Thus during the first twenty-six years of his life he spent less than five years in towns, the rest in the country; and this no doubt laid the foundation for his deep love for country life, which has had so profound an effect upon his writings and his views of existence in general.
The dawning of his talent came during the four years he spent in the Caucasus, and he wrote "Childhood," "The Incursion," "Boyhood," "The Morning of a Landed Proprietor," and "The Cossacks." During the Turkish campaign he was ordered to the staff of Prince M.D.Gortchakoff, on the Danube, and in 1855 received the command of a mountain battery, and took part in the fight at Tchernaya, and the siege of Sevastopol.

The literary fruits of this experience were "Sevastopol," in December, May, and August, three sketches.
It is convenient to finish his statistical history at this point with the statement that in 1862 he married, having firmly resolved, two years previously, that he never would do so, and clinched the bargain with himself by selling the big manor-house at Yasnaya Polyana for transportation and re-erection elsewhere.

Between that date and 1888 he had a family of fifteen[42] children, of whom seven are still alive.
In his very first efforts in literature we detect certain characteristics which continue to distinguish him throughout his career, and some of which, on attaining their legitimate and logical development seem, to the ordinary reader, to be of extremely recent origin.

In "Childhood" and "Boyhood" ("Youth," the third section, was written late in the '50's) we meet the same keen analysis which is a leading feature in his later works, and in them is applied with such effect to women and to the tender passion, neither of which elements enters into his early works in any appreciable degree.

He displays the most astounding genius in detecting and understanding the most secret and trivial movements of the human soul.