Copying your brother

When the central character of Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time (Jeg forbanner tidens elv) is twenty and attending a college he gets a student loan and moves out of his childhood home.

"The first thing I did was to go into town and buy a stereo with some of the money, a TR 200 Tandberg amplifier, a Lenco record player and a couple of 20 watt loudspeakers of a make I can no longer recall, but the sound was superb, and to be honest the whole thing was identical to the stereo my eldest brother had put together and bought with his student loan."

An remarkably similar thing is described by Tolstoy in Youth (Юность) when the central character, Tolstoy himself, passes his university entrance examinations, and is given money and access to a horse and trap (or drozhky) he also decides to copy his older brother, Volodya ... "I remembered that when Volodya entered the University he had bought himself some lithographs of horses byVictor Adam, some tobacco and several pipes, and I felt it essential to do the same." ("Я  вспомнил,  что  Володя  при  вступлении  в  университет  купил  себе литографии лошадей  Виктора Адама,  табаку  и  трубки,  и  мне  показалось необходимым сделать то же самое").

Petterson goes on to say that the older brother also tried to copy the younger brother's intense interest in books; Tolstoy later reveals that the older brother had in fact been copying one of his more worldly friends.