ABSTRACT
BY the time Tolstoy arrived in Petersburg, in literary circles he had already acquired a considerable reputation. Dostoevsky had confided to Maykov that "he liked L. T. very much," though he had an idea that he would come to nothing; Panaev had admired Childhood to such an extent that Turgenev remarked that no one dare speak to him in the street without having long passages of it quoted to him from memory; Pisemsky (then writing A Thousand Souls) remarked gruffly to Gorbunov: "We might just as well give up writing—this young writer will one day eclipse us all"; the Emperor was so impressed with the first Sevastopol sketch that he himself gave orders for it to be translated into French, and that the life of the young man who had written it should be taken care of; while it was said that not only the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, but Turgenev himself, had shed tears over it. Whether or not this last was true, Turgenev had certainly written to Aksakov that he had not only read it, but "shouted Hurrah! and drunk the author's health."
