Alexey Nikolaevich Tolstoy’s autobiographical children’s novella “Childhood of Nikita” (also known as “The Tale of Many Excellent Things”), written in 1920 for a French children’s magazine, tells in sequence about one year in the life of a boy — on the eve of his entering school.
His union with the natural world and his sense of his inseparable connection with it give rise in the child’s soul to a constant foreboding of joy. Nikita tries to see poetry in the ordinary and transform reality, imagining it as it reveals itself to him in his dreams.