One torrid day, Tolstoy saw a mosquito land on Chertkov's bald pate and smacked it. The disciple looked reproachfully up at his master: "What have you done, Leo Nikolayevich? You have killed a living creature! You should be ashamed of yourself!"
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, October 03, 2004
Insect Rights
Henri Troyat, Tolstoy, tr. N. Ampoux (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), p. 646: