[7] Here is a characteristic instance of Tolstoy's enslavement by his creative genius: his _Journal_ is interrupted for thirteen years, from November 1, 1865, when the composition of _War and Peace_ was in full swing. The egoism of the artist has silenced the monologue of the conscience.--This period of creation was also a period of robust physical life. Tolstoy was "mad on hunting." "Hunting, I forget everything...." (Letter of 1864.) In September, 1864, during a hunt on horse back, he broke his arm, and it was during his convalescence that the first portions of _War and Peace_ were dictated.--"On recovering consciousness after fainting, I said to myself: 'I am an artist.' And I am, but a lonely artist." (Letter to Fet, January 29, 1865.) All the letters written at this time to Fet are full of an exulting joy of creation. "I regard all that I have hitherto published," he says, "as merely a trial of my pen." (_Ibid._) [8] Before this date Tolstoy had noted, among the books which influenced him between the ages of twenty and thirty-five: "Goethe: _Hermann and Dorothea_--Very great influence." "Homer: _Iliad and Odyssey_ (in Russian)--Very great influence." [9] The two first parts of _War and Peace_ appeared in 1865-66 under the title _The Year 1805._ [10] Tolstoy commenced this work in 1863 by _The Decembrists_, of which he wrote three fragments. But he saw that the foundations of his plan were not sufficiently assured, and going further back, to the period of the Napoleonic Wars, he wrote _War and Peace._ Publication was commenced in the _Rousski Viestnik_ of January, 1865; the sixth volume was completed in the autumn of 1869. Then Tolstoy ascended the stream of history; and he conceived the plan of an epic romance dealing with Peter the Great; then of another, _Mirovitch_, dealing with the rule of the Empresses of the eighteenth century and their favourites. He worked at it from 1870 to 1873, surrounded with documents, and writing the first drafts of various portions; but his realistic scruples made him renounce the project: he was conscious that he could never succeed in resuscitating the spirit of those distant periods in a sufficiently truthful fashion. Later, in January, 1876, he conceived the idea of another romance of the period of Nikolas I.; then he eagerly returned to the _Decembrists_, collecting the evidence of survivors and visiting the scenes of the action. In 1878 he wrote to his aunt, Countess A. A. Tolstoy: "This work is so important to me! You cannot imagine how much it means to me; it is as much to me as your faith is to you. I would say even more." (_Correspondence_) But in proportion as he plumbed the subject he grew away from it; his heart was in it no longer. As early as April, 1879, he wrote to Fet: "_The Decembrists_? If I were thinking of it, if I were to write it, I should flatter myself with the hope that the very atmosphere of my mind would be insupportable to those