> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://theparnassian.com/en/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Peterson recalls how Tolstoy declined to read about Vereshchagin after an eyewitness account
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/odnazhdy-lev-nikolaevich-tolstoi-poprosil-menia-razyskat-vse-chto-pisalos-o-vereshchagine-kotoryi-v-dvenadtsatom-godu-byl-otdan-rastopchinym-narodu-na-rasterzanie-kak-izmennik/
- Published: 2023-05-20T13:31:56.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T19:02:07.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Books, Moscow

Once `Lev Nikolayevich [Tolstoy]` asked me to track down everything that had been written about Vereshchagin, whom Rostopchin, in the year twelve, handed over to the people to be torn apart as a traitor. I remember that I collected a great many accounts of the event, from newspapers and elsewhere, so that a special table had to be set up for all this literature. Lev Nikolayevich was somehow very long in coming, and when he did come and I pointed out to him the literature on Vereshchagin, he said that he would not read it, because in a madhouse he had met some old man, an eyewitness of the event, and that man had told him how it all came about.

*From the memoirs of the publicist Nikolay Pavlovich Peterson, who worked on the proofs of "War and Peace"*