Childhood - Tolstoy, Leo

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Résumé :
Leo Tolstoy started writing his trilogy at three different phases of his life: Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth in his mid-twenties. Even though he would in his old age broadly excuse it as an ' awkward mixture of fact and fiction, years after years readers have not concurred but considered the novel as a beguiling and sagacious picture of emerging awareness against the foundation of a world limned with unprecedented clearness, effortlessness, and variety. Obvious too, in its splendid record of a youngster's arising attention to the world and of his place inside it is a considerable lot of the positions, strategies, and subjects that would come to full bloom in the unfading 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina', and in the other extraordinary works of Tolstoy's development.

Biographie:
The novel is set 60 years before Tolstoy's day, but he had spoken with people who lived through the 1812 French invasion of Russia. He read all the standard histories available in Russian and French about the Napoleonic Wars and had read letters, journals, autobiographies and biographies of Napoleon and other key players of that era. There are approximately 160 real persons named or referred to in War and Peace. He worked from primary source materials (interviews and other documents), as well as from history books, philosophy texts and other historical novels. Tolstoy also used a great deal of his own experience in the Crimean War to bring vivid detail and first-hand accounts of how the Russian army was structured. Tolstoy was critical of standard history, especially military history, in War and Peace. He explains at the start of the novel's third volume his own views on how history ought to be written. His aim was to blur the line between fiction and history, to get closer to the truth, as he states in Volume ii.

Sommaire:
Leo Tolstoy (born September 9, 1828, in Yasnaya Polyana, Russia, and died November 20, 1910) is considered one of the most significant writers in world literature. He is renowned for his works, particularly War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which are seen as pillars of realist fiction. Tolstoy's works are influential in both the literary world and beyond, with themes of morality, spirituality, and social justice. In his later years, Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis and distanced himself from the Russian Orthodox Church, advocating for a life of simplicity, nonviolence, and a rejection of materialism, which influenced both his writing and his lifestyle. His work has inspired a broad range of thinkers and writers, including Fyodor Dostoevsky and Alexander Pushkin. Tolstoy married Sophia Tolstaya in 1862, and they had several children. Despite his personal and family struggles, Tolstoy's legacy endures as a deeply influential figure in literature, philosophy, and social thought....