It would be called, improbably, All's Well That Ends Well. The novel would be set in 1856, and concern an aristocratic revolutionary and his return from exile in Siberia. He wrote War and Peace between 18, and intended, at first, to write a domestic chronicle in the manner of Trollope (whom Tolstoy, with a few qualifications, admired). And there is no better example of that challenge than the way in which Tolstoy's project kept growing. James would never have nominated War and Peace – he famously thought it a "loose baggy monster" – but Tolstoy's novel is surely the greatest attempt in the history of the genre to represent and embody the branching infinity of human relations of which James spoke. H enry James once said that "really, universally, human relations stop nowhere," and that the exquisite problem of the writer is to draw the circle "within which they shall happily appear to do so".
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