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Zusatztext “No one has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour! the exact quality of a feeling.” — Isaiah Berlin Informationen zum Autor Michael Scammell is the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography , and has translated many Russian works, including Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment , and The Gift and The Defense by Nabokov. He teaches nonfiction writing and translation at Colum-bia University and is working on a biography of Arthur Koestler. Klappentext Begun in 1851! when Tolstoy was twenty-three and serving as a cadet in the Russian army! Childhood! the first part of Tolstoy's first novel! won immediate praise from Turgenev and others! and marked Tolstoy's emergence as a major writer. Its originality was striking! as Tolstoy sought to communicate with great immediacy the "poetry” of childhood—the intense emotions! confusions! and fears attendant upon a young boy! Nikolenka! as he grows up. In the years following! Boyhood and Youth appeared (a fourth volume was planned but never executed)! each replete with psychological and philosophical subtleties hitherto unknown in Russian literature. In Scammell's resplendent translation! Childhood! Boyhood! and Youth remains one of Tolstoy's major works. I: Childhood Karl Ivanich, the Tutor At 7 a.m. on August 12, 18, on exactly the third day after my tenth birthday, when I had received such wonderful presents, Karl Ivanich woke me up with a fly swatter made of wrapping paper on the end of a stick with which he was swatting a fly immediately over my head. He did this so awkwardly that he jogged the picture of my guardian angel which was hanging on the oaken headboard of my bed, and the dead fly fell directly on my head. I thrust my nose out from under the quilt, steadied the still-swaying picture with my hand, brushed the dead fly onto the floor, and cast a sleepy but irate glance at Karl Ivanich. But he, dressed in his brightly colored, quilted dressing gown, which was gathered at the waist with a belt of the same material, and wearing a red knitted skullcap with a tassel, and soft goatskin slippers on his feet, continued to patrol the walls, taking aim at the flies and swatting them. "Just because I'm small," I thought, "why does he have to bother me? Why doesn't he swat the flies by Volodya's bed? There are heaps of them there! No, Volodya's older than me; and I'm the youngest of all: that's why he tortures the life out of me. All he thinks about the whole time," I whispered to myself, "is how to be unpleasant to me. He knows very well that he woke me up and frightened me, but he makes out he didn't notice . . . what a nasty man! And his dressing gown and cap and tassel?they're all nasty!" While I was thus mentally expressing my displeasure with Karl Ivanich, he went to his bed, looked at the watch hanging over it in a beaded and embroidered leather slipper, hung the fly swatter on a nail and turned to us in what was clearly an excellent frame of mind. "Auf, Kinder, auf! . . . s'ist Zeit. Die Mutter ist schon im Saal," he cried in his kind, German voice; then he came to me, sat at the foot of the bed, and took a snuffbox from his pocket. I pretended to be sleeping. First Karl Ivanich took a pinch of snuff, wiped his nose and snapped his fingers, and only then did he turn his attention to me. Smilingly he began to tickle my heels. "Nun, nun, Faulenzer!" he said. Afraid as I was of the tickling, I nonetheless refrained from jumping up in bed and did not answer him, merely thrusting my head farther under the pillows, kicking my legs as hard as I could and making every effort not to laugh. How kind he is and how he loves us, and yet I was able to think so badly of him! I was annoyed both with myself and with Karl Ivanich; I felt like laughing and crying at the same time. My nerves were on edge. "Ach, lassen Sie, Kar...
