_Childhood_ and _Boyhood_ are, it is now known, autobiographical stories, in which only small details are altered, and in the boy Irténeff we have a glimpse of what L. N. Tolstóy was in his childhood. He was born in 1828, in the estate of Yásnaya Polyána, which now enjoys universal fame, and for the first fifteen years of his life he remained, almost without interruption, an inhabitant of the country. His father and grandfather--so we are told by the Russian critic, S. Venguéroff--are described in _War and Peace_, in Nicholas Róstoff and the old Count Róstoff respectively; while his mother, who was born a Princess Volkhónskaya, is represented as Mary Bolkónskaya. Leo Tolstóy lost his mother at the age of two, and his father at the age of nine, and after that time his education was taken care of by a woman relative, T. A. Ergólskaya, in Yásnaya Polyána, and after 1840, at Kazáñ, by his aunt P. I. Yúshkova, whose house, we are told, must have been very much the same as the house of the Róstoffs in _War and Peace_. Leo Tolstóy was only fifteen when he entered the Kazáñ University, where he spent two years in the Oriental faculty and two years in the faculty of Law. However, the teaching-staff of both faculties was so feeble at that time that only a single professor was able to awaken in the young man some passing interest in his subject. Four years later, that is in 1847, when he was only nineteen, Leo Tolstóy had already left the University and was making at Yásnaya Polyána some attempts at improving the conditions of his peasant serfs, of which attempts he has told us later on, with such a striking sincerity, in _The Morning of a Landlord_. The next four years of his life he spent, externally, like most young men of his aristocratic circle, but internally, in a continual reaction against the life he was leading. An insight into what he was then--slightly exaggerated, of course, and dramatised--we can get from the _Notes of a Billiard Marker_. Happily he could not put up with such paltry surroundings and in 1851, he suddenly renounced the life he had hitherto led--that of an idle aristocratic youth--and following his brother Nicholas, he went to the Caucasus, in order to enter military service. There he stayed first at Pyatigórsk--the place so full of reminiscences of Lérmontoff--until, having passed the necessary examinations, he was received as a non-commissioned officer (_yunker_) in the artillery and went to serve in a Cossack village on the banks of the Térek.