ABSTRACT
AS always with Tolstoy, no matter what other interests preoccupied him, he could never go for long without writing; and once he had recovered from the exhaustion which immediately succeeded War and Peace, he was again faced with the most exacting of all problems: the choice of a subject. Soon he was contemplating the period of Peter I; and, carried away by his recent enthusiasm for the drama, even began a play of that period, of which he wrote a scene. But lack of material and the strict requirements of an unfamiliar medium soon caused him to change his mind, though for long the period continued to fascinate him, and he spent much time in studying it and in collecting documents and information from every available source.
