Enoch, who did not die

Serezha does not believe in death, and one of his favourite occupations is watching for his mother on walks: every graceful dark-haired woman might be her, and today a lady in a purple veil in the Summer Garden made his heart sink. Told she was dead, then told by his nurse that she was not, then told that she is dead to him because she is bad, he goes on waiting. At his father's lesson he cannot hold the Gospel verses for staring at a sharp bone above his father's temple, and cannot name the antediluvian patriarchs because Enoch — taken up to Heaven alive, and therefore proof that not everyone dies — has crowded out the rest. His father, who talks to him as if he were an imaginary boy out of a book, is displeased and punishes him. The trouble is not incapacity: he guards his soul as the eyelid guards the eye and lets no one in without the key of love, and learns eagerly from the hall-porter and his nurse. In bed he prays that tomorrow, his birthday, his mother will stop hiding.

Enoch is the chapter's argument: a boy fails a scripture lesson because one story in it has taken hold of him completely, and the failure is the proof that he is learning. Tolstoy's image for the schooling — water that has long since leaked out and turns a wheel somewhere else — is his whole objection to education. The prayer at the end answers the letter refused two chapters ago.