and to realise at leisure the masterpieces of his brain, the colossal monuments which dominate the fiction of the nineteenth century—War and Peace (1864-69) and Anna Karenin (1873-77).
War and Peace is the vastest epic of our times—a modern Iliad. A world of faces and of passions moves within it. Over this human ocean of innumerable waves broods a sovereign mind, which serenely raises or stills the tempest.
More than once in the past, while contemplating this work, I was reminded of Homer and of Goethe, in spite of the vastly different spirit and period of the work. Since then I have discovered that at the period of writing these books Tolstoy was as a matter of fact nourishing his mind upon Homer and Goethe.[1] Moreover, in the notes, dated 1865,
- ↑ Before this date Tolstoy had noted, among the books
which influenced him between the ages of twenty and thirty-five:
“Goethe: Hermann and Dorothea—Very great influence.”
“Homer: Iliad and Odyssey (in Russian) Very great influence.”
silenced the monologue of the conscience. This period of creation was also a period of robust physical life. Tolstoy was “mad on hunting.” “Hunting, I forget everything…” (Letter of 1864.) In September, 1864, during a hunt on horse back, he broke his arm, and it was during his convalescence that the first portions of War and Peace were dictated.—“On recovering consciousness after fainting, I said to myself: ‘I am an artist.’ And I am, but a lonely artist” (Letter to Fet, January 29, 1865.) All the letters written at this time to Fet are full of an exulting joy of creation. “I regard all that I have hitherto published,” he says, “as merely a trial of my pen” (Ibid.)
