in which he classifies the various departments of
letters, he mentions, as belonging to the same
family, “Odyssey, Iliad, 1805.”[1] The natural development
of his mind led him from the romance
of individual destinies to the romance of armies
and peoples, those vast human hordes in which
the wills of millions of beings are dissolved. His
tragic experiences at the siege of Sebastopol helped
him to comprehend the soul of the Russian nation
and its daily life. According to his first intentions,
the gigantic War and Peace was to be merely the
central panel of a series of epic frescoes, in which
the poem of Russia should be developed from Peter
the Great to the Decembrist.[2]
- ↑ The two first parts of War and Peace appeared in 1865-66 under the title The Year 1805.
- ↑ Tolstoy commenced this work in 1863 by The Decembrists, of which he wrote three fragments. But he saw that the foundations of his plan were not sufficiently assured, and going further back, to the period of the Napoleonic Wars, he wrote War and Peace. Publication was commenced in the Rousski Viestnik of January, 1865; the sixth volume was completed in the autumn of 1869. Then Tolstoy ascended the
And in June, 1863, he notes in his diary:
“I am reading Goethe, and many ideas are coming to life within me.”
In the spring of 1863 Tolstoy was re-reading Goethe, and wrote of Faust as “the poetry of the world of thought; the poetry which expresses that which can be expressed by no other art.”
Later he sacrificed Goethe, as he did Shakespeare, to his God. But he remained faithful in his admiration of Homer. In August, 1857, he was reading, with equal zest, the Iliad and the Bible. In one of his latest works, the pamphlet attacking Shakespeare (1903), it is Homer that he opposes to Shakespeare as an example of sincerity, balance, and true art.
