One of my favorite novels is "Anna Karenina"; this trilogy starts off as strongly. In the first volume, "Childhood," the immediacy of experience is palpable, the vividness of sensations is high, the emotionality is less diluted by philosophical wonderings. Tolstoy's writing is evocative, clear, and engaging in this book. His writing becomes increasingly abstract with each volume in the series. As his protagonist moves through adolescence, his uncertainties, moodiness, and fickle nature bogged down the narrative, I thought. Of course, this reflects the state of mind of the young man, but in comparison with the brightness of the first volume, made for some tedious reading. The books do, however, show how masterful Tolstoy was from the beginning of his career.

I thought that this was a lovely novel, a deeply reflective work in which Tolstoy concentrates on the life of the character Nikolai Irtenyev from his early childhood to his days as an aspiring student.

It's told in picaresque style, and reminded me a lot of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" (had Proust been influenced by Tolstoy at all?). As an example:

"It was almost dark in the room, and very hot; there was a mingled smell of mint, eau-de-cologne, camomile and Hoffman's drops. The smell struck me so forcibly that, not only when I happen to smell it but even when I recall it, my imagination instantly carries me back to that darkly stifling room and reproduces every minute detail of that terrible moment."

The novel is full of such fine descriptive passages - the approach of a thunderstorm being the one that sticks in my mind.

But the main strength of this work is, I thought, that Tolstoy does a good job of describing the sweetnesses of childhood but does not cover up the agonies of growing up. This is no sugary, romantic account. Childhood and adolescence are portrayed as immensely trying times, both for Nikolai himself and for his family and friends. All the emotions, anger, misunderstandings and disorientation are detailed by Tolstoy.

Fine Stuff.

G Rodgers

When this book first hit the stores in Russia about 150 years ago, folks didn't think too much of it, seeing it merely as a minor work by one who had read Dickens. Tolstoy himself claimed that no one taught him more about the art of fiction than Dickens, and the literary circles of Russia were Dickens-fanatics, Russia recieving his works only after England.

But beyond being similiar to David Copperfield, this book has moments in it that match parts of Karenin and War and Peace in beauty and texture if not in scope. What's amazing about Tolstoy is that his earliest work (this and his early war sketches) seem as artistically mature as his later, epic masterpieces. The death-obsession and intense philosophical and spiritual doubts that plagued Tolstoy later in life did not all of a sudden erupt while writing Anna Karenin; but rather they were always there in one form or another... an echo of adolescent sadness.