Youth

Youth is a semi-autobiographical novel by Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1857. It completes the trilogy that begins with Childhood and continues with Boyhood.

Nikolai Irtenyev enters university convinced that adulthood can begin through a strict program of moral improvement. He writes rules for himself, imagines a distinguished future, and tries to determine which friendships and ambitions are worthy of the person he hopes to become.

Experience quickly exposes the distance between those ideals and his behavior. Nikolai becomes preoccupied with appearance, social rank, romance, and the approval of wealthier students, even while criticizing the vanity he recognizes in himself.

University life brings new intellectual freedom but also embarrassment and failure. Tolstoy follows the private reasoning through which a young person excuses, revises, and sometimes confronts his mistakes.

More introspective than plot-driven, Youth examines the unstable formation of adult identity. Its honest attention to self-consciousness, privilege, and moral inconsistency turns one student's education into a wider study of aspiration and self-deception.

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

This is book 3 in the Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth trilogy.