Do in after life the freshness and light–heartedness, the craving for love and for strength of faith, ever return which we experience in our childhood's years? What better time is there in our lives than when the two best of virtues—innocent gaiety and a boundless yearning for affection—are our sole objects of pursuit?
That this is the first novel published by Tolstoy may account for the awkward phrasing with which this excerpt begins. Or, perhaps, it is an idiosyncrasy of translation. Regardless of the beginning which definitely seems, the rest of the narrator’s nostalgic reflections upon childhood from the perspective of adulthood is one that runs throughout the narrative, stating its themes and affecting the reliability of the first-person narrative.
Vanity mingled with grief shows itself in a desire to be recognized as unhappy or resigned; and this ignoble desire—an aspiration which, for all that we may not acknowledge it is rarely absent, even in cases of the utmost affliction—takes off greatly from the force, the dignity, and the sincerity of grief.
On the other hand, the narrator’s reliability and capacity for breaking free from grip of nostalgic recollection is directly revealed through moments of insight in the present in which the adult narrator demonstrates not just a desire to examine the psychological motivations behind why people act the way they do, but an adroit talent for it. Of course, when one realizes that the narrator is a semi-autobiographical stand-in for the author himself, that adroitness of the narrator may actually just be the author congratulating himself.
The Princess was a woman of about forty–five, small and delicate, with a shriveled skin and disagreeable, greyish–green eyes, the expression of which contradicted the unnaturally suave look of the rest of her face. Underneath her velvet bonnet, adorned with an ostrich feather, was visible some reddish hair, while against the unhealthy color of her skin her eyebrows and eyelashes looked even lighter and redder that they would otherwise have done.
This quote also works toward pointing to the autobiographical nature of the novel. This is description of character at the level of literary talent rather than just mere observation. It is also a worthy example of the means by which Tolstoy uses literary devices to convey character. Writers typically rely upon metaphorical comparisons—especially similes—as shortcuts for portraying characters, especially in a novel with a large cast. Tolstoy’s preference not just in this example, but throughout the novel is for imagery as a replacement for similes. The result is typical Russian verbosity atypically done without wasting words.
With Mamma's death the happy time of my childhood came to an end, and a new epoch—the epoch of my boyhood—began.
Childhood is actually the first entry in a trilogy of novels. This quote occurs shortly before the novel’s end and the narrator’s philosophical reflection on the chronological divergence occasioned by the emotional trauma so mentioned represents more than just a new epoch. It is also direct link to the middle entry in the trilogy, titled Boyhood.
