Childhood - Boyhood - Youth - The Trilogy

Published between 1852, when the author was twenty-four years old, and 1854, this trilogy (Childhood-Boyhood-Youth) is inspired by the themes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an author whom Tolstoy idolized as a boy. These three books already introduce the main features of Tolstoy's literary production. They constitute the psychological story of the protagonist's growth to maturity as a man, constructed with a manipulation between autobiography and literary fiction.
Reading the early novels is crucial to fully understanding Tolstoy's poetics, because the relationship between them and the major works is unbroken and rooted in an exemplariness of narrative that makes the author one of the greatest novelists of the nineteenth century.