Leo Tolstoy

Acknowledgements

I want to express my deepest gratitude to Alex Wilbraham and Arkady Ostrovsky for their generous support and help in the long process of writing this short book. Mikhail Dolbilov kindly read the manuscript and provided valuable remarks and suggestions. The colleagues at Tolstoy Museum in Moscow and Yasnaya Polyana were incredibly generous and supportive of my work. As always, I am grateful to my wife Irina Zorina for her help and encouragement.

When I was young, I used to discuss Tolstoy with my closest friend Boris (Barukh) Berman (1957–1992), who was then an aspiring Tolstoy scholar. He tragically died in a car accident near Jerusalem. His several remaining articles on Tolstoy were published posthumously. I do not think he would have agreed with everything I say and cannot even be sure he would have liked this book at all. Still his intellectual passion and personal integrity served as a major source of inspiration for me. Remembering our unforgettable conversations, I want to dedicate my book to his memory.