«Count Lev Nikolaievich Tolstoy—says Selma Ancira—was completely unpredictable. One day he was in the middle of a battle in the Crimea and the next he was mowing hay with the peasants. Another day we found out that he was learning the shoemaker's trade and days later that he was studying classical Greek to read Homer. There were moments in which he surprised us with the thorough examination of conscience to which he subjected himself, while in others we saw him lose his property due to gambling debts. He was a personality full of contradictions, excessive and seductive, whose life had been recorded in a diary. » This volume is a broad and significant selection of the diaries that Lev Tolstoy wrote between 1847 and 1894. Little given to concessions, Tolstoy presents himself to us in them in his most intimate humanity, in the struggle he maintained with himself and with his environment, in the incessant search for his fulfillment as a man and as a writer.