Note 1 — Chapter XIV

To these years was attributed, in respect of the date of publication, and perhaps of completion, a work which was really written during the happy period of betrothal and the first years of marriage: the beautiful story of a horse, Kholstomier (1861-86). Tolstoy speaks of it in 1883 in a letter to Fet (Further Correspondence.) The art of the commencement, with its fine landscapes, its penetrating psychological sympathy, its humour, and its youth, has much in common with the art of Tolstoy's maturity (Family Happiness, War and Peace), The macabre quality of the end, and the last pages comparing the body of the old horse with that of his master, are full of a realistic brutality characteristic of the years after 1880.