[Illustration: Portrait of Tolstoï] SEBASTOPOL BY COUNT LEO TOLSTOÏ _TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH_ BY FRANK D. MILLET WITH INTRODUCTION BY W. D. HOWELLS WITH PORTRAIT NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1887 Copyright, 1887, by HARPER & BROTHERS. _All rights reserved._ _LEO TOLSTOÏ._ When I read in the excellent essay of M. Ernest Dupuy that “Count Leo N. Tolstoï was born on the 28th of August, 1828, at Yasnaya Polyana, a village near Inla, in the government of Inla,” I have a sense of lunar remoteness in him. It is as if these geographical expressions were descriptive of localities in the ungazetteered regions of the moon; and yet this far-fetched Russian nobleman is precisely the human being with whom at this moment I find myself in the greatest intimacy; not because I know him, but because I know myself through him; because he has written more faithfully of the life common to all men, the universal life which is the most personal life, than any other author whom I have read. This merit the Russian novelists have each in some degree; Tolstoï has it in pre-eminent degree, and that is why the reading of “Peace and War,” “Anna Karenina,” “My Religion,” “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth,” “Scenes at the Siege of Sebastopol,” “The Cossacks,” “The Death of Ivan Illitch,” “Katia,” and “Polikouchka,” forms an epoch for thoughtful people. In these books you seem to come face to face with human nature for the first time in fiction. All other fiction at times _seems_ fiction; these alone seem the very truth always.