Leo Nikolaivich Tolstoy

Russian Author
1828-1910

Tolstoy read everything that came into his hands, and took notes on a wide variety of subjects. Ever precise, he drew up a list of his literary discoveries over the years, marking opposite each the degree of admiration it had aroused in him:

• The Gospel According to Matthew (immense influence)
• Sterne's Sentimental Voyage (very great influence)
• Rousseau's Confessions (immense influence) Emile (immense influence)
• La Nouvelle Heloise (very great influence)
• Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (very great influence)
• Schiller's The Robbers (very great influence)
• Gogol's The Overcoat, Ivan Ivanovich, The Nevsky Prospect (great influence)
  Vii (immense influence) Dead Souls (very great influence)
• Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches (very great influence)
• Druzhnin's Pauline Saks (very great influence)
• Grigorovich's Anton Goremyka (very great influence)
• Dickens's David Copperfield (immense influence)
• Lermontov's A Hero of Our Times (very great influence)
• Prescott's Conquest of Mexico (great influence)

Tolstoy's walls were decorated with stag-antlers brought back from the Caucasus, and the antlers of a stuffed reindeer-head served as his clothes hooks. Beside them hung portraits of Dickens, Schopenhauer, and Fet.

See Tolstoy: A Biographyby Henry Troyat