Fiction · 1852
Childhood
Leo Tolstoy · translated by C. J. Hogarth
Nikolenka Irtenyev is ten, and the book is the inside of his head for two days and their aftermath: the German tutor Karl Ivanitch waking the boys by killing a fly over Nikolenka's head, lessons, the hunt, the first party in Moscow and the humiliation of the mazurka, a first love, the death of his mother, and the discovery at her coffin that he is watching himself grieve and wondering how he appears. Nothing is arranged as plot; the interest is entirely in the exactness of the remembering.
Leo Tolstoy wrote it at twenty-three and sent it anonymously to the journal The Contemporary, which published it in 1852 over the initials L.N. It is his first published work and the first part of the trilogy completed by Boyhood and Youth, and the method that made it — the minute tracking of a mind talking to itself — is already the method of the novels. This edition is C. J. Hogarth's English translation.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.
Contents
- I—The Tutor, Karl Ivanitch
- II—Mamma
- III—Papa
- IV—Lessons
- V—The Idiot
- VI—Preparations for the Chase
- VII—The Hunt
- VIII—We Play Games
- IX—A First Essay in Love
- X—The Sort of Man My Father Was
- XI—In the Drawing-Room and the Study
- XII—Grisha
- XIII—Natalia Savishna
- XIV—The Parting
- XV—Childhood
- XVI—Verse-Making
- XVII—The Princess Kornakoff
- XVIII—Prince Ivan Ivanovitch
- XIX—The Iwins
- XX—Preparations for the Party
- XXI—Before the Mazurka
- XXII—The Mazurka
- XXIII—After the Mazurka
- XXIV—In Bed
- XXV—The Letter
- XXVI—What Awaited Us at the Country-House
- XXVII—Grief
- XXVIII—Sad Recollections
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1828–1910 · Victorian
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was born at Yasnaya Polyana, his family’s estate south of Moscow, served in the Caucasus and at Sevastopol, and between 1863 and 1877 wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. A spiritual crisis after Anna Karenina turned him to religious and moral writing and to the doctrines of non-violence and simplicity that made him, by the end of his life, a world figure; the late fiction includes The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection. He died at the railway station of Astapovo after leaving home at eighty-two.
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