Childhood

Childhood is a semi-autobiographical novel by Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1852. It is the opening volume of the trilogy completed by Boyhood and Youth.

Nikolai Irtenyev looks back on his early years in an aristocratic Russian family, beginning on a country estate where affection, lessons, servants, and small humiliations define his protected world. A move to Moscow gradually disrupts that sense of security.

Rather than presenting childhood as simple innocence, Tolstoy follows the rapid changes of a child's inner life: pride becomes shame, love mixes with jealousy, and minor events assume enormous emotional importance. Nikolai observes adults closely without yet understanding the class structures and compromises around him.

Family separation and loss bring childhood to a painful end. The adult narrator's memory adds another layer, questioning which feelings were genuine and which have been reshaped by time.

Brief, intimate, and psychologically precise, Childhood anticipates Tolstoy's later interest in self-examination, family life, and moral growth. It is both a coming-of-age story and a study of how identity is constructed through memory.

This edition uses the English translation by C. J. Hogarth.

This is book 1 in the Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth trilogy.