Tolstoy's Fifty Influential Books

[Extollager]

It's nonsense that the list was only available... yada yada. I have had the list since I got the two-volume set of Tolstoy's Letters around 40 years ago.

But thought not so very rare, it is, still, an interesting list.

Leo Tolstoy Creates a List of the 50+ Books That Influenced Him Most (1891) | Open Culture

I mean to read one of the items on it, Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, as soon as my two vols. thereof arrive.

 

[Boaz]

A real mixture of fiction, nonfiction, religion, philosophy...

 

[hitmouse]

Nice to know he liked George Elliott and Anthony Trollope.

 

[Extollager]

It's delightful to see the items by Dickens and Gogol too & to have read them & relished them. Gogol's Dead Souls in the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation is one of a handful of things I've read that have had me almost gasping with mirth. (In case anyone didn't know -- the title shouldn't suggest at all something grim, morbid, dreary; the novel, or anyway the Part One that's the bulk of it & the only Part he finished) is a masterpiece about a conman in rural Russia.

It's interesting that Dostoevsky doesn't make the list.