Tolstoi said of him:
“Gorky lacks a sense of proportion. He has a familiar style which is unpleasant.”
Tolstoi wrote a short preface to Von Polenz’s novel Der Büttnerbauer.
On that occasion he said:
“As I read the novel, I kept saying to myself: ‘Why did not you, you fool, write this novel?’—indeed, I know this world; and how very important it is to point out the poetry of peasant life! Men with their civilization will cut down this lime tree here, this forest; they will lay pavements and make houses with tall chimneys, and they will destroy the boundless beauty of natural life.”
On my asking him whether he had ever tried to write such a novel, Tolstoi said that he had done so several times long ago.
Tolstoi said of Grigorovich:
“He is now old-fashioned and seems feeble, but he is an important and remarkable writer, and God grant that Chekhov may be a tenth part as important as Grigorovich was. He belonged to the number of the best men who found an important movement. He has also many artistic merits. For instance, in the beginning of his Anton Goremika, when the old peasant comes home and gives his son or grandson a twig, it is a moving incident which depicts the old peasant as well as the simplicity and artlessness of his life.”
Of Turgenev, Tolstoi said:
“He was a typical representative of the men of the ’fifties—a radical in the best sense of the word. His struggle against serfdom is remarkable, and also his love for what he describes; for instance, the way he describes the old man in Old Portraits. And then there is his sensitiveness to the beauties of nature.”