What, then, is the historian’s task? To describe the ultimate data of subjective experience – the personal lives lived by men, the ‘thoughts, knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hates, passions’30 of which, for Tolstoy, ‘real’ life is compounded, and only that? That was the task to which Turgenev was perpetually calling Tolstoy – him and all writers, but him in particular, because therein lay his true genius, his destiny as a great Russian writer; and this he rejected with violent indignation even during his middle years, before the final religious phase. For this was not to give the
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