Youth

The third part of Tolstoy's autobiographical trilogy: Moscow University, a boy of sixteen who has decided to become perfect, the rules he writes in a notebook, his first drunk, his first calls on society, and the exam he fails. Tolstoy was in his twenties and had not yet fought at Sevastopol; the honesty is already frightening — no writer has ever caught the vanity of a serious young man more precisely, or with less mercy for his younger self.