Penguin Classics: Childhood, Boyhood, Youth

Despite the tangle of ideas in my mind . . . I was young, innocent, free, and therefore almost happy'

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.

Judson Rosengrant's lucid new translation conveys the freshness, poetry, and power of Tolstoy's early prose, while his introduction looks at Tolstoy's early development and the complex relationship between the trilogy and his life. The edition also contains a biographical chronology, suggestions for further reading, and extensive historical notes.