The most interesting thing that has happened to me since I last wrote is reading War and Peace. . . . It has completely changed my view of novels.
Hitherto I had always looked on them as rather a dangerous form—I mean dangerous to the health of literature on the whole. I thought that the strong ‘narrative lust’—the passionate itch to ‘see what happened in the end’—which novels aroused, necessarily injured the taste for other, better, but less irresistible, forms of literary pleasure: and that growth of novel reading largely explained the deplorable division of readers into low-brow and high-brow—the low-brow being simply those who had learned to expect from books this ‘narrative lust,’ from the time they began to read, and who had thus destroyed in advance their possible taste for better things. . . .
Tolstoy, in this book, has changed all that.
Letter to Arthur Greeves, March 29, 1931