Tolstoy managed his own estate and, by the testimony of many observers, was exceedingly successful with his stock, his buildings, and his crops; he succeeded also in making his peasants happy and contented. His family was large, and his wife proved herself an admirable mother, devoting herself passionately to her children. It was during this period that Tolstoy achieved his European reputation as a novelist by producing his two great works of _War and Peace_, 1864-9, and _Anna Karénina_, 1873-6. Tolstoy was a most conscientious and exacting literary artist. Before writing _War and Peace_, he made careful historical studies; it is his longest and most ambitious work, and might be termed a prose epic rather than a novel. Tolstoy also planned a novel on the period of Peter the Great, but the more he studied this subject the less he liked it; he found the whole epoch unsympathetic, and declared that Peter's so-called reforms were not really intended for the good of the people, but mainly for his own personal profit, and that what he really desired was freedom for a life of immorality. Tolstoy's next great novel, _Anna Karénina_, was based on an event which had occurred in real life--the suicide of a young lady who, owing to an unhappy love affair, flung herself before a train. Tolstoy chose as a motto for his book the biblical saying: "Vengeance is mine, I will repay," the fundamental idea being that people have no right to judge others, and that for human relations there is but one law--the law of mercy. Among all Tolstoy's critics Dostoïevsky appears to have been {29} the only one who understood him in this sense; most readers seem to have interpreted the motto in the narrowest possible way as meaning the punishment of Anna for her breach of the marriage vow. During all this period of literary activity Tolstoy was greatly aided by his wife; she served as his amanuensis, she alone being able to interpret his crabbed and difficult handwriting with its endless corrections, and one of her relatives records that she seven times re-copied the enormous MS. of _War and Peace_. It was, as he himself tells us, about his fiftieth year that a great change came over Tolstoy. His life had been one of brilliant success; he had achieved great distinction, he had an excellent property, a congenial wife, a happy family, but he became profoundly dissatisfied. Merejkovsky, the most severe of Tolstoy's critics, ascribes this condition mainly to the ebb of vitality natural at his age, and considers it to be, in its origin, essentially physical and egoistic; but Merejkovsky surely forgets the intense interest in moral and religious problems which Tolstoy had always taken even in his youth; in _The Cossacks_, and in _War and Peace_, Tolstoy's heroes are continually searching for "the meaning of life."