Childhood, Boyhood, Youth

Tolstoy wrote Childhood at twenty-three and Youth at twenty-eight, and between them he found the method that would carry War and Peace: the small event held still until it gives up everything it contains. Nikolenka Irtenyev loses his mother, moves to Moscow, fails an examination, falls in and out of friendship, and learns — slowly, and against his own vanity — to see other people. The three books are printed here as one continuous work, in the order Tolstoy wrote them. Ilya Repin and Ivan Shishkin lead 100 plates of Russian landscape and portraiture, 1791 to 1901, that hold the quiet, watchful world of Nikolenka's growing up.