usly, that he never would do so, and clinched the bargain with
himself by selling the big manor-house at Yasnaya Polyana for
transportation and re-erection elsewhere. Between that date and 1888 he
had a family of fifteen[42] children, of whom seven are still alive.

In his very first efforts in literature we detect certain
characteristics which continue to distinguish him throughout his career,
and some of which, on attaining their legitimate and logical development
seem, to the ordinary reader, to be of extremely recent origin. In
"Childhood" and "Boyhood" ("Youth," the third section, was written late
in the '50's) we meet the same keen analysis which is a leading feature
in his later works, and in them is applied with such effect to women and
to the tender passion, neither of which elements enters into his early
works in any appreciable degree. He displays the most astounding genius
in detecting and understanding the most secret and trivial movements of
the human soul. In this respect his methods are those of a miniature
painter. Another point must be borne in mind in studying Tolstoy's
characters, that, unlike Turgeneff, who is almost exclusively objective,
Tolstoy is in the highest degree subjective, and has presented a study
of his own life and soul in almost every one of his works, in varying
degrees, and combined with widely varying elements. In the same way he
has made use of the spiritual and mental state of his relatives. For
example, who can fail to recognize a self-portrait from the life in
Levin ("Anna Karenin"), and in Prince Andrei Bolkonsky ("War and
Peace")? And the feminine characters in these great novels are either
simple or composite portraits of his nearest relations, while many of
the incidents in both novels are taken straight from their experience or
his own, or the two combined.

It is useless to catalogue his many works with their dates in this
place. Unquestionably the finest of them (despite the author's present
erroneous view, that they constitute a sin and a reproach to him) are
his magnificent "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenin." Curiously enough,
neither met with prompt or enthusiastic welcome in Russia when they
first made their appearance.[43] The public had grown used to the very
different methods of the other celebrated romance-writers of the '40's,
with whom we have already dealt. Gontcharoff had accustomed them to the
delineation of character by broad, sweeping strokes; Dostoevsky t