A review by zachhois
Childhood, by Leo Tolstoy

emotional inspiring slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

3.0

Wow, this gets self-consciously sad. Even if this IS told from a child's perspective (obviously) (red flag for me), it was interesting to see the beginning of Tolstoy's life. There was some deep-rooted emotion here that you can tell shaped him throughout his life, like the mother chapter and the grandmother chapter. The guilt he feels being apart of bullying a poor kid in order to appeal to his classmates is relatable for anyone, but shoutout my mans for ditching the friend that "held power over him" after his first "thou" with a girl. 🙂  Also, bruh, his mother's last letter before her death when he was little followed by him looking over her body and flashing back to all of their happy moments. FAM.... Tolstoy for real my favorite pure writer probably. dude just throws beautiful prose out there no matter the situation.

There are also some stellar quotes:

However vivid be one’s recollection of the past, any attempt to recall the features of a beloved being shows them to one’s vision as through a mist of tears—dim and blurred. Those tears are the tears of the imagination.

In my opinion, it is in the smile of a face that the essence of what we call beauty lies. If the smile heightens the charm of the face, then the face is a beautiful one. If the smile does not alter the face, then the face is an ordinary one. But if the smile spoils the face, then the face is an ugly one indeed.

Somehow I seemed to remember something which had never been.

Happy, happy, never-returning time of childhood! How can we help loving and dwelling upon its recollections? They cheer and elevate the soul, and become to one a source of higher joys.

Do in after life the freshness and light-heartedness, the craving for love and for strength of faith, ever return which we experience in our childhood’s years? What better time is there in our lives than when the two best of virtues—innocent gaiety and a boundless yearning for affection—are our sole objects of pursuit?

Those who have experienced what embarrassment is know that it is a feeling which grows in direct proportion to delay, while decision decreases in similar measure. In other words the longer the condition lasts, the more invincible does it become, and the smaller does the power of decision come to be.

“You know, Nicolinka, nobody will ever love you for your face alone, so you must try all the more to be a good and clever boy.”

Why grieve and weep over imagined evils?

It is strange how, when a child, I always longed to be like grown-up people, and yet how I have often longed, since childhood’s days, for those days to come back to me!

I deprived myself of the pure delight of a fresh, childish instinct for the absurd purpose of trying to resemble grown-up people.

The sufferings of shy people proceed only from the doubts which they feel concerning the opinions of their fellows. No sooner are those opinions expressed (whether flattering or the reverse) than the agony disappears.

I have grown accustomed to no longer relying, so far as the children are concerned, upon your gains at play, nor yet—excuse me for saying so—upon your income. Therefore your losses cause me as little anxiety as your gains give me pleasure.

My soul can never lack its love for you; and I know that that love will exist for ever, since such a feeling could never have been awakened if it were not to be eternal. I shall no longer be with you, yet I firmly believe that my love will cleave to you always, and from that thought I glean such comfort that I await the approach of death calmly and without fear.

Such of those present as were strangers I found intolerable. In fact, the phrases of condolence with which they addressed Papa (such, for instance, as that “she is better off now” “she was too good for this world,” and so on) awakened in me something like fury. What right had they to weep over or to talk about her?

Mamma was no longer with us, but our life went on as usual. We went to bed and got up at the same times and in the same rooms; breakfast, luncheon, and supper continued to be at their usual hours; everything remained standing in its accustomed place; nothing in the house or in our mode of life was altered: only, she was not there.

Yet it seemed to me as though such a misfortune ought to have changed everything.

Vanity is a sentiment so entirely at variance with genuine grief, yet a sentiment so inherent in human nature, that even the most poignant sorrow does not always drive it wholly forth.

Vanity mingled with grief shows itself in a desire to be recognised as unhappy or resigned; and this ignoble desire—an aspiration which, for all that we may not acknowledge it is rarely absent, even in cases of the utmost affliction—takes off greatly from the force, the dignity, and the sincerity of grief.

Only those who can love strongly can experience an overwhelming grief. Yet their very need of loving sometimes serves to throw off their grief from them and to save them. The moral nature of man is more tenacious of life than the physical, and grief never kills.

“Did Providence unite me to those two beings solely in order to make me regret them my life long?”