Volume 25, Number 11 · June 29, 1978
Tolstoy in Doubt
By Aileen Kelly
Tolstoy's Letters: Volume I, 1828-1879; Volume II, 1880-1910
selected, edited, and translated by R. F. Christian
Scribner's, 737 pp., $35.00
Thus Tolstoy wrote in 1885, in one of the long and bitter letters to his wife in which he sought to explain the appalling suffering which they had caused each other since his spiritual crisis of the 1870s. Their misery was all due, he believed, to one fatal mistake: she had succumbed to 'the general opinion that a literary artist…should write works of art, and not think about his life or improve it, and that all that is a kind of folly or mental illness.'
Review, 5728 words
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