Childhood, 1852, Boyhood, 1854, Youth, 1857

Childhood is Tolstoy’s first published work and it brings him immediate acclaim. It is originally intended to be the first of four novels with the umbrella title Four Periods of Growth, but in the end only three are published. The narrator, Nicholas Irtenev, looks back to when he was 10 years old in Childhood, which is set over one day in the country and another in the city. In Boyhood Tolstoy explores the narrator’s relationship with his brothers and others around him, his growing awareness of injustice and religion, and also his sexual awakening. In Youth, which is generally regarded as the least successful of the three novels, the hero tries to put his philosophical ideas into practice, to strive for self-improvement, to become a good man. The novels use incidents from Tolstoy’s own childhood and from the lives of childhood friends who lived nearby, namely “the illegitimate children of the amorous gambler Alexander Mikhailovich Islenev (Tolstoy’s wife’s grandfather) and Princess Kozlovskaya ... There were six children in all, who took the surname Islavin, and Tolstoy was especially friendly with the youngest boy – ‘externally very attractive but profoundly immoral’, as he later described him – and about whom he wrote in his diary in 1851, ‘My love for Islavin ruined the whole eight months of my life in Petersburg. Albeit unconsciously, I thought of nothing else but how to please him’.” (p20, Tolstoy, A Critical Introduction, Christian). When the mother of these children died, Islenev married and had another three children.