Empire, William Shakespeare’s Complete Works and Leo Tolstoy ’s Anna Karenina among his favourite works...
He lists Michel de Montaigne's Essais, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, William Shakespeare’s Complete Works and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina among his favourite works (Greenblatt, Interview). Some of his favourite films are M, The Third Man and Shakespeare in Love (Greenblatt, Interview).

This horrific reception, two disastrous visits to writer Leo Tolstoy's estate and Rachmaninoff's distress over the Russian Orthodox Church's objection to his marrying his cousin, Natalia Satina, contributed to a period of severe depression that lasted three years, during which he wrote virtually no music.

Shklovsky introduced the term "ostranenie" ("остранение"), that can be translated to English as "alienation", to describe a specific technique used by Leo Tolstoy to present things as if they are seen for the first time "as if through a child's eye". To Shklovsky, "alienation" was one of the main methods and goals in art that could fight with "automatism of perception". Shklovsky showed that "ostranenie" works in the way that the form of a phenomenon or of a thing is changed, without changing its essence. Or when an author talks about a certain phenomenon but using the language borrowed from a totally different context. This, according to Shklovsky, allows the reader to "see" the thing and not to "recognize" it.