The Prophet Period, 1879–1910

The essays and treatises, what exists in English, where everything sits in time — and the correspondence threads running underneath, from Chertkov's 941 letters down to the three Tolstoy wrote Gandhi. Built from the project's own verified data: the work-dives, the translation-gap ledger, and the 9,087-letter tolstoydigital TEI corpus.

1The corpus in time — essays over fiction, correspondence underneath

Every bar spans composition years. Essay color = English-translation status. The strips below show letters per year to each major correspondent (darker = more letters that year). Hover anything.

Fiction & drama (grey lane) are all fully translated — they're context for where the essays sit. Letter strips count letters by Tolstoy with a date in the TEI file (1,101 of 9,087 letters are undated and excluded). Gandhi's row is nearly empty by design: the thread is three letters, Oct 1909 – Sep 1910, the last finished two months before Tolstoy died.

2How long each work waited for English

Years from the end of composition to the first published English edition. The story has three acts: censorship-era smuggling (1–3 years), the Free Age Press machine (same-year English, often before legal Russian publication), and the wisdom anthologies — which mostly never arrived.

Two outliers tell the tale: The Law of Violence and the Law of Love (1908) waited 40 years for complete English; Круг чтения waited 89 years for even a partial edition — Sekirin's 1997 Calendar of Wisdom drops all 52 weekly readings, so a complete English version still doesn't exist.

3How much of each body of writing is in English

The polemics were translated as fast as Tolstoy wrote them. The gap is concentrated in the private channel (letters) and the compression endpoint (the anthologies).

Letters: R. F. Christian's two-volume selection (1978) gives 608 of 8,500+ — about 7%. The Chertkov correspondence — the largest single thread — has no English edition at all. Diaries: selection only (Christian 1985). Source: the late-voice dive's translation-gap ledger, web-verified 2026-06-12.

4The correspondence threads, 1840–1910

Letters per year to each correspondent, each row scaled to its own peak. Read top to bottom: the early correspondents (aunt Ergolskaya, cousin A. A. Tolstaya, Fet, Strakhov) fade as the Prophet-period circle — Chertkov, Biryukov, Gorbunov-Posadov, Maude — takes over. Gandhi enters in the final fourteen months.

The shaded band is the Prophet period. The Chertkov thread runs 1883–1910 without a break — 941 letters, none translated. The three Gandhi letters: 25 Sep 1909 (reply to Gandhi's first letter from Johannesburg), 25 Apr 1910 (on Indian Home Rule), 7 Sep 1910 (the long letter on non-resistance, read aloud at Tolstoy Farm after his death).