Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/11



N almost every kind of literary work he touched, Tolstoy succeeded at once in reaching the foremost rank.

When he sent his first story, "Childhood," anonymously to the poet Nekrásov, editor of The Contemporary (then the leading Petersburg magazine), the latter promptly accepted and published it; Dostoyévsky was so struck by it that he wrote from Siberia to inquire who its talented author was; Turgénev sang its praises; and Panáev was so delighted with it that his friends, it was said, had to avoid him on the Névsky lest he should insist on reading them extracts from it.

When Tolstoy turned from stories to novels he achieved the same immediate and complete success. The appearance of the first instalment of "War and Peace" sufficed to place him abreast of the world's greatest writers of fiction.

Fourteen years later he turned to spiritual auto-