Childhood

4 hrs. 46 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Leo Tolstoy

Narrator Mikhail Bogdasarov

Description

A coming-of-age trilogy—how Tolstoy enters literature: contemporaries discover the psychology of a child and are amazed by how deeply one can describe a person’s inner life.

Tolstoy’s trilogy was born from the diaries of a young Tolstoy, seeking an answer to the question of how pure, direct creation could turn into a vain and corrupt person. Tender and sensitive Nikolеньka Irtenyev (at the beginning he is ten, at the end sixteen)—the prototype is Tolstoy himself—lives an ordinary life: studying reluctantly, playing with pleasure, composing bad poems, falling in love for the first time, experiencing the death of his mother, becoming an awkward teenager, envying his brother, entering university, failing his exam. Tolstoy tells of a typical path of growing up and tries to record the slightest movements of the soul, which, in the future, might influence a whole life.

“Childhood” opens for contemporaries not only the psychology of a child, but introspection itself—self-analysis—as the basis of the narrative. Tolstoy’s debut created a whole wave of imitations and brought instant fame to the young writer.