agreeable news altogether.

I wake up every night and read "War and Peace." One reads it with the same
interest and naive wonder as though one had never read it before. It's
amazingly good. Only I don't like the passages in which Napoleon appears.
As soon as Napoleon comes on the scene there are forced explanations and
tricks of all sorts to prove that he was stupider than he really was.
Everything that is said and done by Pierre, Prince Andrey, or the
absolutely insignificant Nikolay Rostov--all that is good, clever, natural,
and touching; everything that is thought and done by Napoleon is not
natural, not clever, inflated and worthless.

When I live in the provinces (of which I dream now day and night), I shall
practice as a doctor and read novels.

I am not coming to Petersburg.

If I had been by Prince Andrey I should have saved him. It is strange to
read that the wound of a prince, a rich man spending his days and nights
with a doctor and being nursed by Natasha and Sonya, should have smelt like
a corpse. What a scurvy affair medicine was in those days! Tolstoy could
not help getting soaked through with hatred for medicine while he was
writing his thick novel....




MOSCOW,
November 18, 1891.