independent will of his own. Such a system necessarily postulates the non-existence of separate human individuality, and, logically pursued, would make unconscious instinct the best, because the strongest force in nature. Even religion is discarded, because, as Tolstoi plainly perceived, religion strengthens the sense of individuality by making man self-conscious. This after all is “Die Welt in Wille und Vorstellung” in a nutshell. No wonder, then, if Tolstoi’s great contemporary, Dostoevsky, after reading “Voina i Mir,” put the book down with the simple remark: “The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.” Yet Tolstoi himself at a later day was to reject Schopenhauer’s philosophy as inadequate.
Tolstoi himself, at least while actually engaged upon the work, was not a little proud of “Voina i Mir.” “I regard all that I have printed hitherto,” he wrote to a friend, “as mere trial-work for my pen.” The first volume appeared in 1867, the last in 1869. The work of preparatory research tried Tolstoi severely. “You have no idea,” he wrote to Fet in November, ’69, “how difficult the initial labour of deep ploughing in the field where I am obliged to sow has been to me. . . . ‘Ars longa, vita brevis,’ I think to myself every day.”
After completing “Voina i Mir,” Tolstoi set about writing a romance of the age of Peter the Great, and began collecting and arranging his materials with his usual energy and conscientiousness. “Dear little Lev,” wrote his wife on this occasion, “is surrounded by piles of book, portraits, and pictures, and sits reading and writing and re-writing with puckered brows. In
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