Book description
Leo Tolstoy began his trilogy,
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth,
in his early twenties. Although he would in his old age famously
dismiss it as an 'awkward mixture of fact and fiction', generations of
readers have not agreed, finding the novel to be a charming and
insightful portrait of inner growth against the background of a world
limned with extraordinary clarity, grace and colour. Evident too in its
brilliant account of a young person's emerging awareness of the world
and of his place within it are many of the stances, techniques and
themes that would come to full flower in the immortal War and Peace
and Anna Karenina
, and in the other great works of Tolstoy's maturity.
Leo Tolstoy
was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula province, and
educated privately. He studied Oriental languages and law at the
University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until 1851 when he
joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the
Crimean War and after the defence of Sebastopol he wrote The
Sebastopol Sketches (1855-56), which established his reputation.
After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, he married Sofya
Andreyevna Behrs in 1862. The next fifteen years was a period of great
happiness; they had thirteen children, and Tolstoy managed his vast
estates in the Volga Steppes, continued his educational projects,
cared for his peasants and wrote War and Peace (1869) and
Anna Karenina (1877). A Confession (1879-82) marked a
spiritual crisis in his life, and in 1901 he was excommunicated by the
Russian Holy Synod. He died in 1910, in the course of a dramatic
flight from home, at the small railway station of Astapovo.
Judson Rosengrant has translated and edited a wide range of Russian
literature and historiography, including works by Olesha, Lydia
Ginzburg, Iskander, Limonov and Radzinsky. He has taught Russian
language, literature and culture at the University of Southern
California, Indiana University and Reed College in the United States,
and translation theory and practice at St Petersburg State University
in Russia.
