my Tolstoy essay – TRANSLATION
It was written, as best as I can remember, for an evening course I took at NYU in the fall of 1981.
I got an impulse today to read the English translation (which I did subsequently, years later, on my own) again.
I can’t believe how well it reads.
My Russian friend Yuri did a careful analysis/proofreading of my original Russian. He found a number of mistakes, but they were all minor, such as a non-native speaker might make: often mistakes in the declension (case endings) of Russian words, Or spelling.
Of course, the instructor insisted, repeatedly, that I copied the essay somewhere. Which is a real compliment.
— Roger W. Smith
November 2026
