children even for a single day, and hastened back to them with rapture when the detaining business had been happily transacted. It was at this time of his life that an acquaintance said of him that he was laughing all day long.
But Tolstoi had other and more serious work during the long winter evenings. It was in the midst of this period of supreme domestic felicity that his two immortal masterpieces, “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” were composed.
“Voina i Mir” (“War and Peace”) was begun immediately after his marriage, under the happiest auspices, and was completed in five years. That such a stupendous work, a whole library in itself, should have been composed within such a comparatively short time is sufficiently surprising, but our surprise becomes amazement when we learn that the author actually transcribed its thousands of pages with his own hand seven times before he was satisfied with it. With the possible exception of Turgenev’s “Otsui i Dycti” (“Fathers and Sons”) five years earlier no other Russian book ever created such a sensation. Despite its obvious defects (defects far less discernible, however, in the original than the translations be they never so good), prolixity, an almost total absence of humour and a disposition to philosophize á la Schopenhauer, under whose fascination Tolstoi lay at that particular time,[1] “Voina i Mir” must ever
- ↑ On August 30th, 1869, Tolstoi wrote to a friend: “I have an indescribable enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, who has given me a succession of intellectual delights, the like of which I have never experienced before. I know not, of course, whether my opinions may
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