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.