment at the Yalta Sanatorium of Alexander III and a successfully transferred appendicitis operation due to tuberculosis, I am currently completing my training for general certificate.