Childhood

Nikolenka Irtenev, a sensitive ten-year-old boy on a Russian country estate in the early nineteenth century, describes his world with intense feeling: his beloved mother, his kind German tutor Karl Ivanych, a holy fool who visits the house, a hunt with the dogs, a children's dance in Moscow, his first loves and quarrels, and finally the death of his mother, which brings his childhood to an end.

This was Leo Tolstoy's first published work, appearing in a magazine in 1852, when he was twenty-four and serving as a soldier in the Caucasus, and it made him famous at once. Its close attention to feelings and memory already shows the author of War and Peace. C. J. Hogarth made the translation. From here, try The Cossacks.

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), born at Yasnaya Polyana and a veteran of the Crimean War, wrote two of the summits of the novel, War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

In later life he preached simplicity and non-violence in The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a book that deeply influenced Gandhi.