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Loading... Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Classics) (original 1852; edition 1973)by Leo Tolstoy, Rosemary Edmonds (Introduction)
Work InformationChildhood, Boyhood, Youth by Leo Tolstoy (1852)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Youth ruined this for me. If I had only read Childhood and Boyhood, this would have been a 4 star rating. ( ) In [Childhood], the young Count captures the wrath of "God's Thunderstorm," setting a truly high standard for landscape descriptions which often only he equals. The education episodes with St.-Jerome felt contrived, awkward and went on way too long. His earliest meditative philosophy on death and thinking about thinking then alternates with his inner turmoils. These continue in [Boyhood] as he explores man's destiny to perfect himself as he suddenly emerges in public as a scholar and, finally, with a best friend, despite his impenetrable shyness. Fascinating studies of people's appearances, personalities, and projected feelings are ongoing. With [Youth], he applies his ideas to his actions and begins his Rules for Life, moving away from arrogance, pride, and self absorbed selfishness. He is surrounded by mostly rich women, yet does not see how constricted their lives remain. As he helps the servant, Nicolai, repair a window, he is summoned by nature - the fresh air, sunshine, dark earth, grass, insects, rain, the flowering garden, and joyful birds! This is an instance where, I think, translation matters. I checked this book out electronically from my library--the only copy in the entire system--and realized too late that it was a Barnes & Noble production with an anonymous translator. In the preface, in fact, the translator spoke of Tolstoy as being alive, so I imagine this was translated during the author's lifetime! I have a sense that if I'd read the newer translations, I'd have gotten even more out of this. That being said, Tolstoy's genius was evident even in this fragmentary, very early work. His description of nature and natural phenomenon is second to none. His complex and deep character descriptions (rather than characterization, which I don't think had truly reached its full flower here) transfixed me, and I copied down many examples for later study. It ends abruptly, of course, because it was meant to be a much longer work, and there is, frustratingly, an entire section that the translator merely reports was not included in the original Russian. I have no idea if this means it was lost or never written. no reviews | add a review
'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 Peaceand 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, extensive historical notes and a list of characters. Translated with an introduction and notes by Judson Rosengrant No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)891.733Literature Literature of other languages Literature of east Indo-European and Celtic languages Russian and East Slavic languages Russian fiction 1800–1917LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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