Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Tolstoy, Leo - William Dean Howells (essay date 1895)

William Dean Howells (essay date 1895)

SOURCE: "Tolstoy," in My Literary Passions, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1895, pp. 250-58.

[Howells was an American novelist and essayist. In the following essay, he discusses the influence of Tolstoy's religious and philosophical writings on his own works and thought.]

I come now, though not quite in the order of time, to the noblest of all these enthusiasms, namely, my devotion for the writings of Lyof Tolstoy. I should wish to speak of him with his own incomparable truth, yet I do not know how to give a notion of his influence without the effect of exaggeration. As much as one merely human being can help another I believe that he has helped me; he has not influenced me in aesthetics only, but in ethics, too, so that I can never again see life in the way I saw it before I knew him. Tolstoy awakens in his reader the will to be a man; not effectively, not spectacularly, but simply, really. He leads...

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