EARLY WORK: TALES OF THE CAUCASUS _The Story of my Childhood_[1] was commenced in the autumn of 1851, at Tiflis; it was finished at Piatigorsk in the Caucasus, on the 2nd of July, 1852. It is curious to note that while in the midst of that nature by which he was so intoxicated, while leading a life absolutely novel, in the midst of the stirring risks of warfare, occupied in the discovery of a world of unfamiliar characters and passions, Tolstoy should have returned, in this his first work, to the memories of his past life. But _Childhood_ was written during a period of illness, when his military activity was suddenly arrested. During the long leisure of a convalescence, while alone and suffering, his state of mind inclined to the sentimental;[2] the past unrolled itself before his eyes at a time when he felt for it a certain tenderness. After the exhausting tension of the last few unprofitable years, it was comforting to live again in thought the "marvellous, innocent, joyous, poetic period" of early childhood; to reconstruct for himself "the heart of a child, good, sensitive, and capable of love." With the ardour of youth and its illimitable projects, with the cyclic character of his poetic imagination, which rarely conceived an isolated subject, and whose great romances are only the links in a long historic chain, the fragments of enormous conceptions which he was never able to execute,[3] Tolstoy at this moment regarded his narrative of _Childhood_ as merely the opening chapters of a _History of Four Periods_, which was to include his life in the Caucasus, and was in all probability to have terminated in the revelation of God by Nature. In later years Tolstoy spoke with great severity of his _Childhood_, to which he owed some part of his popularity. "It is so bad," he remarked to M. Birukov: "it is written with so little literary conscience!... There is nothing to be got from it." He was alone in this opinion. The manuscript was sent, without the author's name, to the great Russian review, the _Sovremennik_ (_Contemporary_); it was published immediately (September 6, 1852), and achieved a general success; a success confirmed by the public of every country in Europe. Yet in spite of its poetic charm, its delicacy of touch and emotion, we can understand that it may have displeased the Tolstoy of later years. It displeased him for the very reasons by which it pleased others. We must admit it frankly: except in the recording of certain provincial types, and in a restricted number of passages which are remarkable for their religious feeling or for the realistic treatment of emotion,[4] the personality of Tolstoy is barely in evidence.