Tolstoy's creative literary works came to a halt after "War and Peace." This does not mean that the writer remained idle; on the contrary, he read extensively and worked on composing the "Four Books of Reading," which he considered the most significant literary works of his life. New novel projects blossomed in his mind. However, Sofia Tolstoy recorded the following on February 24, 1870: "Last night he told me that a model of a married, aristocratic woman had appeared to him. She had lost her way. He told me that his task was to portray this woman as worthy of sympathy and not guilty, and as soon as this model appeared before him, all the masculine characters and temperaments that had appeared to him before found their place and arranged themselves around this woman." "But that was only a fleeting idea; and the project seemed to have no future. Indeed, in the three years that followed, Tolstoy completed the four reading books and sent them to print in 1872, and he was preoccupied, above all, with the idea of writing a novel set in the era of Peter the Great, a novel in which he would move his grandfather, Pyotr Tolstoy, that ambiguous character whose life ended in a very dramatic way. He surrounded himself with a collection of documents and read history books, and rewrote the beginning about ten times, then, in the end, was unable to transport his imagination to the era of the great, distant monarch, so he abandoned his project to return to the creatures around him. To the social environment he knew very well and which he could describe with greater clarity.