In July of 1852, a young Count Leo Tolstoy sent his first work to the journal The Contemporary, which forever changed Russian literature. This work was a narrative, Childhood.
For many researchers of Tolstoy’s works, it remains a mystery how a 25-year-old man, having no special traits to stand out from the total mass of people of his time, was able to create such a work as Childhood. The fact is that no one before Tolstoy made his debut in this way. In this work, the writer tries to analyze events from his childhood and understand the nature of human psychology, the reasons that created him. For modern culture, this approach to creating a literary work does not seem surprising, but in those days it was a real breakthrough. Moreover, the topic itself was unusual: the mysterious world of childhood was not the subject of attention for writers, artists, philosophers, and Tolstoy did this first.
The idea of the story itself would not have cost anything without the style of the writer, which impressed contemporaries no less than everything else. The story of the 25-year-old author has already implemented unique artistic techniques, which he will later use widely in his great novels. It was in the story Childhood that Tolstoy first applied the technique, which critics would later call the "dialectic of the soul." Describing the state of a character, he uses an internal monologue that allows to convey sharp changes in the state of the character: from joy to grief, from anger to feelings of shame. The author penetrates deeply into the psychology of a child, seeks to find internal, not external causes of his actions.
The manuscript of Childhood was a document that Tolstoy sent to Nekrasov, in the most influential literary magazine of the time The Contemporary. The editor changed the name: the story came out under the title The Story of My Childhood. This infuriated Tolstoy. In a letter to Nekrasov, he wrote: “The history of MY childhood will be of no interest to anyone!”, and made some daring remarks. However, he sent this letter not to Nekrasov, but to his brother to show how he can speak with the famous poet.
In subsequent years, Tolstoy will write the continuation of Childhood - the novel Boyhood and Youth, will risk his life during the siege of Sevastopol, create the Sevastopol Tales that made him famous, will return to Moscow, but will soon disappear in on his estate to create novels that have become world classics. But the story Childhood remains the first, and therefore one of the most important, creations of the Russian classic authors.
