In 1861 Tolstoy quit the Court. "For quite some time I was under the illusion that I'd be able to suppress my artistic nature but life taught me different; this struggle was futile. Service and the arts are incompatible," he wrote in a letter to disappointed Alexander II. "Tolstoy represented a rare type of man who not only evaded by every possible means the favours and laurels that came his way, but had to go through painfully tedious battles with people who, driven by the best of intentions, were imposing every opportunity of making a brilliant career on him," wrote literary historian and BEED biographer Semyon Vengerov in 1903.