[From Memoirs. (c) 1990 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Translated by Richard Lourie]

I began to teach myself to read at four, first spelling out words on signboards and the names of steamships. Some of the books I read as I grew older:

Pushkin's The Tale of Czar Saltan, Dubrovsky and The Captain's Daughter; Dumas' The Three Musketeers (Athos' wounded shoulder, Porthos' baldness, Aramis' handkerchief); Hector Malot's Sans Famille; Hugo's Les Miserables; and James Greenwood's The True History of a Little Ragamuffin, an excellent book seemingly forgotten in its native England but popular in Russia thanks to Chukovsky's translation. I notably loved Jules Verne, especially The Children of Captain Grant; The Mysterious Island, a tribute to human labor and the power of science and technology; and the fabulous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I also enjoyed Dickens' David Copperfield, Dombey and Son (surely his best and most moving novel) and Oliver Twist; Gogol's early works, including The Gamblers, The Marriage and the Ukrainian tales; Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and The Prince and the Pauper; Andersen's Thumbelina, The Little Match Girl and The Tinder Box ("Grandpa Adya, do you like The Tinder Box?" my little granddaughter would ask me from faraway Newton, Mass., 50 years later. "Yes, I do, very much!"); Thomas Mayne Reid's The Cliff Climbers and Oceola the Seminole; Swift's splenetic, impassioned Gulliver's Travels; Jack London's Martin Eden, The Star Rover and the dog stories; Ernest Thompson Seton; H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, Men Like Gods and The War of the Worlds; and, a little later, virtually everything by Pushkin and Gogol. I was able to memorize Pushkin's poetry with ease. I read Goethe's Faust and Shakespeare's Hamlet and Othello. I remember discussing with Grandmother almost every page of Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, Youth and War and Peace--a whole world of people whom "we know better than our own friends and neighbors." I entered adolescence enriched by these books and many others I haven't listed here.