From “terribly disgusting” to one of the greatest novels of all time — In 1876, Leo Tolstoy lamented to a friend that the book he was writing had become “sickening to me,” “unbearably repulsive,” “terribly disgusting and nasty,” and “a bore, insipid as a bitter radish.” Tolstoy had made the mistake of showing the novel’s opening pages to the Russian Messenger, which promptly…