# Essays on Russian Novelists/Tolstoi

V
TOLSTOI
On the 6 September 1852, signed only with initials, appeared in a Russian periodical the first work of Count Leo Tolstoi—Childhood. By 1867, his name was just barely known outside of Russia, for in that year the American diplomat, Eugene Schuyler, in the preface to his translation of Fathers and Sons, said, "The success of Gogol brought out a large number of romance-writers, who abandoned all imitation of German, French, and English novelists, and have founded a truly national school of romance." Besides Turgenev, "easily their chief," he mentioned five Russian writers, all but one of whom are now unknown or forgotten in America. The second in his list was "the Count Tolstoi, a writer chiefly of military novels." During the seventies, the English scholar Ralston published in a review some paraphrases of Tolstoi, because, as he said, "Tolstoi will probably never be translated into English." To-day the works of Tolstoi are translated into forty-five languages, and in the original Russian the sales have gone into many millions. During the last ten years of his life he held an absolutely unchallenged position as ​the greatest living writer in the world, there being not a single contemporary worthy to be named in the same breath.
Tolstoi himself, at the end of the century, divided his life into four periods: the innocent, joyous, and poetic time of childhood, from earliest recollection up to the age of fourteen; the "terrible twenties," full of ambition, vanity, and licentiousness, lasting till his marriage at the age of thirty-four; the third period of eighteen years, when he was honest and pure in family life, but a thorough egoist; the fourth period, which he hoped would be the last, dating from his Christian conversion, and during which he tried to shape his life in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount.
He was born at Yasnaya Polyana, in south central Russia, not far from the birthplace of Turgenev, on the 28 August 1828. His mother died when he was a baby, his father when he was only nine. An aunt, to whom he was devotedly attached, and whom he called "Grandmother," had the main supervision of his education. In 1836 the family went to live at Moscow, where the boy formed that habit of omnivorous reading which characterised his whole life. Up to his fourteenth year, the books that chiefly influenced him were the Old ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/188 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/189 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/190 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/191 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/192 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/193 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/194 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/195 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/196 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/197 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/198 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/199 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/200 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/201 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/202 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/203 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/204 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/205 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/206 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/207 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/208 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/209 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/210 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/211 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/212 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/213 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/214 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/215 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/216 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/217 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/218 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/219 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/220 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/221 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/222 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/223 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/224 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/225 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/226 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/227 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/228 ​Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/229 ​Resurrection teaches directly what Tolstoi always taught—what he taught less directly, but with even greater art, in Anna Karenina.
In reading this work of his old age, we cannot help thinking of what Carlyle said of the octogenarian Goethe: "See how in that great mind, beaming in mildest mellow splendour, beaming, if also trembling, like a great sun on the verge of the horizon, near now to its long farewell, all these things were illuminated and illustrated."