Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana in the province of Tula, 120 miles south of Moscow. He had three elder brothers — Nikolai, Sergei and Dmitri – and after giving birth to a daughter Maria, always known as Masha, his mother died when he was only 2 years old. Such a bereavement was so common in those days that it was taken for granted, by the deprived child and by the rest of the family, and it is only with the psychological hindsight of today that the possible consequences have become of theoretical interest. Loss of a mother, and Tolstoy always claimed afterwards that he had been especially close to his, can have a permanent effect on adult mentality and outlook. Tolstoy came near to claiming, in his last years, that he had never really grown up. He remembered, he said, the slippery sides of the wooden bowl in which is mother had bathed him, and such memories came to him all the more vividly at the time of his own death. ‘As I was then, so am I now’, he said when he was an old man of 82.

Certainly he had an uncanny gift for remembering and describing childhood and childhood sensations: more than that, the descriptions and the tone of reality in all his great stories and novels possess the air of something seen and apprehended for the first time, as a child might see it. The formalist critic Shklovsky, one of his most brilliant and detailed commentators, has pointed out that not only are things seen in Tolstoy's writing as if never before, but they have for this reason a permanent air of the surprising and the unfamiliar. Tolstoy's descriptions, said Shklovsky, ‘make it strange’. That is to say we are present as readers at a party, or at a battle or a ballet, as a child might be present, seeing everything not in its conventional familiar shapes as an adult sees it, but as a primary phenomenon – strange or wonderful or terrifying. Tolstoy's novels abound in illustrations of this, and sometimes in his didactic way he makes a special point of it. When Natasha in War and Peace goes to the ballet for the first time she cannot see the point of a man in comic tights waving his legs about; it all seems to her affected and ridiculous.