Childhood
Leo TOLSTOY (1828 - 1910)
(IDB Productions, July 6, 2017)
Childhood is the first book in Leo Tolstoy’s autobiographical trilogy, which also comprises Boyhood, and Youth. The novel earned paramount attention from several Russian novelists such as Ivan Turgenev and declared Leo Tolstoy as a key personage in Russian literature. Childhood is a verbalization of the discovery of his private life as a little child, Nikolenka. It was a modern style in Russian literature, combining actualities, make believe stories and sensations to portray the feelings and awareness of the storyteller. Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy simply known as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian author who is deemed as among the best writers in history. Leo then had an intellectual principled confrontation, ensued by what he thought as a paralleled exhaustive religious enlivening, as summarized in his non-fiction writing A Confession. His literal apprehension of the righteous canons of Jesus, concentrating on the Sermon on the Mount, resulted him to be a devout Christian anarchist and pacifist. His notions on peaceable intransigence, revealed in his writings including The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have an enlightened influence on the climactic 20th century personages as Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Bevel. Leo also was a devoted supporter of Georgism, the industrial ideology of Henry George, which he integrated in his work, specifically Resurrection. Some of the authors expressed their admiration for Leo such as Gustave Flaubert, "What an artist and what a psychologist!" Anton Chekhov, "When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in literature."