Virginia Woolf on Leo Tolstoy and the Superb Sincerity of the Russian Writers (TLS 1917)

It is pleasant to welcome Tolstoy’s The Cossacks and other tales of the Caucasus to the World Classics. ‘The greatest of Russia’s writers,’ say Mr. and Mrs. Maude in their introduction. And when we read or re-read these stories, how can we deny Tolstoy’s right to the title? Of late years both Dostoevsky and Tchekov have become famous in England, so that there has certainly been less discussion, and perhaps less reading of Tolstoy himself. Coming back to him after an interval the shock of his genius seems to us quite surprising; in his own line it is hard to imagine that he can ever be surpassed. For an English reader proud of the fiction of this country there is even something humiliating in the comparison between such a story as The Cossacks, published in 1863, and the novels which were being written at about the same time in England. As the lovable immature work of children compared with the work of grown men they appear to us; and it is still more strange to consider that, while much of Thackeray and Dickens seems to us far away and obsolete, this story of Tolstoy’s reads as if it had been written a month or two ago. ... [mehr] http://lithub.com/virginia-woolf-on-leo-tolstoy-and-the-superb-sincerity-of-the-russian-writers/