# Scholarship view — народные рассказы and the Posrednik project *Generated 2026-06-11 by research subagent from web search + primary-source cross-check.* *Sources accessed via WebSearch/WebFetch; primary-source quotations verified against PSS extracts in this repo.* --- ## Received view ### Literary assessment: minor works, masterpieces of simplicity, or didactic decline? The dominant scholarly position occupies a middle ground: the folk tales are admired as accomplished achievements within a self-imposed constraint, but they are rarely claimed as Tolstoy's greatest fiction. The standard framing, articulated most concisely by the author of the "Tolstoy's Later Short Stories" chapter in *Introduction to Tolstoy's Writings* (1968 — attributed in internal heading to the same source, pages drawing on E. B. Greenwood's tradition of appreciation), is that the tales succeed precisely *because* their didactic purpose and their art are not in tension: "the clear religious or moral lesson is not permitted to intrude upon the narrative interest." The same source calls "The Story of Ivan the Fool" "an unblemished folk tale" and "Alyosha the Pot" "a perfect masterpiece in miniature." Some tales are conceded to fail on these terms — in "A Spark Neglected Burns the House" the moral feels imposed — but the best of them are treated as deliberate formal achievements, not concessions to propaganda. Gary R. Jahn's chapter "Tolstoy as a Writer of Popular Literature" in *The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy* (Donna Tussing Orwin, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2002, ch. 4, pp. 111–126) is the primary specialist treatment in English. Jahn contextualises the folk tales within the Russian tradition of *narodnaia literatura* — literature of or for the common people, including heroic songs, fairy tales, religious legends — and shows that Tolstoy's score or so of *narodnye rasskazy* are sophisticated stylisations: they "imitate as closely as possible the spirit and forms of their folk models" while deploying distinctly Tolstoyan moral architecture. The chapter provides the most careful generic delineation available in English-language scholarship. R. F. Christian's brief treatment (in *Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction*, Cambridge University Press, 1969) and Hugh McLean's introductory materials (for the Penguin *Master and Man and Other Stories*, 2005, and for *In Quest of Tolstoy*, Academic Studies Press, 2008) share a broadly appreciative line: the folk tales represent a successful and deliberate return to fiction after the religious crisis, using simplicity as an aesthetic principle rather than merely as accessibility. McLean in particular argues that the tales demonstrate Tolstoy's artistic prowess across five decades and reads them alongside the conversion rather than against it. The "didactic decline" framing — reading the tales as a falling-off from *Anna Karenina* — appears mainly in popular biography rather than specialist Tolstoy scholarship. A. N. Wilson's *Tolstoy: A Biography* (Norton, 1988) and Rosamund Bartlett's *Tolstoy: A Russian Life* (Profile, 2010) both treat the conversion and folk-tale period as the great biographical rupture, but neither dismisses the tales artistically; Bartlett in particular situates them in the broader network of Chertkov, Sytin, and the popular-education programme without reducing them to propaganda. Scholarly studies of the folk tales specifically, Jahn notes, "have appeared infrequently, especially compared to the masses of published materials on other segments of his work" — an acknowledgment of relative neglect rather than deliberate critical rejection. ### The Posrednik project: Jeffrey Brooks and the economics of popular print Jeffrey Brooks, *When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917* (Princeton University Press, 1985) is the standard historical account. Brooks situates Posrednik within the massive expansion of cheap commercial print that followed the emancipation: the lubok (woodcut broadsheet) market was Posrednik's commercial model and its ideological opponent simultaneously. Tolstoy's and Chertkov's intent was to displace the existing cheap literature — primitive, morally dubious — with artistically worthy texts at the same price point. The economics as reported in secondary synthesis (drawing on Brooks and on the publishing history assembled in the PSS editorial apparatus): Posrednik publications were priced at fractions of a kopek per copy — the standard figure is "the equivalent of a cent" (i.e. approximately ½–1½ kopeks). The publishing house sold *twelve million copies in its first four years* (1884–1888); a higher figure of *twenty million* in the first nine years is also reported. These are extraordinary numbers for the period. Brooks's own account (pp. 337–340 in the Princeton edition) treats Posrednik as one of the most significant cultural interventions of the era, combining the format and distribution methods of commercial popular literature with the moral and aesthetic ambitions of the intelligentsia. The Posrednik infrastructure: Vladimir Chertkov founded it in late 1884 in partnership with Ivan Sytin's printing house (the largest cheap-print operation in Russia); Biryukov managed the St Petersburg warehouse; Gorbunov-Posadov became editor-in-chief from 1888. Tolstoy was author, editor, quality controller, and lobbyist — personally recruiting Leskov, Turgenev, Garshin, Ertel, and Semyonov, vetting manuscripts, and writing to Suvorin to secure press coverage. The flat-fee rights model (30–50 rubles per sheet for unlimited print runs) made mass distribution economically possible. ### The "conversion → late fiction" narrative The standard narrative, shared by Christian, McLean, Wilson, and Bartlett, reads the folk tales as the first fruits of Tolstoy's *artistically productive* response to his conversion crisis. They are placed at the hinge: the religious writings (*A Confession*, *What I Believe*, *What Then Must We Do?*) produced the new worldview; the folk tales, beginning with "What Men Live By" (1882), showed that the worldview could be embodied in narrative rather than argument. The tales occupy, in this narrative, a distinct generic slot — between the pedagogical Azbuka stories of 1872 and the full-length late fiction (*The Death of Ivan Ilyich*, *The Kreutzer Sonata*, *Resurrection*) — and are read as the matrix in which Tolstoy worked out his post-conversion aesthetic. *What Is Art?* (1898) is then treated as the theoretical retrospective on what the folk tales had already enacted. Gary Jahn's 1975 article "The Aesthetic Theory of Leo Tolstoy's *What Is Art?*" (*Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism*, 34, pp. 59–65) provides the technical aesthetics account; Jahn notes that the central term "emotion/feeling" is never adequately defined and the religious/universal/counterfeit categorisation "is often confusing," but treats the treatise as a serious, if flawed, philosophical position. The project's existing *What Is Art?* dive (docs/research/1897-1898-what-is-art/index.md) cross-references Jahn's critique and Šilbajoris's more sympathetic reading. --- ## Triangulation ### 1. The tales as a deliberate aesthetic programme — the 1887 Zheltov letter **Primary evidence:** PSS 64, letter to F. A. Zheltov, 21 April 1887 (v64_067): "Я не могу вам вкратце выразить то, что я считаю нужным для писания, иначе, как указав вам на мои народные рассказы последнего времени и на предисловие к «Цветнику»." Tolstoy names the *narodnye rasskazy* as the positive model for aspiring writers — a decade before *What Is Art?* theorised it. **Conventional scholarly view:** Jahn (2002) treats the folk tales as a deliberate programme aligned with Tolstoy's developing aesthetic theory, noting they embody "religious art" and "universal art" in practice before he named those categories. The letter to Zheltov is cited in PSS commentary but has not, as far as web-accessible scholarship shows, been singled out as a discrete data point in English-language secondary literature. Scholarly awareness of the Zheltov correspondence is largely limited to specialists working with PSS Tom 64. **Relation:** *extends* — the Zheltov letter confirms and makes explicit what Jahn and McLean infer from the tales' formal properties, but the explicit articulation ("мои народные рассказы … нужны для писания") is not itself a known reference point in mainstream scholarship. **Sources:** Gary R. Jahn, "Tolstoy as a Writer of Popular Literature," in Donna Tussing Orwin, ed., *The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy* (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 111–126, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-tolstoy/tolstoy-as-a-writer-of-popular-literature/271267B55DD3310F482CD31BE093E625 --- ### 2. The economics: pricing, the 600,000-copy transfer, million-copy circulation **Primary evidence:** The 1½-kopek pricing and copy-count records are documented in PSS letters (esp. v64_114 — Tolstoy's own annotated copy-count for 17 Posrednik titles, 1887) and in the PSS editorial apparatus. **Conventional scholarly view:** Brooks (1985) provides the benchmark account: Posrednik publications at approximately one cent (½–1½ kopeks) sold twelve million copies in the first four years and twenty million in the first nine. The secondary synthesis from *Introduction to Tolstoy's Writings* (1968) gives the same twelve-million figure, sourced to the publishing history. These numbers confirm that Posrednik was not a marginal cultural experiment but one of the largest single-author publishing operations in late Imperial Russia. **Relation:** *confirms* — mainstream scholarship fully endorses the economic reach claim. The specific 600,000-copy first-transfer figure is a primary-source detail not yet corroborated in web-accessible secondary sources, but the broader scale (millions of copies, mass peasant readership) is a consensus finding. **Sources:** Jeffrey Brooks, *When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917* (Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 337–340, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1479674.When_Russia_Learned_to_Read; "Tolstoy's Later Short Stories," in *Introduction to Tolstoy's Writings* (1968), https://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/smmnsej/tolstoy/chap9.htm --- ### 3. The What Is Art? footnote: which works does Tolstoy name? **Primary evidence (verified from PSS Tom 30, reproduced in docs/research/1897-1898-what-is-art/index.md):** Tolstoy's footnote reads: > «При этом еще должен заметить, что свои художественные произведения я причисляю к области дурного искусства, за исключением рассказа «Бог правду видит», желающего принадлежать к первому роду, и «Кавказского пленника», принадлежащего ко второму.» Working English: "I must also note that I assign my own artistic works to the domain of bad art, with the exception of the story *God Sees the Truth [But Waits]*, which wishes to belong to the first kind, and *A Prisoner of the Caucasus*, which belongs to the second." Location: a footnote in the Conclusion/late chapters of the treatise (PSS Tom 30, pp. 156–157 per the What Is Art? dive; the main chapter bodies do not contain this passage — it is in the footnote apparatus). The Maude translation (first complete English text, 1898) renders it in Chapter XVI context (the chapter on good art's two kinds: religious and universal). The two named stories are both from the 1872 *Azbuka* — the elementary school reader — NOT from the 1882–1887 *narodnye rasskazy*. **What this means:** The implication is that the entire *narodnye rasskazy* corpus — "What Men Live By," "Where Love Is God Is," "Ivan the Fool," "Three Hermits," "Two Old Men," and the rest — is silently included in Tolstoy's sweep of his own "bad art." He does not explicitly condemn them; he simply does not exempt them. The only two works he exempts are from sixteen years earlier. **Conventional scholarly view:** This is well known and widely cited. Wikipedia's *What Is Art?* article states it directly: "He labels his own works as 'bad art', excepting only the short stories 'God Sees the Truth' and 'Prisoner of the Caucasus'." The EBSCO Research Starter on *What Is Art?* specifies the classification: *God Sees the Truth* "seeks a place in the first class (religious art)" and *A Prisoner of the Caucasus* "belongs to the second (universal art)." Pistelli (2020) notes that Tolstoy acknowledges his "taste has been perverted by false training" — the hedging footnote. The secondary literature does not register the paradox that the *narodnye rasskazy* — the works Tolstoy most publicly promoted as the model for popular writers in 1887 — receive no exemption. **Relation:** *complicates* — the conventional view correctly reports the footnote's content, but does not draw the inference that the folk tales are implicitly condemned along with everything else. The *What Is Art?* scholarship focuses on the Beethoven/Wagner/Shakespeare verdicts; the self-condemnation of the *narodnye rasskazy* by omission is not a known scholarly topic. **Sources:** *What Is Art?* Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Art%3F; EBSCO Research Starter on *What Is Art?*, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/what-art-leo-tolstoy; John Pistelli review (2020), https://johnpistelli.com/2020/06/11/leo-tolstoy-what-is-art/; PSS Tom 30 footnote (verified), docs/research/1897-1898-what-is-art/index.md --- ### 4. Censorship asymmetry: secular vs spiritual **Primary evidence:** v64_001 (Fayner'man, before Dec 1886): "«Крестник» — запрещение в издании «Посредник» … В издании «Посредник» была напечатана лишь в 1906 г."; v63_577 (Biryukov, Nov 1886): calendar stuck in censorship; v64_077 (Biryukov, May 1887): Posrednik Alphabet blocked by Moscow censors, approved by Warsaw censors; v64_183 (Semyonov, 1888): «Солдатка» banned by censors. Isabel Hapgood's 1887 article "Count Tolstoi and the Public Censor" documents the secular censor cutting politically dangerous material from Tolstoy's works. **Conventional scholarly view:** The dual censorship structure (secular/Main Directorate and spiritual/Holy Synod) is documented in scholarship on late Imperial censorship but rarely analysed in the specific context of the *narodnye rasskazy*. Brooks (1985) notes that Posrednik was harassed by censors throughout its operation. The standard Tolstoy biographies (Wilson, Bartlett) note that his religious writings were suppressed abroad first and that the Synod targeted his theological works, but the specific pattern — political tales (Ivan the Fool's anti-money anarchism) hitting the secular censor while heterodox legends (The Godson, the Ge *Last Supper* text) hitting the spiritual censor — is not delineated as a distinct analytical point in any web-accessible secondary source. **Relation:** *extends* — scholarship confirms censorship as a pervasive reality but does not map the asymmetric pattern (secular/political vs spiritual/heterodox) that our primary-source sweep reveals. **Sources:** Isabel F. Hapgood, "Count Tolstoi and the Public Censor" (1887), https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/about/1887/count-tolstoi-and-the-public-censor.html; Jeffrey Brooks, *When Russia Learned to Read* (1985); PSS letters (v64_001, v63_577, v64_077, v64_183). --- ### 5. «Где любовь, там и Бог» and the Saillens affair **Primary evidence (verified from PSS):** v64_268 (Oct 1888, Tolstoy to Saillens, in French): "je me suis rendu coupable envers vous d'un plagiat involontaire" — Tolstoy's public admission of the "involuntary plagiarism." He explains: Chertkov gave him an unsigned Russian translation of Saillens' story; he revised the style, added scenes, and submitted it without his name (as agreed for all Posrednik tales); the publisher later added his name to the second edition without checking. v72_072 (March 1899, Tolstoy to Saillens): confirmation that all Russian editions carry the attribution to the French source. The phrase «неумышленный плагиат» is Tolstoy's own characterisation. **Conventional scholarly view:** This is generally known and treated as a settled biographical fact rather than a critical problem. The secondary literature notes it briefly: the story was based on Saillens' "Le Père Martin" (1881, Toulouse), Tolstoy encountered it in a sourceless Russian translation, adapted it, and apologised in writing. The yeyebook.com page provides a clear summary. English-language scholarship does not appear to have made a sustained case for how the adaptation episode illuminates either Tolstoy's compositional method (radical creative re-use) or the legal/ethical dimensions of the unsigned-publication agreement that caused the confusion. **Relation:** *confirms* — mainstream scholarship knows the fact. What it does not explore is the mechanism (the unsigned-publication agreement with Chertkov as the structural cause) or what it reveals about the collaborative nature of the whole Posrednik enterprise. **Sources:** Leo Tolstoy to R. Saillens, Oct 1888 (PSS 64, no. 268), verified in this repo; Leo Tolstoy to R. Saillens, 20 March 1899 (PSS 72, no. 72), verified in this repo; yeyebook.com article, https://www.yeyebook.com/en/leo-tolstoy-story-where-love-is-god-is-martins-christmas/ --- ### 6. The oral source: Shchegolyonok's 1879 visit **Primary evidence:** PSS Tom 25 editorial commentary (История писания) names V. P. Shchegolyonok (Vasily Petrovich Shchegolenok, 1817–1894), a bylina singer from Zaonezhye, as the oral source for the plots of «Чем люди живы», «Два старика», «Три старца», and others — plots supplied during his month-long stay at Yasnaya Polyana in 1879. **Conventional scholarly view:** Shchegolenok's 1879 visit is documented in the biographical record. A portrait of him by Polenov was painted during that visit and survives. The connection between his visit and the genesis of the folk tales is noted in the Yasnaya Polyana biographical literature and in the PSS editorial apparatus, but it has not generated substantial English-language critical attention. The *Twenty-Three Tales* Wikipedia article notes that "at least one of the stories presented Tolstoy had heard from a wandering storyteller in 1876" — slightly off on both the date and the identification. Web-accessible English scholarship does not name Shchegolenok directly in connection with specific tales. **Relation:** *silent* — the oral-source connection is a standard PSS editorial fact that has not been picked up and analysed in accessible English-language secondary scholarship. No source confirms, contradicts, or nuances it; it exists in the primary apparatus and in Russian-language Tolstoy studies. **Sources:** PSS Tom 25 editorial commentary (Historia pisania for «Чем люди живы», «Два старика», «Три старца»); Hermitage Fine Art auction record (portrait of Shchegolenok by Polenov, 1879), https://hermitagefineart.com/en/lots/2020-july-russian-art/40/ (confirms 1879 visit); *Twenty-Three Tales* Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-Three_Tales --- ### 7. Tolstoy's 1910 graded ranking of Posrednik leaflets **Primary evidence (verified from PSS Tom 82):** Letter to I. I. Gorbunov-Posadov, 24 October 1910, Yasnaya Polyana (v82_278). Tolstoy writes: "Разобрал их на четыре сорта: самые хорошие, хорошие, посредственные и плохие." His "очень хорошие" (top-tier) list from his own Posrednik titles includes: «Три старца», «Кающийся грешник»; «Где любовь, там и бог»; «Крестник»; «Упустишь огонь не потушишь»; «Большая медведица», «Камни», «Вражье лепко, а божье крепко»; «Работник Емельян и пустой барабан»; «Ильяс»; «Зерно с куриное яйцо». In "хорошие" (second tier): «Много ли человеку земли нужно» and «Ассирийский царь Ассархадон». The letter is dated 24 October 1910 — two weeks before his death on 7 November. **Conventional scholarly view:** No web-accessible English-language secondary source cites or discusses this letter. Searches for "1910 ranking," "deathbed ranking," and "graded list" returned nothing specific to this document. The letter is in PSS Tom 82 and is presumably known to Russian Tolstoy specialists, but it has not entered anglophone critical discourse as a reference point. **Relation:** *silent* — this terminal ranking is primary-source material not registered in accessible English scholarship. It matters because it shows Tolstoy at the end of his life affirming the *narodnye rasskazy* core (Three Hermits, Where Love Is, Godson, Spark Neglected, Ilyich, Two Workers, Emilyan) as still his best Posrednik work — a different and more affirmative self-assessment than the *What Is Art?* footnote's silence about the same tales. **Sources:** PSS 82, no. 278 (v82_278_I_I_Gorbunovu_Posadovu.txt, verified in this repo, 24 Oct 1910). --- ### 8. Reception asymmetry: Power of Darkness failed with the people, folk tales reached them **Primary evidence:** Our primary-source dive (Power of Darkness dive notes) documents that Tolstoy himself observed the play was not understood by its intended audience; the play was staged abroad (Paris, 1888) before it could reach Russian peasants; the stage ban (1887–1902) prevented any Russian performance. The folk tales, by contrast, reached millions via Posrednik by the close of the 1880s. **Conventional scholarly view:** The Wikipedia article on *The Power of Darkness* confirms: "its production was banned in Russia until 1902, mainly through the influence of Konstantin Pobedonostsev." Emma Goldman's 1914 essay "The Social Significance of the Modern Drama" discusses the play's ideas without addressing peasant reception. Secondary literature on Posrednik (Brooks, the 1968 *Introduction*) discusses the folk tales' mass reach without contrasting it to the drama's failure. No web-accessible source explicitly registers the reception asymmetry between the play (written for the people, banned from them) and the tales (written for the people, read by them). **Relation:** *silent* — the facts are separately documented (drama ban in standard theatrical history; folk tale circulation in Brooks and the Posrednik record), but the contrast as an analytical point — the reception asymmetry as evidence about what Tolstoy's popular aesthetic could and could not achieve in different genres — is not made in accessible scholarship. **Sources:** *The Power of Darkness* Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Darkness; Jeffrey Brooks, *When Russia Learned to Read* (1985); *Introduction to Tolstoy's Writings* (1968), https://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/smmnsej/tolstoy/chap9.htm --- ## Sources 1. Gary R. Jahn, "Tolstoy as a Writer of Popular Literature," in Donna Tussing Orwin, ed., *The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy* (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 111–126. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-tolstoy/tolstoy-as-a-writer-of-popular-literature/271267B55DD3310F482CD31BE093E625 2. Jeffrey Brooks, *When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917* (Princeton University Press, 1985). Review: Scott J. Seregny, *History of Education Quarterly* 27:3 (1987), pp. 396–401. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1479674.When_Russia_Learned_to_Read 3. [Author unattributed], "Tolstoy's Later Short Stories" [= ch. 9 of *Introduction to Tolstoy's Writings*, 1968]. https://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/smmnsej/tolstoy/chap9.htm 4. Gary R. Jahn, "The Aesthetic Theory of Leo Tolstoy's *What Is Art?*," *Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism*, 34 (1975), pp. 59–65. [No open-access URL; cited in docs/research/1897-1898-what-is-art/index.md] 5. Hugh McLean, "Introduction," in Leo Tolstoy, *Master and Man and Other Stories* (Penguin Classics, 2005, ed. and trans. Ronald Wilks). https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/35514/master-and-man-and-other-stories-by-leo-tolstoy-edited-and-trans-by--ronald-wilks-notes-paul-foote-intro-professor-hugh-mclean/9780140449624 6. Hugh McLean, *In Quest of Tolstoy* (Academic Studies Press, 2008). https://www.academicstudiespress.com/9781618116802/ 7. R. F. Christian, *Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction* (Cambridge University Press, 1969). [No open-access URL; standard reference] 8. A. N. Wilson, *Tolstoy: A Biography* (Norton, 1988). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/127966.Tolstoy 9. Rosamund Bartlett, *Tolstoy: A Russian Life* (Profile Books, 2010). https://archive.org/details/tolstoyrussianli0000bart 10. *What Is Art?* — Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Art%3F 11. "What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy" — EBSCO Research Starters. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/what-art-leo-tolstoy 12. John Pistelli, "Leo Tolstoy, *What Is Art?*" (review, 2020). https://johnpistelli.com/2020/06/11/leo-tolstoy-what-is-art/ 13. Tolstoy, *What Is Art?*, ch. XVI text (Marxists Internet Archive, Aylmer Maude translation). https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/1897/what-is-art/chapter-16.html 14. Tolstoy, *What Is Art?* — Gutenberg full text. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64908/64908-h/64908-h.htm 15. "Posrednik Publishing House" — The Free Dictionary / Great Soviet Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Posrednik+Publishing+House [403; content summarised via search] 16. Isabel F. Hapgood, "Count Tolstoi and the Public Censor" (1887). https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/about/1887/count-tolstoi-and-the-public-censor.html 17. *The Power of Darkness* — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Darkness 18. *Where Love Is, God Is* — yeyebook.com (Saillens/Tolstoy adaptation account). https://www.yeyebook.com/en/leo-tolstoy-story-where-love-is-god-is-martins-christmas/ 19. Vasily Shchegolenok (Shchegolyonok) portrait — Hermitage Fine Art auction, 2020. https://hermitagefineart.com/en/lots/2020-july-russian-art/40/ 20. *Twenty-Three Tales* — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-Three_Tales 21. PSS Tom 64, no. 67 — Tolstoy to F. A. Zheltov, 21 April 1887 (primary source, verified in this repo). 22. PSS Tom 64, no. 268 — Tolstoy to R. Saillens, Oct 1888 (primary source, verified in this repo). 23. PSS Tom 72, no. 72 — Tolstoy to R. Saillens, 20 March 1899 (primary source, verified in this repo). 24. PSS Tom 82, no. 278 — Tolstoy to I. I. Gorbunov-Posadov, 24 October 1910 (primary source, verified in this repo). 25. PSS Tom 30 (footnote) — Tolstoy, *What Is Art?*, self-condemnation footnote (primary source, verified in docs/research/1897-1898-what-is-art/index.md).