About this audiobook
Nikolenka Irtenyev is moving away from the familiar certainties of childhood. Family relationships, study and encounters with other people acquire meanings that he cannot always explain to himself. His wish to appear independent exists beside an intense awareness of how he is being judged, making apparently minor experiences feel unusually consequential.
In the second part of his autobiographical trilogy, Leo Tolstoy examines the uneven development of a young person's conscience. Pride, embarrassment and the desire for affection repeatedly complicate Nikolenka's understanding of his own conduct. His observations can be perceptive without freeing him from the misunderstandings that shape his relationships.
Boyhood follows the inward changes through which a child begins to recognise a wider social world. It explores the distance between an immediate feeling and a later judgement of it, inviting attention to the small discoveries and uncomfortable contradictions that accompany the effort to understand oneself and other people.
