"I am inclined to think that Tolstoy must be placed beside Shakespeare: his art is not art in the manner of Turgenev, Shakespeare or Maupassant, it is something new, and it creates deeper qualities of self-awareness and analysis"
The Nobel laureate in literature John Galsworthy, in a letter to the English translator of Russian literature Constance Garnett, who first introduced the English-speaking public to the texts of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov