Childhood

Leo Tolstoy published Childhood at twenty-three, anonymously, from an artillery post in the Caucasus — and the great editor Nekrasov printed it at once. Ten-year-old Nikolenka is carried from the country to Moscow, and everything of importance happens in the small print of a boy's days: the tutor's temper, the hunt, his mother's hands at the piano, the first lie he ever tells. All the powers of th...