Childhood. Adolescence. Youth

The trilogy about growing up, with which Tolstoy enters literature: contemporaries discover the psychology of a child and are amazed at the depth with which a person’s inner life can be described. The creation of the trilogy took six years. Work on it was constantly interrupted: parallel ideas arose, military service took up a lot of time, and the idea of the trilogy itself was constantly changing. Having completed the first edition of Childhood by March 1851, Tolstoy did not at all imagine that the story would have a sequel. “The Main Books of Russian Literature” is a joint series of the Alpina. Proza publishing house and the Polka Internet project. The books that are published in it are chosen by contemporary writers, critics, literary scholars, and teachers. This is both an attempt to determine what the Russian literary canon looks like today and a new look at famous works: each book is accompanied by a preface by the authors of Polka. For all lovers of classical Russian literature and for high school students.