In the Library
Boyhood
Leo Tolstoy, 1854
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by C. J. Hogarth
- Chapters
- Chapters 27
- Length
- Length 28k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I felt in my heart that delightful impulse to be up and doing which is a sign of sincere enjoyment.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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What this kind of self-examination becomes if nobody grows out of it, written by someone who found the paralysis funnier and much crueller.
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy
The same author's method applied to the end of a life instead of the middle of a childhood, and just as unwilling to let anyone perform.
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About the book
Somewhere on the road to Moscow the boy works out that other people have inner lives as complicated as his own, and the discovery nearly knocks him flat. Tolstoy called that chapter a new point of view and it is the hinge of the whole book. The child of the first volume has become an adolescent, which here means resentful, self-dramatising, convinced of his own ugliness, secretly certain he is a genius, and wrong about nearly everyone. He philosophises himself into paralysis. He is cruel to a servant and cannot undo it. The family is coming apart quietly in the background and he barely notices, being busy. The accuracy is awful and entirely unsentimental, and the mercy of the book is that Tolstoy neither mocks the boy nor spares him.