I should wish to speak of him with his own incomparable truth, yet I do not know how to give a notion of his influence without the effect of exaggerationTolstoy awakens in his reader the will to be a man; not effectively, not spectacularly, but simply, really. He leads you back to the only true ideal, away from that false standard of the gentleman, to the Man who sought not to be distinguished from other men, but identified with them, to that Presence in which the finest gentleman shows his alloy of vanity, and the greatest genius shrinks to the measure of his miserable egotism.
Leo Tolstoy