CHIEF AUTHORITIES FOR CHAPTER XII
The literature that has grown up both in Russia and elsewhere round Tolstoy's earlier writings is so voluminous, that I can merely indicate a few of the best known works.
In English we have:
Matthew Arnold's essay: Count Leo Tolstoi in Essays in Criticism, Second Series: Macmillan and Co., London.
W. D. Howells has written several very readable and excellent essays on Tolstoy. I have unfortunately mislaid my note of them. If any American admirer of W. D. Howells will supply me with a list, I shall be glad to include it in any future edition of this work.
P. Kropotkin's Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature gives a very good idea of Tolstoy's general influence and relation to Russian life and literature generally.
In Russian:
Mihaylovsky's articles in his collected works are interesting.
N. Strahof's Krititcheskiya Statyi o Tourgeneve i Tolstom, Petersburg, 1895, is excellent.
V. Zelinsky's Rousskaya Krititcheskaya Literatoura o proizvedeniyakh L. N. Tolstovo (7 vols.) reprints a large collection of Russian criticisms on Tolstoy's works.
D. S. Merezhkovsky's Zhizn i tvortchestvo L. N. Tolstovo i Dostoyevskavo contains some acute literary criticism, but for all that relates to Tolstoy as a man, it is worse than useless. Merezhkovsky did not know Tolstoy personally when he wrote about him. He relied on the works of Behrs and Anna Seuron, and even that scrappy information he used unfairly. His talk about scents and fine linen, and in general his whole characterisation of Tolstoy, is spiteful, and to those who know the man attacked, it is merely ridiculous.