More than once in the past, while contemplating this work, I was reminded of Homer and of Goethe, in spite of the vastly different spirit and period of the work. Since then I have discovered that at the period of writing these books Tolstoy was as a matter of fact nourishing his mind upon Homer and Goethe.[8] Moreover, in the notes, dated 1865, in which he classifies the various departments of letters, he mentions, as belonging to the same family, "Odyssey, Iliad, 1805,"[9] The natural development of his mind led him from the romance of individual destinies to the romance of armies and peoples, those vast human hordes in which the wills of millions of beings are dissolved. His tragic experiences at the siege of Sebastopol helped him to comprehend the soul of the Russian nation and its daily life. According to his first intentions, the gigantic _War and Peace_ was to be merely the central panel of a series of epic frescoes, in which the poem of Russia should be developed from Peter the Great to the Decembrists.[10] And in June, 1863, he notes in his diary: "I am reading Goethe, and many ideas are coming to life within me." In the spring of 1863 Tolstoy was re-reading Goethe, and wrote of _Faust_ as "the poetry of the world of thought; the poetry which expresses that which can be expressed by no other art." Later he sacrificed Goethe, as he did Shakespeare, to his God. But he remained faithful in his admiration of Homer. In August, 1857, he was reading, with equal zest, the _Iliad_ and the Bible. In one of his latest works, the pamphlet attacking Shakespeare (1903), it is Homer that he opposes to Shakespeare as an example of sincerity, balance, and true art. To be truly sensible of the power of this work, we must take into account its hidden unity. Too many readers, unable to see it in perspective, perceive in it nothing but thousands of details, whose profusion amazes and distracts them. They are lost in this forest of life. The reader must stand aloof, upon a height; he must attain the view of the unobstructed horizon, the vast circle of forest and meadow; then he will catch the Homeric spirit of the work, the calm of eternal laws, the awful rhythm of the breathing of Destiny, the sense of the whole of which every detail makes a part; and the genius of the artist, supreme over the whole, like the God of Genesis who broods upon the face of the waters. In the beginning, the calm of the ocean. Peace, and the life of Russia before the war. The first hundred pages reflect, with an impassive precision, a detached irony, the yawning emptiness of worldly minds. Only towards the hundredth page do we hear the cry of one of these living dead--the worst among them, Prince Basil: "We commit sins; we deceive one another; and why do we do it all? My friend, I am more than sixty years old.... All ends in death.... Death--what horror!"