Death features prominently in Tolstoy's artistic and intellectual universe. Tolstoy's very first work, Childhood, a semi-fictional account of scenes inspired by his childhood, relates the 10-year-old protagonist's first confrontation with death when his mother unexpectedly succumbs to an illness. Tolstoy was about 2 years old when his mother died, and 9 when his father followed her. This initial painful realization of human mortality clearly exerted a profound impact, prompting him to recreate the image of his mother in Childhood and to return again and again to the theme of death in his subsequent works. Both War and Peace and Anna Karenina contain celebrated death scenes unparalleled in world literature, but shorter works have been just as powerful, in particular “Three Deaths,” The Death of Ivan Ilych, and The Kreutzer Sonata. Notable death scenes are also scattered in many, if not most, of his other pieces, including the Sevastopol sketches, The Cossacks, and Hadji Murat. The prominence of death in Tolstoy's oeuvre can hardly be overstated, and so it is no surprise that Philippe Ariès discusses Tolstoy's treatment of death at length in his seminal The Hour of Death, a survey of the history of dying in Western civilization.

Little Nikolenka, the protagonist and first-person narrator of Childhood, does not witness the final moments of his mother's life; he and his brother are led away from her deathbed, more out of concern for the dying mother than to spare the boys.