Childhood
by Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy's artistic work has been described as "nothing more than a single great diary kept for more than fifty years." It is this "diary" that begins with Tolstoy's first published work, written only when he was 23 years old. A semi-autobiographical work recounts two days of the childhood of 10-year-old Nikolai Irtenev and reproduces vivid impressions of people, places and events from the violent point of view of a child, enriched by the ironic retrospective understanding of an adult.
