ABSTRACT
Tolstoi is a good judge of the child soul. Adown the memories of his own childhood, he observes the child both in his life out of doors and in school, that school which itself is no more than a fragment of life. It is thus that Tolstoi acquires his vision into the child nature. His two great works War and Peace and Anna Karenina, as well as other stories, abound in child types and child portraits. War and Peace was written after the first period of Tolstoi's educational activity, Anna Karenina after the second. These sketches are by a master hand; nowhere does Tolstoi reveal himself as a truer psychologist. In presence of these sketches, the authors need not linger over the thankless, perhaps the chimerical, task of trying to discover what has been borrowed from the memories of his own childhood, then, from his observation of the child in life, and afterwards from studying the child at school.
