Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth: Introduction by A. N. Wilson [Hardcover]

Leo Tolstoy’s earliest published work, the trilogyChildhood, Boyhood,andYouth,was written when he was in his twenties, offering a tantalizing first glimpse of the literary talents that would come to fruition in his later masterpieces.

Chronicling the experiences of a wealthy landowner’s son as he grows up and becomes aware of the world and his place in it, these three short novels were only loosely inspired by Tolstoy’s own memories. In old age he condemned the work as “an awkward mixture of fact and fiction,” but the imaginative powers that enabled him to capture so vividly the universal emotions and sensations of childhood have enthralled generations of readers. We are blessed to have, alongside the mature writer ofAnna KareninaandWar and Peaceand the revolutionary mystic of the later years, the young Tolstoy who wrote these elegiac tales. In their sensitivity to nature and their evocations of fugitive feelings, they reveal his genius in all its untroubled early splendor. 

“No one has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour, the exact quality of a feeling.” —Isaiah BerlinMichael Scammellis the author ofSolzhenitsyn: A Biography, and has translated many Russian works, including Dostoevsky’sCrime and Punishment, andThe GiftandThe Defenseby Nabokov. He teaches nonfiction writing and translation at Colum-bia University and is working on a biography of Arthur Koestler.I: Childhood
Karl Ivanich, the Tutor

At 7 a.m. on August 12, 18, on exactly the third day after my tenth birthday, when I had received such wonderful presents, Karl Ivanich woke me up with a fly swatter made of wrapping paper on the end of a stick with which he was swatting a fly immediately over my head. He did this so awkwardly that he jogged the picture of my guardian angel which was hanging on the oaken headblE