spite of its poetic charm, its delicacy of touch and emotion, we can understand that it may have displeased the Tolstoy of later years.
It displeased him for the very reasons by which it pleased others. We must admit it frankly: except in the recording of certain provincial types, and in a restricted number of passages which are remarkable for their religious feeling or for the realistic treatment of emotion,[1] the personality of Tolstoy is barely in evidence.
A tender, gentle sentimentality prevails from cover to cover; a quality which was always afterwards antipathetic to Tolstoy, and one which he sedulously excluded from his other romances. We recognise it; these tears, this sentimentality came from Dickens, who was one of Tolstoy’s favourite authors between his fourteenth and his twenty-first year. Tolstoy notes in his Journal: “Dickens: David Copperfield. Influence considerable.” He read the book again in the Caucasus.
Two other influences, to which he himself confesses, were Sterne and Töppfer. “I was then,” he says, “under their inspiration.”[2]
Who would have thought that the Nouvelles Genevoises would be the first model of the author of War and Peace? Yet knowing this to be a fact, we discern in Tolstoy’s Childhood the same bantering, affected geniality, transplanted to the soil of a more aristocratic nature. So we see that
