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LTLeo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Life dates: 1828 AD — 1910 AD

Tolstoy’s scenes give memorable ideas to an atmosphere or a speaker. Read the Rostov celebration and Pierre’s encounter with a Mason in the Maude translation, keeping their voices distinct from direct authorial advice.

▷ Play this voiceSearch these words ↗Place in time ↗lovetruthjusticelifeknowledgehappinesspeacenature

Life and writing

The catalogue identifies Leo Tolstoy and gives his lifetime as 1828–1910. It names Aylmer Maude and Louise Maude as translators of this English reading edition. The linked text confirms their translation credit and organises the narrative into books with historical year labels. Those labels locate the fictional setting; they do not date the archive extracts. An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger receive digital credits. The checked record does not identify its underlying print publisher, and the catalogue HTML ISBN belongs to this electronic edition rather than an original Russian printing.

Book Four, Chapter XI gives the atmosphere of the Rostov holiday gathering a voice urging happiness and love. It is the spirit of the place in the narrator’s description, not a sentence spoken directly by Tolstoy to the reader. Book Five, Chapter II places the image of truth built stone by stone in a Mason’s conversation with Pierre, within a religious argument. Both complete selected English extracts match the linked Maude translation under limited normalization. Neither match independently authenticates other Tolstoy-labelled records or proves their original translation history.

Reading this voice

Read Book Four, Chapter XI beside Book Five, Chapter II. Separate the voice given to a festive atmosphere from the Mason’s religious address to Pierre. The complete selected English extracts match the Maude text under punctuation, case and spacing comparison. These scenes supply local context, not a universal instruction or a claim that every archive translation used this edition.

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Quotations and sayings

18c. 1869 AD
My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfilment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires I should not have known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guess of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless.
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