Leo Tolstoy - Круг чтения - 1910

"The Circle of Reading" is a religious and philosophical work by Leo Tolstoy, written in the form of a literary collage of aphorisms by writers of various eras and schools of thought. The book became the ideological and artistic result of Tolstoy's many years of work, a kind of repetition and embodiment in small aphoristic forms of the problems and themes of previous works. The work was published only in 1928 for the centenary of the writer's birth, while the previous attempts at publication (1906-1908 - during his lifetime) and the second (December 1910 - posthumous) editions were seized by the Press Committee, lifted only after many fundamental places were excluded from this work. Over the next three decades, this collection was not reprinted. The text of the "Reading Circle" is categorized according to the calendar principle: the headings consist of the serial number of the calendar day, the name of the calendar month and the subtitle - the topic of the heading, for which the aphorisms are selected. This system of categorization remained from the prototype of the "Reading Circle" - "Calendar with proverbs for 1887". In the "Reading Circle", unlike the prototype, there is no reference to the calendar year, this work is supposed to be a reader's desk book for daily reading, which it became for Tolstoy himself, as evidenced by numerous references to it in the diary entries of the last years of his life. This book was with Tolstoy even after his departure from Yasnaya Polyana in October-November 1910, and amazingly, the day of Tolstoy's death, November 7, coincided with the day of the "Reading Circle", entitled "Immortality".