Tolstoy’s diaries greatly exceed in length and scope those of any other Russian author. They are usually divided into two categories. The diaries proper are written for the most part in exercise books, and are dated chronologically. The so-called ‘notebooks’ consist of various kinds of scribbling pads, desk calendars and loose sheets of paper, some dated, some not. Some notebooks are virtually identical with diaries in the normal sense and contain entries, usually dated, for periods when Tolstoy did not keep a regular diary. Others contain random notes and observations, lists of popular expressions and a variety of ephemeral matter. Others again, especially those of the last twenty years of his life, were essentially first drafts of what were later to become entries in his diary proper. Tolstoy’s diaries and notebooks taken together occupy thirteen volumes of the ninety-volume Soviet edition of his works (the Jubilee Edition 1928–58), and it is most unlikely that they will ever be translated in full. For the purposes of this edition I have confined myself almost entirely to the diaries proper, and have only very occasionally included an extract from a noteboook or sheet of paper where the content seemed to justify it. When this has been done, I have indicated it in a footnote.
Tolstoy’s diaries span a period of sixty-three years. The first entry is dated 17 March 1847, when Tolstoy was aged eighteen and a student at Kazan University. The last entry was written on 3 November 1910, as he lay dying at the railway station at Astapovo. There are unfortunately considerable gaps in the record, of which the first is the three-year period from June 1847 to June 1850. It was once argued that Tolstoy had destroyed his diaries for these years, but there is no evidence to support this contention and it is no longer seriously maintained. For the period 1850 to 1865 Tolstoy kept his diary fairly regularly in the sense that there are at least some entries for every year, but those for the late 1850s and early 1860s are comparatively short. Then there is a gap of thirteen years from 1865 to 1878 when Tolstoy was wholly absorbed in writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina – in some respects surrogate diaries – while from 1878 to 1888 there are relatively few entries except for two sustained six-month periods in 1881 and 1884. From 1888 to 1910 Tolstoy kept his diary regularly and the older he grew the longer it became. Roughly speaking, one half of it covers the period up to 1894 when Tolstoy was already sixty-six, while the other half is devoted to the last sixteen years of his life when his greatest literary achievements were behind him and his writing became increasingly didactic and moralistic. I have deliberately included a higher proportion of what he wrote in his younger days, but even so the balance of any selection must inevitably be weighted towards the years of his decline as an artist and his rapidly growing reputation as a moral and spiritual guide.
To translate all Tolstoy’s diaries into English would be a daunting task, and it is not surprising that it has never been undertaken. A beginning was made in 1917 with The Diaries of Leo Tolstoy. Youth, 1847–1852, translated from the Russian by C. J. Hogarth and A. Sirnis. It was an unsatisfactory beginning, and the book has long been out of print. The year 1917 also saw the appearance of The Journal of Leo Tolstoy; First Volume, 1895–1899, translated by Rose Strunsky, but this translation also left much to be desired, and there was no second volume. Ten years later Louise and Aylmer Maude published The Private Diary of Leo Tolstoy, 1853–1857, a vast improvement over any previous translation of any portion of the diaries, but despite their great experience and intimate knowledge of Tolstoy and his family they were unable to avoid some errors in deciphering the manuscripts, while certain passages were omitted for reasons of propriety. Finally the fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death in 1960 was marked by the publication in America of The Last Diaries of Leo Tolstoy, translated by Lydia Weston-Kesich, an accurate translation but confined to the year 1910. With the exception of Strunsky’s unsatisfactory version there are no English translations in whole or part of the years between 1857 and 1909, although individual entries have of course been quoted in English by biographers with access to Russian sources.
After publishing my edition of Tolstoy’s letters in 1978, the Athlone Press invited me to produce a companion edition of his diaries, also in two volumes and of roughly comparable length. My choice of what to include was made first of all on the basis of a careful reading of volumes 46–58 of the Jubilee Edition of Tolstoy’s works. I then compared the passages I had chosen with the choice made in volumes 19 and 20 of the more recent edition of N. N. Akopova and others, Moscow, 1965, and made a number of changes in order to reduce the amount of my own material and make it approximate more closely to their judicious and carefully balanced selection, while retaining certain passages of a politically sensitive or indelicate nature, as well as entries which present Tolstoy in a less than favourable light and which for that reason are sometimes conveniently overlooked. In making my selection I followed the same general principles as I followed when preparing my edition of Tolstoy’s letters. First of all I chose passages to do with Tolstoy the writer, his views about his own works and the works of other writers; secondly – those which concerned Tolstoy the thinker in a broader sense and expressed his attitude to the times he lived in, contemporary social problems, rural life, industrialisation, education, and more especially in later life, religious and spiritual questions; and thirdly – those which recorded the main stages of his biography, his relations with his family and friends, and the growth and development of his own personality. When introducing Tolstoy’s letters I expressed the hope that my work would stimulate others to produce a comparable edition of his diaries. I never imagined that the task would fall to me!
Tolstoy’s diaries are an invaluable mine of information about his life and thought, his restless, complex, contradictory nature and his unrelenting quest for ‘self-improvement’ and a rational answer to the question of the purpose of existence. They are the fullest and frankest record of his dissolute bachelor days, his eventful career as a soldier, his first, faltering steps as a writer, his disoriented years divided between the capital cities and his country estate, his hesitant and fruitless courtship of Valeriya Arsenyeva, his travels in Europe, and his eventual wooing and winning of Sofya Behrs. They are an indispensable source (together with the diaries of his wife) for the story of a most exceptional marriage, and they record his considered thoughts and ill-considered prejudices on the great variety of subjects to which he applied his powerful and unorthodox mind. They are the germ out of which his earliest ‘fiction’ grew, and although they tell us disappointingly little about his two great masterpieces, they reveal a lot about his literary tastes and practices. They cannot by any stretch of imagination be called works of literature. The language in which they are written is decidedly unpolished, at times ponderous and repetitive, at times laconic and abrupt. The syntax can be awkward and involved, the grammar not impeccable. The diaries abound in abbreviations, misspellings and lapses of the pen. The punctuation is unorthodox. The handwriting defies description. To charges of stylistic inelegance, Tolstoy would certainly have replied that he was only concerned with what he wished to say, not how he said it, and that he was not writing with one eye on the public (not, at least, until very late in life). It does not follow, however, that the form is always redeemed by the content. It would be foolish to pretend that there are not many trivial and tedious entries, or that the thoughts which take up a disproportionate amount of space in later years have not been more cogently expressed in one or other of his numerous books and articles. Nevertheless the diaries are an unparalleled record of the stages of development of a unique personality. Tolstoy himself attached the greatest importance to them. He often referred not merely to the pleasure he got from reading and rereading them, but also to their significance for understanding him. Towards the end of his life he frankly acknowledged ‘The diaries are me’. They are the story of his life told by himself and when read consecutively they reveal the process of his evolution as no other document can do.
The Honourable Gwendolyn Fairfax once remarked to Miss Cecily Cardew: ‘I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.’ If not sensational, the first entry in Tolstoy’s diary was sufficiently unusual for parts of it to be omitted from Hogarth’s translation, being written at the age of eighteen in a university clinic where Tolstoy was recovering from venereal disease, and it immediately strikes a note of candour and self-preoccupation. At this stage of his life Tolstoy had no audience in mind except himself and there is no reason to doubt the truthfulness of what he wrote. He began by asking himself what his motives were for keeping a diary at all and acknowledged that one comprehensive purpose was to monitor the development of his faculties, draw up tables of rules for cultivating those faculties and define the nature and scope of his future activities. One of his first rules for developing his intellectual faculties was to evaluate and make extracts from important books he was reading, and since as a young law student at Kazan University he had been set the task of comparing Catherine the Great’s Instructions to the commission charged with preparing a new Code of Laws with Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois, it seemed appropriate for him to record in his diary his views about the Empress’s manifesto. I have included these ponderous and unremarkable views at some length as an illustration of Tolstoy’s mental processes as a second-year undergraduate. In addition to registering the growth and development of his faculties, his diaries were also intended to record his frequent dissatisfaction with himself, his many falls from grace and subsequent remorse and his constant striving towards moral self-improvement. It is Tolstoy himself and not the world about him that is the centre of attention of these early entries, and the picture which emerges from them is of a young man over-addicted to self-analysis and self-reproach, vain, egotistical, prone to show off, lazy, irresolute, fond of gambling and abnormally sensual. He is convinced that he is ‘a remarkable person’, an exception. At the same time he recognises that he must be a difficult, even an ‘unbearable’ man, hard to get on with, difficult to understand, ‘somehow unlovable’, for all the love he claims to feel towards other people. He desperately wants to be loved, to be accepted, to earn the praise of his fellow men, while being at the same time uneasily aware of his superiority over them. On at least one occasion he admits to wishing to ‘influence other people’s happiness’, to be useful to them, but for the most part it is his own personality, its shortcomings and the need to remedy them that are his main preoccupation. As well as tabulating his weaknesses, the early diaries contain some succinct generalisations about life and death, religion and various aspects of human behaviour – as, for example, that ‘the most offensive form of egoism is self-sacrifice’ or ‘unhappiness makes man virtuous, happiness makes him vicious’. They also include observations on the books he is reading and occasional extracts from literary or philosophical works which have impressed him. Having moved to the Caucasus in 1851 he begins to record details of army life, military actions and the officers and men with whom he lived. His entries become more self-consciously literary and he confesses to wishing to use his diaries ‘to form his style’, to serve in fact as trials of the pen. He seems now at times to be writing with an imaginary audience in mind and to be drafting out material which will form the basis of short stories firmly grounded in his own experience. ‘I’ll try and sketch Knoring’s portrait’, he writes of an officer colleague, adding significantly that ‘it’s impossible to describe a man, but it is possible to describe the effect he has on me’. His thumb-nail sketch of the Cossack Mark (10 August 1851) is another example of Tolstoy feeling his way as an aspiring author – and incidentally an illustration of the fact that writing did not come easily to him, as witness the phrase ‘he completely satisfied the requirements of the posture of a man sitting down’! He tried his hand too at natural descriptions and recorded conversations which would reappear in revised form in his earliest fiction. He painstakingly formulated generalisations on human virtues and vices – on courage, for example, or cowardice – and on national characteristics. He also made notes about his literary plans and outlined the ideas for his early Caucasian stories and his first major work of fiction Childhood. It was in his diaries that he spoke for the first time about his love of history, his wish ‘to compile a true, accurate history of Europe’, and the need of the historian to explain every historical fact in human terms. Tolstoy never realised his characteristically unrealisable ambition as a historian, but his extensive historical reading and his overriding concern with the role of the individual in the historical process provided much of the stimulus to write a full-scale novel on a major historical theme.
Scattered throughout the early diaries are numerous obiter dicta about writers and works of literature – interesting more for what they tell us about Tolstoy than about the authors themselves. They include references to Pushkin, Lermontov, Griboyedov, Turgenev, Pisemsky and Ostrovsky, as well as Rousseau, Balzac and George Sand, Goethe and Schiller, Dickens and Thackeray. They confirm his belief in the moral purpose of literature; they venture the opinion – welcome for him – that in contemporary works of fiction interest in the details of feelings is replacing interest in events themselves; and they reveal that it is the character and personality of an author as reflected in what he writes that interests him most as a reader. They also contain, incidentally, some unflattering remarks about women authors which ill accord with his later admration for George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Mrs Henry Wood and others.
At this early stage in Tolstoy’s life one already finds in his diaries an anti-militaristic strain, a tendency to venerate the common people at the expense of his own class of society and on orientation towards the practical and the useful which are such typical features of the mature Tolstoy – whether in his resolve to edit a journal to propagate morally useful writings or his desire to found a religion ‘purged of faith and mystery, a practical religion which does not promise a future bliss but provides bliss on earth’. It was also becoming clear to him that literature was to be his true vocation; ‘literary fame’, as he expressed it, ‘and the good which I can do by my writing’.
His writing, however, did not immediately prosper after his return to St Petersburg in 1856, and the next few years until his marriage in 1862 were difficult and unsettled ones, punctuated by travels in Western Europe, estate management and educational experiments at home, and the determination to find a wife before it was too late. His diaries give a clear, if incomplete, picture of his mental and spiritual development during his late twenties and early thirties, and I drew on them extensively when constructing a picture of this period of his life in an earlier book on Tolstoy.* As I said there, although he moved in the circles of the Moscow and Petersburg intelligentsia he was not himself an ‘intellectual’, and while he had certain convictions and beliefs, they did not tally with any recognisable conservative, liberal or radical viewpoint. His views altered with the company he kept. He liked upsetting other people’s convictions. Although hostile to ‘progress’ in the sense of industrialisation, capitalist expansion or the building of railways, and to a system of priorities which put telegraphs, roads and ships before literature, he criticised the Slavophiles for their backwardness and expressed the fear that he might himself lag behind his age. Indifferent or hostile to constitutional government and unimpressed by what he saw of parliamentary democracy in the West, he noted that ‘all governments are alike in their extent of good and evil: the best ideal is anarchy’. Nationalism he regarded as ‘a unique obstacle to the development of freedom’, although he had his moments of jingoism during the Crimean War and again during the Polish insurrection of 1863. Contemptuous of aristocratic privilege and indolence, he could also write, in a positive sense: ‘Aristocratic feeling is worth a lot.’ Congenitally hostile to the dogmas of Orthodoxy, he still classed himself as a believer and found inspiration, though not rational satisfaction, in the ritual of the Orthodox Church. ‘The nearness to death’, he wrote, ‘is the best argument for faith … Better to accept the old, time-honoured, comforting and childishly simple [faith]. This is not rational, but you feel it.’ Instinct and intuition counted for much with him. His powerful mind seemed able to demolish any logical theory, but only to throw him back on irrational hunches, faith, or the activity of the heart which by their very nature defy logic. Elsewhere he confessed to himself, ‘The sort of mind which I have and which I like in others is the sort which does not believe in any theory …’ Caught between the Scylla of faith and the Charybdis of reason, he lived in a state of constant turmoil, unsure of himself and deeply suspicious of people who subscribed to any man-made philosophy. It was bad enough, no doubt, to have to believe in God when all your reason revolted against it; but it was much better than believing in Chernyshevsky.
The single most important event in Tolstoy’s life was his marrige to Sofya Behrs in 1862, the prelude to, and immediate aftermath of which are recorded in his diary for that year. On the one hand his wife brought him a sense of stability which he had not previously known and created an atmosphere in which he could work with the maximum encouragement and support; on the other hand her strong personality and quick temper, and the fact that her views on many fundamental issues differed widely from his own led to increasing friction and animosity as time went by and his attitudes became more extreme. Shortly before he was married Tolstoy gave his fiancée his bachelor diaries to read and the shock which she – a sheltered girl of eighteen – experienced on learning about his sexual promiscuity was one from which she never perhaps fully recovered. Both husband and wife had recourse to their diaries at times of bitterness and tension. Each had access to what the other wrote and both said things which they bitterly regretted afterwards. ‘She will remain a mill-stone round my neck and round the children’s until I die,’ he wrote in 1884. On another occasion he wrote that it was fortunate for his daughter Masha that her mother did not love her, while his son Seryozha is described as having ‘the same castrated mind’ as his mother. Needless to say, these were uncontrollable outbursts which later caused him great remorse. ‘Some three days ago,’ he observed in 1894, ‘I read through my diary for 1884 and was disgusted with myself for my unkindness and the cruelty of my opinions about Sonya and Seryozha. Let them know that I take back all the unkind things I said about them.’ The following year he wrote ‘When reading through my diary I found a passage – there were several of them – where I repudiate those angry words which I wrote about her. These words were written at moments of exasperation. I now repeat this once more for the sake of everybody who should come across these diaries [Tolstoy’s underlining]. I was often exasperated with her because of her hasty, inconsiderate temper, but, as Fet used to say, every husband gets the wife he needs. She was – and I can see now in what way – the wife I needed. She was the ideal wife in a pagan sense, in the sense of loyalty, domesticity, self-denial, love of family – pagan love – and she has the potential to become a Christian friend.’ Likewise his wife had occasion to regret her more intemperate utterances – provoked by Tolstoy’s absurd jealousy of the composer Taneyev she once allegedly shouted at him ‘you’re evil, you’re a beast’ – although she did not actually repudiate them in writing in the same way as her husband. A reading of both their diaries is absolutely essential to an understanding of their long, loving, but at times unhappy and turbulent marriage; yet considerable allowance must be made for the fact that both partners often wrote in moments of anger or depression, and that when things were running smoothly as they often were, they seldom found the need to say so.
From the early 1880s onwards, after Tolstoy’s so-called ‘conversion’, his diaries came to be used more and more as a vehicle for his religious, moral and social philosophy, and to include raw material which was subsequently processed into articles, letters and even works of fiction. Towards the end of his life they were written in the knowledge that they would be read outside the family (at times, indeed, in the hope that they would be) and increasingly they became the subject of bitter family altercations, especially with the appearance on the scene of Tolstoy’s dedicated, but dictatorial disciple Vladimir Chertkov. The story of the struggle for their possession and publication and the bitterness it created between those most closely involved – Tolstoy and his wife, their daughter Alexandra and Chertkov – has been told many times. Every entry made was certain to become public property, if not immediately, at least in the not very distant future, not excluding the so-called ‘secret diary’ of 1908 and the ‘diary for myself alone’ of 1910. In the circumstances it is not surprising that the more intimate side of Tolstoy’s life is less in evidence – though frank enough when it is – and that the prevailing tone of the later diaries is pedagogical and moralistic. The constant harping on certain themes is bound to be tedious at times, but that does not mean that there are not many shrewd observations on a wide range of subjects of universal interest. There are, for example, some pertinent remarks on social and political theories, some of which have not been widely circulated in the Soviet Union. ‘It doesn’t follow,’ he wrote, ‘that, as Marx says, capitalism leads to socialism. Perhaps it will do, but only to socialism by force.’ And again: ‘Even if what Marx predicts were to happen, then the only thing that would happen would be that despotism would be transferred. Now the capitalists are in power, then the workers’ bosses would be in power.’ The argument that the end justifies the means never weighed in the least with Tolstoy. Indeed on one occasion he referred disparagingly to what he called ‘the socialist, Marxist idea that if you do something wrong for a very long time it will come right of itself’. His views on economics were concerned primarily with an answer to the question of the ownership and redistribution of land, and he believed that it was to be found in the writings of the American economist Henry George and in his Single Tax system. The most important factor in the economic equation for him was the agricultural labourer, but no economic or political changes, he reiterated, could be of lasting value as long as people remained the same. Only religion, he belived, had the power to transform people’s lives and eliminate the need, inherent in all political systems, for a quite unacceptable degree of coercion. His views on religion take up many pages of his later diaries, especially his insistence on religion as a moral code of practice, whether sanctioned by Christ or by one of the Eastern faiths to which he became increasingly attracted. His diaries reveal that he was a most unorthodox Christian and in one entry he went so far as to write: ‘Read an interesting book about Christ never having existed, that it was a myth. There is as much to be said for the likelihood that this is true as there is against.’ What one believed, however, or which of the great religious teachers of the world one turned to for support, was ultimately less important than how one lived. There was no reason why a Christian should live a better life than, say, a Hindu; but Tolstoy for his part found that the essence of Christ’s teaching as he interpreted it, especially its emphasis on turning the other cheek, non-resistance to evil by force, loving one’s neighbour and forgiving one’s enemies, provided him with the best prescription for a happy and worthwhile life – if only he could follow it! Another theme which constantly recurs in the diaries is that of the meaning and purpose of art, an activity which he, like many other people, regarded as essentially the expression and communication of feelings. But, more than most people, he was acutely aware of the power of art – its power for evil as well as good – and therefore the nature and quality of the feelings communicated by the artist must be the paramount considerations, and what was good art must ultimately be a question of ethics, not aesthetics; a quasi-religious activity with a clear moral purpose. Tolstoy’s attitude to art as a necessary ingredient in his recipe for the moral and spiritual progress of mankind obviously conditioned his views about what he was reading and what he would write. Of course in later life he never wrote anything to compare artistically with War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but he did continue to produce stories, plays and one major novel which are still widely read all over the world today. There are many references in the diaries of the last two decades of his life to Resurrection, Hadji Murat, The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergey and The Fruits of Enlightenment and also to many other minor works. They include draft plans and modifications to them, as well as various seemingly trivial details which are nevertheless important to the student of Tolstoy’s literary methods and practices. He also confided to his diaries some terse, laconic pronouncements about his fellow authors, especially Russian, which, although influenced naturally enough by his general philosophy of art, were often shrewd. He praised Gorky for his great talent and knowledge of the people, but did not admire him as a psychologist and found his attribution of heroic thoughts and feelings to his characters arbitrary and exaggerated. Gogol had, in his opinion, ‘an enormous talent, a wonderful heart and a weak, i.e. unadventurous, timid mind’. He acknowledged that Chekhov, like Pushkin, had made important advances in form and was enthusiastic about some of his short stories, but was disappointed by what he saw as a lack of content, more particularly in his plays. He found much to admire in The Brothers Karamazov, especially the Grand Inquisitor legend and the Father Zosima episode, but criticised Dostoyevsky for his ‘slipshod manner of writing’ and ‘unnatural conversations’. Of Andreyev he said: ‘His denominator is disproportionately big compared with his numerator.’ Of Bernard Shaw – ‘He has got more brains than is good for him’!
If Tolstoy’s observations about his fellow writers are unlikely to give offence, the same is not true of some of the derogatory things he said about women. ‘For seventy years,’ he wrote in 1899, ‘I have been lowering my opinion of women more and more, and I need to lower it still further.’ He also once admitted to finding it difficult to love a Jew, adding that he ‘must try hard’. But it is not so much his prejudices that dominate the diaries of his old age as the personal tragedy of a man who tried to live – and to love his neighbours – in an environment from which he was growing increasingly alienated, while continuing to be surrounded by a loving family and the veneration of men and women throughout the world. These diaries record his sense of loneliness and isolation, his anguish at being continually misunderstood and on numerous occasions his wish to die. ‘Living is dying,’ he wrote. ‘Try to die well.’ The tragic events of 1910, his wife’s hatred of Chertkov, her attempts at suicide and his own departure from home in the middle of the night make painful reading. The very last entry in his diary shortly before he lost consciousness, ends with the words: ‘Here is my plan. Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra [do what you must, come what may]. And all is for the good of others and above all for me.’ Perhaps significantly, the last word he wrote was – me.
In translating the diaries I have kept as closely as possible to the sense of the original, while smoothing over some of the syntactical roughnesses and correcting obvious slips of the pen. To facilitate reading I have inserted the first person pronoun in a number of contexts where Tolstoy omits it and I have also taken liberties with the punctuation. My transliteration system and general editorial policy follow the principles set out in the preface to my edition of Tolstoy’s letters. In a few cases, however, I have retranslated the titles of articles by Tolstoy, so that what was previously A Circle of Reading is now called A Cycle of Reading and The End of an Age has been renamed The End of the World. Letter to an Indian has been preferred to the earlier Letter to a Hindu, while the word zapiski has been con sistently translated as ‘notes’ instead of ‘memoirs’ in the stories The Notes of a Billiard Marker, The Notes of a Madman and The Posthumous Notes of Fyodor Kuzmich. The spelling of the Cossack village where Tolstoy was first stationed has been standardised as Starogladkovskaya (different variants exist), and I have regularly used the forms Vanechka and Kostenka (not Vanichka and Kostinka) where Tolstoy’s own spelling is erratic. I have used the hybrid combination Nicholas Pavlovich (not Nikolay Pavlovich) when the Tsar Nicholas I is referred to by Christian name and patronymic, but Nicholas in all other contexts. With newspaper titles I have kept the widely used Notes of the Fatherland to translate Otechestvenniye zapiski and have used The Herald of Europe for Vestnik Evropy and The Russian Herald for Russky vestnik. Sankt-Peterburgskiye vedomosti is rendered as either The St Petersburg Gazette or the Petersburg Gazette, depending on whether Tolstoy uses the full or abbreviated form. Versta (3,500 feet), arshin (28 inches) and vershok (1¾ inches) have not been translated. Dvoryanstvo has normally been translated as ‘gentry’, except in the standardised phrase ‘Marshal of the Nobility’. I have generally preferred to translate khudozhestvenny (artistic) as ‘literary’ or ‘fictional’ in a literary context; both ‘hunting’ and ‘shooting’ have been used to render okhota and its derivatives. Generally speaking, I have tried in my translations, as I did in the Letters, to recapture Tolstoy’s habit of repeating the same word rather than employing a synonym, and the observations I made in my preface to that edition are applicable to this one also.
The footnotes and critical apparatus are intended to be self-sufficient, but cross-references have been made to the Letters in cases where more detailed information might be desired, particularly where a person mentioned has a biographical entry in that edition as one of Tolstoy’s family circle or a frequent correspondent. The short narrative account of Tolstoy’s life, divided chronologically into periods, follows the same lines as the one originally written for the Letters.
I would like to express my gratitude to those members of the staff of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow who have assisted me on a number of occasions both personally and in correspondence, and in particular to Mrs Norma Porter who typed the manuscript with exemplary patience and accuracy.
St Andrews, 1984
R. F. Christian
* (Tolstoy: A critical introduction, 1969)