Peterson recalls how Tolstoy declined to read about Vereshchagin after an eyewitness account

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"