As a translator I may testify that Tolstoy never fully learned the lesson Drouzhínin here set him, and that to the very last he continued occasionally to intermingle passages of extraordinary simplicity and force with sentences that defy analysis and abound in redundances. Nearly fifty years later Tolstoy himself criticised the subject-matter of _Childhood_, _Boyhood_, and _Youth_ as follows: I have re-read them and regret that I wrote them; so ill, artificially and insincerely are they penned. It could not be otherwise: first, because what I aimed at was not to write my own history but that of the friends of my youth, and this produced an awkward mixture of the facts of their and my own childhood; and secondly, because at the time I wrote it I was far from being independent in my way of expressing myself, being strongly influenced by two writers: Sterne (his _Sentimental Journey_) and Töpffer (his _Bibliothèque de Mon Oncle_). I am now specially dissatisfied with the two last parts. _Boyhood_ and _Youth_, in which besides an awkward mixture of truth and invention, there is also insincerity: a desire to put forward as good and important what I did not then consider good and important, namely, my democratic tendency. Before concluding this chapter it will be in place to give a list of books Tolstoy mentions as having influenced him after he left the University and before his marriage. They were: Goethe's _Hermann und Dorothea_; Hugo's _Notre Dame de Paris_; Plato's _Phaedo_ and _Symposium_ (in Cousin's French translation); and the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ in Russian versions. All these, he says, had a 'very great' influence on him, while the poems of his compatriots, Tútchef, Kóltsof, and his friend Fet, had 'great' influence. He tells us that artistic talent in literature influenced him more than any political or social tendency; and this is quite in accord both with his highly artistic nature and with his general apathy towards public affairs. There was a Slavophil theory (built to justify things as they were) which proclaimed it natural for a Slavonic people to leave the task of governing to its rulers, while retaining its intellectual freedom to disapprove of what was done amiss; and though Tolstoy never joined the Slavophils, this has been very much his own attitude on the matter. Even in early childhood he had appreciated some of Poúshkin's poems, such as _To the Sea_ and _To Napoleon_, and had learned them by heart and recited them with feeling; but curiously enough it was the perusal of Mérimée's French prose translation of Poúshkin's _Gipsies_ that, after he was grown up, aroused Tolstoy's keen admiration of Poúshkin's mastery of clear, simple, direct language. Later in life Tolstoy used to say that Poúshkin's prose stories, such as _The Captain's Daughter_, are his best works; but he never lost his appreciation of Poúshkin's power of expression in verse. In his Diary (4th January 1857) he wrote: