His attention, as we have already seen, was however not wholly absorbed by literature, but was divided between that and the management of his property. He had during his stay among the Kirghiz in the Province of Samára, noticed how extremely cheap and how fertile was the land in those parts. He therefore wished to purchase an estate there, and visited the district in the autumn of 1864, probably with that end in view. How long he stayed there I do not know, but from a letter he wrote to Fet on 7th October, saying, 'We start for home to-day and do not know how we shall make our way to happy Yásnaya,' we know when he returned. In November he again wrote to Fet, and mentioned the laborious preparations he was at that time making for _War and Peace_: I am in the dumps and am writing nothing, but work painfully. You cannot imagine how hard I find the preliminary work of ploughing deep the field in which I must sow. To consider and reconsider all that may happen to all the future characters in the very large work I am preparing, and to weigh millions of possible combinations in order to select from among them a millionth part, is terribly difficult. And that is what I am doing.... Late in that month he wrote again to Fet: This autumn I have written a good deal of my novel. _Ars longa, vita brevis_ comes to my mind every day. If one could but make time to accomplish a hundredth part of what one understands--but only a thousandth part gets done! Nevertheless the consciousness that _I can_ is what brings happiness to men of our sort. You know that feeling, and I experience it with particular force this year. The year 1864 saw the publication of the first collected edition of Tolstoy's works, and though they have been already mentioned, it may be as well to give a complete list of those twenty 'trials of the pen' which preceded the appearance of _War and Peace_, and had already sufficed to place Tolstoy in the front rank of Russian writers. The following are their titles, with the years in which they were first published. They suffice to fill four very substantial volumes. 1852 _Childhood._ 1853 _The Raid: A Volunteer's Story._ 1854 _Boyhood._ 1855 _Memoirs of a Billiard-Marker._ 1855 *_Sevastopol in December._ " *_Sevastopol in May._ " *_The Wood-Felling._ 1856 *_Sevastopol in August._ " _The Snow Storm._ " *_Two Hussars._ " *_Meeting a Moscow Acquaintance in the Detachment._ " _A Squire's Morning._ 1857 _Youth._ " _Lucerne._ 1858 _Albert._ 1859 _Three Deaths._ " _Family Happiness._ 1862 Educational articles in _Yásnaya Polyána_. 1863 _The Cossacks._ " _Polikoúshka._