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Biography former the latter is worth nothing." In 1870 he began to study Greek and would read nothing else. Xenophon greatly pleased him, but he was still more delighted with Homer. "How glad I am that God has given me the humour for it," he writes to a friend; "I am convinced that of all the truly beautiful, the simply beautiful which the human mind has produced, I hitherto knew nothing." Of his own literary work he was still very proud, and yet his complacency was not without a tinge of self-contempt. In 1876 he wrote to a friend, "I continue under the delusion that what I am writing is very important, although I know that within a month the remembrance of it will be on my conscience. Sometimes I feel myself to be as a God from whom nothing is concealed, and at other times I am as stupid as a brute beast." It pleased him to reflect that he was already numbered amongst the greatest of Russian writers, and it is certain that from 1880 onwards he was without a rival in the national literature. In the fifties Turgenev had been in the ascendant; in the sixties he had been obliged to share that distinction with Ostrovsky and Pisemsky; in the seventies the satirist, Saltuikov, and the most Russian of all the Russian novelists, Dostoevsky, held the public; but five years after the publication of "Anna Karenina," Tolstoi had distanced every competitor, and was undeniably supreme. And, characteristically enough, just as he had reached the height of his glory, doubts began to arise in his mind whether, to use a common phrase, the game was really worth the candle. Except for a very brief period in his youth Tolstoi had always despised mere xxxv.