AFTER FINISHING War and Peace in 1869, Tolstoy plunged into a series of violently unrelated activities. First he studied the German philosophers and rejected all but one, the most pessimistic; he announced that his summer had been "an endless ecstasy over Schopenhauer." But the ecstasy was soon forgotten, and he spent the winter of 1870 "busy with drama"
that is, busy reading the collected plays of Shake- speare, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, and Gogol while dreaming about a comedy of his own. He also vaguely thought of starting a novel, which would be concerned so he told Sonya, his wife with a married woman in high society who betrayed her husband. The author's problem, he said, "was to represent this woman as not guilty but merely pitiful."