Everybody is a regionalist. Tolstoy is a regionalist - one is where one lives, where one writes.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.
We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must take root - almost literally.
One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.
A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.
I'm most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.
I write about my region, the countryside in which I grew up.
Country people give me more than writers, and country places than towns.
A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.
This is not Tolstoy. I don't want to know what critics and professors think of what I'm writing. It might hurt my feelings.