This summer on my way to work, I found something just for me in a box of cast-off books on a sidewalk in downtown Northampton: a biography of Tolstoy by Henri Troyat published in 1967 and translated from the original French by Nancy Amphoux. A clipping with a photo of Troyat and his bio was inside the book—probably this was taken from the original dust jacket. Troyat was a Russian-born French novelist and biographer. He died in 2007.
I found something even cooler inside: a yellowed and fragile New York Times Book Review clipping, from April 2, 1978: a list of the books that Tolstoy was most impressed by, organized by the age at which he read them. Gold for this wannabe Tolstoy scholar. I have reproduced it here. Isn’t it tempting to create a list like this for oneself?
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“Tolstoy Was Impressed”
The following list was provided by Leo Tolstoy to a Petersburg publisher who had asked Tolstoy and many other famous people for the books that had most influenced them. It was Tolstoy’s idea to divide the list into phases of his life. The list was attached to a letter written from Yasnaya Polyana on Oct. 25, 1891 [he was 63 years old] and appears in “Tolstoy’s Letters,” edited by R. F. Christian, which will be published by Scribner’s next month.
WORKS WHICH MADE AN IMPRESSION
Childhood to the age of 14 or so
The story of Joseph from the Bible Enormous
Tales from The Thousand and One Nights: the 40 Thieves, Prince Qam-al-Zaman Great
The Little Black Hen by Pogorelsky V. great
Russian byliny: Dobrynya Nikitich, Ilya Muromets, Alyosha Popovich. Folk Tales Enormous
Puskin’s poems: Napoleon Great
Age 14 to 20
Matthew’s Gospel: Sermon on the Mount Enormous
Sterne’s Sentimental Journey V. great
Rousseau: Confessions Enormous
Emile Enormous
Nouvelle Héloise V. great
Puskin’s Yevgeny Onegin V. great
Schiller’s Die Räuber V. great
Gogol’s Overcoat, The Two Ivans, Nevsky Prospect Great
Viy [a story by Gogol] Enormous
Dead Souls V. great
Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches V. great
Druzhinin’s Polinka Sachs V. great
Grigorovich’s The Hapless Anton V. great
Dickens’ David Copperfield Enormous
Lermontov’s A Hero for our Time, Taman V. great
Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico Great
Age 20 to 35
Goethe. Hermann and Dorothea V. great
Victor Hugo. Notre Dame de Paris V. great
Tyutchev’s poems Great
Koltsov’s poems Great
The Odyssey and The Iliad (read in Russian) Great
Fet’s poems Great
Plato’s Phaedo and Symposium (in Cousin’s translation) Great
Age 35 to 50
The Odyssey and The Iliad (in Greek) V. great
The byliny V. great
Victor Hugo. Les Misérables Enormous
Xenophon’s Anabasis V. great
Mrs. [Henry] Wood. Novels Great
George Eliot. Novels Great
Trollope, Novels Great
Age 50 to 63
All the Gospels in Greek Enormous
Book of Genesis (in Hebrew) V. great
Henry George. Progress and Poverty V. great
[Theodore] Parker. Discourse on religious subject Great
[Frederick William] Robertson’s sermons Great
Feuerback (I forget the title; work on Christianity) [“The Essence of Christianity”] Great
Pascal’s Pensées Enormous
Epictetus Enormous
Confucius and Mencius V. great
On the Buddha. Well-known Frenchman (I forget) [“Lalita Vistara”] Enormous
Lao-Tzu. Julien [S. Julien, French translator] Enormous
