Childhood, boyhood, youth

Summary: Leo Tolstoy began this trilogy in his twenties. Although he would, in his old age, famously dismiss it as an awkward mixture of fact and fiction, generations of readers have not agreed, finding the novel to be a charming and insightful portrait of inner growth against the background of a world described with extraordinary clarity, grace and colour. Evident too in its brilliant account of a young person's emerging awareness of the world and of his place within it are many of the stances, techniques and themes that would come to full flower in the immortal War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and in other great works of Tolstoy's maturity.