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Leo Tolstoy: Colour photographic portrait, 1908Colour photographic portrait, 1908Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii; cropped reproduction · Public domain

412 collected words

Leo Tolstoy

Life dates: 1828 AD — 1910 AD

Tolstoy’s scenes give memorable ideas to an atmosphere or a speaker. Read the Rostov celebration and Pierre’s encounter with a Mason in the Maude translation, keeping their voices distinct from direct authorial advice.

▷ Play this voiceSearch these words ↗Place in time ↗lovetruthjusticelifeknowledgehappinesspeacenature

Life and writing

The catalogue identifies Leo Tolstoy and gives his lifetime as 1828–1910. It names Aylmer Maude and Louise Maude as translators of this English reading edition. The linked text confirms their translation credit and organises the narrative into books with historical year labels. Those labels locate the fictional setting; they do not date the archive extracts. An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger receive digital credits. The checked record does not identify its underlying print publisher, and the catalogue HTML ISBN belongs to this electronic edition rather than an original Russian printing.

Book Four, Chapter XI gives the atmosphere of the Rostov holiday gathering a voice urging happiness and love. It is the spirit of the place in the narrator’s description, not a sentence spoken directly by Tolstoy to the reader. Book Five, Chapter II places the image of truth built stone by stone in a Mason’s conversation with Pierre, within a religious argument. Both complete selected English extracts match the linked Maude translation under limited normalization. Neither match independently authenticates other Tolstoy-labelled records or proves their original translation history.

Reading this voice

Read Book Four, Chapter XI beside Book Five, Chapter II. Separate the voice given to a festive atmosphere from the Mason’s religious address to Pierre. The complete selected English extracts match the Maude text under punctuation, case and spacing comparison. These scenes supply local context, not a universal instruction or a claim that every archive translation used this edition.

Subjects to explore

lovetruthcooperationfaith

Words to begin with

Profile sources and editorial notes

Agent-assisted editorial profile, updated 2026-10-05. A human reviewer is not recorded. Biographical context does not independently authenticate every quotation attributed to this person.

  • Project Gutenberg catalogue — War and Peace ↗

    Checked identity/lifetime, specific digital edition, any supplied HTML ISBN and US-public-domain basis. Automatic synopsis and digital dates do not establish quotation wording or composition dates. Checked 2026-10-05.

  • Checked related reading — War and Peace ↗

    Complete selected English extracts, adjacent speaker/context and available edition credits checked. Limited normalization; no whole-corpus authentication or human review. Checked 2026-10-05.

Quotations and sayings

05c. 1869 AD
It was long before I could believe that human learning had no clear answer to this question. For a long time it seemed to me, as I listened to the gravity and seriousness wherewith Science affirmed its positions on matters unconnected with the problem of life, that I must have misunderstood something. For a long time I was timid in the presence in learning, and I fancied that the insufficiency of the answers which I received was not its fault, but was owing to my own gross ignorance, but this thing was not a joke or a pastime with me, but the business of my life, and I was at last forced, willy-nilly, to the conclusion that these questions of mine were the only legitimate questions underlying all knowledge, and that it was not I that was in fault in putting them, but science in pretending to have an answer for them.
Leo Tolstoy / quote
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09c. 1869 AD
But in the depths of his heart, the older he became, and the more intimately he knew his brother, the more and more frequently the thought struck him that this faculty of working for the public good, of which he felt himself utterly devoid, was possibly not so much a quality as a lack of something --not a lack of good, honest, noble desires and tastes, but a lack of vital force, of what is called heart, of that impulse which drives a man to choose someone out of the innumerable paths of life, and to care only for that one. The better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who worked for the public welfare, were not led by an impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this generalization by observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a new machine.
Leo Tolstoy / quote
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12c. 1869 AD
He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better), but from his being shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog yelping with pain. He knew that his sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them
Leo Tolstoy / quote
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17c. 1869 AD
Rostov kept thinking about that brilliant feat of his, which, to his surprise, had gained him the St. George Cross and even given him the reputation of a brave man - and there was something in it that he was unable to understand. "So they're even more afraid than we are!" he thought. "So that's all there is to so-called heroism? And did I really do it for the fatherland? And what harm had he done, with his dimple and his light blue eyes? But how frightened he was! He thought I'd kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand faltered. And they gave me the St. George Cross. I understand nothing, nothing!
Leo Tolstoy / quote
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