Works Author:Leo Tolstoy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION TO W. VON POLENZ'S "DER BUTTNER- BAUER" Last year an acquaintance of mine, in whose taste I have confidence, gave me a German novel, Von Polenz's... more » Der Buttnerbauer, to read. I read it, and I was surprised to find that this production, which appeared about two years ago, was almost unknown to people. This novel is not one of those imitations of artistic productions which are in our time produced in such enormous quantities, but a real artistic production. This novel does not belong to those descriptions of events and persons, which present no interest whatever and which are artificially connected among themselves for no other reason than that the author, having learned how to handle the technique of artistic descriptions, wishes to write a new novel; nor to those dissertations on a given theme, which, clothed in the form of a drama or a novel, also pass in our time among the reading public for artistic productions, nor to those productions, called decadent, which particularly please the modern public for the very reason that, resembling the raving of a maniac, they are something of the nature of rebuses, the guessing of which forms a pleasant occupation and at the same time is considered to be a sign of refinement. This novel does not belong to any of these, but is a really artistic production, in which the author tells%what he must tell, because he loves that of which he tells, and does not speak with reflections, with hazy allegories, but by the simple means with which artistic contents can be rendered, by poetic pictures, — not fantastic, unusual, incomprehensible pictures, which are united without any inner necessity, but by the representation of the most ordinary, simple persons and events, which are united among themselves by an inner artistic necessity. ...« less