Word: tolstoys
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...never read for pleasure," said captious, craft-minded Novelist John P. (Women and Thomas Harrow) Marquond to the New York Herald Tribune. "I don't have time. If spare moments do occur, I read Dumas, Tolstoy and Trollope, in that order, with occasionally a little Conrad. Sometimes I read Fielding, but that's only when I'm alone in the evening and have three drinks inside me. Richardson? He requires more drinks...
...that they are encountering a formidable talent. But, as was the case with Proust and Joyce, his greatest impact may be on other writers-who have become increasingly dismayed at the possibility of finding anything to say in the "realistic" novel that has not already been said better by Tolstoy. Dostoevsky, Melville, Thackeray, Balzac...
...Copy for Tolstoy. Ségur was seldom far from the Emperor's side during the five fearful months that it took to unravel Napoleon's grand design. He was close enough to hear Napoleon exclaim as he came within sight of the Muscovite capital of logs and gilded domes: "So here at last is that famous city! It was high time!" The remark was used by Tolstoy in War and Peace; probably one of the original French editions of Ségur's journal (first in 1824) was before Tolstoy as he wrote his masterpiece...
...crisscrossed by searchlights and rocked by the thud of primitive bombs. Author Troyat, Russian-born but an adoptive Frenchman since his youth, writes out of a passionate love of France. His Pierre and Amelie in their simplicity and capacity for goodness seem closer to the gentle peasant folk of Tolstoy than the rapacious villagers of Balzac. Yet even Amelie loses innocence as the book progresses: she learns how to connive with petty officialdom so that she can visit Pierre in the forward areas; she discovers her own frailty in turning away the love of a young Spaniard; she shows ruthlessness...
...friends often seem to have stepped from the pages of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, with their doom writ large on their foreheads. There is Alexander, the perennial student, pompously lecturing the girls on the Hellenic past, and Madame Edlinsky. who likes Jews yet loves an anti-Semite. And there is the wide-horizoned land itself: "We knew without thinking that it was a great, rich country, and a great people. Evil was organized and directed, but the good sprang from the heart and mind of man, and ran like a river between its natural banks. The word 'duty...