Audiobook · read by volunteers
Childhood
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
Read by Hugh McGuire, Alex Foster, Dale Hudjik, Randy Phillips, Mark Bradford, Andrew, Scoot, Ezwa · 18 chapters · 4 h 06
About the book
Nikolenka is a boy of about ten, living on a Russian country estate, and Leo Tolstoy lets us see the world as he sees it. There are lessons with tutors who are by turns kind and strict, hunting parties, a father who is both loved and feared, a mother whose gentleness the boy never forgets, a first awareness of class and money, and the sudden shame of small humiliations that seem enormous at that age. Nothing here is a grand event, yet everything matters, because Tolstoy catches how a child feels from moment to moment: the sulk, the adoration, the vanity, the sudden flood of tenderness. The prose is clear, observant and strikingly honest. In eighteen sections and a little over four hours, Childhood in C. J. Hogarth’s English version gives us a portrait of memory itself, and perhaps of a time in our own lives that we have half forgotten.
Introduction
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was in his early twenties when Childhood appeared in 1852. It was his first published work, and it drew immediate notice among Russian writers, including Ivan Turgenev. Readers saw in the young author a new voice, and the book is generally regarded as the opening of what became an autobiographical trilogy, followed by Boyhood and Youth. Readers often point to the book’s gentle pace, its scenes of lessons, outings and family evenings, and its willingness to dwell on a feeling until it feels true. It is a story without a conventional plot, held together by memory. Tolstoy’s later fame lends the book an extra interest, since it shows the beginnings of the psychological attention that would become his trademark.
What set it apart was its method. Tolstoy blended fact, fiction and emotion to render the moods and reactions of a young narrator, Nikolenka, with a closeness that was new in Russian prose. The story is not strictly his own, but it draws on the world he knew: a landed family, a country house, a tutor and the rituals of a privileged childhood. The result reads less like a plot than like a stretch of remembered life.
This recording uses the English translation by C. J. Hogarth and is divided into 18 sections that group the original chapters. It runs for about four hours and is shared among eight LibriVox volunteers.
Why listen today? Because Tolstoy’s attention to a child’s inner life is still astonishing, and because the book offers an early look at the gifts that would later produce War and Peace and Anna Karenina. It is intimate, generous and humane.
Public domain
Leo Tolstoy died in 1910: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text