CHAPTER II
CHILDHOOD, BOYHOOD, AND YOUTH
Much about Tolstoy's childhood is to be found in the fragmentary memoirs he wrote for various editions of his works. His novel, “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth,” cannot be considered a true picture of his own early days, as in it reality is blended with imagination.
His recollections went very far back. He faintly remembers how he was swaddled, and bathed in a tub.
“It is a strange and awful thought,” he says in his “First Recollections,” “that from my birth to the age of three, during which time I was suckled, I began to crawl, to walk, and to speak; yet in spite of all my efforts I cannot find anything to remember except the two facts of swaddling and bathing. When did my existence commence? When did I begin to live? And why should it give me pleasure to represent myself at the beginning of life, and dread seizes me, as it does many others, at the thought of re-entering a
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