The second panel of the trilogy: a boy of fourteen at the awkward age, jealous, ashamed of his hands, in love with a footman's opinion of him, watching his family from a corner. Tolstoy wrote it at twenty-six, before Sevastopol; the astonishing thing is not the memory but the refusal to make the boy likeable, and the chapter on the tutor Karl Ivanitch is one of the kindest things he ever wrote. Twenty-one plates of Russian genre painting, from Venetsianov's peasant children to Fedotov's domestic scenes, match the novel's close attention to ordinary lives.
