This riverrun edition presents a master Russian storyteller whose fierce gift for intimate address summons the wholeness of life on every page. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, whose versions were those in which many of Tolstoy's best-known and most influential works were first read in English.
"The beautiful illusion, when reading Tolstoy, is that one is looking directly at the world, as opposed to a depiction" Andrew O'Hagan from his preface to Childhood, Boyhood and Youth
Published in 1852, when he was just twenty-four, Childhood was Tolstoy's first published work, and the first of a trilogy of stories that evoke the upbringing and traditional education of a Russian aristocrat in a world that vanished with the revolution. In this self-portrait, narrated by its protagonist Nikólya, the young Tolstoy captured the textures of adolescence with a psychological insight and subtlety of analysis that look forward to his mature achievements; while his matchless objectivity - summoning the smells, sights and sounds of early childhood - is already fully present in these pages.
The riverrun edition reissues the translation of Louise and Aylmer Maude, whose influential versions of Tolstoy first brought his work to a wide readership in English.
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