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Biography Tolstoi himself, at least, while actually engaged upon the work, was not a little proud of "Voina i Mir." "I regard all that I have printed hitherto," he wrote to a friend, "as mere trial-work for my pen." The first volume appeared in 1867, the last in 1869. The work of preparatory research tried Tolstoi severely. "You have no idea," he wrote to Fet in November, '69, "how difficult the initial labour of deep ploughing in the field where I am obliged to sow has been to me. . . . 'Ars longa, vita brevis,' I think to myself every day."

After completing "Voina i Mir," Tolstoi set about writing a romance of the age of Peter the Great, and began collecting and arranging his materials with his usual energy and conscientiousness. "Dear little Lev," wrote his wife on this occasion, "is surrounded by piles of books, portraits, and pictures, and sits reading and writing and re-writing with puckered brows. In the evening when the children have gone to bed he tells me of his plans." But after five years of labour Tolstoi abandoned the idea altogether, because he had arrived at an estimate of Peter's character diametrically opposite to that which generally obtains, and discovered that he had no sympathy whatever with the Petrine period itself. "Not only do I find nothing great in the personality and the acts of Peter I., but I find that everything on the contrary was very bad," writes Tolstoi. "In all his so-called reforms he only looked after his own personal profit xxxii.