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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Forged Coupon by Leo Tolstoy: This spirit of patriotism which Tolstoy repudi-
ated is none the less the animating power of the
noble epic, "War and Peace," and of his peasant-
tales, of his rare gift of reproducing the expressive
Slav vernacular, and of his magical art of infusing
his pictures of Russian scenery not merely with
beauty, but with spiritual significance. I can
think of no prose writer, unless it be Thoreau, so
wholly under the spell of Nature as Tolstoy; and
while Thoreau was preoccupied with the normal
phenomena of plant and animal life, Tolstoy,
The Forged Coupon |
