The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Anna Karenina

A Calendar of Wisdom

Schopenhauer, Arthur: The World as Will and Representation

Tolstoy, who among European writers of the nineteenth century probably had the widest access to all sectors of his society, was able to stock War and Peace with an enormous cast of characters and range of situations.

The novel's outside world, if well enough created, does live on, when you look at the world of Jane Austen, Flaubert, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Proust! They're indelible. War and Peace is not only real to today's reader, it will outlast him too.

The play that Luisa Capetillo wrote in 1909, Influencias de las ideas modernas (The Influence of Modern Ideas), published in San Juan in 1916, was inspired by Tolstoy's philosophy and included a main character who resembled him.

Tolstoy was an advocate of non-resistance only because he was protected from people's impudence by his innumerable friends. One man can stand for non-resistance, because those who stand for resistance will protect him. You will not be able to do without resistance advocates.

If I could kill him and create a new person exactly the same as he is now, I would do so happily.

The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past. His work is often an attempt to come to terms with 'the thing that has been', a struggle, as it were, to sensitively register his encounter with history, his people's history. And the novelist, at his best, must feel himself heir to a continuous tradition. He must feel himself, as I think Tolstoy did in War and Peace or Sholokov in And Quiet Flows the Don, swimming, struggling, defining himself, in the mainstream of his people's historical drama.