A Calendar of Wisdom

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I would like to express my deepest and most sincere acknowledgments to the following people:

professors who introduced me to Russian literature: K. Lantz, R. Bogert, Ch. Barnes, H. Marshall, R. Lindheim, O. Bakitsh, C. Bedford, M. Valdez, L. Hutcheon; and other professors and students of the Slavic Department and the Department of Comparitive Literature of the University of Toronto; my literary agent, Ivy Fischer Stone, of the Fifi Oscard Agency; my friend Kim Yates and Stella Cho, who read the manuscript; my parents, Vera and Vsevolod Sekirin; the staff at Scribner, especially my editor Scott Moyers and Susan Moldow; Their wisdom and tireless support have helped this project to become a reality.

—PETER SEKIRIN, Torbonto 1996

TOLSTOY AND THE CREATION OF A Calendar of Wisdom

PETER SEKIRIN

This was Leo Tolstoy’s last major work. With it, he fulfilled a dream he had nourished for almost fifteen years, that of “collecting the wisdom of the centuries in one book” meant for a general audience. Tolstoy put a huge amount of effort into its creation, preparing three revised editions between 1904 and 1910. It was his own favorite everyday reading, a book he would turn to regularly for the rest of his life.

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