"His life followed a familiar pattern. There were in Russia scores of noblemen who gambled, got drunk and wenched in their youth, who married and had a flock of children, who settled down on their estates, looked after their property, rode horseback and hunted; and there were not a few who shared Tolstoy's liberal principles and, distressed at the ignorance of the peasants, their dreadful poverty and the squalor in which they lived, sought to ameliorate their lot. The only thing that distinguished him from all of them was that during this time he wrote two of the world's greatest novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. How this came about is a mystery as inexplicable as that the son and heir of a stodgy Sussex squire should have written the Ode to the West Wind."

- W. Somerset Maugham, "War and Peace", 1948.