“marvellous, innocent, joyous, poetic period” of early childhood; to reconstruct for himself “the heart of a child, good, sensitive, and capable of love.” With the ardour of youth and its illimitable projects, with the cyclic character of his poetic imagination, which rarely conceived an isolated subject, and whose great romances are only the links in a long historic chain, the fragments of enormous conceptions which he was never able to execute,[1] Tolstoy at this moment regarded his narrative of Childhood as merely the opening chapters of a History of Four Periods, which was to include his life in the Caucasus, and was in all probability to have terminated in the revelation of God by Nature.
In later years Tolstoy spoke with great severity of his Childhood, to which he owed some part of his popularity.
“It is so bad,” he remarked to M. Birukov: “it is written with so little literary conscience!… There is nothing to be got from it.”
He was alone in this opinion. The manuscript was sent, without the author’s name, to the great Russian review, the Sovremennik (Contemporary); it was published immediately (September 6, 1852), and achieved a general success; a success confirmed by the public of every country in Europe. Yet in
- ↑ The Russian Proprietor (A Landlord’s Morning) is the fragment of a projected Romance of a Russian Landowner. The Cossacks forms the first portion of a great romance of the Caucasus. In the author’s eyes the huge War and Peace was only a sort of preface to a contemporary epic, of which The Decembrists was to have been the nucleus.
