Childhood

Ten-year-old Nikolenka is taken from the country to Moscow, and everything happens in the small print: the tutor's temper, the hunt, his mother's hands at the piano, the first lie he tells. Tolstoy published it at twenty-three, anonymously, from an artillery post in the Caucasus, and Nekrasov printed it immediately. Everything the mature novelist could do is already here in miniature. Nine plates ...