Childhood

Author(s): Leo Tolstoy, Charles James Hogarth

Genre(s): Fictional Biographies & Memoirs

Narrators: Hugh McGuire, Alex Foster, Dale Hudjik, Randy Phillips, Mark Bradford, Andrew, Scoot, Ezwa

Number of Chapters: 18

Length: 4 hours and 06 minutes

Language: English

Childhood, published in 1852, is the first novel in Leo Tolstoy’s autobiographical trilogy, which also includes Boyhood, and Youth. Published when Tolstoy was twenty-three, the book gained immediate notice among Russian writers including Ivan Turgenev, and heralded the young Tolstoy as a major figure in Russian letters. Childhood is an expressionist exploration of the internal life of a young boy, Nikolenka, and was a new form in Russian writing, mixing fact, fiction and emotions to render the moods and reactions of the narrator. Childhood is Tolstoy’s first published work. Translated into English by C. J. Hogarth. (Summary by Hugh)