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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780140441390
ISBN number: 0140441395
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: September 30, 1964
Publishing house: Penguin Classics
Sale Popularity Level: 657001
Studio: Penguin Classics
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Begun in 1851, when Tolstoy was twenty-three and serving as a cadet in the Russian army, Childhood, the very first part of Tolstoy’s very first novel, won immediate praise from Turgenev and others, and marked Tolstoy’s emergence as a major writer. Its originality was striking, as Tolstoy sought to communicate with great immediacy the “poetry” of childhood—the intense emotions, confusions, and fears attendant upon a young boy, Nikolenka, as he grows up. In the years following, Boyhood and Youth appeared (a fourth volume was planned but never executed), each replete with psychological and philosophical subtleties hitherto unknown in Russian literature. In Scammell’s resplendent translation, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth remains one of Tolstoy’s major works.
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Rated by buyers 
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Most people when they think of Tolstoy, War and Peace comes to mind. Others, Anna Karenina which is in large part due to Hollywood, the popular media and the numerous translations available over the years (Constance Garnet, Maud, etc..).
When people think of Nineteenth Century Russian Literature as whole, names like Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Chekhov come to mind. "Crime and Punishment", "Eugene Onegin" and "The Cherry Orchard" are works we might randomly associate with the novel, the narrative-poem and the plays of the great Russian masters.
Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth is that work which stands on the periphery, not only of Tolstoy's works but also of Russian literature in general. It feels Russian, the characters are Russians but the influences come from French literature (Rousseau) and Germany (Schiller, Goethe). There is a Bildungsroman element but I wouldn't want to label it a novel of development. There is also something more. Feeling, wonder, innocence, they too appear in the French and Germanic influences but there is also a great deal of sensation (a "novel of sensation"?). Reading this book, I could feel the narrator's home, I could feel his emotions. It is a work that explores the visceral aspects of being young, growing up and trying to find one's way in society.
Tolstoy's work often carry a great philosophical and moral weight. He was heavily influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer and his theories about the "will-to-live" and the endless cravings of "desire". Not only that, he was reading up on the works of the Shakers, their celibacy stance. The Kreuzer Sonata and The Devil are essentially works in which Tolstoy is maddened with lust and morality.
Here, you could say is the lighter Tolstoy, a Tolstoy of impressions, beauty, and tender emotions. There is no moralizing or foreboding, no fear of judgment, no murdering of wives. It is novel that looks forward to Proust in its dreamlike presentation of being young. While reading this book I felt like I disappeared into the child I once was and still am. A true hidden treasure and also the perfect example of how all Russian literature is not necessarily dark and murky.
Rated by buyers 
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I have read most of Tolstoy's major work including his most well known short stories. This is an early work from 1852 to 1856 and it is considered to be semi-autobiographical. It is not up to the standards of his later works, although it is long and detailed and made up of three stories that flow together as one.
Tolstoy was born in 1828 and he was in his twenties when he wrote this early work. He his famous for detailed physical descriptions combined with emotional drama. For example, read that wonderul short story Master and Man that combines those two elements. The present work has the detailed descriptions but lacks the emotional appeal and lacks the great characters that we see in other works, i.e.: a crying youth because he is humiliated is hardly a great emotional experienece.
Tolstoy remains as one of the leading writers of novels. His impressive legacy includes three of four monumental works including War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and the novella The Death of Ivan Ilych. According to his own estimate, he has over 400 works - as he describes in one of his non-fiction works.
Tolstoy's writing can be divided into three phases: the early years up to 1860 to 1861, the mid-career years from approximately 1861 to 1890, and his final years when he turned to non-fiction polemics. His most important fiction was written in the middle period, and it started with the release of The Cossacks in 1863. That story contains emotional elements and descriptions similar to what we read in Anna Karenina. His writings before The Cossacks contains his famous detail but lacks the same level of drama and emotion.
The present work is a good example of his early work pre-1961. Tostoy follows a Gogol like approach to produce a lengthy and detailed account of a young man growing up. The narrative is about a young man living in rural Russia. He goes on to attend university in Moscow and he is the son of a landowner as was Tolstoy himself. The story covers the boy's experiences from around the age of ten to the age of twenty. The character is based on one of Tolstoy's childhood friends and includes other characters based on real people that he knew. The story is a work of fiction. Tolstoy's own father died when he was still young as did his mother who died before his father.
This is a very slow read. It took me a week on and off to get through 314 pages in small font. Readers should not confuse this work with his famous works that came in his mid-career. The prose is excellent, especially the description of the thunderstorm about one third of the way into the book, but the story lacks drama and charm. Considering the author and his complete body of work, this is just 4 stars among the stories by Tolstoy.
As a side note, this is a beautifully bound hardcover book.
Rated by buyers 
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This semi-autobiographical youth memories are characteristic for the life of a young member of the Russian tsarist high society.
The main character wants to be a young man `comme il faut': `The comme il faut people I respected and considered worthy of being on terms of equality with me; the comme il ne faut pas I pretended to despise but in reality hated. The lower classes did not exist for me, I despised them completely.'
This stands in sharp contrast with: `His tendency of ecstatic adoration of the ideal virtue and a conviction that the purpose of man's life is continually to perfect himself. At that time it seemed very possible to improve all men, to destroy all the vices and miseries of mankind.'
But as the young man states himself: `noble words seldom go with noble deeds.'
His life is not without problems: his father, who loses all credit with his son, is a big gambler and doesn't give a damn for his estate. His mother adores her husband and forgives him everything. But she dies when the main character is still young. He receives an aristocratic education and, unsurprisingly, his life goes on very smoothly with `dancing' problems, adolescent loves and student exams.
This book contains beautiful pictures of the Russian countryside and lively childhood memories, but it is rather innocent stuff.
Only for Tolstoy fans.
For a picture of the lower classes (still not the `people of the abyss'), I recommend Maksim Gorky's `My Childhood'.
Rated by buyers -
One of my favorite novels is "Anna Karenina"; this trilogy starts off as strongly. In the very first volume, "Childhood," the immediacy of experience is palpable, the vividness of sensations is high, the emotionality is less diluted by philosophical wonderings. Tolstoy's writing is evocative, clear, and engaging in this book. His writing becomes increasingly abstract with each volume in the series. As his protagonist moves through adolescence, his uncertainties, moodiness, and fickle nature bogged down the narrative, I thought. Of course, this reflects the state of mind of the young man, but in comparison with the brightness of the very first volume, made for some tedious reading. The books do, however, show how masterful Tolstoy was from the beginning of his career.
Rated by buyers -
When this book very first hit the stores in Russia about 150 years ago, folks didn't think too much of it, seeing it merely as a minor work by one who had read Dickens. Tolstoy himself claimed that no one taught him more about the art of fiction than Dickens, and the literary circles of Russia were Dickens-fanatics, Russia recieving his works only after England.
But beyond being similiar to David Copperfield, this book has moments in it that match parts of Karenin and War and Peace in beauty and texture if not in scope. What's amazing about Tolstoy is that his earliest work (this and his early war sketches) seem as artistically mature as his later, epic masterpieces. The death-obsession and intense philosophical and spiritual doubts that plagued Tolstoy later in life did not all of a sudden erupt while writing Anna Karenin; but rather they were always there in one form or another... an echo of adolescent sadness.
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