A Russian Schoolboy

Translated by J. D. Duff / 191-page paperback / 5" x 8" / ISBN 9781589880511 / Publication Date: February 2009 "The happiness of childhood is the Golden Age, and the recollection of it has power to move the old man's heart with pleasure and with pain. Happy the man who once possessed it and is able to recall the memory of it in later years!" Thus Sergei Aksakov recalls the "magic world" of youth, as he portrays the delights and tumults of Russian country life at the turn of the 18th century. In 1856 at the age of 64, Aksakov sat down to write the story of his long-ago student life. A Russian Schoolboy is the result. As the older man thinks back to that time more than fifty years earlier, unbidden memories come to him, some painful and others sweet. Under the spell of Aksakov’s writing, we can imagine we are listening to the child himself as he suffers the anguished separation from his mother or thrills to his developing capacities as a student. We grow fond of the boy and dearly apprec