Leo Tolstoy embarked on Childhood, Boyhood, Youth in his early twenties. Though he
later regarded his first published sketches as an ‘awkward mixture of fact and fiction’,
they provide a highly expressive self-portrait which makes clear the man and the writer
Tolstoy was to become. Within these accounts of growing awareness of the world can be seen
the moralist, the aristocrat in sympathy with the people, the meticulous observer of men and
of nature, the immortal author of War and Peace, and even the tragic fugitive of his
final unhappy days.
