War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich — many of us have felt the influence, to the good or the ill of our own reading and writing, of Leo Tolstoy. But whose influence did Leo Tolstoy feel the most? As luck would have it, we can give you chapter and verse on this, since the novelist drew up just such a list in 1891, which would have put him at age 63.

A Russian publisher had asked 2,000 professors, scholars, artists, and men of letters, public figures, and other luminaries to name the books important to them, and Tolstoy responded with this list divided into five ages of man, with their actual degree of influence ("enormous," "v. great," or merely "great") noted.

It comes as something of a rarity, up to now only available transcribed in a post at Northampton, Massachusetts' Valley Advocate:

WORKS WHICH MADE AN IMPRESSION Childhood to the age of 14 or so The story of Joseph from the Bible - Enormous Tales from The Thousand and One Nights: the 40 Thieves, Prince Qam-al-Zaman - Great The Little Black Hen by Pogorelsky - V. great Russian byliny: Dobrynya Nikitich, Ilya Muromets, Alyosha Popovich. Folk Tales - Enormous Puskin’s poems: Napoleon - Great Age 14 to 20 Matthew’s Gospel: Sermon on the Mount - Enormous Sterne’s Sentimental Journey - V. great Rousseau Confessions - Enormous Emile - Enormous Nouvelle Héloise - V. great Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin - V. great Schiller’s Die Räuber - V. great Gogol’s Overcoat, The Two Ivans, Nevsky Prospect - Great "Viy" [a story by Gogol] - Enormous Dead Souls - V. great Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches - V. great Druzhinin’s Polinka Sachs - V. great Grigorovich’s The Hapless Anton - V. great Dickens’ David Copperfield - Enormous Lermontov’s A Hero for our Time, Taman - V. great Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico - Great Age 20 to 35 Goethe. Hermann and Dorothea - V. great Victor Hugo. Notre Dame de Paris - V. great Tyutchev’s poems - Great Koltsov’s poems - Great The Odyssey and The Iliad (read in Russian) - Great Fet’s poems - Great Plato’s Phaedo and Symposium (in Cousin’s translation) - Great Age 35 to 50 The Odyssey and The Iliad (in Greek) - V. great The byliny - V. great Victor Hugo. Les Misérables - Enormous Xenophon’s Anabasis - V. great Mrs. [Henry] Wood. Novels - Great George Eliot. Novels - Great Trollope, Novels - Great Age 50 to 63 All the Gospels in Greek - Enormous Book of Genesis (in Hebrew) - V. great Henry George. Progress and Poverty - V. great [Theodore] Parker. Discourse on religious subject - Great [Frederick William] Robertson’s sermons - Great Feuerbach (I forget the title; work on Christianity) [“The Essence of Christianity”] - Great Pascal’s Pensées - Enormous Epictetus - Enormous Confucius and Mencius - V. great On the Buddha. Well-known Frenchman (I forget) [“Lalita Vistara”] - Enormous Lao-Tzu. Julien [S. Julien, French translator] - Enormous

The writer at the Valley Advocate, a Tolstoy aficionado, came across the list by sheer happenstance. "On my way to work, I found something just for me in a box of cast-off books on a sidewalk," they write: a biography of Tolstoy with "something cooler inside": a "yellowed and fragile New York Times Book Review clipping" from 1978 containing the full list as Tolstoy wrote it. "Gold," in other words, "for this wannabe Tolstoy scholar." If you, too count yourself among the ranks of wannabe Tolstoy scholars — or indeed credentialed Tolstoy scholars — you'll no doubt find more than a few intriguing selections here. And if you simply admire Tolstoy, well, get to reading: learn not how to make the same things your idols made, I often say, but to think how they thought. Not that any of us have time to write War and Peace these days anyway, though with luck, we do still have time to read it — along with The Thousand and One Nights, David Copperfield, The Odyssey, and so on. Many of these works you can find in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.