Page:Rolland Life of Tolstoy.djvu/90

86 in which he classifies the various departments of letters, he mentions, as belonging to the same family, “Odyssey, Iliad, 1805.” The natural development of his mind led him from the romance of individual destinies to the romance of armies and peoples, those vast human hordes in which the wills of millions of beings are dissolved. His tragic experiences at the siege of Sebastopol helped him to comprehend the soul of the Russian nation and its daily life. According to his first intentions, the gigantic War and Peace was to be merely the central panel of a series of epic frescoes, in which the poem of Russia should be developed from Peter the Great to the Decembrist.