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Title: Tolstoy

Author: Romain Rolland

Translator: Bernard Miall

Release date: July 13, 2015 [eBook #49435]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/49435

Credits: Produced by Clare Graham and Marc D'Hooghe

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOLSTOY ***

TOLSTOY
BY

ROMAIN ROLLAND
AUTHOR OF "JEAN CHRISTOPHE"

TRANSLATED BY

BERNARD MIALL

T. FISHER UNWIN

LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20

1911

Contents

PREFACE

To those of my own generation, the light that has but lately failed was the
purest that illumined their youth. In the gloomy twilight of the later
nineteenth century it shone as a star of consolation, whose radiance
attracted and appeased our awakening spirits. As one of the many—for
there are many in France—to whom Tolstoy was very much more than an
admired artist: for whom he was a friend, the best of friends, the one true
friend in the whole of European art—I wish to lay before this sacred
memory my tribute of gratitude and of love.

The days when I learned to know him are days that I shall never forget. It
was in 1886. After some years of silent germination the marvellous flowers
of Russian art began to blossom on the soil of France. Translations of
Tolstoy and of Dostoyevsky were being issued in feverish haste by all the
publishing houses of Paris. Between the years '85 and '87 came War and
Peace, Anna Karenin, Childhood and Youth, Polikushka, The Death of Ivan
Ilyitch, the novels of the Caucasus, and the Tales for the People. In the
space of a few months, almost of a few weeks, there was revealed to our
eager eyes the presentment of a vast, unfamiliar life, in which was reflected
a new people, a new world.
I had but newly entered the Normal College. My fellow-scholars were of
widely divergent opinions. In our little world were such realistic and
ironical spirits as the philosopher Georges Dumas; poets, like Suarès,
burning with love of the Italian Renaissance; faithful disciples of classic
tradition; Stendhalians, Wagnerians, atheists and mystics. It was a world of
plentiful discussion, plentiful disagreement; but for a period of some
months we were nearly all united by a common love of Tolstoy. It is true
that each loved him for different reasons, for each discovered in him
himself; but this love was a love that opened the door to a revelation of life;
to the wide world itself. On every side—in our families, in our country
homes—this mighty voice, which spoke from the confines of Europe,
awakened the same emotions, unexpected as they often were. I remember
my amazement upon hearing some middle-class people of Nivernais, my
native province—people who felt no interest whatever in art, people who
read practically nothing—speak with the most intense feeling of The Death
of Ivan Ilyitch.
I have read, in the writings of distinguished critics, the theory that Tolstoy
owed the best of his ideas to the French romantics: to George Sand, to
Victor Hugo. We may ignore the absurdity of supposing that Tolstoy, who
could not endure her, could ever have been subject to the influence of
George Sand; but we cannot deny the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and of Stendhal; nevertheless, we belittle the greatness of Tolstoy, and the
power of his fascination, if we attribute them to his ideas. The circle of
ideas in which art moves and has its being is a narrow one. It is not in those
ideas that his might resides, but in his expression of them; in the personal
accent, the imprint of the artist, the colour and savour of his life.

Whether Tolstoy's ideas were or were not borrowed—a matter to be
presently considered—never yet had a voice like to his resounded
throughout Europe. How else can we explain the thrill of emotion which we
all of us felt upon hearing that psychic music, that harmony for which we
had so long waited, and of which we felt the need? In our opinion the style
counted for nothing. Most of us, myself included, made the acquaintance of
Melchior de Vogüé's work on the subject of the Russian novel[1] after we
had read the novels of Tolstoy; and his admiration of our hero seemed, after
ours, a pallid thing. M. de Vogüé spoke essentially as a man of letters pure
and simple. But for our part it was not enough to admire the presentation of
life: we lived it; it was our own. Ours it was by its ardent love of life, by its
quality of youth; ours by its irony, its disillusion, its pitiless discernment,
and its haunting sense of mortality. Ours by its dreams of brotherly love, of
peace among men; ours by its terrible accusation of the lies of civilisation;
ours by its realism; by its mysticism ours; by its savour of nature, its sense
of invisible forces, its vertigo in the face of the infinite.
To many of us the novels of Tolstoy were what Werther was to an earlier
generation: the wonderful mirror of our passions, our strength, our
weaknesses, of our hopes, our terrors, our discouragement. We were in no
wise anxious to reconcile these many contradictions; still less did we
concern ourselves to imprison this complex, multiple mind, full of echoes
of the whole wide world, within the narrow limits of religious or political
categories, as have the greater number of those who have written of Tolstoy
in these latter years: incapable of extricating themselves from the conflict of
parties, dragging him into the arena of their own passions, measuring him
by the standards of their socialistic or clerical coteries. As if our coteries
could be the measure of a genius? What is it to me if Tolstoy is or is not of
my party? Shall I ask of what party Shakespeare was, or Dante, before I
breathe the atmosphere of his magic or steep myself in its light?
We did not say, as do the critics of to-day, that there were two Tolstoys: the
Tolstoy of the period before the crisis and he of the period after the crisis;
that the one was the great artist, while the other was not an artist at all. For
us there was only one Tolstoy, and we loved the whole of him; for we felt,
instinctively, that in such souls as his all things are bound together and each
has its integral place.

[1] Le Roman russe.

CONTENTS

PREFACE
I. CHILDHOOD
II. BOYHOOD AND YOUTH
III. YOUTH: THE ARMY
IV. EARLY WORK: TALES OF THE CAUCASUS
V. SEBASTOPOL: WAR AND RELIGION
VI. ST. PETERSBURG
VII. "FAMILY HAPPINESS"
VIII. MARRIAGE
IX. "ANNA KARENIN"
X. THE CRISIS
XI. REALITY
XII. ART AND CONSCIENCE
XIII. SCIENCE AND ART
XIV. THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC
XV. "RESURRECTION"
XVI. RELIGION AND POLITICS
XVII. OLD AGE
XVIII. CONCLUSION
INDEX

TOLSTOY

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD

Our instinct was conscious then of that which reason must prove to-day.
The task is possible now, for the long life has attained its term; revealing

itself, unveiled, to the eyes of all, with unequalled candour, unexampled
sincerity. To-day we are at once arrested by the degree in which that life has
always remained the same, from the beginning to the end, in spite of all the
barriers which critics have sought to erect here and there along its course; in
spite of Tolstoy himself, who, like every impassioned mind, was inclined to
the belief, when he loved, or conceived a faith, that he loved or believed for
the first time; that the commencement of his true life dated from that
moment. Commencement—recommencement!' How often his mind was the
theatre of the same struggles, the same crises I We cannot speak of the unity
of his ideas, for no such unity existed; we can only speak of the persistence
among them of the same diverse elements; sometimes allied, sometimes
inimical; more often enemies than allies. Unity is to be found neither in the
spirit nor the mind of a Tolstoy; it exists only in the internal conflict of his
passions, in the tragedy of his art and his life.
In him life and art are one. Never was work more intimately mingled with
the artist's life; it has, almost constantly, the value of autobiography; it
enables us to follow the writer, step by step, from the time when he was
twenty-five years of age, throughout all the contradictory experiences of his
adventurous career. His Journal, which he commenced before the
completion of his twentieth year, and continued until his death,[1] together
with the notes furnished by M. Birukov,[2] completes this knowledge, and
enable us not only to read almost day by day in the history of Tolstoy's
conscience, but also to reconstitute the world in which his genius struck
root, and the minds from which his own drew sustenance.
His was a rich inheritance. The Tolstoys and the Volkonskys were very
ancient families, of the greater nobility, claiming descent from Rurik;
numbering among their ancestors companions of Peter the Great, generals
of the Seven Years' War, heroes of the Napoleonic struggle, Decembrists,
and political exiles. This inheritance included family traditions; old
memories to which Tolstoy was indebted for some of the most original
types in his War and Peace; there was the old Prince Bolkonsky, his
maternal grandfather, Voltairian, despotic, a belated representative of the
aristocracy of the days of Catherine II.; Prince Nikolas Grigorovitch
Volkonsky, a cousin of his mother, who was wounded at Austerlitz, and,
like Prince Andrei, was carried off the field of battle under the eyes of
Napoleon; his father, who had some of the characteristics of Nicolas

Rostoff;[3] and his mother, the Princess Marie, the ugly, charming woman
with the beautiful eyes, whose goodness illumines the pages of War and
Peace.
He scarcely knew his parents. Those delightful narratives, Childhood and
Youth, have, therefore, but little authenticity; for the writer's mother died
when he was not yet two years of age. He, therefore, was unable to recall
the beloved face which the little Nikolas Irtenieff evoked beyond a veil of
tears: a face with a luminous smile, which radiated gladness....
"Ah! if in difficult moments I could only see that smile, I should not know
what sorrow is."[4]
Yet she doubtless endowed him with her own absolute candour, her
indifference to opinion, and her wonderful gift of relating tales of her own
invention.
His father he did in some degree remember. His was a genial yet ironical
spirit; a sad-eyed man who dwelt upon his estates, leading an independent,
unambitious life. Tolstoy was nine years old when he lost him. His death
caused him "for the first time to understand the bitter truth, and filled his
soul with despair."[5] Here was the child's earliest encounter with the spectre
of terror; and henceforth a portion of his life was to be devoted to fighting
the phantom, and a portion to its celebration, its transfiguration. The traces
of this agony are marked by a few unforgettable touches in the final
chapters of his Childhood, where his memories are transposed in the
narrative of the death and burial of his mother.
Five children were left orphans in the old house at Yasnaya Polyana.[6]
There Leo Nikolayevitch was born, on the 28th of August, 1828, and there,
eighty-two years later, he was to die. The youngest of the five was a girl:
that Marie who in later years became a religious; it was with her that
Tolstoy took refuge in dying, when he fled from home and family. Of the
four sons, Sergius was charming and selfish, "sincere to a degree that I have
never known equalled"; Dmitri was passionate, selfcentred, introspective,
and in later years, as a student, abandoned himself eagerly to the practices
of religion; caring nothing for public opinion; fasting, seeking out the poor,
sheltering the infirm; suddenly, with the same quality of violence, plunging
into debauchery; then, tormented by remorse, ransoming a girl whom he

had known in a public brothel, and receiving her into his home; finally
dying of phthisis at the age of twenty-nine.[7] Nikolas, the eldest, the
favourite brother, had inherited his mother's gift of imagination, her power
of telling stories;[8] ironical, nervous, and refined; in later years an officer in
the Caucasus, where he formed the habit of a drunkard; a man, like his
brother, full of Christian kindness, living in hovels, and sharing with the
poor all that he possessed. Tourgenev said of him "that he put into practice
that humble attitude towards life which his brother Leo was content to
develop in theory."
The orphans were cared for by two great-hearted women, one was their
Aunt Tatiana,[9] of whom Tolstoy said that "she had two virtues: serenity
and love." Her whole life was love; a devotion that never failed. "She made
me understand the moral pleasure of loving."
The other was their Aunt Alexandra, who was for ever serving others,
herself avoiding service, dispensing with the help of servants. Her favourite
occupation was reading the lives of the Saints, or conversing with pilgrims
or the feeble-minded. Of these "innocents" there were several, men and
women, who lived in the house. One, an old woman, a pilgrim, was the
godmother of Tolstoy's sister. Another, the idiot Gricha, knew only how to
weep and pray....
"Gricha, notable Christian! So mighty was your faith that you felt the
approach of God; so ardent was your love that words rushed from your lips,
words that your reason could not control. And how you used to celebrate
His splendour, when speech failed you, when, all tears, you lay prostrated
on the ground!"[10]
Who can fail to understand the influence, in the shaping of Tolstoy, of all
these humble souls? In some of them we seem to see an outline, a prophecy,
of the Tolstoy of later years. Their prayers and their affection must have
sown the seeds of faith in the child's mind; seeds of which the aged man
was to reap the harvest.
With the exception of the idiot Gricha, Tolstoy does not speak, in his
narrative of Childhood, of these humble helpers who assisted in the work of
building up his mind. But then how clearly we see it through the medium of
the book—this soul of a little child; "this pure, loving heart, a ray of clear

light, which always discovered in others the best of their qualities"—this
more than common tenderness! Being happy, he ponders on the only
creature he knows to be unhappy; he cries at the thought, and longs to
devote himself to his good. He hugs and kisses an ancient horse, begging
his pardon, because he has hurt him. He is happy in loving, even if he is not
loved. Already we can see the germs of his future genius; his imagination,
so vivid that he cries over his own stories; his brain, always busy, always
trying to discover of what other people think; his precocious powers of
memory[11] and observation; the attentive eyes, which even in the midst of
his sorrow scrutinise the faces about him, and the authenticity of their
sorrow. He tells us that at five years of age he felt for the first time "that life
is not a time of amusement, but a very heavy task."[12]
Happily he forgot the discovery. In those days he used to soothe his mind
with popular tales; those mythical and legendary dreams known in Russia
as bylines; stories from the Bible; above all the sublime History of Joseph,
which he cited in his old age as a model of narrative art: and, finally, the
Arabian Nights, which at his grandmother's house were recited every
evening, from the vantage of the window-seat, by a blind story-teller.

[1] With the exception of a few interruptions: one especially of considerable length, between 1865
and 1878.
[2] For his remarkable biography of Léon Tolstoï, Vie et Oeuvre, Mémoires, Souvenirs, Lettres,
Extraits du Journal intime, Notes et Documents biographiques, réunis, coordonnés et annotés par P.
Birukov, revised by Leo Tolstoy, translated into French from the MS. by J. W. Bienstock.
[3] He also fought in the Napoleonic campaigns, and was a prisoner in France during the years 1814-
15.
[4] Childhood, chap. ii.
[5] Childhood, chap, xxvii.
[6] Yasnaya Polyana, the name of which signifies "the open glade" (literally, the "light glade"), is a
little village to the south of Moscow, at a distance of some leagues from Toula, in one of the most
thoroughly Russian of the provinces. "Here the two great regions of Russia," says M. Leroy-
Beaulieu, "the region of the forests and the agricultural region, meet and melt into each other. In the
surrounding country we meet with no Finns, Tatars, Poles, Jews, or Little Russians. The district of
Toula lies at the very heart of Russia."
[7] Tolstoy has depicted him in Anna Karenin, as the brother of Levine.
[8] He wrote the Diary of a Hunter.
[9] In reality she was a distant relative. She had loved Tolstoy's father, and was loved by him; but
effaced herself, like Sonia in War and Peace.

[10] Childhood, chap. xii.
[11] He professes, in his autobiographical notes (dated 1878), to be able to recall the sensations of
being swaddled as a baby, and of being bathed in a tub. See First Memories.
[12] First Memories.

CHAPTER II

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

He studied at Kazan.[1] He was not a notable student. It used to be said of
the three brothers[2]: "Sergius wants to, and can; Dmitri wants to, and can't;
Leo can't, and doesn't want to."
He passed through the period which he terms "the desert of adolescence"; a
desert of sterile sands, blown upon by gales of the burning winds of folly.
The pages of Boyhood, and in especial those of Youth[3] are rich in intimate
confessions relating to these years.
He was a solitary. His brain was in a condition of perpetual fever. For a year
he was completely at sea; he roamed from one system of philosophy to
another. As a Stoic, he indulged in self-inflicted physical tortures. As an
Epicurean he debauched himself. Then came a faith in metempsychosis.
Finally he fell into a condition of nihilism not far removed from insanity; he
used to feel that if only he could turn round with sufficient rapidity he
would find himself face to face with nothingness ... He analysed himself
continually:
"I no longer thought of a thing; I thought of what I thought of it."[4]
This perpetual self-analysis, this mechanism of reason turning in the void,
remained to him as a dangerous habit, which was "often," in his own words,
"to be detrimental to me in life"; but by which his art has profited
inexpressibly.[5]
As another result of self-analysis, he had lost all his religious convictions;
or such was his belief. At sixteen years of age ceased to pray; he went to

church no longer;[6] but his faith was not extinguished; it was only
smouldering.
"Nevertheless, I did believe—in something. But in what? I could not say. I
still believed in God; or rather I did not deny Him. But in what God? I did
not know. Nor did I deny Christ and his teaching; but I could not have said
precisely what that doctrine was."[7]
From time to time he was obsessed by dreams of goodness. He wished to
sell his carriage and give the money to the poor: to give them the tenth part
of his fortune; to live without the help of servants, "for they were men like
himself." During an illness[8] he wrote certain "Rules of Life." He naively
assigned himself the duty of "studying everything, of mastering all subjects:
law, medicine, languages, agriculture, history, geography, and mathematics;
to attain the highest degree of perfection in music and painting," and so
forth. I had "the conviction that the destiny of man was a process of
incessant self-perfection."
Insensibly, under the stress of a boy's passions, of a violent sensuality and a
stupendous pride of self,[9] this faith in perfection went astray, losing its
disinterested quality, becoming material and practical. If he still wished to
perfect his will, his body, and his mind, it was in order to conquer the world
and to enforce its love.[10] He wished to please.
To please: it was not an easy ambition. He was then of a simian ugliness:
the face was long, heavy, brutish; the hair was cropped close, growing low
upon the forehead; the eyes were small, with a hard, forbidding glance,
deeply sunken in shadowy orbits; the nose was large, the lips were thick and
protruding, and the ears were enormous.[11] Unable to alter this ugliness,
which even as a child had subjected him to fits of despair,[12] he pretended
to a realisation of the ideal man of the world, l'homme comme il faut.[13]
This ideal led him to do as did other "men of the world": to gamble, run
foolishly into debt, and to live a completely dissipated existence.[14]
One quality always came to his salvation: his absolute sincerity.
"Do you know why I like you better than the others?" says Nekhludov to his
friend. "You have a precious and surprising quality: candour."

"Yes, I am always saying things which I am ashamed to own even to
myself."[15]
In his wildest moments he judges himself with a pitiless insight.
"I am living an utterly bestial life," he writes in his Journal. "I am as low as
one can fall." Then, with his mania for analysis, he notes minutely the
causes of his errors:
"1. Indecision or lack of energy. 2. Self-deception. 3. Insolence. 4. False
modesty. 5. Ill-temper. 6. Licentiousness. 7. Spirit of imitation. 8.
Versatility. 9. Lack of reflection."
While still a student he was applying this independence of judgment to the
criticism of social conventions and intellectual superstitions. He scoffed at
the official science of the University; denied the least importance to
historical studies, and was put under arrest for his audacity of thought. At
this period he discovered Rousseau, reading his Confessions and Émile. The
discovery affected him like a mental thunderbolt.
"I made him an object of religious worship. I wore a medallion portrait of
him hung round my neck, as though it were a holy image."[16]
His first essays in philosophy took the form of commentaries on Rousseau
(1846-47).
In the end, however, disgusted with the University and with "smartness," he
returned to Yasnaya Polyana, to bury himself in the country (1847-51);
where he once more came into touch with the people. He professed to come
to their assistance, as their benefactor and their teacher. His experiences of
this period have been related in one of his earliest books, A Russian
Proprietor (A Landlord's Morning) (1852); a remarkable novel, whose hero,
Prince Nekhludov, Nekhludov figures also in Boyhood and Youth (1854), in
A Brush with the Enemy (1856); the Diary of a Sportsman (1856); Lucerne
(1857); and Resurrection (1899). We must remember that different
characters appear under this one name. Tolstoy has not always given
Nekhludov the same physical aspect; and the latter commits suicide at the
end of the Diary of a Sportsman. These different Nekhludovs are various
aspects of Tolstoy, endowed with his worst and his best characteristics, is
Tolstoy in disguise.

Nekhludov is twenty years old. He has left the University to devote himself
to his peasants. He has been labouring for a year to do them good. In the
course of a visit to the village we see him striving against jeering
indifference, rooted distrust, routine, apathy, vice, and ingratitude. All his
efforts are in vain. He returns indoors discouraged, and muses on his
dreams of a year ago; his generous enthusiasm, his "idea that love and
goodness were one with happiness and truth: the only happiness and the
only truth possible in this world." He feels himself defeated. He is weary
and ashamed.
"Seated before the piano, his hand unconsciously moved upon the keys. A
chord sounded; then a second, then a third.... He began to play. The chords
were not always perfect in rhythm; they were often obvious to the point of
banality; they did not reveal any talent for music; but they gave him a
melancholy, indefinable sense of pleasure. At each change of key he
awaited, with a flutter of the heart, for what was about to follow; his
imagination vaguely supplementing the deficiencies of the actual sound. He
heard a choir, an orchestra ... and his keenest pleasure arose from the
enforced activity of his imagination, which brought before him, without
logical connection, but with astonishing clearness, the most varied scenes
and images of the past and the future...."
Once more he sees the moujiks—vicious, distrustful, lying, idle, obstinate,
contrary, with whom he has lately been speaking; but this time he sees them
with all their good qualities and without their vices; he sees into their hearts
with the intuition of love; he sees therein their patience, their resignation to
the fate which is crushing them; their forgiveness of wrongs, their family
affection, and the causes of their pious, mechanical attachment to the past.
He recalls their days of honest labour, healthy and fatiguing....
"'It is beautiful,' he murmurs.... Why am I not one of these?'"[17]
The entire Tolstoy is already contained in the hero of this first novel;[18] his
piercing vision and his persistent illusions. He observes men and women
with an impeccable realism; but no sooner does he close his eyes than his
dreams resume their sway; his dreams and his love of mankind.

[1] From 1842 to 1847. Science was as yet unorganised; and its teachers, even in Western Europe,
had not the courage of the facts they taught. Men still sought for an anchor in the philosophic systems

of the ancients. The theory of evolution, put forward at the beginning of the century, had fallen into
obscurity. Science was dry, dogmatic, uncoordinated, insignificant. Hence, perhaps, the contempt for
science which distinguished Tolstoy throughout his life, and which made the later Tolstoy possible.—
TRANS.
[2] Nikolas, five years older than Leo, had completed his studies in 1844.
[3] The English translation is entitled Childhood, Boyhood, Youth.
[4] Youth, six.
[5] Notably in his first volumes—in the Tales of Sebastopol.
[6] This was the time when he used to read Voltaire, and find pleasure in so doing.
[7] Confessions, vol. i.
[8] In March and April, 1847.
[9] "All that man does he does out of amour-propre," says Nekhludov, in Boyhood. In 1853 Tolstoy
writes, in his Journal: "My great failing: pride. A vast self-love, without justification.... I am so
ambitious that if I had to choose between glory and virtue (which I love) I am sure I should choose
the former."
[10] "I wanted to be known by all, loved by all. I wanted every one, at the mere sound of my name,
to be struck with admiration and gratitude."
[11] According to a portrait dated 1848, in which year he attained his twentieth year.
[12] "I thought there would be no happiness on earth for any one who had so large a nose, so thick
lips, and such small eyes."
[13] "I divided humanity into three classes: the 'correct,' or 'smart,' who alone were worthy of esteem;
those who were not 'correct,' who deserved only contempt and hatred; and the people, the plebs, who
simply did not exist." (Youth, xxxi.)
[14] Especially during a period spent in St. Petersburg, 1847-48.
[15] Boyhood.
[16] Conversations with M. Paul Boyer (Le Temps), August 28, 1901.
[17] A Russian Proprietor.
[18] Contemporary with Childhood.

CHAPTER III

YOUTH: THE ARMY

Tolstoy, in the year 1850, was not as patient as Nekhludov. Yasnaya Polyana
had disillusioned and disappointed him. He was as weary of the people as
he was of the world of fashion; his attitude as benefactor wearied him; he

could bear it no more. Moreover, he was harassed by creditors. In 1851 he
escaped to the Caucasus; to the army in which his brother Nikolas was
already an officer.
He had hardly arrived, hardly tasted the quiet of the mountains, before he
was once more master of himself; before he had recovered his God.
"Last night[1] I hardly slept. I began to pray to God. I cannot possibly
express the sweetness of the feeling that came to me when I prayed. I
recited the customary prayers; but I went on praying for a long time. I felt
the desire of something very great, very beautiful.... What? I cannot say
what. I wanted to be one with the Infinite Being: to be dissolved,
comprehended, in Him. I begged Him to forgive me my trespasses.... But
no, I did not beg Him; I felt that He did pardon me, since He granted me
that moment of wonderful joy. I was praying, yet at the same time I felt that
I could not, dared not pray. I thanked Him, not in words, but in thought....
Scarcely an hour had passed, and I was listening to the voice of vice. I fell
asleep dreaming of glory, of women: it was stronger than I. Never mind! I
thank God for that moment of happiness: for showing me my pettiness and
my greatness. I want to pray, but I do not know how; I want to understand,
but I dare not. I abandon myself to Thy will!"[2]
The flesh was not conquered; not then, nor ever; the struggle between God
and the passions of man continued in the silence of his heart. Tolstoy speaks
in his Journal of the three demons which were devouring him:
1. The passion for gambling. Possible struggle.
2. Sensuality. Struggle very difficult.
3. Vanity. The most terrible of all.
At the very moment when he was dreaming of living for others and of
sacrificing himself, voluptuous or futile thoughts would assail him: the
image of some Cossack woman, or "the despair he would feel if his
moustache were higher on one side than the other."—"No matter!" God was
there; He would not forsake him. Even the effervescence of the struggle
was fruitful: all the forces of life were exalted thereby.
"I think the idea of making a journey to the Caucasus, however frivolous at
the time of conception, was inspired in me from above. God's hand has

guided me. I never cease to thank Him. I feel that I have become better
here; and I am firmly convinced that whatever happens to me can only be
for my good, since it is God Himself who has wished it...."[3]
It is the song of gratitude of the earth in spring. Earth covers herself with
flowers; all is well, all is beautiful. In 1852 the genius of Tolstoy produces
its earliest flowers: Childhood, The Russian Proprietor, The Invasion,
Boyhood; and he thanks the Spirit of life who has made him fruitful.[4]

[1] The 11th of June, 1851, in the fortified camp of Starï-Iourt, in the Caucasus.
[2] Journal.
[3] Letter to his Aunt Tatiana, January, 1852.
[4] A portrait dated 1851 already shows the change which is being accomplished in his mind. The
head is raised; the expression is somewhat brighter; the cavities of the orbits are less in shadow; the
eyes themselves still retain their fixed severity of look, and the open mouth, shadowed by a growing
moustache, is gloomy and sullen; there is still a quality of defiant pride, but far more youth.

CHAPTER IV

EARLY WORK: TALES OF THE CAUCASUS

The Story of my Childhood[1] was commenced in the autumn of 1851, at
Tiflis; it was finished at Piatigorsk in the Caucasus, on the 2nd of July,
1852. It is curious to note that while in the midst of that nature by which he
was so intoxicated, while leading a life absolutely novel, in the midst of the
stirring risks of warfare, occupied in the discovery of a world of unfamiliar
characters and passions, Tolstoy should have returned, in this his first work,
to the memories of his past life. But Childhood was written during a period
of illness, when his military activity was suddenly arrested. During the long
leisure of a convalescence, while alone and suffering, his state of mind
inclined to the sentimental;[2] the past unrolled itself before his eyes at a
time when he felt for it a certain tenderness. After the exhausting tension of
the last few unprofitable years, it was comforting to live again in thought
the "marvellous, innocent, joyous, poetic period" of early childhood; to

reconstruct for himself "the heart of a child, good, sensitive, and capable of
love." With the ardour of youth and its illimitable projects, with the cyclic
character of his poetic imagination, which rarely conceived an isolated
subject, and whose great romances are only the links in a long historic
chain, the fragments of enormous conceptions which he was never able to
execute,[3] Tolstoy at this moment regarded his narrative of Childhood as
merely the opening chapters of a History of Four Periods, which was to
include his life in the Caucasus, and was in all probability to have
terminated in the revelation of God by Nature.
In later years Tolstoy spoke with great severity of his Childhood, to which
he owed some part of his popularity.
"It is so bad," he remarked to M. Birukov: "it is written with so little literary
conscience!... There is nothing to be got from it."
He was alone in this opinion. The manuscript was sent, without the author's
name, to the great Russian review, the Sovremennik (Contemporary); it was
published immediately (September 6, 1852), and achieved a general
success; a success confirmed by the public of every country in Europe. Yet
in spite of its poetic charm, its delicacy of touch and emotion, we can
understand that it may have displeased the Tolstoy of later years.
It displeased him for the very reasons by which it pleased others. We must
admit it frankly: except in the recording of certain provincial types, and in a
restricted number of passages which are remarkable for their religious
feeling or for the realistic treatment of emotion,[4] the personality of Tolstoy
is barely in evidence.
A tender, gentle sentimentality prevails from cover to cover; a quality which
was always afterwards antipathetic to Tolstoy, and one which he sedulously
excluded from his other romances. We recognise it; these tears, this
sentimentality came from Dickens, who was one of Tolstoy's favourite
authors between his fourteenth and his twenty-first year. Tolstoy notes in his
Journal: "Dickens: David Copperfield. Influence considerable." He read the
book again in the Caucasus.
Two other influences, to which he himself confesses, were Sterne and
Töppfer. "I was then," he says, "under their inspiration."[5]

Who would have thought that the Nouvelles Genevoises would be the first
model of the author of War and Peace? Yet knowing this to be a fact, we
discern in Tolstoy's Childhood the same bantering, affected geniality,
transplanted to the soil of a more aristocratic nature. So we see that the
readers of his earliest efforts found the writer's countenance familiar. It was
not long, however, before his own personality found self-expression. His
Boyhood (Adolescence), though less pure and less perfect than Childhood,
exhibits a more original power of psychology, a keen feeling for nature, and
a mind full of distress and conflict, which Dickens or Töppfer would have
been at a loss to express. In the Russian Proprietor (October, 1852[6])
Tolstoy's character appeared sharply defined, marked by his fearless
sincerity and his faith in love. Among the remarkable portraits of peasants
which he has painted in this novel, we find an early sketch of one of the
finest conceptions of his Popular Tales: the old man with the beehives; a
the little old man under the birch-tree, his hands outstretched, his eyes
raised, his bald head shining in the sun, and all around him the bees,
touched with gold, never stinging him, forming a halo.... But the truly
typical works of this period are those which directly register his present
emotions: namely, the novels of the Caucasus. The first, The Invasion
(finished in December, 1852), impresses the reader deeply by the
magnificence of its landscapes: a sunrise amidst the mountains, on the bank
of a river; a wonderful night-piece, with sounds and shadows noted with a
striking intensity; and the return in the evening, while the distant snowy
peaks disappear in the violet haze, and the clear voices of the regimental
singers rise and fall in the transparent air. Many of the types of War and
Peace are here drawn to the life: Captain Khlopoff, the true hero, who by no
means fights because he likes fighting, but because it is his duty; a man
with "one of those truly Russian faces, placid and simple, and eyes into
which it is easy and agreeable to gaze." Heavy, awkward, a trifle ridiculous,
indifferent to his surroundings, he alone is unchanged in battle, where all
the rest are changed; "he is exactly as we have seen him always: with the
same quiet movements, the same level voice, the same expression of
simplicity on his heavy, simple face." Next comes the lieutenant who
imitates the heroes of Lermontov; a most kindly, affectionate boy, who
professes the utmost ferocity. Then comes the poor little subaltern,
delighted at the idea of his first action, brimming over with affection, ready
to fall on his comrade's neck; a laughable, adorable boy, who, like Petia

Rostoff, contrives to get stupidly killed. In the centre of the picture is the
figure of Tolstoy, the observer, who is mentally aloof from his comrades,
and I already utters his cry of protest against warfare:
"Is it impossible, then, for men to live in peace, in this world so full of
beauty, under this immeasurable starry sky? How is it they are able, here, to
retain their feelings of hostility and vengeance, and the lust of destroying
their fellows? All there is of evil in the human heart ought to disappear at
the touch of nature, that most immediate expression of the beautiful and the
good."[7]
Other tales of the Caucasus were to follow which were observed at this
time, though not written until a later period. In 1854-55. The Woodcutters
was written; a book notable for its exact and rather frigid realism; full of
curious records of Russian soldier-psychology—notes to be made use of in
the future. In 1856 appeared A Brush with the Enemy, in which there is a
man of the world, a degraded non-commissioned officer, a wreck, a coward,
a drunkard and a liar, who cannot support the idea of being slaughtered like
one of the common soldiers he despises, the least of whom is worth a
hundred of himself.
Above all these works, as the summit, so to speak, of this first mountain
range, rises one of the most beautiful lyric romances that ever fell from
Tolstoy's pen: the song of his youth, the poem of the Caucasus, The
Cossacks.[8] The splendour of the snowy mountains displaying their noble
lines against the luminous sky fills the whole work with its music. The book
is unique, for it belongs to the flowering-time of genius, "the omnipotent
god of youth," as Tolstoy says, "that rapture which never returns." What a
spring-tide torrent! What an overflow of love!
"'I love—I love so much!... How brave! How good!' he repeated: and he felt
as though he must weep. Why? Who was brave, and whom did he love?
That he did not precisely know."[9]
This intoxication of the heart flows on, unchecked. Olenin, the hero, who
has come to the Caucasus, as Tolstoy came, to steep himself in nature, in
the life of adventure, becomes enamoured of a young Cossack girl, and
abandons himself to the medley of his contradictory aspirations. At one
moment he believes that "happiness is to live for others, to sacrifice
oneself," at another, that "self-sacrifice is only stupidity"; finally he is

inclined to believe, with Erochta, the old Cossack, that "everything is
precious. God has made everything for the delight of man. Nothing is a sin.
To amuse oneself with a handsome girl is not a sin: it is only health." But
what need to think at all? It is enough to live. Life is all good, all happiness;
life is all-powerful and universal; life is God. An ardent naturalism uplifts
and consumes his soul. Lost in the forest, amidst "the wildness of the
woods, the multitude of birds and animals, the clouds of midges in the
dusky green, in the warm, fragrant air, amidst the little runlets of water
which trickle everywhere beneath the boughs"; a few paces from the
ambushes of the enemy, Olenin is "seized suddenly by such a sense of
causeless happiness that in obedience to childish habit he crossed himself
and began to give thanks to somebody." Like a Hindu fakir, he rejoices to
tell himself that he is alone and lost in this maëlstrom of aspiring life: that
myriads of invisible beings, hidden on every hand, are that moment hunting
him to death; that these thousands of little insects humming around him are
calling:
"Here, brothers, here! Here is some one to bite!"
And it became obvious to him that he was no longer a Russian gentleman,
in Moscow society, but simply a creature like the midge, the pheasant, the
stag: like those which were living and prowling about him at that moment.
"Like them, I shall live, I shall die. And the grass will grow above me...."
And his heart is full of happiness.
Tolstoy lives through this hour of youth in a delirium of vitality and the
love of life. He embraces Nature, and sinks himself in her being. To her he
pours forth and exalts his griefs, his joys, and his loves; in her he lulls them
to sleep. Yet this romantic intoxication never veils the lucidity of his
perceptions. Nowhere has he painted landscape with a greater power than in
this fervent poem; nowhere has he depicted the type with greater truth. The
contrast of nature with the world of men, which forms the basis of the book;
and which through all Tolstoy's life is to prove one of his favourite themes,
and an article of his Credo, has already inspired him, the better to castigate
the world, with something of the bitterness to be heard in the Kreutzer
Sonata.[10] But for those who love him he is no less truly himself; and the
creatures of nature, the beautiful Cossack girl and her friends, are seen

under a searching light, with their egoism, their cupidity, their venality, and
all their vices.
An exceptional occasion was about to offer itself for the exercise of this
heroic veracity.

[1] Published in English as part of Childhood, Boyhood, Youth.
[2] His letters of this period to his Aunt Tatiana are full of tears and of sentimentality. He was, as he
says, Liovariova, "Leo the Sniveller" (January 6, 1852).
[3] The Russian Proprietor (A Landlord's Morning) is the fragment of a projected Romance of a
Russian Landowner. The Cossacks forms the first portion of a great romance of the Caucasus. In the
author's eyes the huge War and Peace was only a sort of preface to a contemporary epic, of which
The Decembrists was to have been the nucleus.
[4] See the passage relating to the pilgrim Gricha, or to the death of his mother.
[5] Letter to Birukov.
[6] Completed only in 1855-56. The Two Old Men (1885).
[7] The Invasion.
[8] Although completed much later—in 1860—and appearing only in 1863—the bulk of this volume
was of this period.
[9] The Cossacks.
[10] For example, see Oleniln's letter to his friends in Russia.

CHAPTER V

SEBASTOPOL: WAR AND RELIGION

In November, 1853, war was declared upon Turkey. Tolstoy obtained an
appointment to the army of Roumania; he was transferred to the army of the
Crimea, and on November 7, 1854, he arrived in Sebastopol. He was
burning with enthusiasm and patriotic faith. He went about his duties
courageously, and was often in danger, in especial throughout the April and
May of 1855, when he served on every alternate day in the battery of of the
4th bastion.

Living for months in a perpetual tremor and exaltation, face to face with
death, his religious mysticism revived. He became familiar with God. In
April, 1855, he noted in his diary a prayer to God, thanking Him for His
protection in danger and beseeching Him to continue it, "so that I may
achieve the glorious and eternal end of life, of which I am still ignorant,
although I feel a presentiment of it." Already this object of his life was not
art, but religion. On March 5, 1855, he wrote:
"I have been led to conceive a great idea, to whose realisation I feel capable
of devoting my whole life. This idea is the foundation of a new religion; the
religion of the Christ, but purified of dogmas and mysteries.... To act with a
clear conscience, in order to unite men by means of religion."[1]
This was to be the programme of his old age.
However, to distract himself from the spectacles which surrounded him, he
began once more to write. How could he, amidst that hail of lead, find the
necessary freedom of mind for the writing of the third part of his memories:
Youth? The book is chaotic; and we may attribute to the conditions of its
production a quality of disorder, and at times a certain dryness of abstract
analysis, which is increased by divisions and subdivisions after the manner
of Stendhal.[2] Yet we admire his calm penetration of the mist of dreams and
inchoate ideas which crowd a young brain. His work is extraordinarily true
to itself, and at moments what poetic freshness!—as in the vivid picture of
springtime in the city, or the tale of the confession, and the journey to the
convent, on account of the forgotten sin! An impassioned pantheism lends
to certain pages a lyric beauty, whose accents recall the tales of the
Caucasus. For example, this description of an evening in the spring:
"The calm splendour of the shining crescent; the gleaming fish-pond; the
ancient birch-trees, whose long-tressed boughs were on one side silvered by
the moonlight, while on the other they covered the path and the bushes with
their black shadows; the cry of a quail beyond the pond; the barely
perceptible sound of two ancient trees which grazed one another; the
humming of the mosquitoes; the fall of an apple on the dry leaves; and the
frogs leaping up to the steps of the terrace, their backs gleaming greenish
under a ray of moonlight.... The moon is mounting; suspended in the limpid
sky, she fills all space with her light; the splendour of the moonlit water
grows yet more brilliant, the shadows grow blacker, the light more

transparent.... And to me, an obscure and earthy creature, already soiled
with every human passion, but endowed with all the stupendous power of
love, it seemed at that moment that all nature, the moon, and I myself were
one and the same."[3]
But the present reality, potent and imperious, spoke more loudly than the
dreams of the past. Youth remained unfinished; and Captain Count Tolstoy,
behind the plating of his bastion, amid the rumbling of the bombardment, or
in the midst of his company, observed the dying and the living, and
recorded their miseries and his own, in his unforgettable narratives of
Sebastopol.
These three narratives—Sebastopol in December, 1854, Sebastopol in May,
1855, Sebastopol in August, 1855—are generally confounded with one
another; but in reality they present many points of difference. The second in
particular, in point both of feeling and of art, is greatly superior to the
others. The others are dominated by patriotism; the second is charged with
implacable truth.
It is said that after reading the first narrative[4] the Tsarina wept, and the
Tsar, moved by admiration, commanded that the story should be translated
into French, and the author sent out of danger. We can readily believe it.
Nothing in these pages but exalts warfare and the fatherland. Tolstoy had
just arrived; his enthusiasm was intact; he was afloat on a tide of heroism.
As yet he could see in the defenders of Sebastopol neither ambition nor
vanity, nor any unworthy feeling. For him the war was a sublime epic; its
heroes were "worthy of Greece." On the other hand, these notes exhibit no
effort of the imagination, no attempt at objective representation. The writer
strolls through the city; he sees with the utmost lucidity, but relates what he
sees in a form which is wanting in freedom: "You see ... you enter ... you
notice...." This is first-class reporting; rich in admirable impressions.
Very different is the second scene: Sebastopol in May, 1855. In the opening
lines we read:
"Here the self-love, the vanity of thousands of human beings is in conflict,
or appeased in death...."
And further on:

"And as there were many men, so also were there many forms of vanity....
Vanity, vanity, everywhere vanity, even at the door of the tomb! It is the
peculiar malady of our century.... Why do the Homers and Shakespeares
speak of love, of glory, and of suffering, and why is the literature of our
century nothing but the interminable history of snobs and egotists?"
The narrative, which is no longer a simple narrative on the part of the
author, but one which sets before us men and their passions, reveals that
which is concealed by the mask of heroism. Tolstoy's clear, disillusioned
gaze plumbs to the depths the hearts of his companions in arms; in them, as
in himself, he reads pride, fear, and the comedy of those who continue to
play at life though rubbing shoulders with death. Fear especially is avowed,
stripped of its veils, and shown in all its nakedness. These nervous crises,[5]
this obsession of death, are analysed with a terrible sincerity that knows
neither shame nor pity. It was at Sebastopol that Tolstoy learned to eschew
sentimentalism, "that vague, feminine, whimpering passion," as he came
disdainfully to term it; and his genius for analysis, the instinct for which
awoke, as we saw, in the later years of his boyhood, and which was at times
to assume a quality almost morbid,[6] never attained to a more hypnotic and
poignant intensity than in the narrative of the death of Praskhoukhin. Two
whole pages are devoted to the description of all that passed in the mind of
the unhappy man during the second following upon the fall of the shell,
while the fuse was hissing towards explosion; and one page deals with all
that passed before him after it exploded, when "he was killed on the spot by
a fragment which struck him full in the chest."
As in the intervals of a drama we hear the occasional music of the orchestra,
so these scenes of battle are interrupted by wide glimpses of nature; deep
perspectives of light; the symphony of the day dawning upon the splendid
landscape, in the midst of which thousands are agonising. Tolstoy the
Christian, forgetting the patriotism of his first narrative, curses this impious
war:
"And these men, Christians, who profess the same great law of love and of
sacrifice, do not, when they perceive what they have done, fall upon their
knees repentant, before Him who in giving them life set within the heart of
each, together with the fear of death, the love of the good and the beautiful.
They do not embrace as brothers, with tears of joy and happiness!"

As he was completing this novel—a work that has a quality of bitterness
which, hitherto, none of his work had betrayed—Tolstoy was seized with
doubt. Had he done wrong to speak?
"A painful doubt assails me. Perhaps these things should not have been said.
Perhaps what I am telling is one of those mischievous truths which,
unconsciously hidden in the mind of each one of us, should not be
expressed lest they become harmful, like the lees that we must not stir lest
we spoil the wine. If so, when is the expression of evil to be avoided? When
is the expression of goodness to be imitated? Who is the malefactor and
who is the hero? All are good and all are evil...."
But he proudly regains his poise: "The protagonist of my novel, whom I
love with all the strength of my soul, whom I try to present in all her beauty,
who always was, is, and shall be beautiful, is Truth."
After reading these pages[7] Nekrasov, the editor of the review
Sovremennik, wrote to Tolstoy: "That is precisely what Russian society
needs to-day: the truth, the truth, of which, since the death of Gogol, so
little has remained in Russian letters.... This truth which you bring to our art
is something quite novel with us. I have only one fear: lest the times, and
the cowardice of life, the deafness and dumbness of all that surrounds us,
may make of you what it has made of most of us—lest it may kill the
energy in you."[8]
Nothing of the kind was to be feared. The times, which waste the energies
of ordinary men, only tempered those of Tolstoy. Yet for a moment the trials
of his country and the capture of Sebastopol aroused a feeling of regret for
his perhaps too unfeeling frankness, together with a feeling of sorrowful
affection.
In his third narrative—Sebastopol in August, 1855—while describing a
group of officers playing cards and quarrelling, he interrupts himself to say:
"But let us drop the curtain quickly over this picture. To-morrow—perhaps
to-day—each of these men will go cheerfully to meet his death. In the
depths of the soul of each there smoulders the spark of nobility which will
make him a hero."
Although this shame detracts in no wise from the forcefulness and realism
of the narrative, the choice of characters shows plainly enough where lie the

sympathies of the writer. The epic of Malakoff and its heroic fall is told as
affecting two rare and touching figures: two brothers, of whom the elder,
Kozeltoff, has some of the characteristics of Tolstoy. Who can forget the
younger, the ensign Volodya, timid and enthusiastic, with his feverish
monologues, his dreams, his tears?—tears that rise to his eyes for a mere
nothing; tears of tenderness, tears of humiliation—his fear during the first
hours passed in the bastion (the poor boy is still afraid of the dark, and
covers his head with his cloak when he goes to bed); the oppression caused
by the feeling of his own solitude and the indifference of others; then, when
the hour arrives, his joy in danger. He belongs to the group of poetic figures
of youth (of whom are Petia in War and Peace, and the sub-lieutenant in
The Invasion), who, their hearts full of affection, make war with laughter on
their lips, and are broken suddenly, uncomprehending, on the wheel of
death. The two brothers fall wounded, both on the same day—the last day
of the defence. The novel ends with these lines, in which we hear the
muttering of a patriotic anger:
"The army was leaving the town; and each soldier, as he looked upon
deserted Sebastopol, sighed, with an inexpressible bitterness in his heart,
and shook his fist in the direction of the enemy."[9]

[1] Journal.
[2] We notice this manner also in The Woodcutters, which was completed at the same period. For
example: "There are three kinds of love: 1. æsthetic love; 2. devoted love; 3. active love," &c.
(Youth). "There are three kinds of soldiers: 1. the docile and subordinate; 2. the authoritative; 3. the
boasters—who themselves are subdivided into: (a) The docile who are cool and lethargic; (b) those
who are earnestly docile; (c) docile soldiers who drink," &c. (The Woodcutters).
[3] Youth, xxxii.
[4] Sent to the review Sovremennik and immediately published.
[5] Tolstoy refers to them again at a much later date, in his Conversations with his friend Teneromo.
He tells him of a crisis of terror which assailed him one night when he was lying down in the
"lodgement" dug out of the body of the rampart, under the protective plating. This Episode of the
Siege of Sebastopol will be found in the volume entitled The Revolutionaries.
[6] Droujinine, a little later, wrote him a friendly letter in which he sought to put him on his guard
against this danger: "You have a tendency to an excessive minuteness of analysis; it may become a
serious fault. Sometimes you seem on the point of saying that so-and-so's calf indicated a desire to
travel in the Indies.... You must restrain this tendency: but do not for the world suppress it." (Letter
dated 1856 cited by P. Birukov.)
[7] Mutilated by the censor.

[8] 1 September 2, 1855.
[9] In 1889, when writing a preface to Memories of Sebastopol, by an Officer of Artillery (A. J.
Erchoff), Tolstoy returned in fancy to these scenes. Every heroic memory had disappeared. He could
no longer remember anything but the fear which lasted for seven months—the double fear: the fear of
death and the fear of shame—and the horrible moral torture. All the exploits of the siege reduced
themselves, for him, to this: he had been "flesh for cannon."

CHAPTER VI

ST. PETERSBURG

When, once issued from this hell, where for a year he had touched the
extreme of the passions, vanities, and sorrows of humanity, Tolstoy found
himself, in November, 1855, amidst the men of letters of St. Petersburg,
they inspired him with a feeling of disdain and disillusion. They seemed to
him entirely mean, ill-natured, and untruthful. These men, who appeared in
the distance to wear the halo of art—even Tourgenev, whom he had
admired, and to whom he had but lately dedicated The Woodcutters—even
he, seen close at hand, had bitterly disappointed him. A portrait of 1856
represents him in the midst of them: Tourgenev, Gontcharov, Ostrovsky,
Grigorovitch, Droujinine. He strikes one, in the free-and-easy atmosphere
of the others, by reason of his hard, ascetic air, his bony head, his lined
cheeks, his rigidly folded arms. Standing upright, in uniform, behind these
men of letters, he has the appearance, as Suarès has wittily said, "rather of
mounting guard over these gentry than of making one of their company; as
though he were ready to march them back to gaol."[1]
Yet they all gathered about their young colleague, who came to them with
the twofold glory of the writer and the hero of Sebastopol. Tourgenev, who
had "wept and shouted 'Hurrah!'" while reading the pages of Sebastopol,
held out a brotherly hand. But the two men could not understand one
another. Although both saw the world with the same clear vision, they
mingled with that vision the hues of their inimical minds; the one, ironic,
resonant, amorous, disillusioned, a devotee of beauty; the other proud,
violent tormented with moral ideas, pregnant with a hidden God.

What Tolstoy could never forgive in these literary men was that they
believed themselves an elect, superior caste; the crown of humanity. Into his
antipathy for them there entered a good deal of the pride of the great noble
and the officer who condescendingly mingles with liberal and middle-class
scribblers.[2] It was also a characteristic of his—he himself knew it—to
"oppose instinctively all trains of reasoning, all conclusions, which were
generally admitted."[3] A distrust of mankind, a latent contempt for human
reason, made him always on the alert to discover deception in himself or
others.
"He never believed in the sincerity of any one. All moral exhilaration
seemed false to him; and he had a way of fixing, with that extraordinarily
piercing gaze of his, the man whom he suspected was not telling the truth."
[4]
"How he used to listen! How he used to gaze at those who spoke to him,
from the very depths of his grey eyes, deeply sunken in their orbits! With
what irony his lips were pressed together!"[5]
"Tourgenev used to say that he had never experienced anything more
painful than this piercing gaze, which, together with two or three words of
envenomed observation, was capable of infuriating anybody."[6]
At their first meetings violent scenes occurred between Tolstoy and
Tourgenev. When at a distance they cooled down and tried to do one
another justice. But as time went on Tolstoy's dislike of his literary
surroundings grew deeper. He could not forgive these artists for the
combination of their depraved life and their moral pretensions.
"I acquired the conviction that nearly all were immoral men, unsound,
without character, greatly inferior to those I had met in my Bohemian
military life. And they were sure of themselves and selfcontent, as men
might be who were absolutely sound. They disgusted me."[7]
He parted from them. But he did not at once lose their interested faith in art.
[8]
His pride was flattered thereby. It was a faith which was richly rewarded;
it brought him "women, money, fame."
"Of this religion I was one of the pontiffs; an agreeable and highly
profitable situation."

The better to consecrate himself to this religion, he sent in his resignation
from the army (November, 1856).
But a man of his temper could not close his eyes for long. He believed, he
was eager to believe, in progress. It seemed to him "that this word signified
something." A journey abroad, which lasted from the end of January to the
end of July of 1857, during which period he visited France, Switzerland,
and Germany, resulted in the destruction of this faith. In Paris, on the 6th of
April, 1857, the spectacle of a public execution "showed him the emptiness
of the superstition of progress."
"When I saw the head part from the body and fall into the basket I
understood in every recess of my being that no theory as to the reason of the
present order of things could justify such an act. Even though all the men in
the world, supported by this or that theory, were to find it necessary, I
myself should know that it was wrong; for it is not what men say or do that
decides what is good or bad, but my own heart."[9]
In the month of July the sight of a little perambulating singer at Lucerne, to
whom the wealthy English visitors at the Schweizerhof were refusing alms,
made him express in the Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov his contempt for all
the illusions dear to Liberals, and for those "who trace imaginary lines upon
the sea of good and evil."
"For them civilisation is good; barbarism is bad; liberty is good; slavery is
bad. And this imaginary knowledge destroys the instinctive, primordial
cravings, which are the best. Who will define them for me—liberty,
despotism, civilisation, barbarism? Where does not good co-exist with evil?
There is within us only one infallible guide: the universal Spirit which
whispers to us to draw closer to one another."
On his return to Russia and Yasnaya he once more busied himself about the
peasants. Not that he had any illusions left concerning them. He writes:
"The apologists of the people and its good sense speak to no purpose; the
crowd is perhaps the union of worthy folk; but if so they unite only on their
bestial and contemptible side, a side which expresses nothing but the
weakness and cruelty of human nature."[10]
Thus he does not address himself to the crowd, but to the individual
conscience of each man, each child of the people. For there light is to be

found. He founded schools, without precisely knowing what he would
teach. In order to learn, he undertook another journey abroad, which lasted
from the 3rd of July, 1860, to the 23rd of April, 1861.[11]
He studied the various pedagogic systems of the time. Need we say that he
rejected one and all? Two visits to Marseilles taught him that the true
education of the people is effected outside the schools (which he considered
absurd), by means of the journals, the museums, the libraries, the street, and
everyday life, which he termed "the spontaneous school." The spontaneous
school, in opposition to the obligatory school, which he considered silly and
harmful; this was what he wished and attempted to institute upon his return
to Yasnaya Polyana.[12] Liberty was his principle. He would not admit that
an elect class, "the privileged Liberal circle," should impose its knowledge
and its errors upon "the people, to whom it is a stranger." It had no right to
do so. This method of forced education had never succeeded in producing,
at the University, "the men of whom humanity has need; but men of whom
a depraved society has need; officials, official professors, official literary
men, or men torn aimlessly from their old surroundings, whose youth has
been spoiled and wasted, and who can find no plan in life: irritable, puny
Liberals."[13] Go to the people to learn what they want I If they do not value
"the art of reading and writing which the intellectuals force upon them,"
they have their reasons for that; they have other spiritual needs, more
pressing and more legitimate. Try to understand those needs, and help them
to satisfy them!
These theories, those of a revolutionary Conservative, as Tolstoy always
was, he attempted to put into practice at Yasnaya, where he was rather the
fellow-disciple than the master of his pupils.[14] At the same time, he
endeavoured to introduce a new human spirit into agricultural exploitation.
Appointed in 1861 territorial arbitrator for the district of Krapiona, he was
the people's champion against the abuses of power on the part of the
landowners and the State.
We must not suppose that this social activity satisfied him, or entirely filled
his life. He continued to be the prey of contending passions. Although he
had suffered from the world, he always loved it and felt the need of it.
Pleasure resumed him at intervals, or else the love of action. He would risk
his life in hunting the bear. He played for heavy stakes. He would even fall

under the influence of the literary circles of St. Petersburg, for which he felt
such contempt. After these aberrations came crises of disgust. Such of his
writings as belong to this period bear unfortunate traces of this artistic and
moral uncertainty. The Two Hussars (1856) has a quality of pretentiousness
and elegance, a snobbish worldly flavour, which shocks one as coming
from Tolstoy. Albert, written at Dijon in 1857, is weak and eccentric, with
no trace of the writer's habitual depth or precision. The Diary of a
Sportsman (1856), a more striking though hasty piece of work, seems to
betray the disillusionment which Tolstoy inspired in himself. Prince
Nekhludov, his Doppellganger, his double, kills himself in a gaming-house.
"He had everything: wealth, a name, intellect, and high ambitions; he had
committed no crime; but he had done still worse: he had killed his courage,
his youth; he was lost, without even the excuse of a violent passion; merely
from a lack of will."
The approach of death itself does not alter him:
"The same strange inconsequence, the same hesitation, the same frivolity of
thought...."
Death!... At this period it began to haunt his mind. Three Deaths (1858-59)
already foreshadowed the gloomy analysis of The Death of Ivan Ilyitch; the
solitude of the dying man, his hatred of the living, his desperate query
—"Why?" The triptych of the three deaths—that of the wealthy woman,
that of the old consumptive postilion, and that of the slaughtered dog—is
not without majesty; the portraits are well drawn, the images are striking,
although the whole work, which has been too highly praised, is somewhat
loosely constructed, while the death of the dog lacks the poetic precision to
be found in the writer's beautiful landscapes. Taking it as a whole, we
hardly know how far it is intended as a work of art for the sake of art, or
whether it has a moral intention.
Tolstoy himself did not know. On the 4th of February, 1858, when he read
his essay of admittance before the Muscovite Society of Amateurs of
Russian Literature, he chose for his subject the defence of art for art's sake.
[16]
It was the president of the Society, Khomiakov, who, after saluting in
Tolstoy "the representative of purely artistic literature," took up the defence
of social and moral art.[17]

A year later the death of his dearly-loved brother, Nikolas, who succumbed
to phthisis[18] at Hyères, on the 19th of September, 1860, completely
overcame Tolstoy; shook him to the point of "crushing his faith in
goodness, in everything," and made him deny even his art:
"Truth is horrible.... Doubless, so long as the desire to know and to speak
the truth exists men will try to know and to speak it. This is the only
remnant left me of my moral concepts. It is the only thing I shall do; but not
in the form of art, your art. Art is a lie, and I can no longer love a beautiful
lie."[19]
Less than six months later, however, he returned to the "beautiful lie" with
Polikushka,[20] which of all his works is perhaps most devoid of moral
intention, if we except the latent malediction upon money and its powers for
evil; a work written purely for art's sake; a masterpiece, moreover, whose
only flaws are a possibly excessive wealth of observation, an abundance of
material which would have sufficed for a great novel, and the contrast,
which is too severe, a little too cruel, between the humorous opening and
the atrocious climax.[21]

[1] Suarès: Tolstoï, edition of the Union pour l'Action morale, 1899 (reprinted, in the Cahiers de la
Quinzaine, under the title Tolstoï vivant).
[2] Tourgenev complained, in a conversation, of "this stupid nobleman's pride, his bragging
Junkerdom."
[3] "A trait of my character, it may be good or ill, but it is one which was always peculiar to me, is
that in spite of myself I always used to resist external epidemic influences.... I had a hatred of the
general tendency." (Letter to P. Birukov.)
[4] Tourgenev.
[5] Grigorovitch.
[6] Eugène Gardine: Souvenirs sur Tourgeniev, 1883. See Vie et Oeuvre de Tolstoï, by Birukov.
[7] Confessions.
[8] "There was no difference between us and an asylum full of lunatics. Even at the time I vaguely
suspected as much; but as all madmen do, I regarded them as all mad excepting myself."—
Confessions.
[9] Confessions.
[10] Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov.
[11] At Dresden, during his travels he made the acquaintance of Auerbach, who had been the first to
inspire him with the idea of educating the people; at Kissingen he met Froebel, in London Herzen,

and in Brussels Proudhon, who seems to have made a great impression upon him.
[12] Especially in 1861-62.
[13] Education and Culture. See Vie et Oeuvre, by Birukov, vol. ii.
[14] Tolstoy explained these principles in the review Yasnaya Polyana, 1862.
[16] Lecture on The Superiority of the Artistic Element in Literature over all its Contemporary
Tendencies.
[17] He cited against Tolstoy his own examples, including the old postilion in The Three Deaths.
[18] We may remark that another brother, Dmitri, had already died of the same disease in 1856.
Tolstoy himself believed that he was attacked by it in 1856, in 1862, and in 1871. He was, as he
writes (the 28th of October, 1852), "of a strong constitution, but feeble in health." He constantly
suffered from chills, sore throats, toothache, inflamed eyes, and rheumatism. In the Caucasus, in
1852, he had "two days in the week at least to keep his room." Illness stopped him for several months
in 1854, on the road from Silistria to Sebastopol. In 1856, at Yasnaya, he was seriously ill with an
affection of the lungs. In 1862 the fear of phthisis induced him to undergo a Koumiss cure at Samara,
where he lived with the Bachkirs, and after 1870 he returned thither almost yearly. His
correspondence with Fet is full of preoccupations concerning his health. This physical condition
enables one the better to understand his obsession by the thought of death. In later years he spoke of
this illness as of his best friend:
"When one is ill one seems to descend a very gentle slope, which at a certain point is barred by a
curtain, a light curtain of some filmy stuff; on the hither side is life, beyond is death. How far
superior is the state of illness, in moral value, to that of health! Do not speak to me of those people
who have never been ill! They are terrible, the women especially so! A woman who has never known
illness is an absolute wild beast!" (Conversations with M. Paul Boyer, Le Temps, 27th of August,
1901.)
[19] Letter to Fet, October 17, 1860 (Further Letters: in the French version, Correspondance inédite,
pp. 27-30).
[20] Written in Brussels, 1861.
[21] Another novel written at this period is a simple narrative of a journey—The Snowstorm—which
evokes personal memories, and is full of the beauty of poetic and quasi-musical impressions. Tolstoy
used almost the same background later, in his Master and Servant (1895).

CHAPTER VII

"FAMILY HAPPINESS"

From this period of transition, during which the genius of the man was
feeling its way blindly, doubtful of itself and apparently exhausted, "devoid
of strong passion, without a directing will," like Nekhludov in the Diary of

a Sportsman—from this period issued a work unique in its tenderness and
charm: Family Happiness (1859). This was the miracle of love.
For many years Tolstoy had been on friendly terms with the Bers family. He
had fallen in love with the mother and the three daughters in succession.[1]
His final choice fell upon the second, but he dared not confess it. Sophie
Andreyevna Bers was still a child; she was seventeen years old, while
Tolstoy was over thirty; he regarded himself as an old man, who had not the
right to associate his soiled and vitiated life with that of an innocent young
girl. He held out for three years.[2] Afterwards; in Anna Karenin, he related
how his declaration to Sophie Bers was effected, and how she replied to it:
both of them tracing with one finger, under a table, the initials of words
they dared not say.
Like Levine in Anna Karenin, he was so cruelly honest as to place his
intimate journal in the hands of his betrothed, in order that she should be
unaware of none of his past transgressions; and Sophie, like Kitty in Anna
Karenin, was bitterly hurt by its perusal. They were married on the 23rd of
September, 1862.
In the artist's imagination this marriage was consummated three years
earlier, when Family Happiness was written.[3] For these years he had been
living in the future; through the ineffable days of love that does not as yet
know itself: through the delirious days of love that has attained self-
knowledge, and the hour in which the divine, anticipated words are
whispered; when the tears arise "of a happiness which departs for ever and
will never return again"; and the triumphant reality of the early days of
marriage; the egoism of lovers, "the incessant, causeless joy," then the
approaching weariness, the vague discontent, the boredom of a monotonous
life, the two souls which softly disengage themselves and grow further and
further away from one another; the dangerous attraction of the world for the
young wife—flirtations, jealousies, fatal misunderstandings;—love
dissimulated, love lost; and at length the sad and tender autumn of the heart;
the face of love which reappears, paler, older, but more touching by reason
of tears and the marks of time; the memory of troubles, the regret for the ill
things done and the years that are lost; the calm of the evening; the august
passage from love to friendship, and the romance of the passion of
maternity.... All that was to come, all this Tolstoy had dreamed of, tasted in

advance; and in order to live through those days more vividly he lived in
the well-beloved. For the first time—perhaps the only time in all his
writings—the story passes in the heart of a woman, and is told by her; and
with what exquisite delicacy, what spiritual beauty!—the beauty of a soul
withdrawn behind a veil of the truest modesty. For once the analysis of the
writer is deprived of its cruder lights; there is no feverish struggle to present
the naked truth. The secrets of the inward life are divined rather than
spoken. The art and the heart of the artist are both touched and softened;
there is a harmonious balance of thought and form. Family Happiness has
the perfection of a work of Racine.
Marriage, whose sweet and bitter Tolstoy presented with so limpid a
profundity, was to be his salvation. He was tired, unwell, disgusted with
himself and his efforts. The brilliant success which had crowned his earlier
works had given way to the absolute silence of the critics and the
indifference of the public.[4] He pretended, haughtily, to be not ill-pleased.
"My reputation has greatly diminished in popularity; a fact which was
saddening me. Now I am content; I know that I have to say something, and
that I have the power to speak it with no feeble voice. As for the public, let
it think what it will!"[5]
But he was boasting: he himself was not sure of his art. Certainly he was
the master of his literary instrument; but he did not know what to do with it,
as he said in respect of Polikuskha: "it was a matter of chattering about the
first subject that came to hand, by a man who knows how to hold his pen."
[6]
His social work was abortive. In 1862 he resigned his appointment as
territorial arbitrator. The same year the police made a search at Yasnaya
Polyana, turned everything topsy-turvy, and closed the school. Tolstoy was
absent at the time, suffering from overwork; fearing that he was attacked by
phthisis.
"The squabbles of arbitration had become so painful to me, the work of the
school so vague, and the doubts which arose from the desire of teaching
others while hiding my own ignorance of what had to be taught, were so
disheartening that I fell ill. Perhaps I should then have fallen into the state
of despair to which I was to succumb fifteen years later, had there not
remained to me an unknown aspect of life which promised salvation—the
life of the family."[7]

[1] When a child he had, in a fit of jealousy, pushed from a balcony the little girl—then aged nine—
who afterwards became Madame Bers, with the result that she was lame for several years.
[2] See, in Family Happiness, the declaration of Sergius: "Suppose there were a Mr. A, an elderly
man who had lived his life, and a lady B, young and happy, who as yet knew neither men nor life. As
the result of various domestic happenings, he came to love her as a daughter, and was not aware that
he could love her in another way ..." &c.
[3] Perhaps this novel contained the memories also of a romantic love affair which commenced in
1856, in Moscow, the second party to which was a young girl very different to himself, very worldly
and frivolous, from whom he finally parted, although they were sincerely attached to one another.
[4] From 1857 to 1861.
[5] Journal, October, 1857.
[6] Letter to Fet, 1863 (Vie et Oeuvre).
[7] Confessions.

CHAPTER VIII

MARRIAGE

At first he rejoiced in the new life, with the passion which he brought to
everything.[1] The personal influence of Countess Tolstoy was a godsend to
his art. Greatly gifted[2] in a literary sense, she was, as she says, "a true
author's wife," so keenly did she take her husband's work to heart. She
worked with him—worked to his dictation; re-copied his rough drafts.[3]
She sought to protect him from his religious dæmon, that formidable genie
which was already, at moments, whispering words that meant the death of
art. She tried to shut the door upon all social Utopias.[4] She requickened
her husband's creative genius. She did more: she brought as an offering to
that genius the wealth of a fresh feminine temperament. With the exception
of the charming silhouettes in Childhood and Boyhood, there are few
women in the earlier works of Tolstoy, or they remain of secondary
importance. Woman appears in Family Happiness, written under the
influence of his love for Sophie Bers. In the works which follow there are
numerous types of young girls and women, full of intensest life, and even
superior to the male types. One likes to think not only that Countess Tolstoy

served her husband as the model for Natasha in War and Peace[5] and for
Kitty in Anna Karenin,[6] but that she was enabled, by means of her
confidences and her own vision, to become his discreet and valuable
collaborator. Certain pages of Anna Karenin in particular seem to me to
reveal a woman's touch.
Thanks to the advantages of this union, Tolstoy enjoyed for a space of
twelve or fourteen years a peace and security which had been long
unknown to him.[7] He was able, sheltered by love, to dream and to realise
at leisure the masterpieces of his brain, the colossal monuments which
dominate the fiction of the nineteenth century—War and Peace (1864-69)
and Anna Karenin (1873-77).
War and Peace is the vastest epic of our times—a modern Iliad. A world of
faces and of passions moves within it. Over this human ocean of
innumerable waves broods a sovereign mind, which serenely raises or stills
the tempest.
More than once in the past, while contemplating this work, I was reminded
of Homer and of Goethe, in spite of the vastly different spirit and period of
the work. Since then I have discovered that at the period of writing these
books Tolstoy was as a matter of fact nourishing his mind upon Homer and
Goethe.[8] Moreover, in the notes, dated 1865, in which he classifies the
various departments of letters, he mentions, as belonging to the same
family, "Odyssey, Iliad, 1805,"[9] The natural development of his mind led
him from the romance of individual destinies to the romance of armies and
peoples, those vast human hordes in which the wills of millions of beings
are dissolved. His tragic experiences at the siege of Sebastopol helped him
to comprehend the soul of the Russian nation and its daily life. According to
his first intentions, the gigantic War and Peace was to be merely the central
panel of a series of epic frescoes, in which the poem of Russia should be
developed from Peter the Great to the Decembrists.[10]
And in June, 1863, he notes in his diary:
"I am reading Goethe, and many ideas are coming to life within me."
In the spring of 1863 Tolstoy was re-reading Goethe, and wrote of Faust as
"the poetry of the world of thought; the poetry which expresses that which
can be expressed by no other art."

Later he sacrificed Goethe, as he did Shakespeare, to his God. But he
remained faithful in his admiration of Homer. In August, 1857, he was
reading, with equal zest, the Iliad and the Bible. In one of his latest works,
the pamphlet attacking Shakespeare (1903), it is Homer that he opposes to
Shakespeare as an example of sincerity, balance, and true art.
To be truly sensible of the power of this work, we must take into account its
hidden unity. Too many readers, unable to see it in perspective, perceive in
it nothing but thousands of details, whose profusion amazes and distracts
them. They are lost in this forest of life. The reader must stand aloof, upon a
height; he must attain the view of the unobstructed horizon, the vast circle
of forest and meadow; then he will catch the Homeric spirit of the work, the
calm of eternal laws, the awful rhythm of the breathing of Destiny, the
sense of the whole of which every detail makes a part; and the genius of the
artist, supreme over the whole, like the God of Genesis who broods upon
the face of the waters.
In the beginning, the calm of the ocean. Peace, and the life of Russia before
the war. The first hundred pages reflect, with an impassive precision, a
detached irony, the yawning emptiness of worldly minds. Only towards the
hundredth page do we hear the cry of one of these living dead—the worst
among them, Prince Basil:
"We commit sins; we deceive one another; and why do we do it all? My
friend, I am more than sixty years old.... All ends in death.... Death—what
horror!"
Among these idle, insipid, untruthful souls, capable of every aberration, of
every crime, certain saner natures are prominent: genuine natures by their
clumsy candour, like Pierre Besoukhov; by their deeply rooted
independence, their Old Russian peculiarities, like Marie Dmitrievna; by
the freshness of their youth, like the little Rostoffs: natures full of goodness
and resignation, like the Princess Marie; and those who, like Prince Andrei,
are not good, but proud, and are tormented by an unhealthy existence.
Now comes the first muttering of the waves. The Russian army is in
Austria. Fatality is supreme: nowhere more visibly imperious than in the
loosing of elementary forces—in the war. The true leaders are those who do
not seek to lead or direct, but, like Kutuzov or Bagration, to "allow it to be
believed that their personal intentions are in perfect agreement with what is

really the simple result of the force of circumstances, the will of
subordinates, and the caprices of chance." The advantage of surrendering to
the hand of Destiny! The happiness of simple action, a sane and normal
state.... The troubled spirits regain their poise. Prince Andrei breathes,
begins to live.... And while in the far distance, remote from the lifegiving
breath of the holy tempest, Pierre and the Princess Marie are threatened by
the contagion of their world and the deception of love, Andrei, wounded at
Austerlitz, has suddenly, amid the intoxication of action brutally
interrupted, the revelation of the serene immensity of the universe. Lying on
his back, "he sees nothing now, except, very far above him, a sky infinitely
deep, wherein light, greyish clouds go softly wandering."
"What peacefulness! How calm!" he was saying to himself; "it was not like
this when I was running by and shouting.... How was it I did not notice it
before, this illimitable depth? How happy I am to have found it at last! Yes,
all is emptiness, all is deception, except this. And God be praised for this
calm!..."
But life resumes him, and again the wave falls. Left once more to
themselves, in the demoralising atmosphere of cities, the restless,
discouraged souls wander blindly in the darkness. Sometimes through the
poisoned atmosphere of the world sweep the intoxicating, maddening
odours of nature, love, and springtime; the blind forces, which draw
together Prince Andrei and the charming Natasha, to throw her, a moment
later, into the arms of the first seducer to hand. So I much poetry, so much
tenderness, so much purity of heart, tarnished by the world! And always
"the wide sky which broods above the outrage and abjectness of the earth."
But man does not see it. Even Andrei has forgotten the light of Austerlitz.
For him the sky is now only "a dark, heavy vault" which covers the face of
emptiness.
It is time for the hurricane of war to burst once more upon these vitiated
minds. The fatherland, Russia, is invaded. Then comes the day of Borodino,
with its solemn majesty. Enmities are effaced. Dologhov embraces his
enemy Pierre. Andrei, wounded, weeps for pity and compassion over the
misery of the man whom he most hated, Anatol Kuraguin, his neighbour in
the ambulance. The unity of hearts is accomplished; unity in passionate
sacrifice to the country and submission to the divine laws.

"To accept the frightful necessity of war, seriously and austerely.... To
human liberty, war is the most painful act of submission to the divine laws.
Simplicity of heart consists in submission to the will of God."
The soul of the Russian people and its submission to Destiny are incarnated
in the person of the commander-in-chief, Kutuzov. "This old man, who has
no passions left, but only experience, the result of the passions, and in
whom intelligence, which is intended to group together facts and to draw
from them conclusions, is replaced by a philosophical contemplation of
events, devises nothing and undertakes nothing; but he listens to and
remembers everything; he knows how to profit by it at the right moment; he
will hinder nothing that is of use, he will permit nothing harmful. He sees
on the faces of his troops that inexpressible force which is known as the
will to conquer; it is latent victory. He admits something more powerful
than his own will: the inevitable march of the facts which pass before his
eyes; he sees them, he follows them, and he is able mentally to stand aloof."
In short, he has the heart of a Russian. This fatalism of the Russian people,
calmly heroic, is personified also in the poor moujik, Platon Karatayev,
simple, pious, and resigned, with his kindly patient smile in suffering and in
death. Through suffering and experience, above the ruins of their country,
after the horrors of its agony, Pierre and Andrei, the two heroes of the book,
attain, through love and faith, to the moral deliverance and the mystic joy
by which they behold God living.
Tolstoy does not stop here. The epilogue, of which the action passes in
1820, deals with the transition from one age to another: from one
Napoleonic era to the era of the Decembrists. It produces an impression of
continuity, and of the resumption of life. Instead of commencing and ending
in the midst of a crisis, Tolstoy finishes, as he began, at the moment when a
great wave has spent itself, while that following it is gathering itself
together. Already we obtain a glimpse of the heroes to be, of the conflicts
which will ensue between them, and of the dead who are born again in the
living.[11]
I have tried to indicate the broad lines of the romance; for few readers take
the trouble to look for them. But what words are adequate to describe the
extraordinary vitality of these hundreds of heroes, all distinct individuals,
all drawn with unforgettable mastery: soldiers, peasants, great nobles,

Russians, Austrians, Frenchmen! Not a line savours of improvisation. For
this gallery of portraits, unexampled in European literature, Tolstoy made
sketches without number: "combined," as he says, "millions of projects";
buried himself in libraries; laid under contribution his family archives,[12]
his previous notes, his personal memories. This meticulous preparation
ensured the solidity of the work, but did not damp his spontaneity. Tolstoy
worked with enthusiasm, with an eagerness and a delight which
communicate themselves to the reader. Above all, the great charm of War
and Peace resides in its spirit of youth. No other work of Tolstoy's presents
in such abundance the soul of childhood and of youth; and each youthful
spirit is a strain of music, pure as a spring, full of a touching and penetrating
grace, like a melody of Mozart's. Of such are the young Nikolas Rostoff,
Sonia, and poor little Petia.
Most exquisite of all is Natasha. Dear little girl!—fantastic, full of laughter,
her heart full of affection, we see her grow up before us, we follow her
through life, with the tenderness one would feel for a sister—who that has
read of her does not feel that he has known her?... That wonderful night of
spring, when Natasha, at her window, flooded with the moonlight, dreams
and speaks wildly, above the window of the listening Andrei ... the
emotions of the first ball, the expectation of love, the burgeoning of riotous
dreams and desires, the sleigh-ride, the night in the snow-bound forest, full
of fantastic lights; Nature, and the embrace of her vague tenderness: the
evening at the Opera, the unfamiliar world of art, in which reason grows
confused; the folly of the heart, and the folly of the body yearning for love;
the misery that floods the soul; the divine pity which watches over the
dying lover.... One cannot evoke these pitiful memories without emotion;
such emotion as one would feel in speaking of a dear and beloved woman.
How such a creation shows the weakness of the female types in almost the
whole of contemporary drama and fiction! Life itself has been captured; life
so fluid, so supple, that we seem to see it throbbing and changing from one
line to another.
Princess Marie, the ugly woman, whose goodness makes her beautiful, is no
less perfect a portrait; but how the timid, awkward girl would have blushed,
how those who resemble her must blush, at finding unveiled all the secrets
of a heart which hides itself so fearfully from every glance!

In general the portraits of women are, as I have said, very much finer than
the male characters; in especial than those of the two heroes to whom
Tolstoy has given his own ideas: the weak, pliable nature of Pierre
Besoukhov, and the hard, eager nature of Prince Andrie Bolkonsky. These
are characters which lack a centre of gravity; they oscillate perpetually,
rather than evolve; they run from one extreme to the other, yet never
advance. One may, of course, reply that in this they are thoroughly Russian.
I find, however, that Russians have criticised them in similar terms.
Tourgenev doubtless had them in mind when he complained that Tolstoy's
psychology was a stationary matter. "No real development. Eternal
hesitations: oscillations of feeling."[13]
Tolstoy himself admitted that he had at times rather sacrificed the individual
character to the historical design.[14]
It is true, in fact, that the glory of War and Peace resides in the resurrection
of a complete historical period, with its national migrations, its warfare of
peoples. Its true heroes are these peoples; and behind them, as behind the
heroes of Homer, the gods who lead them; the forces, invisible, "infinitely
small, which direct the masses," the breath of the Infinite. These gigantic
conflicts, in which a hidden destiny hurls the blind nations together, have a
mythical grandeur. Our thoughts go beyond the Iliad: we are reminded of
the Hindu epics.

[1] "Domestic happiness completely absorbs me" (January 5, 1863). "I am so happy! so happy! I love
her so!" (February 8, 1863). See Vie et Oeuvre.
[2] She had written several novels.
[3] It is said that she copied War and Peace seven times.
[4] Directly after his marriage Tolstoy suspended his work of teaching, his review, and his school.
[5] Her sister Tatiana, intelligent and artistic, whose wit and musical talent were greatly admired by
Tolstoy, also served him as a model. Tolstoy used to say, "I took Tania [Tatiana]; I beat her up with
Sonia [Sophie Bers, Countess Tolstoy], and out came Natasha" (cited by P. Birukov).
[6] The installation of Dolly in the tumble-down country house; Dolly and the children; a number of
details of dress and toilet; without speaking of certain secrets of the feminine mind, which even the
intuition of a man of genius might perhaps have failed to penetrate, if a woman had not betrayed
them to him.
[7] Here is a characteristic instance of Tolstoy's enslavement by his creative genius: his Journal is
interrupted for thirteen years, from November 1, 1865, when the composition of War and Peace was
in full swing. The egoism of the artist has silenced the monologue of the conscience.—This period of

creation was also a period of robust physical life. Tolstoy was "mad on hunting." "Hunting, I forget
everything...." (Letter of 1864.) In September, 1864, during a hunt on horse back, he broke his arm,
and it was during his convalescence that the first portions of War and Peace were dictated.—"On
recovering consciousness after fainting, I said to myself: 'I am an artist.' And I am, but a lonely
artist." (Letter to Fet, January 29, 1865.) All the letters written at this time to Fet are full of an
exulting joy of creation. "I regard all that I have hitherto published," he says, "as merely a trial of my
pen." (Ibid.)

[8] Before this date Tolstoy had noted, among the books which influenced him between the ages of
twenty and thirty-five:
"Goethe: Hermann and Dorothea—Very great influence."
"Homer: Iliad and Odyssey (in Russian)—Very great influence."
[9] The two first parts of War and Peace appeared in 1865-66 under the title The Year 1805.
[10] Tolstoy commenced this work in 1863 by The Decembrists, of which he wrote three fragments.
But he saw that the foundations of his plan were not sufficiently assured, and going further back, to
the period of the Napoleonic Wars, he wrote War and Peace. Publication was commenced in the
Rousski Viestnik of January, 1865; the sixth volume was completed in the autumn of 1869. Then
Tolstoy ascended the stream of history; and he conceived the plan of an epic romance dealing with
Peter the Great; then of another, Mirovitch, dealing with the rule of the Empresses of the eighteenth
century and their favourites. He worked at it from 1870 to 1873, surrounded with documents, and
writing the first drafts of various portions; but his realistic scruples made him renounce the project:
he was conscious that he could never succeed in resuscitating the spirit of those distant periods in a
sufficiently truthful fashion. Later, in January, 1876, he conceived the idea of another romance of the
period of Nikolas I.; then he eagerly returned to the Decembrists, collecting the evidence of survivors
and visiting the scenes of the action. In 1878 he wrote to his aunt, Countess A. A. Tolstoy: "This
work is so important to me! You cannot imagine how much it means to me; it is as much to me as
your faith is to you. I would say even more." (Correspondence) But in proportion as he plumbed the
subject he grew away from it; his heart was in it no longer. As early as April, 1879, he wrote to Fet:
"The Decembrists? If I were thinking of it, if I were to write it, I should flatter myself with the hope
that the very atmosphere of my mind would be insupportable to those who fire upon men for the
good of humanity." (Ibid.) At this period of his life the religious crisis had set in; he was about to
burn his ancient idols.
[11] Pierre Besoukhov, who has married Natasha, will become a Decembrist. He has founded a secret
society to watch over the general good, a sort of Tugelbund. Natasha associates herself with his plans
with the utmost enthusiasm. Denissov cannot conceive of a pacific revolution; but is quite ready for
an armed revolt. Nikolas Rostoff has retained his blind soldier's loyalty. He who said before
Austerlitz, "We have only one thing to do: to fight and never to think," is angry with Pierre, and
exclaims: "My oath before all! If I were ordered to march against you with my squadron I should
march and I should strike home." His wife, Princess Marie, agrees with him. Prince Andrei's son,
little Nikolas Bolkonsky, fifteen years old, delicate, sickly, yet charming, with wide eyes and golden
hair, listens feverishly to the discussion; all his love is Pierre's and Natasha's; he does not care greatly
for Nikolas and Marie; he worships his father, whom he has never seen; he dreams of growing like
him, of being grown up, of doing something wonderful, he knows not what. "Whatever they tell me, I
will do it.... Yes, I shall do it. He would have been pleased with me."—And the book ends with the
dream of a child, who sees himself in the guise of one of Plutarch's heroes, with his uncle Pierre by
his side, preceded by Glory, and followed by an army.—If the Decembrists had been written then
little Bolkonsky would doubtless have been one of its heroes.
[12] I have remarked that the two families Rostoff and Bolkonsky, in War and Peace, recall the
families of Tolstoy's father and mother by many characteristics. Again, in the novels of the Caucasus
and Sebastopol there are many of the types of soldiers, officers and men, which appear in War and
Peace.
[13] Letter of February 2, 1868, cited by Birukov.
[14] Notably, he said, that of Prince Andrei in the first part.

CHAPTER IX

"ANNA KARENIN"

Anna Karenin, with War and Peace,[1] marks the climax of this period of
maturity. Anna Karenin is the more perfect work; the work of a mind more
certain of its artistic creation, richer too in experience; a mind for which the
world of the heart holds no more secrets. But it lacks the fire of youth, the
freshness of enthusiasm, the mighty pinions of War and Peace. Already
Tolstoy has lost something of the joy of creation. The temporary peace of
the first months of marriage has flown. Into the enchanted circle of love and
art which Countess Tolstoy had drawn about him moral scruples begin to
intrude.
Even in the early chapters of War and Peace, written one year after
marriage, the confidences of Prince Andrei to Pierre upon the subject of
marriage denote the disenchantment of the man who sees in the beloved
woman the stranger, the innocent enemy, the involuntary obstacle to his
moral development. Some letters of 1865 announce the coming return of
religious troubles. As yet they are only passing threats, blotting out the joy
of life. But during the months of 1869, when Tolstoy was finishing War and
Peace, there fell a more serious blow.
He had left his home for a few days to visit a distant estate. One night he
was lying in bed; it had just struck two:
"I was dreadfully tired; I was sleepy, and felt comfortable enough. All of a
sudden I was seized by such anguish, such terror as I had never felt in all
my life. I will tell you about it in detail; it was truly frightful. I leapt from
the bed and told them to get the horses ready. While they were putting them
in I fell asleep, and when I woke again I was completely recovered.
Yesterday the same thing happened, but in a much less degree."
The palace of illusion, so laboriously raised by the love of the wife, was
tottering. In the spiritual blank which followed the achievement of War and
Peace the artist was recaptured by his philosophical[2] and educational
preoccupations; he wished to write a spelling-book for the people; he

worked at it feverishly for four years; he was prouder of it than of War and
Peace, and when it was finished (1872) he wrote a second (1875). Then he
conceived a passion for Greek; he studied Latin from morning to night; he
abandoned all other work; he discovered "the delightful Xenophon," and
Homer, the real Homer; not the Homer of the translators, "all these
Joukhovskys and Vosses who sing with any sort of voice they can manage
to produce, guttural, peevish, mawkish," but "this other devil, who sings at
the top of his voice, without it ever entering his head that any one may be
listening."[3]
"Without a knowledge of Greek, no education! I am convinced that until
now I knew nothing of all that is truly beautiful and of a simple beauty in
human speech."
This is folly, and he admits as much. He goes to school again with such
passionate enthusiasm that he falls ill. In 1871 he was forced to go to
Samara to undergo the koumiss cure, staying with the Bachkirs. Nothing
pleased him but his Greek. At the end of a lawsuit, in 1872, he spoke
seriously of selling all that he possessed in Russia and of settling in
England. Countess Tolstoy was in despair:
"If you are always absorbed in your Greeks you will never get well. It is
they who have caused this suffering and this indifference concerning your
present life. It is not in vain that we call Greek a dead language; it produces
a condition of death in the spirit."[4]
Finally, to the great joy of the Countess, after many plans abandoned before
they were fairly commenced, on March 19, 1873, he began to write Anna
Karenin.[5] While he worked at it his life I was saddened by domestic
sorrow;[6] his wife was ill. "Happiness does not reign in the house,"[7] he
writes to Fet in 1876.
To some extent the work bears traces of these depressing experiences, and
of passions disillusioned.[8] Save in the charming passages dealing with the
betrothal of Levine, love is no longer presented with the spirit of youth and
poetry which places certain pages of War and Peace on a level with the
most beautiful lyric poetry of all times. It has assumed a different character:
bitter, sensual, imperious. The fatality which broods over the romance is no
longer, as in War and Peace, a kind of Krishna, murderous and serene, the

Destiny of empires, but the madness of love, "Venus herself." She it is, in
the wonderful ball scene, when passion seizes upon Anna and Vronsky
unawares, who endows the innocent beauty of Anna, crowned with forget-
me-not and clothed in black velvet, with "an almost infernal seductiveness."
She it is who, when Vronsky has just declared his love, throws a light upon
Anna's face; but a light "not of joy; it was the terrible glare of an incendiary
fire upon a gloomy night." She it is who, in the veins of this loyal and
reasonable woman, this young, affectionate mother, pours a voluptuous
stream as of irresistible ichor, and installs herself in her heart, never to leave
it until she has destroyed it. No one can approach Anna without feeling the
attraction and the terror of this hidden dæmon. Kitty is the first to discover
it, with a shock of bewilderment. A mysterious fear mingles with the delight
of Vronsky when he goes to see Anna. Levine, in her presence, loses all his
will. Anna herself is perfectly well aware that she is no longer her own
mistress. As the story develops the implacable passion consumes, little by
little, the whole moral structure of this proud woman. All that is best in her,
her sincere, courageous mind, crumbles and falls; she has no longer the
strength to sacrifice her worldly vanity; her life has no other object than to
please her lover; she refuses, with shame and terror, to bear children;
jealousy tortures her; the sensual passion which enslaves her obliges her to
lie with her gestures, her voice, her eyes; she falls to the level of those
women who no longer seek anything but the power of making every man
turn to look after them; she uses morphia to dull her sufferings, until the
intolerable torments which consume her overcome her with the bitter sense
of her moral downfall, and cast her beneath the wheels of the railway-
carriage. "And the little moujik with the untidy beard"—the sinister vision
which has haunted her dreams and Vronsky's—"leaned over the track from
the platform of the carriage"; and, as the prophetic dream foretold, "he was
bent double over a sack, in which he was hiding the remains of something
which had known life, with its torments, its betrayals, and its sorrow."
"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord."[9]
Around this tragedy of a soul consumed by love and crushed by the law of
God—a painting in a single shade, and of terrible gloom—Tolstoy has
woven, as in War and Peace, the romances of other lives. Unfortunately
these parallel stories alternate in a somewhat stiff and artificial manner,
without achieving the organic unity of the symphony of War and Peace. It

may also be said that the perfect realism of certain of the pictures—the
aristocratic circles of St. Petersburg and their idle discourse—is now and
again superfluous and unnecessary. Finally, and more openly than in War
and Peace, Tolstoy has presented his own moral character and his
philosophic ideas side by side with the spectacle of life. None the less, the
work is of a marvellous richness. There is the same profusion of types as in
War and Peace, and all are of a striking justness. The portraits of the men
seem to me even superior. Tolstoy has depicted with evident delight the
amiable egoist, Stepan Arcadievitch, whom no one can look at without
responding to his affectionate smile, and Karenin, the perfect type of the
high official, the distinguished and commonplace states-man, with his
mania for concealing his real opinions and feelings under a mask of
perpetual irony: a mixture of dignity and cowardice, of Phariseeism and
Christian feeling: a strange product of an artificial world, from which he
can never completely free himself in spite of his intelligence and his true
generosity; a man afraid to listen to his I own heart, and rightly so afraid,
since when he does surrender to it, he ends by falling into a state of
nonsensical mysticism.
But the principal interest of the romance, besides the tragedy of Anna and
the varied pictures of Russian society towards 1860—of salons, officers'
clubs, balls, theatres, races—lies in its autobiographical character. More
than any other personage of Tolstoy's books, Constantine Levine is the
incarnation of the writer himself. Not only has Tolstoy attributed to him his
own ideas—at one and the same time conservative and democratic—and
the anti-Liberalism of the provincial aristocrat who despises "intellectuals;
[10]
but he has made him the gift of part of his own life. The love of Levine
and Kitty and their first years of marriage are a transposition of his own
domestic memories, just as the death of Levine's brother is a melancholy
evocation of the death of Tolstoy's brother, Dmitri. The latter portion,
useless to the romance, gives us an insight into the troubles which were
then oppressing the author. While the epilogue of War and Peace was an
artistic transition to another projected work, the epilogue to Anna Karenin is
an autobiographical transition to the moral revolution which, two years
later, was to find expression in the Confessions. Already, in the course of
Anna Karenin, he returns again and again to a violent or ironical criticism
of contemporary society, which he never ceased to attack in his subsequent
works. War is declared upon deceit: war upon lies; upon virtuous as well as

vicious lies; upon liberal chatter, fashionable charity, drawing-room
religion, and philanthropy. War against the world, which distorts all truthful
feelings, and inevitably crushes the generous enthusiasm of the mind! Death
throws an unexpected light upon the social conventions. Before Anna
dying, the stilted Karenin is softened. Into this lifeless soul, in which
everything is artificial, shines a ray of love and of Christian forgiveness. All
three—the husband, the wife, and the lover—are momentarily transformed.
All three become simple and loyal. But as Anna recovers, all three are
sensible, "facing the almost holy moral strength which was guiding them
from within, the existence of another force, brutal but all-powerful, which
was directing their lives despite themselves, and which would not leave
them in peace." And they knew from the beginning that they would be
powerless in the coming struggle, in which they would be obliged to do the
evil that the world would consider necessary."[11]
If Levine, like Tolstoy, whose incarnation he is, also became purified in the
epilogue to the book, it was because he too was touched by mortality.
Previously, "incapable of believing, he was equally incapable of absolute
doubt."[12] After he beheld his brother die the terror of his ignorance
possessed him. For a time this misery was stifled by his marriage; but it re-
awakened at the birth of his firstborn. He passed alternately through crises
of prayer and negation. He read the philosophers in vain. He began, in his
distracted state, to fear the temptation of suicide. Physical work was a
solace; it presented no doubts; all was clear. Levine conversed with the
peasants; one of them spoke of the men "who live not for self, but for God."
This was to him an illumination. He saw the antagonism between the reason
and the heart. Reason preached the ferocious struggle for life; there is
nothing reasonable in loving one's neighbour:
"Reason has taught me nothing; all that I know has been given to me,
revealed to me by the heart."[13]
From this time peace returned. The word of the humble peasant, whose
heart was his only guide, had led him back to God.... To what God? He did
not seek to know. His attitude toward the Church at this moment, as was
Tolstoy's for a long period, was humble, and in no wise defiant of her
dogmas.

"There is a truth even in the illusion of the celestial vault and in the
apparent movement of the stars."[14]

[1] It is regrettable that the beauty of the poetical conception of the work is often tarnished by the
philosophical chatter with which Tolstoy has loaded his work, especially in the later portions. He is
determined to make an exposition of his theory of the fatality of history. The pity is that he returns to
the point incessantly, and obstinately repeats himself. Flaubert, who "gave vent to cries of
admiration" while reading the first two volumes, which he declared "sublime" and "full of
Shakespearean things," threw the third volume aside in boredom: "He goes off horribly. He repeats
himself, and he philosophises. We see the aristocrat, the author, and the Russian, while hitherto we
have seen nothing but Nature and Humanity." (Letter to Tourgenev, January, 1880.)
[2] While he was finishing War and Peace, in the summer of 1869, he discovered Schopenhauer, and
was filled with enthusiasm. "I am convinced that Schopenhauer is the most genial of men. Here is the
whole universe reflected with an extraordinary clearness and beauty." (Letter to Fet, August 30,
1869.)
[3] "Between Homer and his translators," he says again, "there is the difference between boiled and
distilled water and the spring-water broken on the rocks, which may carry the sand along with it as it
flows, but becomes more pure and fresh on that account."
[4] Papers of Countess Tolstoy (Vie et Oeuvre).
[5] It was completed in 1877. It appeared—minus the epilogue—in the Rousski Viestniki.
[6] The death of three children (November 18, 1873, February, 1875, November, 1875); of his Aunt
Tatiana, his adopted mother (June, 1874), and of his Aunt Pelagia (December, 1875).
[7] Letter to Fet, March, 1876.
[8] "Woman is the stumbling-block of a man's career. It is difficult to love a woman and to do nothing
of any profit; and the only way of not being reduced to inaction by love is to marry." (Anna Karenin.)
[9] The motto at the commencement of the book.
[10] Notice also, in the epilogue, the hostility towards warfare, nationalism, and Pan-Slavism.
[11] "Evil is that which is reasonable to the world. Sacrifice and love are insanity."
[12] (Anna Karenin, vol. ii.)
[13] Anna Karenin, vol. ii.
[14] Ibid.

CHAPTER X

THE CRISIS

The misery which oppressed Levine, and the longing for suicide which he
concealed from Kitty, Tolstoy was at this period concealing from his wife.
But he had not as yet achieved the calm which he attributed to his hero. To
be truthful, this mental state is hardly communicated to the reader. We feel
that it is desired rather than realised, and that Levine's relapse among his
doubts is imminent. Tolstoy was not duped by his desires. He had the
greatest difficulty in reaching the end of his work. Anna Karenin wearied
him before he had finished it.[1] He could work no longer. He remained at a
standstill; inert, without will-power, a prey to selfterror and self-disgust.
There, in the emptiness of his life, rose the great wind which issued from
the abyss; the vertigo of death.
Tolstoy told of these terrible years at a later period, when he was newly
escaped from the abyss.[2]
"I was not fifty," he said; "I loved; I was loved; I had good children, a great
estate, fame, health, and moral and physical vigour; I could reap or mow
like any peasant; I used to work ten hours at a stretch without fatigue.
Suddenly my life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep.
But this was not to live. I had no desires left. I knew there was nothing to
desire. I could not even wish to know the truth. The truth was that life is a
piece of insanity. I had reached the abyss, and I saw clearly that there was
nothing before me but death. I, a fortunate and healthy man, felt that I could
not go on living. An irresistible force was urging me to rid myself of life.... I
will not say that I wanted to kill myself. The force which was edging me out
of life was something stronger than myself; it was an aspiration, a desire
like my old desire for life, but in an inverse sense. I had to humour, to
deceive myself, lest I should give way to it too promptly. There I was, a
happy man,—and I would hide away a piece of cord lest I should hang
myself from the beam that ran between the cupboards of my room, where I
was alone every night while undressing. I no longer took my gun out for a
little shooting, lest I should be tempted.[3] It seemed to me that life was a
dreary farce, which was being played out before my eyes. Forty years of
work, of trouble, of progress, only to find that there is nothing! Nothing!
Nothing will remain of me but putrescence and worms.... One can live only
while one is intoxicated with life; but the moment the intoxication is over
one sees that all is merely deceit, a clumsy fraud.... My family and art were
no longer enough to satisfy me. My family consisted of unhappy creatures

like myself. Art is a mirror to life. When life no longer means anything it is
no longer amusing to use the mirror. And the worst of it was, I could not
resign myself—I was like a man lost in a forest, who is seized with horror
because he is lost, and who runs hither and thither and cannot stop, although
he knows that at every step he is straying further."
Salvation came from the people. Tolstoy had always had for them "a strange
affection, absolutely genuine,"[4] which the repeated experiences of his
social disillusions were powerless to shake. Of late years he, like Levine,
had drawn very near to them.[5] He began to ponder concerning these
millions of beings who were excluded from the narrow circle of the learned,
the rich, and the idle who killed themselves, endeavoured to forget
themselves, or, like himself, were basely prolonging a hopeless life. He
asked himself why these millions of men and women escaped this despair:
why they did not kill themselves. He then perceived that they were living
not by the light of reason, but without even thinking of reason; they were
living by faith. What was this faith which knew nothing of reason?
"Faith is the energy of life. One cannot live without faith. The ideas of
religion were elaborated in the infinite remoteness of human thought. The
replies given by faith to Life the sphinx contain the deepest wisdom of
humanity."
Is it enough, then, to be acquainted with those formulæ of wisdom recorded
in the volume of religion? No, for faith is not a science; faith is an act; it has
no meaning unless it is lived. The disgust which Tolstoy felt at the sight of
rich and right-thinking people, for whom faith was merely a kind of
"epicurean consolation," threw him definitely among the simple folk who
alone lived lives in agreement with their faith.
"And he understood that the life of the labouring people was life itself, and
that the meaning to be attributed to that life was truth."
But how become a part of the people and share its faith? It is not enough to
know that others are in the right; it does not depend upon ourselves whether
we are like them. We pray to God in vain; in vain we stretch our eager arms
toward Him. God flies. Where shall He be found?
But one day grace descended:

"One day of early spring I was alone in the forest, listening to its sounds.... I
was thinking of my distress during the last three years; of my search for
God; of my perpetual oscillations from joy to despair.... And I suddenly saw
that I used to live only when I used to believe in God. At the very thought
of Him the delightful waves of life stirred in me. Everything around me
grew full of life; everything received a meaning. But the moment I no
longer believed life suddenly ceased.
"Then what am I still searching for? a voice cried within me. For Him,
without whom man cannot live! To know God and to live—it is the same
thing! For God is Life....
"Since then this light has never again deserted me."[6]
He was saved. God had appeared to him.[7]
But as he was not a Hindu mystic, to whom ecstasy suffices; as to the
dreams of the Asiatic was added the thirst for reason and the need of action
of the Occidental, he was moved to translate his revelation into terms of
practical faith, and to draw from the holy life the rules of daily existence.
Without any previous bias, and sincerely wishing to believe in the beliefs of
his own flesh and blood, he began by studying the doctrine of the Orthodox
Church, of which he was a member.[8] In order to become more intimately a
part of that body he submitted for three years to all its ceremonies;
confessing himself, communicating; not presuming to judge such matters as
shocked him, inventing explanations for what he found obscure or
incomprehensible, uniting himself, through and in their faith, with all those
whom he loved, whether living or dead, and always cherishing the hope that
at a certain moment "love would open to him the gates of truth." But it was
all useless: his reason and his heart revolted. Such ceremonies as baptism
and communion appeared to him scandalous. When he was forced to repeat
that the host was the true body and true blood of Christ, "he felt as though a
knife were plunged into his heart." But it was not the dogmas which raised
between the Church and himself an insurmountable wall, but the practical
questions, and in especial two: the hateful and mutual intolerance of the
Churches[9] and the sanction, formal or tacit, of homicide: of war and of
capital punishment.

So he broke loose, and the rupture was the more violent in that for three
years he had suppressed his faculty of thought. He walked delicately no
longer. Angrily and violently he trampled underfoot the religion which the
day before he was still persistently practising. In his Criticism of Dogmatic
Theology (1879-1881) he termed it not only an "insanity, but a conscious
and interested lie."[10] He contrasted it with the New Testament, in his
Concordance and Translation of the Four Gospels (1881-83). Finally, upon
the Gospel he built his faith (What my Faith consists in, 1883).
It all resides in these words:
"I believe in the doctrine of the Christ. I believe that happiness is possible
on earth only when all men shall accomplish it."
Its corner-stone is the Sermon on the Mount, whose essential teaching
Tolstoy expresses in five commandments:
"1. Do not be angry.
"2. Do not commit adultery.
"3. Do not take oaths.
"4. Do not resist evil by evil.
"5. Be no man's enemy."
This is the negative part of the doctrine; the positive portion is contained in
this single commandment:
"Love God, and thy neighbour as thyself."
"Christ has said that he who shall have broken the least of these
commandments will hold the lowest place in the kingdom of heaven."
And Tolstoy adds naively:
"Strange as it may seem, I have been obliged, after eighteen centuries, to
discover these rules as a novelty."
Does Tolstoy believe in the divinity of Christ? By no means. In what quality
does he invoke him? As the greatest of the line of sages—Brahma, Buddha,
Lao-Tse, Confucius, Zoroaster, Isaiah—who have revealed to man the true
happiness to which he aspires, and the way which he must follow.[11]
Tolstoy is the disciple of these great religious creators, of these Hindu,

Chinese, and Hebrew demi-gods and prophets. He defends them, as he
knows how to defend; defends them by attacking those whom he calls "the
Scribes" and "the Pharisees"; by attacking the established Churches and the
representatives of arrogant science, or rather of "scientific philosophism."
Not that he appealed from reason to revelation. Once escaped from the
period of distress described in his Confessions, he remained essentially a
believer in Reason; one might indeed say a mystic of Reason.
"In the beginning was the Word," he says, with St. John; "the Word, Logos,
that is, Reason.[12] A book of his entitled Life (1887) bears as epigraph the
famous lines of Pascal:[13]
"Man is nothing but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a
thinking reed.... All our dignity resides in thought.... Let us then strive to
think well: that is the principle of morality."
The whole book, moreover, is nothing but a hymn to Reason.
It is true that Tolstoy's Reason is not the scientific reason, the restricted
reason "which takes the part for the whole and physical life for the whole of
life," but the sovereign law which rules the life of man, "the law according
to which reasonable beings, that is men, must of necessity live their lives."
"It is a law analogous to those which regulate the nutrition and the
reproduction of the animal, the growth and the blossoming of herb and of
tree, the movement of the earth and the planets. It is only in the
accomplishment of this law, in the submission of our animal nature to the
law of reason, with a view to acquiring goodness, that we truly live....
Reason cannot be defined, and we have no need to define it, for not only do
we all know it, but we know nothing else.... All that man knows he knows
by means of reason and not by faith....[14] True life commences only at the
moment when reason is manifested. The only real life is the life of reason."
Then what is the visible life, our individual existence? "It is not our life,"
says Tolstoy, "for it does not depend upon ourselves.
"Our animal activity is accomplished without ourselves.... Humanity has
done with the idea of life considered as an individual existence. The
negation of the possibility of individual good remains an unchangeable
truth for every man of our period who is endowed with reason."

Then follows a long series of postulates, which I will not here discuss, but
which show how Tolstoy was obsessed by the idea of reason. It was in fact
a passion, no less blind or jealous than the other passions which had
possessed him during the earlier part of his life. One fire was flickering out,
the other was kindling; or rather it was always the same fire, but fed with a
different fuel.
A fact which adds to the resemblance between the "individual" passions and
this "rational" passion is that neither those nor this can be satisfied with
loving. They seek to act; they long for realisation.
"Christ has said, we must not speak, but act."
And what is the activity of reason?—Love.
"Love is the only reasonable activity of man; love is the most reasonable
and most enlightened state of the soul. All that man needs is that nothing
shall obscure the sun of reason, for that alone can help him to grow.... Love
is the actual good, the supreme good which resolves all the contradictions
of life; which not only dissipates the fear of death, but impels man to
sacrifice himself to others: for there is no love but that which enables a man
to give his life for those he loves: love is not worthy of the name unless it is
a sacrifice of self. And the true love can only be realised when man
understands that it is not possible for him to acquire individual happiness. It
is then that all the streams of his life go to nourish the noble graft of the true
love: and this graft borrows for its increase all the energies of the wild stock
of animal individuality...."[15]
Thus Tolstoy did not come to the refuge of faith like an exhausted river
which loses itself among the sands. He brought to it the torrent of
impetuous energies amassed during a full and virile life. This we shall
presently see.
This impassioned faith, in which Love and Reason are united in a close
embrace, has found its most dignified expression in the famous reply to the
Holy Synod which excommunicated him:[16]
"I believe in God, who for me is Love, the Spirit, the Principle of all things.
I believe that He is in me as I am in Him. I believe that the will of God has
never been more clearly expressed than in the teaching of the man Christ;
but we cannot regard Christ as God and address our prayers to him without

committing the greatest sacrilege. I believe that the true happiness of man
consists in the accomplishment of the will of God; I believe that the will of
God is that every man shall love his fellows and do unto them always as he
would they should do unto him, which contains, as the Bible says, all the
law and the prophets. I believe that the meaning of life for each one of us is
only to increase the love within him; I believe that this development of our
power of loving will reward us in this life with a happiness which will
increase day by day, and with a more perfect felicity in the other world. I
believe that this increase of love will contribute, more than any other factor,
to founding the kingdom of God upon earth; that is, to replacing an
organisation of life in which division, deceit, and violence are omnipotent,
by a new order in which concord, truth, and brotherhood will reign. I
believe that we have only one means of growing richer in love: namely, our
prayers. Not public prayer in the temple, which Christ has formally
reproved (Matt. vi. 5-13), but the prayer of which he himself has given as
an example; the solitary prayer which confirms in us the consciousness of
the meaning of our life and the feeling that we depend solely upon the will
of God.... I believe in life eternal; I believe that man is rewarded according
to his acts, here and everywhere, now and for ever. I believe all these things
so firmly that at my age, on the verge of the tomb, I have often to make an
effort not to pray for the death of my body, that is, my birth into a new life."
[17]

[1] "Now I am harnessing myself again to the wearisome and vulgar Anna Karenin, with the sole
desire of getting rid of it as quickly as possible." (Letters to Fet, August 26, 1875.) "I must finish the
romance, which is wearying me." (Ibid. March 1,1876.)
[2] In his Confessions (1879).
[3] See Anna Karenin. "And Levine, who had the love of a woman, and was the father of a family,
put every kind of weapon away out of reach, as though he was afraid of yielding to the temptation of
putting an end to his sufferings." This frame of mind was not peculiar to Tolstoy and his characters.
Tolstoy was struck by the increasing number of suicides among the wealthy classes all over Europe,
and in Russia more especially. He often alludes to the fact in such of his books as were written about
this period. It was as though a great wave of neurasthenia had swept across Europe in 1880,
drowning its thousands of victims. Those who were young men at the time will remember it; and for
them Tolstoy's record of this human experience will have a historic value. He has written the secret
tragedy of a generation.
[4] Confessions.
[5] His portraits of this period betray this plebeian tendency. A painting by Kramskoy (1873)
represents Tolstoy in a moujik's blouse, with bowed head: it resembles a German Christ. The

forehead is growing bare at the temples; the cheeks are lined and bearded.—In another portrait, dated
1881, he has the look of a respectable artisan in his Sunday clothes: the hair cut short, the beard and
whiskers spread out on either side; the face looks much wider below than above; the eyebrows are
contracted, the eyes gloomy; the wide nostrils have a dog-like appearance; the ears are enormous.
[6] Confessions.
[7] To tell the truth—not for the first time. The young volunteer in the Caucasus, the officer at
Sebastopol, Olenin of the Cossacks, Prince Andrei, and Pierre Besoukhov, in War and Peace, had had
similar visions. But Tolstoy was so enthusiastic that each time he discovered God he believed it was
for the first time; that previously there had been nothing but night and the void. He saw nothing of
his past but its shadows and its shames. We who, through reading his Journal, know better than he
himself the story of his heart, know also how profoundly religious was that heart, even when he was
most astray. But he himself confesses in a passage in the preface to the Criticism o; Dogmatic
Theology: "God! God! I have erred; I have sought the truth where I should not have sought it; and I
knew that I erred. I flattered my evil passions, knowing them to be evil; but I never forgot Thee. I was
always conscious of Thee, even when I went astray." The crisis of 1878-79 was only more violent
than the rest; perhaps under the influence of repeated loss and the advance of age; its only novelty
was that the image of God, instead of vanishing and leaving no trace when once the flame of ecstasy
flickered out, remained with him, and the penitent, warned by past experience, hastened to "walk in
the light while he had the light," and to deduce from his faith a whole system of life. Not that he had
not already tried to do so. (Remember the Rules of Life written when he was a student.) But at fifty
years of age there was less likelihood that his passions would divert him from his path.
[8] The sub-title of the Confessions is Introduction to the Criticism of Dogmatic Theology and the
Examination of the Christian Doctrine.
[9] "I, who beheld the truth in the unity of love, was struck with the fact that religion itself destroyed
that which it sought to produce." (Confessions.)
[10] "And I am convinced that the teaching of the Church is in theory a crafty and evil lie, and in
practice a concoction of gross superstitions and witchcraft, under which the meaning of the Christian
doctrine absolutely disappears." (Reply to the Holy Synod, April 4-17, 1901.)
[11] As he grew older, this feeling of the unity of religious truth throughout human history—and of
the kinship of Christ with the other sages, from Buddha down to Kant and Emerson—grew more and
more accentuated, until in his later years Tolstoy denied that he had "any predilection for
Christianity." Of the greatest importance in this connection is a letter written between July 27 and
August 4, 1909, to the painter Jan Styka, and recently reproduced in Le Théosophe (January 16,
1911). According to his habit, Tolstoy, full of his new conviction, was a little inclined to forget his
former state of mind and the starting-point of his religious crisis, which was purely Christian:
"The doctrine of Jesus," he writes, "is to me only one of the beautiful doctrines which we have
received from the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Israel, Hindostan, China, Greece. The two great
principles of Jesus: the love of God, that is, of absolute perfection, and the love of one's neighbour,
that is, of all men without distinction, have been preached by all the sages of the world: Krishna,
Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and, among the moderns,
Rousseau, Pascal, Kant, Emerson, Channing, and many others. Truth, moral and religious, is
everywhere and always the same.... I have no predilection for Christianity. If I have been particularly
attracted by the teaching of Jesus, it is (1) because I was born and have lived among Christians, and
(2) because I have found a great spiritual joy in disengaging the pure doctrine from the astonishing
falsifications created by the Churches."
[12] Tolstoy protests that he does not attack true science, which is modest and knows its limits. (Life,
chap. iv. There is a French version by Countess Tolstoy.)

[13] Tolstoy often read the Pensées during the period of this crisis, which preceded the Confessions.
He speaks of Pascal in his letters to Fet (April 14, 1877, August 3, 1879), recommending his friend to
read the Pensées.
[14] In a letter Upon Reason, written on November 26, 1894, to Baroness X (reproduced in The
Revolutionaries, 1906), Tolstoy says the same thing:
"Man has received directly from God one sole instrument by which he may know himself and his
relations with the world: there is no other means. This instrument is reason. Reason comes from God.
It is not only the highest human quality, but the only means by which the truth is to be known."
[15] Life, xxii.-xxv. As in the case of most of these quotations, I am expressing the sense of several
chapters in a few characteristic phrases.
[16] I hope later, when the complete works of Tolstoy have been published, to study the various
shades of this religious idea, which has certainly evolved in respect of many points, notably in
respect of the conception of future life.
[17] From a translation in the Temps for May 1, 1901.

CHAPTER XI

REALITY

He thought he had arrived in port, had achieved the haven in which his
unquiet soul might take its repose. He was only at the beginning of a new
period of activity.
A winter passed in Moscow (his family duties having obliged him to follow
his family thither),[1] and the taking of the census, in which he contrived to
lend a hand, gave him the occasion to examine at first hand the poverty of a
great city. The impression produced upon him was terrible. On the evening
of the day when he first came into contact with this hidden plague of
civilisation, while relating to a friend what he had seen, "he began to shout,
to weep, and to brandish his fist."
"People can't live like that!" he cried, sobbing. "It cannot be! It cannot be!"
He fell into a state of terrible despair, which did not leave him for months.
Countess Tolstoy wrote to him on the 3rd of March, 1882:
"You used to say, 'I used to want to hang myself because of my lack of
faith.' Now you have faith: why then are you so unhappy?"

Because he had not the sanctimonious, selfsatisfied faith of the Pharisee;
because he had not the egoism of the mystic, "who is too completely
absorbed in the matter of his own salvation to think of the salvation of
others";[2] because he knew love; because he could no longer forget the
miserable creatures he had seen, and in the passionate tenderness of his
heart he felt as though he were responsible for their sufferings and their
abjectness; they were the victims of that civilisation in whose privileges he
shared; of that monstrous idol to which an elect and superior class was
always sacrificing millions of human beings. To accept the benefit of such
crimes was to become an accomplice. His conscience would have given
him no repose had he not denounced them.
What shall we do? (1884-86) is the expression of this second crisis; a crisis
far more tragic than the first, and far richer in consequences. What were the
personal religious sufferings of Tolstoy in this ocean of human
wretchedness—of material misery, not misery created by the mind of a self-
wearied idler? It was impossible for him to shut his eyes to it, and having
seen it he could but strive, at any cost, to prevent it. Alas! was such a thing
possible?
An admirable portrait,[3] which I cannot look at without emotion, tells us
plainly what suffering Tolstoy was then enduring. It shows him facing the
camera; seated, with his arms crossed; he is wear-a moujik's blouse. He
looks overwhelmed. His hair is still black, but his moustache is already
grey, and his long beard and whiskers are quite white. A double furrow
traces symmetrical lines in the large, comely face. There is so much
goodness, such tenderness, in the great dog-like muzzle, in the eyes that
regard you with so frank, so clear, so sorrowful a look. They read your mind
so surely! They pity and implore. The face is furrowed and bears traces of
suffering; there are heavy creases beneath the eyes. He has wept. But he is
strong, and ready for the fight.
His logic was heroic:
"I am always astonished by these words, so often repeated: 'Yes, it is well
enough in theory, but how would it be in practice?' As if theory consisted in
pretty words, necessary for conversation, and was not in the least something
to which practice should conform! When I come to understand a matter on
which I have reflected, I cannot do otherwise than as I have understood."[4]

He begins by describing, with photographic exactitude, the poverty of
Moscow as he has seen it in the course of his visits to the poorer quarters or
the night-shelters.[5]
He is convinced that money is not the power, as he had at first supposed,
which will save these unhappy creatures, all more or less tainted by the
corruption of the cities. Then he seeks bravely for the source of the evil;
unwinding link upon link of the terrible chain of responsibility. First come
the rich, with the contagion of their accursed luxury, which entices and
depraves the soul.[6] Then comes the universal seduction of life without
labour. Then the State, that murderous entity, created by the violent in order
that they might for their own profit despoil and enslave the rest of
humanity. Then the Church, an accomplice; science and art, accomplices.
How is a man to oppose this army of evil? In the first place, by refusing to
join it. By refusing to share in the exploitation of humanity. By renouncing
wealth and ownership of the soil,[7] and by refusing to serve the State.
But this is not sufficient. One "must not lie," nor be afraid of the truth. One
"must repent," and uproot the pride that is implanted by education. Finally,
one must work with one's hands. "Thou shalt win thy bread in the sweat of
thy brow" is the first commandment and the most essential.[8] And Tolstoy,
replying in advance to the ridicule of the elect, maintains that physical
labour does not in any way decrease the energy of the intellect; but that, on
the contrary, it increases it, and that it responds to the normal demand of
nature. Health can only gain thereby; art will gain even more. But what is
more important still, it will re-establish the union of man with man.
In his subsequent works, Tolstoy was to complete these precepts of moral
hygiene. He was anxious to achieve the cure of the soul, to replenish its
energy, by proscribing the vicious pleasures which deaden the conscience[9]
and the cruel pleasures which kill it.[10] He himself set the example. In
1884, he sacrificed his most deeply rooted passion: his love of the chase.[11]
He practised abstinence, which strengthens the will. So an athlete may
subject himself to some painful discipline that he may grapple with it and
conquer.
What shall we do? marks the first stage of the difficult journey upon which
Tolstoy was about to embark, quitting the relative peace of religious

meditation for the social maëlstrom. It was then that the twenty years' war
commenced which the old prophet of Yasnaya Polyana waged in the name
of the Gospel, single-handed, outside the limits of all parties, and
condemning all; a war upon the crimes and lies of civilisation.

[1] "I had hitherto passed my whole life away from the city." (What shall we do?)
[2] Tolstoy has many times expressed his antipathy for the "ascetics, who live for themselves only,
apart from their fellows." He puts them in the same class as the conceited and ignorant revolutionists,
"who pretend to do good to others without knowing what it is that they themselves need .... I love
these two categories of men with the same love, but I hate their doctrines with the same hate. The
only doctrine is that which orders a constant activity, an existence which responds to the aspirations
of the soul and endeavours to realise the happiness of others. Such is the Christian doctrine. Equally
remote from religious quietism and the arrogant pretensions of the revolutionists, who seek to
transform the world without knowing in what real happiness consists." (Letters to a friend, published
in the volume entitled Cruel Pleasures, 1895.)
[3] A daguerreotype of 1885, reproduced in What shall we do? in the complete French edition.
[4] What shall we do?
[5] All the first part of the book (the first fifteen chapters).
[6] "The true cause of poverty is the accumulation of riches in the hands of those who do not
produce, and are concentrated in the cities. The wealthy classes are gathered together in the cities in
order to enjoy and to defend themselves. And the poor man comes to feed upon the crumbs of the
rich. He is drawn thither by the snare of easy gain: by peddling, begging, swindling, or in the service
of immorality."
[7] "The pivot of the evil is property. Property is merely the means cf enjoying the labour of others."
Property, he says again, is that which is not ours: it represents other people. "Man calls his wife, his
children, his slaves, his goods his property, but reality shows him his error; and he must renounce his
property or suffer and cause others to suffer."
Tolstoy was already urging the Russian revolution: "For three or four years now men have cursed us
on the highway and called us sluggards and skulkers. The hatred and contempt of the downtrodden
people are becoming more intense." (What shall we do?)
[8] The peasant-revolutionist Bondarev would have had this law recognised as a universal obligation.
Tolstoy was then subject to his influence, as also to that of another peasant, Sutayev.—"During the
whole of my life two Russian thinkers have had a great moral influence over me, have enriched my
mind, and have elucidated for me my own conception of the world. They were two peasants, Sutayev
and Bondarev." (What shall we do?)
In the same book Tolstoy gives us a portrait of Sutayev, and records a conversation with him.
[9] Vicious Pleasures, or in the French translation Alcohol and Tobacco, 1895.
[10] Cruel Pleasures (the Meat-eaters; War; Hunting), 1895.
[11] The sacrifice was difficult; the passion inherited. He was not sentimental; he never felt much
pity for animals. For him all things fell into three planes: "1. Reasoning beings; 2. animals and plants;
3. inanimate matter." He was not without a trace of native cruelty. He relates the pleasure he felt in
watching the struggles of a wolf which he killed. Remorse was of later growth.

CHAPTER XII

ART AND CONSCIENCE

This moral revolution of Tolstoy's met with little sympathy from his
immediate world; his family and his relatives were appalled by it.
For a long time Countess Tolstoy had been anxiously watching the progress
of a symptom against which she had fought in vain. As early as 1874 she
had seen with indignation the amount of time and energy which her
husband spent in connection with the schools.
"This spelling-book, this arithmetic, this grammar—I feel a contempt for
them, and I cannot assume a semblance of interest in them."
Matters were very different when pedagogy was succeeded by religion. So
hostile was the Countess's reception of the first confidences of the convert
that Tolstoy felt obliged to apologise when he spoke of God in his letters:
"Do not be vexed, as you so often are when I mention God; I cannot help it,
for He is the very basis of my thought."[1]
The Countess was touched, no doubt; she tried to conceal her impatience;
but she did not understand; and she watched her husband anxiously.
"His eyes are strange and fixed. He scarcely speaks. He does not seem to
belong to this world." She feared he was ill.
"Leo is always working, by what he tells me. Alas! he is writing religious
discussions of some kind. He reads and he ponders until he gives himself
the headache, and all this to prove that the Church is not in agreement with
the teaching of the Gospel. He will hardly find a dozen people in Russia
whom the matter could possibly interest. But there is nothing to be done. I
have only one hope: that he will be done with it all the sooner, and that it
will pass off like an illness."
The illness did not pass away. The situation between husband and wife
became more and more painful. They loved one another; each had a
profound esteem for the other; but it was impossible for them to understand

one another. They strove to make mutual concessions, which became—as is
usually the case—a form of mutual torment. Tolstoy forced himself to
follow his family to Moscow. He wrote in his Journal:
"The most painful month of my life. Getting settled in Moscow. All are
settling down. But when, then, will they begin to live? All this, not in order
to live, but because other folk do the same. Unhappy people!"[2]
During these days the Countess wrote:
"Moscow. We shall have been here a month tomorrow. The first two weeks
I cried every day, for Leo was not only sad, but absolutely broken. He did
not sleep, he did not eat, at times even he wept; I thought I should go mad."
[3]

For a time they had to live their lives apart. They begged one another's
pardon for causing mutual suffering. We see how they always loved each
other. He writes to her:
"You say, 'I love you, and you do not need my love.' It is the only thing I do
need.... Your love causes me more gladness than anything in the world."
But as soon as they are together again the same discord occurs. The
Countess cannot share this religious mania which is now impelling Tolstoy
to study Hebrew with a rabbi.
"Nothing else interests him any longer. He is wasting his energies in
foolishness. I cannot conceal my impatience."[4]
She writes to him:
"It can only sadden me that such intellectual energies should spend
themselves in chopping wood, heating the samovar, and cobbling boots."
She adds, with affectionate, half-ironical humour of a mother who watches
a child playing a foolish game:
"Finally, I have pacified myself with the Russian proverb: 'Let the child
play as he will, so long as he doesn't cry.'"[5]
Before the letter was posted she had a mental vision of her husband reading
these lines, his kind, frank eyes saddened by their ironical tone; and she re-
opened the letter, in an impulse of affection:

"Quite suddenly I saw you so clearly, and I felt such a rush of tenderness for
you 1 There is something in you so wise, so naive, so persevering, and it is
all lit up by the radiance of goodness, and that look of yours which goes
straight to the soul.... It is something that belongs to you alone."
In this manner these two creatures who loved also tormented one another
and were straightway stricken with wretchedness because of the pain they
had the power to inflict but not the power to avoid. A situation with no
escape, which lasted for nearly thirty years; which was to be terminated
only by the flight across the steppes, in a moment of aberration, of the
ancient Lear, with death already upon him.
Critics have not sufficiently remarked the moving appeal to women which
terminates What shall we do? Tolstoy had no sympathy for modern
feminism.[6] But of the type whom he calls "the mother-woman," the
woman who knows the real meaning of life, he speaks in terms of pious
admiration; he pronounces a magnificent eulogy of her pains and her joys,
of pregnancy and maternity, of the terrible sufferings, the years without rest,
the invisible, exhausting travail for which no reward is expected, and of that
beatitude which floods the soul at the happy issue from labour, when the
body has accomplished the Law. He draws the portrait of the valiant wife
who is a help, not an obstacle, to her husband. She knows that "the vocation
of man is the obscure, lonely sacrifice, unrewarded, for the life of others."
"Such a woman will not only not encourage her husband in factitious and
meriticious work whose only end is to profit by and enjoy the labour of
others; but she will regard such activity with horror and disgust, as a
possible seduction for her children. She will demand of her companion a
true labour, which will call for energy and does not fear danger.... She
knows that the children, the generations to come, are given to men as their
holiest vision, and that she exists to further, with all her being, this sacred
task. She will develop in her children and in her husband the strength of
sacrifice.... It is such women who rule men and serve as their guiding star....
O mother-women! In your hands is the salvation of the world!"[7]
This appeal of a voice of supplication, which still has hope—will it not be
heard?
A few years later the last glimmer of hope was dead.

"Perhaps you will not believe me; but you cannot imagine how isolated I
am, nor in what a degree my veritable I is despised and disregarded by all
those about me."[8]
If those who loved him best so misunderstood the grandeur of the moral
transformation which Tolstoy was undergoing, one could not look for more
penetration or greater respect in others. Tourgenev with whom he had
sought to effect a reconciliation, rather in a spirit of Christian humility than
because his feelings towards him had suffered any change,[9] said ironically
of Tolstoy: "I pity him greatly; but after all, as the French say, every one
kills his own fleas in his own way."[10]
A few years later, when on the point of death, he wrote to Tolstoy the well-
known letter in which he prayed "his friend, the great writer of the Russian
world," to "return to literature."[11]
All the artists of Europe shared the anxiety and the prayer of the dying
Tourgenev. Melchior de Vogüé, at the end of his study of Tolstoy, written in
1886, made a portrait of the writer in peasant costume, handling a drill, the
pretext for an eloquent apostrophe:
"Craftsman, maker of masterpieces, this is not your tool!... Our tool is the
pen; our field, the human soul, which we must shelter and nourish. Let us
remind you of the words of a Russian peasant, of the the first printer of
Moscow, when he was sent back to the plough: 'It is not my business to sow
grains of corn, but to sow the seed of the spirit broadcast in the world.'"
As though Tolstoy had ever renounced his vocation as a sower of the seed
of the mind! In the Introduction to What I Believe he wrote:
"I believe that my life, my reason, my light, is given me exclusively for the
purpose of enlightening my fellows. I believe that my knowledge of the
truth is a talent which is lent me for this object; that this talent is a fire
which is a fire only when it is being consumed. I believe that the only
meaning of my life is that I should live it only by the light within me, and
should hold that light on high before men that they may see it."[12]
But this light, this fire "which was a fire only when it was being consumed,"
was a cause of anxiety to the majority of Tolstoy's fellow-artists. The more
intelligent could not but suspect that there was a great risk that their art

would be the first prey of the conflagration. They professed to believe that
the whole art of literature was menaced; that the Russian, like Prospero,
was burying for ever his magic ring with its power of creative illusion.
Nothing was further from the truth; and I hope to show that so far from
ruining his art Tolstoy was awakening forces which had lain fallow, and that
his religious faith, instead of killing his artistic genius, regenerated it
completely.

[1] The summer of 1878.
[2] October 8, 1881. Vie et Oeuvre.
[3] October 14. Vie et Oeuvre.
[4] 1882.
[5] October 23, 1884. Vie et Oeuvre.
[6] "The so-called right of women is merely the desire to participate in the imaginary labours of the
wealthy classes, with a view to enjoying the fruit of the labour of others and to live a life that satisfies
the sensual appetites. No genuine labourer's wife demands the right to share her husband's work in
the mines or in the fields."
[7] These are the last lines of What shall we do? They are dated the 14th of February, 1886.
[8] A letter to a friend, published under the title Profession of Faith, in the volume entitled Cruel
Pleasures, 1895.
[9] The reconciliation took place in the spring of 1878. Tolstoy wrote to Tourgenev asking his
pardon. Tourgenev went to Yasnaya Polyana in August, 1878. Tolstoy returned his visit in July, 1881.
Every one was struck with the change in his manner, his gentleness and his modesty. He was "as
though regenerated."
[10] Letter to Polonski (quoted by Birukov).
[11] Letter to Bougival June 28, 1883.
[12] We find that M. de Vogüé, in the reproach which he addressed to Tolstoy, unconsciously used the
phrases of Tolstoy himself. "Rightly or wrongly," he said, "for our chastisement perhaps, we have
received from heaven that splendid and essential evil: thought.... To throw down this cross is an
impious revolt." (Le Roman russe, 1886.) Now Tolstoy wrote to his aunt, the Countess A. A. Tolstoy,
in 1883: "Each of us must bear his cross.... Mine is the travail of the idea; evil, full of pride and
seductiveness." (Letters.)

CHAPTER XIII

SCIENCE AND ART

It is a singular fact that in speaking of Tolstoy's ideas concerning science
and art, the most important of the books in which these ideas are expressed
—namely, What shall we do? (1884-86)—is commonly ignored. There, for
the first time, Tolstoy fights the battle between art and science; and none of
the following conflicts was to surpass the violence of their first encounter. It
is a matter for surprise that no one, during the assaults which have been
recently delivered in France upon the vanity of science and the intellectuals,
has thought of referring to these pages. They constitute the most terrible
attack ever penned against the eunuchs of science" and "the corsairs of art";
against those intellectual castes which, having destroyed the old ruling
castes of the Church, the State, and the Army, have installed themselves in
their place, and, without being able or willing to perform any service of use
to humanity, lay claim to a blind admiration and service, proclaiming as
dogmas an impudent faith in science for the sake of science and in art for
the sake of art—the lying mask which they seek to make their justification
and the apology for their monstrous egoism and their emptiness.
"Never make me say," continues Tolstoy, "that I deny art or science. Not
only do I not deny them; it is in their name that I seek to drive the thieves
from the temple."
"Science and art are as necessary as bread and water; even more
necessary.... The true science is that of the true welfare of all human beings.
The true art is the expression of the knowledge of the true welfare of all
men."
And he praises those who, "since men have existed, have with the harp or
the cymbal, by images or by words, expressed their struggle against
duplicity, their sufferings in that struggle, their hope in the triumph of good,
their despair at the triumph of evil, and the enthusiasm of their prophetic
vision of the future."
He then draws the character of the perfect artist, in a page burning with
mystical and melancholy earnestness:
"The activity of science and art is only fruitful when it arrogates no right to
itself and considers only its duties. It is only because that activity is such as
it is, because its essence is sacrifice, that humanity honours it. The men who
are called to serve others by spiritual work always suffer in the
accomplishment of that task; for the spiritual world is brought to birth only

in suffering and torture. Sacrifice and suffering; such is the fate of the
thinker and the artist, for his fate is the good of men. Men are unhappy; they
suffer; they die; there is no time for him to stroll about, to amuse himself.
The thinker or the artist never strays upon Olympian heights, as we are
accustomed to think; he is always in a state of conflict, always in a state of
emotion. He must decide and must say what will further the welfare of men,
what will deliver them from suffering; and he has not decided it, he has not
said it; and to-morrow it will perhaps be too late, and he will die.... The man
who is trained in an establishment in which artists and scientists are formed
(to tell the truth, such places make destroyers of art and of science); the man
who receives diplomas and a pension—he will not be an artist or a thinker;
but he who would be happy not to think, not to express what is implanted in
his mind, yet cannot refrain from thought and self-expression: for he is
carried along by two invisible forces: his inner need and his love of men.
There are no artists who are fat, lovers of life, and satisfied with
themselves."[1]
This splendid page, which throws a tragic light upon the genius of Tolstoy,
was written under the immediate stress of the suffering caused him by the
poverty of Moscow, and under the conviction that science and art were the
accomplices of the entire modern system of social inequality and
hypocritical brutality. This conviction he was never to lose. But the
impression of his first encounter with the misery of the world slowly faded,
and became less poignant; the wound healed,[2] and in none of his
subsequent books do we recover the tremor of pain and of vengeful anger
which vibrates in this; nowhere do we find this sublime profession of the
faith of the artist who creates with his life-blood, this exaltation of the
sacrifice and suffering "which are the lot of the thinker"; this disdain for
Olympian art. Those of his later works which deal with the criticism of art
will be found to treat the question from a standpoint at once more literary
and less mystical; the problem of art is detached from the background of
that human wretchedness of which Tolstoy could not think without losing
his self-control, as on the night of his visit to the night-shelter, when upon
returning home he sobbed and cried aloud in desperation.
I do not mean to suggest that these didactic works are ever frigid. It is
impossible for Tolstoy to be frigid. Until the end of his life he is the man
who writes to Fet:

"If he does not love his personages, even the least of them, then he must
insult them in such a way as to make the heavens fall, or must mock at them
until he splits his sides."[3]
He does not forget to do so, in his writings on art. The negative portion of
this statement—brimming over with insults and sarcasms—is so vigorously
expressed that it is the only part which has struck the artist. This method has
so violently wounded the superstitions and susceptibilities of the
brotherhood that they inevitably see, in the enemy of their own art, the
enemy of all art whatsoever. But Tolstoy's criticism is never devoid of the
reconstructive element. He never destroys for the sake of destruction, but
only to rebuild. In his modesty he does not even profess to build anything
new; he merely defends Art, which was and ever shall be, from the false
artists who exploit it and dishonour it.
"True science and true art have always existed and will always exist; it is
impossible and useless to attack them," he wrote to me in 1887, in a letter
which anticipated by more than ten years his famous criticism of art (What
is Art?).[4] "All the evil of the day comes from the fact that so-called
civilised people, together with the scientists and artists, form a privileged
caste, like so many priests; and this caste has all the faults of all castes. It
degrades and lowers the principle in virtue of which it was organised. What
we in our world call the sciences and the arts is merely a gigantic humbug, a
gross superstition into which we commonly fall as soon as we free
ourselves from the old superstition of the Church. To keep safely to the road
we ought to follow we must begin at the beginning—we must raise the cowl
which keeps us warm but obscures our sight. The temptation is great. We
are born or we clamber upon the rungs of the ladder; and we find among the
privileged the priests of civilisation, of Kultur, as the Germans have it. Like
the Brahmin or Catholic priests, we must have a great deal of sincerity and
a great love of the truth before we cast doubts upon the principles which
assure us of our advantageous position. But a serious man who ponders the
riddle of life cannot hesitate. To begin to see clearly he must free himself
from his superstitions, however profitable they may be to him. This is a
condition sine quâ non.... To have no superstition. To force oneself into the
attitude of a child or a Descartes."
This superstition of modern art, in which the interested castes believe, "this
gigantic humbug," is denounced in Tolstoy's What is Art? With a somewhat

ungentle zest he holds it up to ridicule, and exposes its hypocrisy, its
poverty, and its fundamental corruption. He makes a clean sweep of
everything. He brings to this work of demolition the joy of a child breaking
his toys. The whole of this critical portion is often full of humour, but
sometimes of injustice: it is warfare. Tolstoy used all weapons that came to
his hand, and struck at hazard, without noticing whom he struck. Often
enough it happened—as in all battles—that he wounded those whom it
should have been his duty to defend: Ibsen or Beethoven. This was the
result of his enthusiasm, which left him no time to reflect before acting; of
his passion, which often blinded him to the weakness of his reasons, and—
let us say it—it was also the result of his incomplete artistic culture.
Setting aside his literary studies, what could he well know of contemporary
art? When was he able to study painting, and what could he have heard of
European music, this country gentleman who had passed three-fourths of
his life in his Muscovite village, and who had not visited Europe since
1860; and what did he see when he was upon his travels, except the schools,
which were all that interested him? He speaks of paintings from hearsay,
citing pell-mell among the decadents such painters as Puvis de Chavannes,
Manet, Monet, Böcklin, Stuck, and Klinger; confidently admiring Jules
Breton and Lhermitte on account of their excellent sentiments; despising
Michelangelo, and among the painters of the soul never once naming
Rembrandt. In music he felt his way better,[5] but knew hardly anything of
it; he could not get beyond the impressions of his childhood, swore by those
who were already classics about 1840, and had not become familiar with
any later composers (excepting Tchaikowsky, whose music made him
weep); he throws Brahms and Richard Strauss into the bottom of the same
bag, teaches Beethoven his business,[6] and, in order to judge Wagner, he
thought it was sufficient to attend a single representation of Siegfried, at
which he arrived after the rise of the curtain, while he left in the middle of
the second act,[7] In the matter of literature he is, it goes without saying,
rather better informed. But by what curious aberration did he evade the
criticism of the Russian writers whom he knew so well, while he laid down
the law to foreign poets, whose temperament was as far as possible
removed from his own, and whose leaves he merely turned with
contemptuous negligence![8]

His intrepid assurance increased with age. It finally impelled him to write a
book for the purpose of proving that Shakespeare "was not an artist."
"He may have been—no matter what: but he was not an artist."[9]
His certitude is admirable. Tolstoy does not doubt. He does not discuss. The
truth is his. He will tell you:
"The Ninth Symphony is a work which causes social disunion."
Again:
"With the exception of the celebrated air for the violin by Bach, the
Nocturne in E flat by Chopin, and a dozen pieces, not even entire, chosen
from among the works of Haydn, Mozart, Weber, Beethoven, and Chopin,...
all the rest may be rejected and treated with contempt, as examples of an art
which causes social disunion."
Again:
"I am going to prove that Shakespeare cannot be ranked even as a writer of
the fourth order. And as a character-painter he is nowhere."
That the rest of humanity is of a different opinion is no reason for
hesitating: on the contrary.
"My opinion," he proudly says, "is entirely different from the established
opinion concerning Shakespeare throughout Europe."
Obsessed by his hatred of lies, he scents untruth everywhere; and the more
widely an idea is received, the more prickly he becomes in his treatment of
it; he refuses it, suspecting in it, as he says with reference to the fame of
Shakespeare, "one of those epidemic influences to which men have always
been subject. Such were the Crusades in the Middle Ages, the belief in
witchcraft, the search for the philosopher's stone, and the passion for tulips.
Men see the folly of these influences only when they have won free from
them. With the development of the press these epidemics have become
particularly notable." And he gives as an example the most recent of these
contagious diseases, the Dreyfus Affair, of which he, the enemy of all
injustice, the defender of all the oppressed, speaks with disdainful
indifference;[10] a striking example of the excesses into which he is drawn
by his suspicion of untruth and that instinctive hatred of "moral epidemics"

of which he admits himself the victim, and which he is unable to master. It
is the reverse side of a virtue, this inconceivable blindness of the seer, the
reader of souls, the evoker of passionate forces, which leads him to refer to
King Lear as "an inept piece of work," and to the proud Cordelia as a
"characterless creature."[11]
Observe that he sees very clearly certain of Shakespeare's actual defects—
faults that we have not the sincerity to admit: the artificial quality of the
poetic diction, which is uniformly attributed to all his characters; and the
rhetoric of passion, of heroism, and even of simplicity. I can perfectly well
understand that a Tolstoy, who was the least literary of writers, should have
been lacking in sympathy for the art of one who was the most genial of men
of letters. But why waste time in speaking of that which he cannot
understand? What is the worth of judgments upon a world which is closed
to the judge?
Nothing, if we seek in these judgments the passport to these unfamiliar
worlds. Inestimably great, if we seek in them the key to Tolstoy's art. We do
not ask of a creative genius the impartiality of the critic. When a Wagner or
a Tolstoy speaks of Beethoven or of Shakespeare, he is speaking in reality
not of Beethoven or of Shakespeare, but of himself; he is revealing his own
ideals. They do not even try to put us off the scent. Tolstoy, in criticising
Shakespeare, does not attempt to make himself "objective." More: he
reproaches Shakespeare for his objective art. The painter of War and Peace,
the master of impersonal art, cannot sufficiently deride those German critics
who, following the lead of Goethe, "invent Shakespeare," and are
responsible for "the theory that art ought to be objective, that is to say,
ought to represent human beings without any reference to moral values—
which is the negation of the religious object of art."
It is thus from the pinnacle of a creed that Tolstoy pronounces his artistic
judgments. We must not look for any personal after-thoughts in his
criticisms. We shall find no trace of such a thing; he is as pitiless to his own
works as to those of others.[12] What, then, does he really intend? What is
the artistic significance of the religious ideal which he proposes?
This ideal is magnificent. The term "religious art" is apt to mislead one as to
the breadth of the conception. Far from narrowing the province of art,
Tolstoy enlarges it. Art, he says, is everywhere.

"Art creeps into our whole life; what we term art, namely, theatres,
concerts, books, exhibitions, is only an infinitesimal portion of art. Our life
is full of artistic manifestations of every kind, from the games of children to
the offices of religion. Art and speech are the two organs of human
progress. One affords the communion of hearts, the other the communion of
thoughts. If either of the two is perverted, then society is sick. The art of to-
day is perverted."
Since the Renascence it has no longer been possible to speak of the art of
the Christian nations. Class has separated itself from class. The rich, the
privileged, have attempted to claim the monopoly of art; and they have
made their pleasure the criterion of beauty. Art has become impoverished as
it has grown remoter from the poor.
"The category of the emotions experienced by those who do not work in
order to live is far more limited than the emotions of those who labour. The
sentiments of our modern society may be reduced to three: pride, sensuality,
and weariness of life. These three sentiments and their ramifications
constitute almost entirely the subject of the art of the wealthy."
It infects the world, perverts the people, propagates sexual depravity, and
has become the worst obstacle to the realisation of human happiness. It is
also devoid of real beauty, unnatural and insincere; an affected, fabricated,
cerebral art.
In the face of this lie of the æsthetics, this pastime of the rich, let us raise
the banner of the living, human art: the art which unites the men of all
classes and all nations. The past offers us glorious examples of such art.
"The majority of mankind has always understood and loved that which we
consider the highest art: the epic of Genesis, the parables of the Gospel, the
legends, tales, and songs of the people."
The greatest art is that which expresses the religious conscience of the
period. By this Tolstoy does not mean the teaching of the Church. "Every
society has a religious conception of life; it is the ideal of the greatest
happiness towards which that society tends." All are to a certain extent
aware of this tendency; a few pioneers express it clearly.
"A religious conscience always exists. IT IS THE BED IN WHICH THE RIVER
FLOWS."

The religious consciousness of our epoch is the aspiration toward happiness
as realised by the fraternity of mankind. There is no true art but that which
strives for this union. The highest art is that which accomplishes it directly
by the power of love; but there is another art which participates in the same
task, by attacking, with the weapons of scorn and indignation, all that
opposes this fraternity. Such are the novels of Dickens and Dostoyevsky,
Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, and the paintings of Millet. But even though
it fail to attain these heights, all art which represents daily life with
sympathy and truth brings men nearer together. Such is Don Quixote: such
are the plays of Molière. It is true that such art as the latter is continually
sinning by its too minute realism and by the poverty of its subjects "when
compared with ancient models, such as the sublime history of Joseph." The
excessive minuteness of detail is detrimental to such works, which for that
reason cannot become universal.
"Modern works of art are spoiled by a realism which might more justly be
called the provincialism of art."
Thus Tolstoy unhesitatingly condemns the principle of his own genius.
What does it signify to him that he should sacrifice himself to the future—
and that nothing of his work should remain?
"The art of the future will not be a development of the art of the present: it
will be founded upon other bases. It will no longer be the property of a
caste. Art is not a trade or profession: it is the expression of real feelings.
Now the artist can only experience real feelings when he refrains from
isolating himself; when he lives the life natural to man. For this reason the
man who is sheltered from life is in the worst possible conditions for
creative work."
In the future "artists will all be endowed." Artistic activity will be made
accessible to all "by the introduction into the elementary schools of
instruction in music and painting, which will be taught to the child
simultaneously with the first principles of grammar." For the rest, art will
no longer call for a complicated technique, as at present; it will move in the
direction of simplicity, clearness, and conciseness, which are the marks of
sane and classic art, and of Homeric art.[13] How pleasant it will be to
translate universal sentiments into the pure lives of this art of the future! To
write a tale or a song, to design a picture for millions of beings, is a matter

of much greater importance—and of much greater difficulty—than writing
a novel or a symphony. It is an immense and almost virgin province. Thanks
to such works men will learn to appreciate the happiness of brotherly union.
"Art must suppress violence, and only art can do so. Its mission is to bring
about the Kingdom of God, that is to say, of Love."[14]
Which of us would not endorse these generous words? And who can fail to
see that Tolstoy's conception is fundamentally fruitful and vital, in spite of
its Utopianism and a touch of puerility? It is true that our art as a whole is
only the expression of a caste, which is itself subdivided not only by the
fact of nationality, but in each country also into narrow and hostile clans.
There is not a single artist in Europe who realises in his own personality the
union of parties and of races. The most universal mind of our time was that
of Tolstoy himself. In him men of all nations and all classes have attained
fraternity; and those who have tasted the virile joy of this capacious love
can no longer be satisfied by the shreds and fragments of the vast human
soul which are offered by the art of the European cliques.

[1] What shall we do? p. 378-9.
[2] In time he even came to justify suffering—not only personal suffering, but the sufferings of
others. "For the assuagement of the sufferings of others is the essence of the rational life. How then
should the object of labour be an object of suffering for the labourer? It is as though the labourer
were to say that an untilled field is a grief to him." (Life, chap, xxxiv.-xxxv.)
[3] February 23, 1860. Further Letters, pp. 19-20. It was for this reason that the "melancholy and
dyspeptic" art of Tourgenev displeased him.
[4] This letter (October 4, 1887) has been printed in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1902, and in the
Further Letters (Correspondance inédite), 1907. What is Art? appeared in 1897-98; but Tolstoy had
been pondering the matter for more than fourteen years.
[5] I shall return to this matter when speaking of the Kreutzer Sonata.
[6] His intolerance became aggravated after 1886. In What shall we do? he did not as yet dare to lay
hands on Beethoven or on Shakespeare. Moreover, he reproached contemporary artists for daring to
invoke their names. "The activity of a Galileo, a Shakespeare, a Beethoven has nothing in common
with that of a Tyndall, a Victor Hugo, or a Wagner; just as the Holy Father would deny all
relationship with the Orthodox popes." (What shall we do?)
[7] For that matter, he wished to leave before the end of the first act. "For me the question was
settled. I had no more doubt. There was nothing to be expected of an author capable of imagining
scenes like these. One could affirm beforehand that he could never write anything that was not evil."
[8] In order to make a selection from the French poets of the new schools he conceived the admirable
idea of "copying, in each volume, the verses printed on page 28!"

[9] Shakespeare, 1903. The book was written on the occasion of an article by Ernest Crosby upon
Shakespeare and the Working Classes.
[10] "Here was one of those incidents which often occur, without attracting the attention of any one,
and without interesting—I do not say the world—but even the French military world." And further
on: "It was not until some years had passed that men awoke from their hypnosis, and understood that
they could not possibly know whether Dreyfus were guilty or not, and that each of them had other
interests more important and more immediate than the Affaire Dreyfus." (Shakespeare.)
[11] "King Lear is a very poor drama, very carelessly constructed, which can inspire nothing but
weariness and disgust."—Othello, for which Tolstoy evinces a certain sympathy, doubtless because
the work is in harmony with his ideas of that time concerning marriage and jealousy, "while the least
wretched of Shakespeare's plays, is only a tissue of emphatic words." Hamlet has no character at all:
"he is the author's phonograph, who repeats all his ideas in a string." As for The Tempest, Cymbeline,
Troilus and Cressida, &c., Tolstoy only mentions them on account of their "ineptitude."
The only character of Shakespeare's whom he finds natural is Falstaff, "precisely because here the
tongue of Shakespeare, full of frigid pleasantries and inept puns, is in harmony with the false, vain,
debauched character of this repulsive drunkard."
Tolstoy had not always been of this opinion. He read Shakespeare with pleasure between 1860 and
1870, especially at the time when he contemplated writing a historical play about the figure of Peter
the Great. In his notes for 1869 we find that he even takes Hamlet as his model and his guide. Having
mentioned his completed works, and comparing War and Peace to the Homeric ideal, he adds:
"HAMLET and my future works; the poetry of the romance-writer in the depicting of character."
[12] He classes his own "works of imagination" in the category of "harmful art." (What is Art?) From
this condemnation he does not except his own plays, "devoid of that religious conception which must
form the basis of the drama of the future."
[13] As early as 1873 Tolstoy had written: "Think what you will, but in such a fashion that every
word may be understood by every one. One cannot write anything bad in a perfectly clear and simple
language. What is immoral will appear so false if clearly expressed that it will assuredly be deleted.
If a writer seriously wishes to speak to the people, he has only to force himself to be comprehensible.
When not a word arrests the reader's attention the work is good. If he cannot relate what he has read
the work is worthless."
[14] This ideal of brotherhood and union among men is by no means, to Tolstoy's mind, the limit of
human activity; his insatiable mind conceives an unknown ideal, above and beyond that of love:
"Science will perhaps one day offer as the basis of art a much higher ideal, and art will realise it."

CHAPTER XIV

THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC

The finest theory finds its value only in the works by which it is
exemplified. With Tolstoy theory and creation are always hand in hand, like

faith and action. While he was elaborating his critique of art he was
producing types of the new art of which he spoke: of two forms of art, one
higher and one less exalted, but both "religious" in the most human sense.
In one he sought the union of men through love; in the other he waged war
upon the world, the enemy of love. It was during this period that he wrote
those masterpieces: The Death of Ivan Ilyitch (1884-86), the Popular Tales
and Stories (1881-1886), The Power of Darkness (1886), the Kreutzer
Sonata (1889), and Master and Servant (1895).[1] At the height and end of
this artistic period, like a cathedral with two spires, the one symbolising
eternal love and the other the hatred of the world, stands Resurrection
(1899).
All these works are distinguished from their predecessors by new artistic
qualities. Tolstoy's ideas had suffered a change, not alone in respect of the
object of art, but also in respect of its form. In reading What is Art? or
Shakespeare we are struck by the principles of art which Tolstoy has
enounced in these two books; for these principles are for the most part in
contradiction to the greatest of his previous works. "Clearness, simplicity,
conciseness," we read in What is Art? Material effects are despised; minute
realism is condemned; and in Shakespeare the classic ideal of perfection
and proportion is upheld. "Without the feeling of balance no artists could
exist." And although in his new work the unregenerate man, with his genius
for analysis and his native savagery, is not entirely effaced, some aspects of
the latter quality being even emphasised, his art is profoundly modified in
some respects: the design is clearer, more vigorously accented; the minds of
his characters are epitomised, foreshortened; the interior drama is
intensified, gathered upon itself like a beast of prey about to spring; the
emotion has a quality of universality; and is freed of all transitory details of
local realism; and finally the diction is rich in illustrations, racy, and
smacking of the soil.
His love of the people had long led him to appreciate the beauty of the
popular idiom. As a child he had been soothed by the tales of mendicant
story-tellers. As a grown man and a famous writer, he experienced an
artistic delight in chatting with his peasants.
"These men," he said in later years to M. Paul Boyer,[2] "are masters. Of
old, when I used to talk with them, or with the wanderers who, wallet on
shoulder, pass through our countryside, I used carefully to note such of their

expressions as I heard for the first time expressions often forgotten by our
modern literary dialect, but always good old Russian currency, ringing
sound.... Yes, the genius of the language lives in these men."
He must have been the more sensitive to such elements of the language in
that his mind was not encumbered with literature.[3] Through living far from
any city, in the midst of peasants, he came to think a little in the manner of
the people. He had the slow dialectic, the common sense which reasons
slowly and painfully, step by step, with sudden disconcerting leaps, the
mania for repeating any idea when he was once convinced, of repeating it
unwearingly and indefinitely, and in the same words.[4]
But these were faults rather than qualities. It was many years before he
became aware of the latent genius of the popular tongue; the raciness of its
images, its poetic crudity, its wealth of legendary wisdom. Even at the time
of writing War and Peace he was already subject to its influence. In March,
1872, he wrote to Strakov:
"I have altered the method of my diction and my writing. The language of
the people has sounds to express all that the poet can say, and it is very dear
to me. It is the best poetic regulator. If you try to say anything superfluous,
too emphatic, or false, the language will not suffer it. Whereas our literary
tongue has no skeleton, you may pull it about in every direction, and the
result is always something resembling literature."
To the people he owed not only models of style; he owed them many of his
inspirations. In 1877 a teller of bylines came to Yasnaya Polyana, and
Tolstoy took notes of several of his stories. Of the number was the legend
By what do Men live? and The Three Old Men, which became, as we know,
two of the finest of the Popular Tales and Legends which Tolstoy published
a few years later.[5]
This is a work unique in modern art. It is higher than art: for who, in
reading it, thinks of literature? The spirit of the Gospel and the pure love of
the brotherhood of man are combined with the smiling geniality of the
wisdom of the people. It is full of simplicity, limpidity, and ineffable
goodness of heart; and that supernatural radiance which from time to time
—so naturally and inevitably—bathes the whole picture; surrounding the
old Elias[6] like a halo, or hovering in the cabin of the cobbler Michael; he

who, through his skylight on the ground-level, sees the feet of people
passing, and whom the Lord visits in the guise of the poor whom the good
cobbler has succoured.[7] Sometimes in these tales the parables of the
Gospel are mingled with a vague perfume of Oriental legends, of those
Thousand and One Nights which Tolstoy had loved since childhood.[8]
Sometimes, again, the fantastic light takes on a sinister aspect, lending the
tale a terrifying majesty. Such is Pakhom the Peasant,[9] the tale of the man
who kills himself in acquiring a great surface of and—all the land which he
can encircle by walking for a whole day—and who dies on completing his
journey.
"On the hill the starschina, sitting on the ground, watched him as he ran;
and he cackled, holding his stomach with both hands. And Pakhom fell.
"'Ah! Well done, my merry fellow! You have won a mighty lot of land!'
"The starschina rose, and threw a mattock to Pakhom's servant.
"'There he is: bury him.'
"The servant was alone. He dug a ditch for Pakhom, just as long as from his
feet to his head: two yards, and he buried him."
Nearly all these tales conceal, beneath their poetic envelope, the same
evangelical moral of renunciation and pardon.
"Do not avenge thyself upon whosoever shall offend thee.[10]
"Do not resist whosoever shall do thee evil.[11]
"Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord."[12]
And everywhere, and as the conclusion of all, is love.
Tolstoy, who wished to found an art for all men, achieved universality at the
first stroke. Throughout the world his work has met with a success which
can never fail, for it is purged of all the perishable elements of art, and
nothing is left but the eternal.
The Power of Darkness does not rise to this august simplicity of heart: it
does not pretend to do so. It is the reverse side of the picture. On the one
hand is the dream of divine love; on the other, the ghastly reality. We may

judge, in reading this play, whether Tolstoy's faith and his love of the people
ever caused him to idealise the people or betray the truth.
Tolstoy, so awkward in most of his dramatic essays,[13] has here attained to
mastery. The characters and the action, are handled with ease; the coxcomb
Nikita, the sensual, headstrong passion of Anissia, the cynical good-humour
of the old woman, Matrena, who gloats maternally over the adultery of her
son, and the sanctity of the old stammering Hakim—God inhabiting a
ridiculous body. Then comes the fall of Nikita, weak and without real evil,
but fettered by his sin; falling to the depths of crime in spite of his efforts to
check himself on the dreadful declivity; but his mother and his wife drag
him downward....
"The peasants aren't worth much.... But the babas! The women! They are
wild animals ... they are afraid of nothing! ... Sisters, there are millions of
you, all Russians, and you are all as blind as moles. You know nothing, you
know nothing!... The moujik at least may manage to learn something—in
the drink-shop, or who knows where?—in prison, or in the barracks; but the
baba—what can she know? She has seen nothing, heard nothing. As she has
grown up, so she will die.... They are like little blind puppies who go
running here and there and ramming their heads against all sorts of filth....
They only know their silly songs: 'Ho—o—o! Ho—o—o!' What does it
mean? Ho—o—o? They don't know!"[14]
Then comes the terrible scene of the murder of the new-born child. Nikita
does not want to kill it. Anissia, who has murdered her husband for him,
and whose nerves have ever since been tortured by her crime, becomes
ferocious, maddened, and threatens to give him up. She cries:
"At least I shan't be alone any longer! He'll be a murderer too 1 Let him
know what it's like!" Nikita crushes the child between two boards. In the
midst of his crime he flies, terrified; he threatens to kill Anissia and his
mother; he sobs, he prays:—
"Little mother, I can't go on!" He thinks he hears the mangled baby crying.
"Where shall I go to be safe?"
It is Shakespearean. Less violent, but still more poignant, is the dialogue of
the little girl and the old servant-woman, who, alone in the house, at night,
hear and guess at the crime which is being enacted off the stage.

The end is voluntary expiation. Nikita, accompanied by his father, the old
Hakim, enters barefooted, in the midst of a wedding. He kneels, asks
pardon of all, and accuses himself of every crime. Old Hakim encourages
him, looks upon him with a smile of ecstatic suffering.
"God! Oh, look at him, God!"
The drama gains quite a special artistic flavour by the use of the peasant
dialect.
"I ransacked my notebooks in order to write The Power of Darkness,"
Tolstoy told M. Paul Boyer.
The unexpected images, flowing from the lyrical yet humorous soul of the
Russian people, have a swing and a vigour about them beside which images
of the more literary quality seem tame and colourless. Tolstoy revelled in
them; we feel, in reading the play, that the artist while writing it amused
himself by noting these expressions, these turns of thought; the comic side
of them by no means escapes him,[15] even while the apostle is mourning
amidst the dark places of the human soul.
While he was studying the people, and sending into their darkness a ray of
light from his station above them, he was also devoting two tragic romances
to the still darker night of the middle classes and the wealthy. At this period
the dramatic form was predominant over his ideas of art. The Death of Ivan
Ilyitch and The Kreutzer Sonata are both true dramas of the inner soul, of
the soul turned upon itself and concentrated upon itself, and in The Kreutzer
Sonata it is the hero of the drama himself who unfolds it by narration.
The Death of Ivan Ilyitch (1884-86) has impressed the French public as few
Russian works have done. At the beginning of this study I mentioned that I
had witnessed the sensation caused by this book among the middle-class
readers in the French provinces, a class apparently indifferent to literature
and art. I think the explanation lies in the fact that the book represents, with
a painful realism, a type of the average, mediocre man; a conscientious
functionary, without religion, without ideals, almost without thought; the
man who is absorbed in his duties, in his mechanical life, until the hour of
his death, when he sees with terror that he has not lived. Ivan Ilyitch is the
representative type of the European bourgeoisie of 1880 which reads Zola,
goes to hear Bernhardt, and, without holding any faith, is not even

irreligious; for it does not take the trouble either to believe or to disbelieve;
it simply never thinks of such matters.
In the violence of its attacks, alternately bitter and almost comic, upon the
world in general, and marriage in particular, the Death of Ivan Ilyitch was
the first of a new series of works; it was the forerunner of the still more
morose and unworldly Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection. There is a
lamentable yet laughable emptiness in this life (as there is in thousands and
thousands of lives), with its grotesque ambitions, its wretched gratification
of vanity, "always better than spending the evening opposite one's wife";
with its weariness and hatred of the official career; its privileges, and the
embitterment which they cause; and its one real pleasure: whist. This
ridiculous life is lost for a cause yet more ridiculous—a fall from a ladder,
one day when Ivan wished to hang a curtain over the drawing-room
window. The lie of life. The lie of sickness. The lie of the well-to-do doctor,
who thinks only of himself. The lie of the family, whom illness disgusts.
The lie of the wife, who professes devotion, and calculates how she will
live when her husband is dead. The universal lie, against which is set only
the truth of a compassionate servant, who does not try to conceal his
condition from the dying man, and helps him out of brotherly kindness.
Ivan Ilyitch, "full of an infinite pity for himself," weeps over his loneliness
and the egoism of men; he suffers horribly, until the day on which he
perceives that his past life has been a lie, and that he can repair that lie.
Immediately all becomes clear—an hour before his death. He no longer
thinks of himself; he thinks of his family; he pities them; he must die and
rid them of himself.
"Where are you, Pain? Here.... Well, you have only to persist.—And Death,
where is Death? He did not find it. In place of Death he saw only a ray of
light. 'It is over,' said some one.—He heard these words and repeated them
to himself. 'Death no longer exists,' he told himself."
In The Kreutzer Sonata there is not even this "ray of light." It is a ferocious
piece of work; Tolstoy lashes out at society like a wounded beast avenging
itself for what it has suffered. We must not forget that the story is the
confession of a human brute, who has taken life, and who is poisoned by
the virus of jealousy. Tolstoy hides himself behind his leading character. We
certainly find his own ideas, though heightened in tone, in these furious
invectives against hypocrisy in general; the hypocrisy of the education of

women, of love, of marriage—marriage, that "domestic prostitution"; the
hypocrisy of the world, of science, of physicians—those "sowers of crime."
But the hero of the book impels the writer into an extraordinary brutality of
expression, a violent rush of carnal images—all the excesses of a luxurious
body—and, by reaction into all the fury of asceticism, the fear and hatred of
the passions; maledictions hurled in the face of life by a monk of the
Middle Ages, consumed with sensuality. Having written the book Tolstoy
himself was alarmed:
"I never foresaw at all," he said in the Epilogue to the Kreutzer Sonata,"[16]
that in writing this book a rigorous logic would bring me where I have
arrived. My own conclusions terrified me at first, and I was tempted to
reject them; but it was impossible for me to refuse to hear the voice of my
reason and my conscience."
He found himself repeating, in calmer tones, the savage outcry of the
murderer Posdnicheff against love and marriage.
"He who regards woman—above all his wife—with sensuality, already
commits adultery with her."
"When the passions have disappeared, then humanity will no longer have a
reason for being; it will have executed the Law; the union of mankind will
be accomplished."
He will prove, on the authority of the Gospel according to Matthew, that
"the Christian ideal is not marriage; that Christian marriage cannot exist;
that marriage, from the Christian point of view, is an element not of
progress but of downfall; that love, with all that precedes and follows it, is
an obstacle to the true human ideal."[17]
But he had never formulated these ideas clearly, even to himself, until they
fell from the lips of Posdnicheff. As often happens with great creative
artists, the work carried the writer with it; the artist outstripped the thinker;
a process by which art lost nothing. In the power of its effects, in passionate
concentration, in the brutal vividness of its impressions, and in fullness and
maturity of form, nothing Tolstoy has written equals the Kreutzer Sonata.
I have not explained the title. To be exact, it is erroneous; it gives a false
idea of the book, in which music plays only an accessory part. Suppress the
sonata, and all would be the same. Tolstoy made the mistake of confusing

two matters, both of which he took deeply to heart: the depraving power of
music, and the depraving power of love. The demon of music should have
been dealt with in a separate volume; the space which Tolstoy has accorded
it in the work in question is insufficient to prove the danger which he
wishes to denounce. I must emphasise this matter somewhat; for I do not
think the attitude of Tolstoy in respect of music has ever been fully
understood.
He was far from disliking music. Only the things one loves are feared as
Tolstoy feared the power of music. Remember what a place the memories
of music hold in Childhood, and above all in Family Happiness, in which
the whole cycle of love, from its springtide to its autumn, is unrolled to the
phrases of the Sonata quasi una fantasia of Beethoven. Remember, too, the
wonderful symphonies which Nekhludov[18] hears in fancy, and the little
Petia, the night before his death.[19] Although Tolstoy had studied music
very indifferently, it used to move him to tears, and at certain periods of his
life he passionately abandoned himself to its influence. In 1858 he founded
a Musical Society, which in later years became the Moscow Conservatoire.
"He was extremely fond of music," writes his brother-in-law, S. A. Bers.
"He used to play the piano, and was fond of the classic masters. He would
often sit down to the piano before beginning his work.[20] Probably he
found inspiration in so doing. He always used to accompany my youngest
sister, whose voice he loved. I have noticed that the sensations which the
music evoked in him were accompanied by a slight pallor and an
imperceptible grimace, which seemed expressive of fear."[21]
It was really fear that he felt; fear inspired by the stress of those unknown
forces which shook him to the roots of his being. In the world of music he
felt his moral will, his reason, and all the reality of life dissolve. Let us turn
to the scene, in the first volume of War and Peace, in which Nikolas
Rostoff, who has just lost heavily at cards, returns in a state of despair. He
hears his sister Natasha singing. He forgets everything.
"He waited with a feverish impatience for the note which was about to
follow, and for a moment the only thing in all the world was the melody in
three-quarter-time: Oh! mio crudele affetto!

"'What an absurd existence ours is!' he thought. 'Unhappiness, money,
hatred, honour—they are all nothing.... Here is the truth, the reality!...
Natasha, my little dove!... Let us see if she is going to reach that B?... She
has reached it, thank God!'
"And to emphasise the B he sung the third octave below it in
accompaniment.
"'How splendid! I have sung it too,' he cried, and the vibration of that
octave awoke in his soul all that was best and purest. Beside this
superhuman sensation, what were his losses at play and his word of
honour?... Follies! One could kill, steal, and yet be happy!"
Nikolas neither kills nor steals, and for him music is only a passing
influence; but Natasha is on the point of losing her self-control. After an
evening at the Opera, "in that strange world which is intoxicated and
perverted by art, and a thousand leagues from the real world; a world in
which good and evil, the extravagant and the reasonable, are mingled and
confounded," she listened to a declaration from Anatol Kouraguin, who was
madly in love with her, and she consented to elope with him.
The older Tolstoy grew, the more he feared music.[22] A man whose
influence over him was considerable—Auerbach, whom in 1860 he had met
in Dresden—had doubtless a hand in fortifying his prejudices. "He spoke of
music as of a Pflichtloser Genuss (a profligate amusement). According to
him, it was an incentive to depravity."[23]
Among so many musicians, some of whose music is at least amoral, why,
asks M. Camille Bellaigue,[24] should Tolstoy have chosen Beethoven, the
purest, the chastest of all?—Because he was the most powerful. Tolstoy had
early loved his music, and he always loved it. His remotest memories of
Childhood were connected with the Sonata Pathétique; and when
Nekhludov in Resurrection heard the andante of the Symphony in C Minor,
he could hardly restrain his tears: "he was filled with tenderness for himself
and for those he loved." Yet we have seen with what animosity Tolstoy
referred in his What is Art?[25] to the "unhealthy works of the deaf
Beethoven"; and even in 1876 the fury with which "he delighted in
demolishing Beethoven and in casting doubts upon his genius" had revolted
Tchaikowsky and had diminished his admiration for Tolstoy. The Kreutzer

Sonata enables us to plumb the depths of this passionate injustice. What
does Tolstoy complain of in Beethoven? Of his power. He reminds us of
Goethe; listening to the Symphony in C Minor, he is overwhelmed by it, and
angrily turns upon the imperious master who subjects him against his will.
[26]

"This music," says Tolstoy, "transports me immediately into the state of
mind which was the composer's when he wrote it.... Music ought to be a
State matter, as in China. We ought not to let Tom, Dick, and Harry wield so
frightful a hypnotic power.... As for these things (the first Presto of the
Sonata) one ought only to be allowed to play them under particular and
important circumstances...."
Yet we see, after this revolt, how he surrenders to the power of Beethoven,
and how this power is by his own admission a pure and ennobling force. On
hearing the piece in question, Posdnicheff falls into an indefinable state of
mind, which he cannot analyse, but of which the consciousness fills him
with delight. "There is no longer room for jealousy." The wife is not less
transfigured. She has, while she plays, "a majestic severity of expression";
and "a faint smile, compassionate and happy, after she has finished." What
is there perverse in all this? This: that the spirit is enslaved: that the
unknown power of sound can do with him what it wills; destroy him, if it
please.
This is true, but Tolstoy forgets one thing: the mediocrity and the lack of
vitality in the majority of those who make or listen to music. Music cannot
be dangerous to those who feel nothing. The spectacle of the Opera-house
during a performance of Salomé is quite enough to assure us of the
immunity of the public to the more perverse emotions evoked by the art of
sounds. To be in danger one must be, like Tolstoy, abounding in life. The
truth is that in spite of his injustice where Beethoven was concerned,
Tolstoy felt his music more deeply than do the majority of those who now
exalt him. He, at least, knew the frenzied passions, the savage violence,
which mutter through the art of the "deaf old man," but of which the
orchestras and the virtuosi of to-day are innocent. Beethoven would perhaps
have preferred the hatred of Tolstoy to the enthusiasm of his admirers.

[1] To these years was attributed, in respect of the date of publication, and perhaps of completion, a
work which was really written during the happy period of betrothal and the first years of marriage:
the beautiful story of a horse, Kholstomier (1861-86). Tolstoy speaks of it in 1883 in a letter to Fet
(Further Correspondence.) The art of the commencement, with its fine landscapes, its penetrating
psychological sympathy, its humour, and its youth, has much in common with the art of Tolstoy's
maturity (Family Happiness, War and Peace), The macabre quality of the end, and the last pages
comparing the body of the old horse with that of his master, are full of a realistic brutality
characteristic of the years after 1880.
[2] Le Temps, August 29, 1901.
[3] "As for style," his friend Droujinin told him in 1856, "You are extremely illiterate; sometimes like
an innovator and a great poet; sometimes like an officer writing to a comrade. All that you write with
real pleasure is admirable. The moment you become indifferent your style becomes involved and is
horrible." (Vie et Oeuvre.)
[4] Vie et Oeuvre.—During the summer of 1879 Tolstoy lived on terms of great intimacy with the
peasants.
[5] In the notes of his readings, between 1860 and 1870, Tolstoy wrote: "The bylines—very greatly
impressed."
[6] The Two Old Men (1885).
[7] Where Love is, there God is also (1885).
[8] By what do Men live? (1881); The Three Old Men (1884); The Godchild (1886).
[9] This tale bears the sub-title, Does a Man need much Soil? (1886).
[10] The Fire that flames does not go out (1885).
[11] The Wax Taper (1885); The Story of Ivan the Idiot.
[12] The Godson (1886).
[13] The love of the theatre came to him somewhat late in life. It was a discovery of his, and he made
this discovery during the winter of 1869-70. According to his custom, he was at once afire with
enthusiasm.
"All this winter I have busied myself exclusively with the drama; and, as always happens to men who
have never, up to the age of forty, thought about such or such a subject, when they suddenly turn their
attention to this neglected subject, it seems to them that they perceive a number of new and
wonderful things.... I have read Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Gogol, and Molière.... I want to read
Sophocles and Euripides.... I have kept my bed a long time, being unwell—and when I am unwell a
host of comic or dramatic characters begin to struggle for life within me ... and they do it with much
success."—Letters to Fet, February 17-21, 1870 (Further Letters).
[14] A variant of Act iv.
[15] The creation of this heart-breaking drama must have been a strain. He writes to Teneromo: "I am
well and happy. I have been working all this time at my play. It is finished." (January, 1887. Further
Letters.)
[16] A French translation of this Epilogue (Postface), by M. Halpérine-Kaminsky was published in
the volume Plaisirs vicieux, under the title Des relations entre les sexes.
[17] Let us take notice that Tolstoy was never guilty of the simplicity of believing that the ideal of
celibacy and absolute chastity was capable of realisation by humanity as we know it. But according

to him an ideal is incapable of realisation by its very definition: it is an appeal to the heroic energies
of the soul.
"The conception of the Christian ideal, which is the union of all living creatures in brotherly love, is
irreconcilable with the conduct of life, which demands a continual effort towards an ideal which is
inaccessible, but does not expect that it will ever be attained."
[18] At the end of A Russian Proprietor.
[19] War and Peace.—I do not mention Albert (1857), the story of a musician of genius; the book is
weak in the extreme.
[20] The period spoken of is 1876-77.
[21] S. A. Bers, Memories of Tolstoy.
[22] But he never ceased to love it. One of the friends of his later years was a musician, Goldenreiser,
who spent the summer of 1910 near Yasnaya. Almost every day he came to play to Tolstoy during the
latter's last illness. (Journal des Débats, November 18, 1910.)
[23] Letter of April 21, 1861.
[24] Tolstoï et la musique (Le Gaulois, January 4, 1911).
[25] Not only to the later works of Beethoven. Even in the case of those earlier works which he
consented to regard as "artistic," Tolstoy complained of "their artificial form."—In a letter to
Tchaikowsky he contrasts with Mozart and Haydn "the artificial manner of Beethoven, Schubert, and
Berlioz, which produces calculated effects."
[26] Instance the scene described by M. Paul Boyer: "Tolstoy sat down to play Chopin. At the end of
the fourth Ballade, his eyes filled with tears. 'Ah, the animal!' he cried. And suddenly he rose and
went out." (Le Temps, November 2, 1902.)

CHAPTER XV

"RESURRECTION"

Ten years separated Resurrection from the Kreutzer Sonata.[1] ten years
which were more and more absorbed in moral propaganda. Ten years also
separated the former book from the end for which this life hungered,
famished as it was for the eternal. Resurrection is in a sense the artistic
testament of the author. It dominates the end of his life as War and Peace
crowned its maturity. It is the last peak, perhaps the highest—if not the most
stupendous—whose invisible summit is lost in the mists. Tolstoy is seventy
years old. He contemplates the world, his life, his past mistakes, his faith,
his righteous anger.

He sees them from a height. We find the same ideals as in his previous
books; the same warring upon hypocrisy; but the spirit of the artist, as in
War and Peace, soars above his subject. To the sombre irony, the mental
tumult of the Kreutzer Sonata and The Death of Ivan Ilyitch he adds a
religious serenity, a detachment from the world, which is faithfully reflected
in himself. One is reminded, at times, of a Christian Goethe.
All the literary characteristics which we have noted in the works of his later
period are to be found here, and of these especially the concentration of the
narrative, which is even more striking in a long novel than in a short story.
There is a wonderful unity about the book; in which respect it differs widely
from War and Peace and Anna Karenin. There are hardly any digressions of
an episodic nature. A single train of action, tenaciously followed, is worked
out in every detail. There is the same vigorous portraiture, the same ease
and fullness of handling, as in the Kreutzer Sonata. The observation is more
than ever lucid, robust, pitilessly realistic, revealing the animal in the man
"the terrible persistence of the beast in man, more terrible when this
animality is not openly obvious; when it is concealed under a so-called
poetical exterior." Witness the drawing-room conversations, which have for
their object the mere satisfaction of a physical need: "the need of
stimulating the digestion by moving the muscles of the tongue and gullet";
the crude vision of humanity which spares no one; neither the pretty
Korchagina, "with her two false teeth, the salient bones of her elbows, and
the largeness of her finger-nails," and her décolletage, which inspires in
Nekhludov a feeling of "shame and disgust, disgust and shame"; nor the
herione, Maslova, nothing of whose degradation is hidden; her look of
premature age, her vicious, ignoble expression, her provocative smile, the
odour of brandy that hangs about her, her red and swollen face. There is a
brutality of naturalistic detail: as instance, the woman who converses while
crouched over the commode. Youth and the poetic imagination have
vanished; except in the passages which deal with the memories of first love,
whose music vibrates in the reader's mind with hypnotic intensity; the night
of the Holy Saturday, and the night of Passover; the thaw, the white mist so
thick "that at five paces from the house one saw nothing but a shadowy
mass, whence glimmered the red light of a lamp"; the crowing of the cocks
in the night; the sounds from the frozen river, where the ice cracks, snores,
bubbles, and tinkles like a breaking glass; and the young man who, from the
night outside, looks through the window at the young girl who does not see

him: seated near the table in the flickering light of the little lamp—Katusha,
pensive, dreaming, and smiling at her dreams.
The lyrical powers of the writer are given but little play. His art has become
more impersonal; more alien to his own life. The world of criminals and
revolutionaries, which he here describes, was unfamiliar to him;[2] he enters
it only by an effort of voluntary sympathy; he even admits that before
studying them at close quarters the revolutionaries inspired him with an
unconquerable aversion. All the more admirable is his impeccable
observation—a faultless mirror. What a wealth of types, of precise details!
How everything is seen; baseness and virtue, without hardness, without
weakness, but with a serene understanding and a brotherly pity.... The
terrible picture of the women in the prison! They are pitiless to one another;
but the artist is the merciful God; he sees, in the heart of each, the distress
that hides beneath humiliation, and the tearful eyes beneath the mask of
effrontery. The pure, faint light which little by little waxes within the
vicious mind of Maslova, and at last illumines her with a sacrificial flame,
has the touching beauty of one of those rays of sunshine which transfigure
some humble scene painted by the brush of Rembrandt. There is no severity
here, even for the warders and executioners. "Lord, forgive them, for they
know not what they do!" ... The worst of it is that often they do know what
they do; they feel all the pangs of remorse, yet they cannot do otherwise.
There broods over the book the sense of the crushing and inevitable fatality
which weighs upon those who suffer and those who cause that suffering: the
director of the prison, full of natural kindness, as sick of his jailer's life as of
the pianoforte exercises of the pale, sickly daughter with the dark circles
beneath her eyes, who indefatigably murders a rhapsody of Liszt; the
Governor-General of the Siberian town, intelligent and kindly, who, in the
hope of escaping the inevitable conflict between the good he wishes to do
and the evil he is forced to do, has been steadily drinking since the age of
thirty-five; who is always sufficiently master of himself to keep up
appearances, even when he is drunk. And among these people we find the
ordinary affection for wife and children, although their calling renders them
pitiless in respect of the rest of humanity.
The only character in this book who has no objective reality is Nekhludov
himself; and this is so because Tolstoy has invested him with his own ideas.
This is a defect of several of the most notable types in War and Peace and

in Anna Karenin; for example, Prince Andrei, Pierre Besoukhov, Levine,
and others. The fault was less grave, however, in these earlier books; for the
characters, by force of their circumstances and their age, were nearer to the
author's actual state of mind. But in Resurrection the author places in the
body of an epicurean of thirty-five the disembodied soul of an old man of
seventy. I will not say that the moral crisis through which Nekhludov is
supposed to pass is absolutely untrue and impossible; nor even that it could
not be brought about so suddenly.[3] But there is nothing in the
temperament, the character, the previous life of the man as Tolstoy depicts
him, to announce or explain this crisis; and once it has commenced nothing
interrupts it. Tolstoy has, it is true, with profound observation, represented
the impure alloy which at the outset is mingled with the thoughts of
sacrifice; the tears of self-pity and admiration; and, later, the horror and
repugnance which seize upon Nekhludov when he is brought face to face
with reality. But his resolution never flinches. This crisis has nothing in
common with his previous crises, violent but only momentary.[4]
Henceforth nothing can arrest this weak and undecided character. A wealthy
prince, much respected, greatly enjoying the good things of the world, on
the point of marrying a charming girl who loves him and is not distasteful
to him, he suddenly decides to abandon everything—wealth, the world, and
social position—and to marry a prostitute in order to atone for a remote
offence; and his exaltation survives, without flinching, for months; it holds
out against every trial, even the news that the woman he wishes to make his
wife is continuing her life of debauchery.[5] Here we have a saintliness of
which the psychology of a Dostoyevsky would have shown us the source, in
the obscure depths of the conscience or even in the organism of his hero.
Nekhludov, however, is by no means one of Dostoyevsky's heroes. He is the
type of the average man, commonplace, sane, who is Tolstoy's usual hero.
To be exact, we are conscious of the juxtaposition of a very materialistic[6]
character and a moral crisis which belongs to another man, and that man the
aged Tolstoy.
The same impression—one of elemental duality—is again produced at the
end of the book, where a third part, full of strictly realistic observation, is
set beside an evangelical conclusion which is not in any way essential; it is
an act of personal faith,[7] which does not logically issue from the life under
observation. This is not the first time that Tolstoy's religion has become

involved with his realism; but in previous works the two elements have
been better mingled. Here they are not amalgamated; they simply co-exist;
and the contrast is the more striking in that Tolstoy's faith is always
becoming less and less indifferent to proof, while his realism is daily
becoming more finely whetted, more free from convention. Here is a sign,
not of fatigue, but of age; a certain stiffness, so to speak, in the joints. The
religious conclusion is not the organic development of the work. It is a Deus
ex machinâ. I personally am convinced that right in the depth of Tolstoy's
being—in spite of all his affirmations—the fusion between his two diverse
natures was by no means complete: between the truth of the artist and the
truth of the believer.
Although Resurrection has not the harmonious fullness of the work of his
youth, and although I, for my part, prefer War and Peace, it is none the less
one of the most beautiful poems of human compassion; perhaps the most
truthful ever written. More than in any other book I see through the pages of
this those bright eyes of Tolstoy's, the pale-grey, piercing eyes, "the look
that goes straight to the heart,"[8] and in each heart sees its God.

[1] Master and Servant (1895) is more or less of a transition between the gloomy novels which
preceded it and Resurrection; which is full of the light of the Divine charity. But it is akin to The
Death of Ivan Ilyitch and the Popular Tales rather than to Resurrection, which only presents, towards
the end of the book, the sublime transformation of a selfish and morally cowardly man under the
stress of an impulse of sacrifice. The greater part of the book consists of the extremely realistic
picture of a master without kindness and a servant full of resignation, who are surprised, by night, on
the steppes, by a blizzard, in which they lose their way. The master, who at first tries to escape,
deserting his companion, returns, and finding the latter half-frozen, throws himself upon him,
covering him with his body, gives him of his warmth, and sacrifices himself by instinct; he does not
know why, but the tears fill his eyes; it seems to him that he has become the man he is seeking to
save—Nikita—and that his life is no longer in himself, but in Nikita. "Nikita is alive; then I am still
alive, myself." He has almost forgotten who he, Vassili, was. He thinks: "Vassili did not know what
had to be done. But I, I know!" He hears the voice of Him whom he was awaiting (here his dream
recalls one of the Popular Tales), of Him who, a little while ago, had commanded him to lie upon
Nikita. He cries, quite happy: "Lord, I am coming!" and he feels that he is free; that nothing is
keeping him back any longer. He is dead.
[2] While on the other hand he had mixed in all the various circles depicted in War and Peace, Anna
Karenin, The Cossacks, and Sebastopol; the salons of the nobles, the army, the life of the country
estate. He had only to remember.
[3] "Men carry in them the germ of all the human qualities, and they manifest now one, now another,
so that they often appear to be not themselves; that is, themselves as they habitually appear. Among
some these changes are more rare; among others more rapid. To the second class of men belongs

Nekhludov. Under the influence of various physical or moral causes sudden and complete changes
are incessantly being produced within him." (Resurrection.)
[4] "Many times in his life he had proceeded to clean up his conscience. This was the term he used to
denote those moral crises in which he decided to sweep out the moral refuse which littered his soul.
At the conclusion of these crises he never failed to set himself certain rules, which he swore always
to keep. He kept a diary; he began a new life. But each time it was not long before he fell once more
to the same level, or lower still, than before the crisis." (Resurrection.)
[5] Upon learning that Maslova is engaged in an intrigue with a hospital attendant, Nekhludov is
more than ever decided to "sacrifice his liberty in order to redeem the sin of this woman."
[6] Tolstoy has never drawn a character with so sure, so broad a touch as in the beginning of
Resurrection. Witness the admirable description of Nekhludov's toilet and his actions of the morning
before the first session in the Palace of Justice.
[7] The word "act" to be found here and there in the text in such phrases as "act of faith" "act of will,"
is used in a sense peculiar to Catholic and Orthodox Christians. A penitent is told to perform an "act
of faith" as penance; which is usually the repetition of certain prayers of the nature of a creed. The
"act," in short, is a repetition, a declamation, a meditation: anything but an action.—(TRANS.)
[8] Letter of Countess Tolstoy's, 1884.

CHAPTER XVI

RELIGION AND POLITICS

Tolstoy never renounced his art. A great artist cannot, even if he would,
abandon the reason of his existence. He can, for religious reasons, cease to
publish, but he cannot cease to write. Tolstoy never interrupted his work of
artistic creation. M. Paul Boyer, who saw him, during the last few years, at
Yasnaya Polyana, says that he would now give prominence to his
evangelistic works, now to his works of imagination; he would work at the
one as a relaxation from the other. When he had finished some social
pamphlet, some Appeal to the Rulers or to the Ruled, he would allow
himself to resume one of the charming tales which he was, so to speak, in
process of recounting to himself; such as his Hadji-Mourad, a military epic,
which celebrated an episode of the wars of the Caucasus and the resistance
of the mountaineers under Schamyl.[1] Art was still his relaxation, his
pleasure; but he would have thought it a piece of vanity to make a parade of
it. With the exception of his Cycle of Readings for Every Day of the Year
(1904-5),[2] in which he collected the thoughts of various writers upon Life

and the Truth—a true anthology of the poetical wisdom of the world, from
the Holy Books of the East to the works of contemporary writers—nearly
all his literary works of art, properly so called, which have been written
later than 1900 have remained in manuscript.[3]
On the other hand he was boldly and ardently casting his mystical and
polemical writings upon the social battlefield. From 1900 to 1910 such
work absorbed the greater part of his time and energy. Russia was passing
through an alarming crisis; for a moment the empire of the Tsars seemed to
totter on its foundations and about to fall in ruin. The Russo-Japanese war,
the disasters which followed it, the revolutionary troubles, the mutinies in
the army and the fleet, the massacres, the agrarian disorders, seemed to
mark "the end of a world," to quote the title of one of Tolstoy's writings.
The height of the crisis was reached in 1904 and 1905. During these years
Tolstoy published a remarkable series of works: War and Revolution, The
Great Crime, The End of a World. During the last ten years of his life he
occupied a situation unique not only in Russia but in the world. He was
alone, a stranger to all the parties, to all countries, and rejected by his
Church, which had excommunicated him.[4] The logic of his reason and the
revolutionary character of his faith had "led him to this dilemma; to live a
stranger to other men, or a stranger to the truth." He recalls the Russian
proverb: "An old man who lies is a rich man who steals," and he severs
himself from mankind in order to speak the truth. He tells the whole truth,
and to all. The old hunter of lies continues, unweariedly, to mark down all
superstitions, religious or social, and all fetishes. The only exceptions are
the old maleficent powers—the persecutrix, the Church, and the imperial
autocracy. Perhaps his enmity towards them was in some degree appeased
now that all were casting stones at them. They were familiar; therefore they
were already not so formidable! After all, too, the Church and the Tsar were
carrying on their peculiar trades; they were at least not deceptive. Tolstoy,
in his letter to the Tsar Nikolas II.,[5] although he speaks the truth in a
manner entirely unaccommodating to the man as sovereign, is full of
gentleness for the sovereign as man; addressing him as "dear brother,"
praying him to "pardon him if he has hurt him unintentionally," and signing
himself, "Your brother who wishes you true happiness."
What Tolstoy can least find it in him to pardon—what he denounces with
the utmost hatred—are the new lies; not the old ones, which are no longer

able to deceive; not despotism, but the illusion of liberty. It is difficult to
say which he hates the more among the followers of the newer idols:
whether the Socialists or the "Liberals."
He had a long-standing antipathy for the Liberals. It had seized upon him
suddenly when, as an officer fresh from Sebastopol, he found himself in the
society of the literary men of St. Petersburg. It had been one of the causes
of his misunderstanding with Tourgenev. The arrogant noble, the man of
ancient race, could not support these "intellectuals," with their profession of
making the nation happy, whether by its will or against it, by forcing their
Utopian schemes upon it. Very much a Russian, and of the old stamp,[6] he
instinctively distrusted all liberal innovations, and the constitutional ideas
which came from the West; and his two journeys abroad only intensified his
prejudices. On his return from his first journey he wrote:
"To avoid the ambition of Liberalism."
On his return from the second:
"A privileged society has no right whatsoever to educate in its own way the
masses of which it knows nothing."
In Anna Karenin he freely expresses his contempt for Liberals in general.
Levine refuses to associate himself with the work of the provincial
institutions for educating the people, and the innovations which are the
order of the day. The picture of the elections to the provincial assembly
exposes the fool's bargain by which the country changes its ancient
Conservative administration for a Liberal régime—nothing is really altered,
except that there is one lie the more, while the masters are of inferior blood.
"We are not worth very much perhaps," says the representative of the
aristocracy, "but none the less we have lasted a thousand years."
Tolstoy fulminates against the manner in which the Liberals abuse the
words, "The People: The Will of the People." What do they know of the
people? Who are the People?
But it is more especially when the Liberal movement seemed on the point
of succeeding and achieving the convocation of, the first Duma that Tolstoy
expressed most violently his disapprobation of its constitutional ideas.

"During the last few years the deformation of Christianity has given rise to
a new species of fraud, which has rooted our peoples yet more firmly in
their servility. With the help of a complicated system of parliamentary
elections it was suggested to them that by electing their representatives
directly they were participating in the government, and that in obeying them
they were obeying their own will: in short, that they were free. This is a
piece of imposture. The people cannot express its will, even with the aid of
universal suffrage—1, because no such collective will of a nation of many
millions of inhabitants could exist; 2, because even if it existed the majority
of voices would not be its expression. Without insisting on the fact that
those elected would legislate and administrate not for the general good but
in order to maintain themselves in power—without counting on the fact of
the popular corruption due to pressure and electoral corruption—this fraud
is particularly harmful because of the presumptuous slavery into which all
those who submit to it fall.... These free men recall the prisoners who
imagine that they are enjoying freedom when they have the right to elect
those of their gaolers who are entrusted with the interior policing of the
prison.... A member of a despotic State may be entirely free, even in the
midst of the most brutal violence. But a member of a constitutional State is
always a slave, for he recognises the legality of the violence done him....
And now men wish to lead the Russian people into the same state of
constitutional slavery in which the other European peoples dwell!"[7]
In his hostility towards Liberalism contempt was his dominant feeling. In
respect of Socialism his dominant feeling was—or rather would have been
—hatred, if Tolstoy had not forbidden himself to hate anything whatever.
He detested it doubly, because Socialism was the amalgamation of two lies:
the lie of liberty and the lie of science. Does it not profess to be founded
upon some sort of economic science, whose laws absolutely rule the
progress of the world?
Tolstoy is very hard upon science. He has pages full of terrible irony
concerning this modern superstition and "these futile problems: the origin
of species, spectrum analysis, the nature of radium, the theory of numbers,
animal fossils and other nonsense, to which people attach as much
importance to-day as they attributed in the Middle Ages to the Immaculate
Conception or the Duality of Substance." He derides these "servants of
science, who, just as the servants of the Church, persuade themselves and

others that they are saving humanity; who, like the Church, believe in their
own infallibility, never agree among themselves, divide themselves into
sects, and, like the Church, are the chief cause of unmannerliness, moral
ignorance, and the long delay of humanity in freeing itself from the evils
under which it suffers; for they have rejected the only thing that could unite
humanity: the religious conscience."[8] But his anxiety redoubles, and his
indignation bursts its bounds, when he sees the dangerous weapon of the
new fanaticism in the hands of those who profess to be regenerating
humanity. Every revolutionist saddens him when he resorts to violence. But
the intellectual and theoretical revolutionary inspires him with horror: he is
a pedantic murderer, an arrogant, sterile intelligence, who loves not men but
ideas.[9]
Moreover, these ideas are of a low order.
"The object of Socialism is the satisfaction of the lowest needs of man: his
material well-being. And it cannot attain even this end by the means it
recommends."[10]
At heart, he is without love. He feels only hatred for the oppressors and "a
black envy for the assured and easy life of the rich: a greed like that of the
flies that gather about ordure."[11] When Socialism is victorious the aspect
of the world will be terrible. The European horde will rush upon the weak
and barbarous peoples with redoubled force, and will enslave them, in order
that the ancient proletariats of Europe may debauch themselves at their
leisure by idle luxury, as did the people of Rome.[12]
Happily the principal energies of Socialism spend themselves in smoke—in
speeches, like those of M. Jaurès.
"What an admirable orator! There is something of everything in his
speeches—and there is nothing.... Socialism is a little like our Russian
orthodoxy: you press it, you push it into its last trenches, you think you
have got it fast, and suddenly it turns round and tells you: 'No, I'm not the
one you think, I'm somebody else.' And it slips out of your hands....
Patience! Let time do its work. There will be socialistic theories, as there
are women's fashions, which soon pass from the drawing-room to the
servants' hall."[13]

Although Tolstoy waged war in this manner upon the Liberals and
Socialists, it was not—far from it—to leave the field free for autocracy; on
the contrary, it was that the battle might be fought in all its fierceness
between the old world and the new, after the army of disorderly and
dangerous elements had been eliminated. For Tolstoy too was a believer in
the Revolution. But his Revolution was of a very different colour to that of
the revolutionaries; it was rather that of a believer of the Middle Ages, who
looked on the morrow, perhaps that very day, for the reign of the Holy
Spirit.
"I believe that at this very hour the great revolution is beginning which has
been preparing for two thousand years in the Christian world—the
revolution which will substitute for corrupted Christianity and the system of
domination which proceeds therefrom the true Christianity, the basis of
equality between men and of the true liberty to which all beings endowed
with reason aspire."[14]
What time does he choose, this seer and prophet, for his announcement of
the new era of love and happiness? The darkest hour of Russian history; the
hour of disaster and of shame! Superb power of creative faith! All around it
is light—even in darkness. Tolstoy saw in death the signs of renewal; in the
calamities of the war in Manchuria, in the downfall of the Russian armies,
in the frightful anarchy and the bloody struggle of the classes. His logic—
the logic of a dream!—drew from the victory of Japan the astonishing
conclusion that Russia should withdraw from all warfare, because the non-
Christian peoples will always have the advantage in warfare over the
Christian peoples "who have passed through the phase of servile
submission." Does this mean the abdication of the Russian people? No; this
is pride at its supremest. Russia should withdraw from all warfare because
she must accomplish "the great revolution."
"The Revolution of 1905, which will set men free from brutal oppression,
must commence in Russia. It is beginning."
Why must Russia play the part of the chosen people? Because the new
Revolution must before all repair the "Great Crime," the great
monopolisation of the soil for the profit of a few thousands of wealthy men
and the slavery of millions of men—the cruellest of enslavements;[15] and

because no people was so conscious of this iniquity as the Russian people.
[16]

Again, and more especially, because the Russian people is of all peoples
most thoroughly steeped in the true Christianity, so that the coming
revolution should realise, in the name of Christ, the law of union and of
love. Now this law of love cannot be fulfilled unless it is based upon the
law of non-resistance to evil.[17] This non-resistance (let us mark this well,
we who have the misfortune to see in it simply an Utopian fad peculiar to
Tolstoy and to a few dreamers) has always been an essential trait of the
Russian people.
"The Russian people has always assumed, with regard to power, an attitude
entirely strange to the other peoples of Europe. It has never entered upon a
conflict with power; it has never participated in it, and consequently has
never been depraved by it. It has regarded power as an evil which must be
avoided. An ancient legend represents the Russians as appealing to the
Varingians to come and govern them. The majority of the Russians have
always preferred to submit to acts of violence rather than respond with
violence or participate therein. They have therefore always submitted.
"A voluntary submission, having nothing in common with servile
obedience.[18]
"The true Christian may submit, indeed it is impossible for him not to
submit without a struggle to no matter what violence; but he could not obey
it—that is, he could not recognise it as legitimate."[19]
At the time of writing these lines Tolstoy was still subject to the emotion
caused by one of the most tragical examples of this heroic nonresistance of
a people—the bloody manifestation of January 22nd in St. Petersburg, when
an unarmed crowd, led by Father Gapon, allowed itself to be shot down
without a cry of hatred or a gesture of self-defence.
For a long time the Old Believers, known in Russia as the Sectators, had
been obstinately practising, in spite of persecution, non-obedience to the
State, and had refused to recognise the legitimacy of its power.[20] The
absurdity of the Russo-Japanese war enabled this state of mind to spread
without difficulty through the rural districts. Refusals of military service
became more and more general; and the more brutally they were punished

the more stubborn the revolt grew in secret. In the provinces, moreover,
whole races who knew nothing of Tolstoy had given the example of an
absolute and passive refusal to obey the State—the Doukhobors of the
Caucasus as early as 1898 and the Georgians of the Gouri towards 1905.
Tolstoy influenced these movements far less than they influenced him; and
the interest of his writings lies in the fact that in spite of the criticisms of
those writers who were of the party of revolution, as was Gorky,[21] he was
the mouthpiece of the Old Russian people.
The attitude which he preserved, in respect of men who at the peril of their
lives were putting into practice the principles which he professed,[22] was
one of extreme modesty and dignity. Neither to the Doukhobors and the
Gourians nor to the refractory soldiers did he assume the pose of a master
or teacher.
"He who suffers no trials can teach nothing to him who does so suffer."
He implores "the forgiveness of all those whom his words and his writings
may have caused to suffer."[23]
He never urges any one to refuse military service. It is a matter for every
man to decide for himself. If he discusses the matter with any one who is
hesitating, "he always advises him not to refuse obedience so long as it
would not be morally impossible." For if a man hesitates it is because he is
not ripe; and "it is better to have one soldier the more than a renegade or
hypocrite, which is what becomes of those who undertake a task beyond
their strength."[24] He distrusts the resolution of the refractory
Gontcharenko. He fears "that this young man may have been carried away
by vanity and vainglory, not by the love of God."[25] To the Doukhobors he
writes that they should not persist in their refusal of obedience out of pride,
but "if they are capable of so doing, they should save their weaker women
and their children. No one will blame them for that." They must persist
"only if the spirit of Christ is indeed within them, because then they will be
happy to suffer."[26] In any case he prays those who are persecuted "at any
cost not to break their affectionate relations with those who persecute
them."[27] One must love even Herod, as he says in a letter to a friend: "You
say, 'One cannot love Herod.'—I do not know, but I feel, and you also, that

one must love him. I know, and you also, that if I do not love him I suffer,
that there is no life in me."[28]
The Divine purity, the unvarying ardour of this love, which in the end can
no longer be contented even by the words of the Gospel: "Love thy
neighbour as thyself," because he finds in them a taint of egoism![29]
Too vast a love in the opinion of some; and so free from human egoism that
it wastes itself in the void. Yet who more than Tolstoy distrusts "abstract
love"?
"The greatest modern sin: the abstract love of humanity, impersonal love for
those who are—somewhere, out of sight.... To love those we do not know,
those whom we shall never meet, is so easy a thing! There is no need to
sacrifice anything; and at the same time we are so pleased with ourselves!
The conscience is fooled.—No. We must love our neighbours—those we
live with, and who are in our way and embarrass us."[30]
I have read in most of the studies of Tolstoy's work that his faith and
philosophy are not original. It is true; the beauty of these ideas is eternal
and can never appear a momentary fashion. Others complain of their
Utopian character. This also is true; they are Utopian, the New Testament is
Utopian. A prophet is a Utopian; he treads the earth but sees the life of
eternity; and that this apparition should have been granted to us, that we
should have seen among us the last of the prophets, that the greatest of our
artists should wear this aureole on his brow—there, it seems to me, is a fact
more novel and of far greater importance to the world than one religion the
more, or a new philosophy. Those are blind who do not perceive the miracle
of this great mind, the incarnation of fraternal love in the midst of a people
and a century stained with the blood of hatred!

[1] Le Temps, November 2, 1902.
[2] Tolstoy regarded this as one of his most important works. "One of my books—For Every Day—
to which I have the conceit to attach a great importance...." (Letter to Jan Styka, July 27 August 9,
1909).
[3] These works should shortly appear, under the supervision of Countess Alexandra, Tolstoy's
daughter. The list of them has been published in various journals. We may mention Hadji-Mourad,
Father Sergius, the psychology of a monk; She Had Every Virtue, the study of a woman; the Diary of
a Madman, the Diary of a Mother, the Story of a Doukhobor, the Story of a Hive, the Posthumous
Journal of Theodore Kouzmitch, Aliocha Govchkoff, Tikhon and Melanie, After the Ball, The Moon

shines in the Dark, A Young Tsar, What I saw in a Dream, Who is the Murderer? (containing social
ideas), Modern Socialism, a comedy; The Learned Woman, Childish Wisdom, sketches of children
who converse upon moral subjects; The Living Corpse, a drama in seventeen tableaux; It is all her
Fault, a peasant comedy in two acts, directed against alcohol (apparently Tolstoy's last literary work,
as he wrote it in May-June, 1910), and a number of social studies. It is announced that they will form
two octavo volumes of six hundred pages each.
But the essential work as yet unpublished is Tolstoy's Journal, which covers forty years of his life,
and will fill, so it is said, no less than thirty volumes.
[4] The excommunication of Tolstoy by the Holy Synod was declared on February 22, 1901. The
excuse was a chapter of Resurrection relating to Mass and the Eucharist. This chapter has unhappily
been suppressed in the French edition.
[5] On the nationalisation of the soil. (The Great Crime, 1905.)
[6] "A 'Great-Russian,' touched with Finnish blood." (M. Leroy-Beaulieu.)
[7] The End of a World (1905-6). See the telegram addressed by Tolstoy to an American journal:
"The agitation in the Zemstvos has as its object the limitation of despotic power and the
establishment of a representative government. Whether or no they succeed the result will be a
postponement of any true social improvement. Political agitation, while producing the unfortunate
illusion of such improvement by external means, arrests true progress, as may be proved by the
example of all the constitutional States—France, England, America, &c." (Preface to the French
translation of The Great Crime, 1905.)
In a long and interesting letter to a lady who asked him to join a Committee for the Propagation of
Reading and Writing among the People, Tolstoy expressed yet other objections to the Liberals: they
have always played the part of dupes; they act as the accomplices of the autocracy through fear; their
participation in the government gives the latter a moral prestige, and accustoms them to
compromises, which quickly make them the instruments of power. Alexander II. used to say that all
the Liberals were ready to sell themselves for honours if not for money; Alexander III. was able,
without danger, to eradicate the liberal work of his father. "The Liberals whispered among
themselves that this did not please them; but they continued to attend the tribunals, to serve the State
and the press; in the press they alluded to those things to which allusion was allowed, and were silent
upon matters to which allusion was prohibited." They did the same under Nikolas II. "When this
young man, who knows nothing and understands nothing, replies tactlessly and with effrontery to the
representatives of the people, do the Liberals protest? By no means ... From every side they send the
young Tsar their cowardly and flattering congratulations." (Further Letters.)
[8] War and Revolution.
In Resurrection, at the hearing of Maslova's appeal, in the Senate, it is a materialistic Darwinist who
is most strongly opposed to the revision, because he is secretly shocked that Nekhludov should wish,
as a matter of duty, to marry a prostitute; any manifestation of duty, and still more, of religious
feeling, having the effect upon him of a personal insult.
[9] As a type, take Novodvorov, the revolutionary leader in Resurrection, whose excessive vanity and
egoism have sterilised a fine intelligence. No imagination; "a total absence of the moral and æsthetic
qualities which produce doubt."
Following his footsteps like a shadow is Markel, the artisan who has become a revolutionist through
humiliation and the desire for revenge; a passionate worshipper of science, which he cannot
comprehend; a fanatical anticlerical and an ascetic.

In Three More Dead or The Divine and the Human we shall find a few specimens of the new
generation of revolutionaries: Romane and his friends, who despise the old Terrorists, and profess to
attain their ends scientifically, by transforming an agricultural into an industrial people.
[10] Letters to the Japanese Izo-Abe, 1904. (Further Letters).
[11] Conversations, reported by Teneromo (published in Revolutionaries, 1906).
[12] Conversations, reported by Teneromo (published in Revolutionaries, 1906).
[13] Conversation with M. Paul Boyer. (Le Temps, November 4, 1902.)
[14] The End of a World.
[15] "The cruellest enslavement is to be deprived of the earth, for the slave of a master is the slave of
only one; but the man deprived of the land is the slave of all the world." (The Great Crime)
[16] Russia was actually in a somewhat special situation; and although Tolstoy may have been wrong
to found his generalisations concerning other European States upon the condition of Russia, we
cannot be surprised that he was most sensible to the sufferings which touched him most nearly. See,
in The Great Crime, his conversations on the road to Toula with the peasants, who were all in want of
bread because they lacked land, and who were all secretly waiting for the land to be restored to them.
The agricultural population of Russia forms 80 per cent, of the nation. A hundred million of men,
says Tolstoy, are dying of hunger because of the seizure of the soil by the landed proprietors. When
people speak to them of remedying their evils through the agency of the Press, or by the separation of
Church and State, or by nationalist representation, or even by the eight-hours day, they impudently
mock at them:
"Those who are apparently looking everywhere for the means of bettering the condition of the masses
of the people remind one of what one sees in the theatre, when all the spectators have an excellent
view of an actor who is supposed to be concealed, while his fellow-players, who also have a full view
of him, pretend not to see him, and endeavour to distract one another's attention from him."
There is no remedy but that of returning the soil to the labouring people. As a solution of the property
question, Tolstoy recommends the doctrine of Henry George and his suggested single tax upon the
value of the soil. This is his economic gospel; he returns to it unwearied, and has assimilated it so
thoroughly that in his writings he often uses entire phrases of George's.
[17] "The law of non-resistance to evil is the keystone of the whole building. To admit the law of
mutual help while misunderstanding the precept of non-resistance is to build the vault without sealing
the central portion." (The End of a World.)
[18] In a letter written in 1900 to a friend (Further Letters) Tolstoy complains of the false
interpretation given to his doctrine of non-resistance. "People," he says, "confound Do not oppose
evil by evil with Do not oppose evil: that is to say, Be indifferent to evil. ..." "Whereas the conflict
with evil is the sole object of Christianity, and the commandment of non-resistance to evil is given as
the most effectual means of conflict."
[19] The End of a World.
[20] Tolstoy has drawn two types of these "Sectators," one in Resurrection (towards the end) and one
in Three More Dead.
[21] After Tolstoy's condemnation of the upheaval in the Zemstvos, Gorky, making himself the
interpreter of the displeasure of his friends, wrote as follows: "This man has become the slave of his
theory. For a long time he has isolated himself from the life of Russia, and he no longer listens to the
voice of the people. He hovers over Russia at too great a height."

[22] It was a bitter trial to him that he could not contrive to be persecuted. He had a thirst for
martyrdom; but the Government very wisely took good care not to satisfy him.
"They are persecuting my friends all around me, and leaving me in peace, although if any one is
dangerous it is I. Evidently I am not worth persecution, and I am ashamed of the fact." (Letter to
Teneromo, 1892, Further Letters.)
"Evidently I am not worthy of persecution, and I shall have to die like this, without having ever been
able to testify to the truth by physical suffering." (To Teneromo, May 16,1892, ibid.)
"It hurts me to be at liberty." (To Teneromo, June i, 1894, ibid.)
That he was at liberty was, Heaven knows, no fault of his! He insults the Tsars, he attacks the
fatherland, "that ghastly fetish to which men sacrifice their life and liberty and reason." (The End of a
World.) Then see, in War and Revolution, the summary of Russian history. It is a gallery of monsters:
"The maniac Ivan the Terrible, the drunkard Peter I., the ignorant cook, Catherine I., the sensual and
profligate Elizabeth, the degenerate Paul, the parricide Alexander I. [the only one of them for whom
Tolstoy felt a secret liking], the cruel and ignorant Nikolas I.; Alexander II., unintelligent and evil
rather than good; Alexander III., an undeniable sot, brutal and ignorant; Nikolas II., an innocent
young officer of hussars, with an entourage of coxcombs, a young man who knows nothing and
understands nothing."
[23] Letter to Gontcharenko, a "refractory," January 17, 1903. (Further Letters.)
[24] Letter to a friend, 1900. (Correspondence.)
[25] To Gontcharenko, February 2, 1903 (ibid.).
[26] To the Doukhobors of the Caucasus, 1898 (ibid.).
[27] To Gontcharenko, January 17, 1903 (ibid.).
[28] To a friend, November, 1901. (Correspondence).
[29] "It is like a crack in a pneumatic machine; all the vapour of egoism that we wish to drain from
the human soul re-enters by it." He ingeniously strives to prove that the original text has been
wrongly read; that the exact wording of the Second Commandment was in fact "Love thy neighbour
as Himself (as God)." (Conversations with Teneromo.)
[30] Conversations with Teneromo.

CHAPTER XVII

OLD AGE

His face had taken on definite lines; had become as it will remain in the
memory of men: the large countenance, crossed by the arch of a double
furrow; the white, bristling eyebrows; the patriarchal beard, recalling that of
the Moses of Dijon. The aged face was gentler and softer; it bore the traces
of illness, of sorrow, of disappointment, and of affectionate kindness. What

a change from the almost animal brutality of the same face at twenty, and
the heavy rigidity of the soldier of Sebastopol! But the eyes have always the
same profound fixity, the same look of loyalty, which hides nothing and
from which nothing is hidden.
Nine years before his death, in his reply to the Holy Synod (April 17, 1901)
Tolstoy had said:
"I owe it to my faith to live in peace and gladness, and to be able also, in
peace and gladness, to travel on towards death."
Reading this I am reminded of the ancient saying: "that we should call no
man happy until he is dead."
Were they lasting, this peace and joy that he then boasted of possessing?
The hopes of the "great Revolution" of 1905 had vanished. The shadows
had gathered more thickly; the expected light had never risen. To the
upheavals of the revolutionaries exhaustion had succeeded. Nothing of the
old injustice was altered, except that poverty had increased. Even in 1906
Tolstoy had lost a little of his confidence in the historic vocation of the
Russian Slavs, and his obstinate faith sought abroad for other peoples
whom he might invest with this mission. He thought of the "great and wise
Chinese nation." He believed "that the peoples of the Orient were called to
recover that liberty which the peoples of the Occident had lost almost
without chance of recovery"; and that China, at the head of the Asiatic
peoples, would accomplish the transformation of humanity in the way of
Tao, the eternal Law.[1]
A hope quickly destroyed: the China of Lao-Tse and Confucius was
decrying its bygone wisdom, as Japan had already done in order to imitate
Europe.[2] The persecuted Doukhobors had migrated to Canada, and there,
to the scandal of Tolstoy, they immediately reverted to the property system.
[3]
The Gourians were scarcely delivered from the yoke of the State when
they began to destroy those who did not think as they did; and the Russian
troops were called out to put matters in order. The very Jews, "whose native
country had hitherto been the fairest a man could desire—the Book,"[4]
were attacked by the malady of Zionism, that movement of false
nationalism, "which is flesh of the flesh of contemporary Europeanism, or
rather its rickety child."[5]

Tolstoy was saddened, but not discouraged. He had faith in God and in the
future.
"All would be perfect if one could grow a forest in the wink of an eye.
Unhappily, this is impossible; we must wait until the seed germinates, until
the shoots push up, the leaves come, and then the stem which finally
becomes a tree."[6]
But many trees are needed to make a forest; and Tolstoy was alone;
glorious, but alone. Men wrote to him from all parts of the world; from
Mohamedan countries, from China and Japan, where Resurrection was
translated, and where his ideas upon "the restitution of the land to the
people" were being propagated.[7] The American papers interviewed viewed
him; the French consulted him on matters of art, or the separation of Church
and State.[8]
But he had not three hundred disciples, and he knew it. Moreover, he did
not take pains to make them. He repulsed the attempts of his friends to form
groups of Tolstoyans.
"We must not go in search of one another, but we must all seek God.... You
say: 'Together it is easier.'—What? To labour, to reap, yes. But to draw near
to God—one can only do so in isolation.... I see the world as an enormous
temple in which the light falls from on high and precisely in the middle. To
become united we must all go towards the light. Then all of us, come
together from all directions, will find ourselves in the company of men we
did not look for; in that is the joy."[9]
How many have found themselves together under the ray which falls from
the dome? What matter! It is enough to be one and alone if one is with God.
"As only a burning object can communicate fire to other objects, so only the
true faith and life of a man can communicate themselves to other men and
to spread the truth."[10]
Perhaps; but to what point was this isolated faith able to assure Tolstoy of
happiness? How far he was, in his latter days, from the voluntary calm of a
Goethe! One would almost say that he avoided it, fled from it, hated it.
"One must thank God for being discontented with oneself. If one could
always be so! The discord of life with what ought to be is precisely the sign

of life itself, the movement upwards from the lesser to the greater, from
worse to better. And this discord is the condition of good. It is an evil when
a man is calm and satisfied with himself."[11]
He imagines the following subject for a novel—showing that the persistent
discontent of a Levine or a Besoukhov was not yet extinct in him:
"I often picture to myself a man brought up in revolutionary circles, and at
first a revolutionist, then a populist, then a socialist, then orthodox, then a
monk at Afone, then an atheist, a good paterfamilias, and finally a
Doukhobor. He takes up everything and is always forsaking everything;
men deride him, for he has performed nothing, and dies, forgotten, in a
hospital. Dying, he thinks he has wasted his life. And yet he is a saint."[12]
Had he still doubts—he, so full of faith? Who knows? In a man who has
remained robust in body and mind even into old age life cannot come to a
halt at a definite stage of thought. Life goes onwards.
"Movement is life."[13]
Many things must have changed within him during the last few years. Did
he not modify his opinion of revolutionaries? Who can even say that his
faith in non-resistance to evil was not at length a little shaken? Even in
Resurrection the relations of Nekhludov with the condemned "politicals"
completely change his ideas as to the Russian revolutionary party.
"Up till that time he had felt an aversion for their cruelty, their criminal
dissimulation, their attempts upon life, their sufficiency, their
selfcontentment, their insupportable vanity. But when he saw them more
closely, when he saw how they were treated by the authorities, he
understood that they could not be otherwise."
And he admires their high ideal of duty, which implies total self-sacrifice.
Since 1900, however, the revolutionary tide had risen; starting from the
"intellectuals," it had gained the people, and was obscurely moving amidst
the thousands of the poor. The advance-guard of their threatening army
defiled below Tolstoy's window at Yasnaya Polyana. Three tales, published
by the Mercure de France,[14] which were among the last pages written by
Tolstoy, give us a glimpse of the sorrow and the perplexity which this
spectacle caused him. The years were indeed remote when the pilgrims

wandered through the countryside of Toula, pious and simple of heart. Now
he saw the invasion of starving wanderers. They came to him every day.
Tolstoy, who chatted with them, was struck by the hatred that animated
them; they no longer, as before, saw the rich as "people who save their souls
by distributing alms, but as bandits, brigands, who drink the blood of the
labouring people." Many were educated men, ruined, on the brink of that
despair which makes a man capable of anything.
"It is not in the deserts and the forests, but in slums of cities and on the
great highways that the barbarians are reared who will do to modern
civilisation what the Huns and Vandals did to the ancient civilisation."
So said Henry George. And Tolstoy adds:
"The Vandals are already here in Russia, and they will be particularly
terrible among our profoundly religious people, because we know nothing
of the curbs, the convenances and public opinion, which are so strongly
developed among European peoples."
Tolstoy often received letters from these rebels, protesting against his
doctrine of non-resistance to evil, and saying that the evil that the rulers and
the wealthy do to the people can only be replied to by cries of "Vengeance!
Vengeance! Vengeance!" Did Tolstoy still condemn them? We do not know.
But when, a few days later, he saw in his own village the villagers weeping
while their sheep and their samovars were seized and taken from them by
callous authorities, he also cried vengeance in vain against these thieves,
"these ministers and their acolytes, who are engaged in the brandy traffic, or
in teaching men to murder, or condemning men to deportation, prison, or
the gallows—these men, all perfectly convinced that the samovars, sheep,
calves, and linen which they took from the miserable peasants would find
their highest use in furthering the distillation of brandy which poisons the
drinker, in the manufacture of murderous weapons, in the construction of
jails and convict prisons, and above all in the distribution of appointments
to their assistants and themselves."
It is sad, after a whole life lived in the expectation and the proclamation of
the reign of love, to be forced to close ones eye's in the midst of these
threatening visions, and to feel one's whole position crumbling. It is still
sadder for one with the impeccably truthful conscience of a Tolstoy to be

forced to confess to oneself that one's life has not been lived entirely in
accordance with one's principles.
Here we touch upon the most pitiful point of these latter years—should we
say of the last thirty years?—and we can only touch upon it with a pious
and tentative hand, for this sorrow, of which Tolstoy endeavoured to keep
the secret, belongs not only to him who is dead, but to others who are
living, whom he loved, and who loved him.
He was never able to communicate his faith to those who were dearest to
him—his wife and children. We have seen how the loyal comrade, who had
so valiantly shared his artistic life and labour, suffered when he denied his
faith in art for a different and a moral faith, which she did not understand.
Tolstoy suffered no less at feeling that he was misunderstood by his nearest
friend.
"I feel in all my being," he wrote to Teneromo, "the truth of these words:
that the husband and the wife are not separate beings, but are as one.... I
wish most earnestly that I had the power to transmit to my wife a portion of
that religious conscience which gives me the possibility of sometimes
raising myself above the sorrows of life. I hope that it will be given her;
very probably not by me, but by God, although this conscience is hardly
accessible to women."[15]
It seems that this wish was never gratified. Countess Tolstoy loved and
admired the purity of heart, the candid heroism, and the goodness of the
great man who was "as one" with her; she saw that "he marched ahead of
the host and showed men the way they should follow";[16] when the Holy
Synod excommunicated him she bravely undertook his defence and insisted
on sharing the danger which threatened him. But she could not force herself
to believe what she did not believe; and Tolstoy was too sincere to urge her
to pretend—he who loathed the petty deceits of faith and love even more
than the negation of faith and love.[17] How then could he constrain her, not
believing, to modify her life, to sacrifice her fortune and that of her
children?
With his children the rift was wider still. M. Leroy-Beaulieu, who saw
Tolstoy with his family at Yasnaya Polyana, says that "at table, when the
father was speaking, the sons barely concealed their weariness and

unbelief."[18] His faith had only slightly affected two or three of his
daughters, of whom one, Marie, was dead. He was morally isolated in the
heart of his family. "He had scarcely any one but his youngest daughter and
his doctor"[19] to understand him.
He suffered from this mental loneliness; and he suffered from the social
relations which were forced upon him; the reception of fatiguing visitors
from every quarter of the globe; Americans, and the idly curious, who wore
him out; he suffered from the "luxury" in which his family life forced him
to live. It was a modest luxury, if we are to believe the accounts of those
who saw him in his simple house, with its almost austere appointments; in
his little room, with its iron bed, its cheap chairs, and its naked walls! But
even this poor comfort weighed upon him; it was a cause of perpetual
remorse. In the second of the tales published by the Mercure de France he
bitterly contrasts the spectacle of the poverty about him with the luxury of
his own house.
"My activity," he wrote as early as 1903, "however useful it may appear to
certain people, loses the greater part of its importance by the fact that my
life is not entirely in agreement with my professions."[20]
Why did he not realise this agreement? If he could not induce his family to
cut themselves off from the world, why did he not leave them, go out of
their life, thus avoiding the sarcasm and the reproach of hypocrisy
expressed by his enemies, who were only too glad to follow his example
and make it an excuse for denying his doctrines?
He had thought of so doing. For a long time he was quite resolved. A
remarkable letter[21] of his has recently been found and published; it was
written to his wife on the 8th of June, 1897. The greater part of it is printed
below. Nothing could better express the secret of this loving and unhappy
heart:
"For a long time, dear Sophie, I have been suffering from the discord
between my life and my beliefs. I cannot force you to change your life or
your habits. Neither have I hitherto been able to leave you, for I felt that by
my departure I should deprive the children, still very young, of the little
influence I might be able to exert over them, and also that I should cause
you all a great deal of pain. But I cannot continue to live as I have lived

during these last sixteen years,[22] now struggling against you and irritating
you, now succumbing myself to the influences and the seductions to which
I am accustomed and which surround me. I have resolved now to do what I
have wished to do for a long time: to go away.... Just as the Hindoos, when
they arrive at their sixtieth year, go away into the forest; just as every aged
and religious man wishes to consecrate the last years of his life to God and
not to jesting, punning, family tittle-tattle, and lawn-tennis; so do I with all
my strength desire peace and solitude, and, if not an absolute harmony, at
least not this crying discord between my whole life and my conscience. If I
had gone away openly there would have been supplications, discussions,
arguments; I should have weakened, and perhaps I should not have carried
out my decision, and it ought to be carried out. I beg you therefore to
forgive me if my action grieves you. And you in particular, Sophie—let me
go, do not try to find me, do not be angry with me, and do not blame me.
The fact that I have left you does not prove that I have any grievance
against you.... I know that you could not, could not see and think with me;
this is why you could not change your life, could not sacrifice yourself to
something you did not understand. I do not blame you at all; on the
contrary, I remember with love and gratitude the thirty-five long years of
our life together, and above all the first half of that period, when, with the
courage and devotion of your mother's nature, you valiantly fulfilled what
you saw as your mission. You have given to me and the world what you had
to give. You have given much maternal love and made great sacrifices. ...
But in the latter period of our life, in the last fifteen years, our paths have
lain apart. I cannot believe that I am the guilty one; I know that I have
changed; it was not your doing, nor the world's; it was because I could not
do otherwise. I cannot blame you for not having followed me, and I shall
always remember with love what you have given me.... Goodbye, my dear
Sophie. I love you."
"The fact that I have left you." He did not leave her. Poor letter! It seemed to
him that it was enough to write, and his resolution would be fulfilled. ...
Having written, his resolution was already exhausted. "If I had gone away
openly there would have been supplications, I should have weakened." ...
There was no need of supplications, of discussion; it was enough for him to
see, a moment later, those whom he wished to leave; he felt that he could
not, could not leave them; and he took the letter in his pocket and buried it
among his papers, with this subscription:

"Give this, after my death, to my wife Sophie Andreyevna."
And this was the end of his plan of departure. Was he not strong enough?
Was he not capable of sacrificing his affections to his God? In the Christian
annals there is no lack of saints with tougher hearts, who never hesitated to
trample fearlessly underfoot both their own affections and those of others.
But how could he? He was not of their company; he was weak: he was a
man; and it is for that reason that we love him.
More than fifteen years earlier, on a page full of heart-breaking
wretchedness, he had asked himself: "Well, Leo Tolstoy, are you living
according to the principles you profess?"
He replied miserably:
"I am dying of shame; I am guilty; I am contemptible.... Yet compare my
former life with my life of to-day. You will see that I am trying to live
according to the laws of God. I have not done the thousandth part of what I
ought to do, and I am confused; but I have failed to do it not because I did
not wish to do it, but because I could not. ... Blame me, but not the path I
am taking. If I know the road to my house, and if I stagger along it like a
drunken man, does that show that the road is bad? Show me another, or
follow me along the true path, as I am ready to follow you. But do not
discourage me, do not rejoice in my distress, do not joyfully cry out: 'Look!
He said he was going to the house, and he is falling into the ditch!' No, do
not be glad, but help me, support me!... Help me! My heart is torn with
despair lest we should all be astray; and when I make every effort to escape
you, at each effort, instead of having compassion, point at me with your
finger crying, 'Look, he is falling into the ditch with us!'"[23]
When death was nearer, he wrote once more:
"I am not a saint: I have never professed to be one. I am a man who allows
himself to be carried away, and who often does not say all that he thinks
and feels; not because he does not want to, but because he cannot, because
it often happens that he exaggerates or is mistaken. In my actions it is still
worse. I am altogether a weak man with vicious habits, who wishes to serve
the God of truth, but who is constantly stumbling. If I am considered as a
man who cannot be mistaken, then each of my mistakes must appear as a lie
or a hypocrisy. But if I am regarded as a weak man, I appear then what I am

in reality: a pitiable creature, yet sincere; who has constantly and with all
his soul desired, and who still desires, to become a good man, a good
servant of God."
Thus he remained, tormented by remorse, pursued by the mute reproaches
of disciples more energetic and less human than himself;[24] tortured by his
weakness and indecision, torn between the love of his family and the love
of God—until the day when a sudden fit of despair, and perhaps the fever
which rises at the approach of death, drove him forth from the shelter of his
house, out upon the roads, wandering, fleeing, knocking at the doors of a
convent, then resuming his flight, and at last falling upon the way, in an
obscure little village, never to rise again.[25] On his death-bed he wept, not
for himself, but for the unhappy; and he said, in the midst of his sobs:
"There are millions of human beings on earth who are suffering: why do
you think only of me?"
Then it came—it was Sunday, November 20, 1910, a little after six in the
morning—the "deliverance," as he named it: "Death, blessed Death."

[1] Letter to the Chinese, October, 1906. (Further Letters).
[2] Tolstoy expressed a fear that this might happen in the above letter.
[3] "It was hardly worth while to refuse military and police service only to revert to property, which
is maintained only by those two services. Those who enter the service and profit by property act
better than those who refuse all service and enjoy property." (Letter to the Doukhobors of Canada,
1899. Further Letters).
[4] In the Conversations with Teneromo there is a fine page dealing with "the wise Jew, who,
immersed in this Book, has not seen the centuries crumble above his head, nor the peoples that
appear and disappear from the face of the earth."
[5] "To see the progress of Europe in the horrors of the modern State, the bloodstained State, and to
wish to create a new Judenstaat is an abominable sin." (Ibid.)
[6] Appeal to Political Men, 1905.
[7] In the appendix to The Great Crime and in the French translation of Advice to the Ruled is the
appeal of a Japanese society for the Re-establishment of the Liberty of the Earth.
[8] Letter to Paul Sabatier, November 7, 1906. (Further Letters.)
[9] Letters to Teneromo, June, 1882, and to a friend, November, 1901. (Further Letters.)
[10] War and Revolution.
[11] War and Revolution.

[12] Perhaps this refers to the History of a Doukhobor, the title of which figures in the list of
Tolstoy's unpublished works.
[13] "Suppose that all the men who had the truth were to be installed all together on an island. Would
that be life?" (To a friend, March, 1901. Further Letters.)
[14] December 1, 1910.
[15] May 16, 1892. Tolstoy's wife was then mourning the loss of a little boy, and he could do nothing
to console her.
[16] Letter of January, 1883.
[17] "I should never reproach any one for having no religion. The shocking thing is when men lie and
pretend to religion." And further: "May God preserve us from pretending to love; it is worse than
hatred."
[18] Revue des Deux Mondes, December 15, 1910.
[19] Ibid.
[20] To a friend, December 10, 1903.
[21] Figaro, December 27, 1910. It was found among Tolstoy's papers after his death.
[22] This state of suffering dates, as we see, from 1881; that is, from the winter passed in Moscow,
and Tolstoy's discovery of social wretchedness.
[23] Letter to a friend, 1895 (the French version being published in Plaisirs cruels, 1895.)
[24] It seems that during his last few years, and especially during the last few months, he was
influenced by Vladimir-Grigorovitch Tchertkoff, a devoted friend, who, long established in England,
had consecrated his fortune to the publication and distribution of Tolstoy's complete works.
Tchertkoff had been violently attacked by Leo, Tolstoy's eldest son. But although he was accused of
being a rebellious and unmanageable spirit, no one could doubt his absolute devotion; and without
approving of the almost inhuman harshness of certain actions apparently committed under his
inspiration (such as the will by which Tolstoy deprived his wife of all property in his writings without
exception, including his private correspondence), we are forced to believe that he thought more of
Tolstoy's fame than Tolstoy himself.
[25] The Correspondance of the Union pour la Verili publishes, in its issue for January 1, 1911, an
interesting account of this flight.
Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana suddenly on October 28, 1910 (November 10th European style) about
five o'clock in the morning. He was accompanied by Dr. Makovitski; his daughter Alexandra, whom
Tchertkoff calls "his most intimate collaborator," was in the secret. At six in the evening of the same
day he reached the monastery of Optina, one of the most celebrated sanctuaries of Russia, which he
had often visited in pilgrimage. He passed the night there; the next morning he wrote a long article on
the death penalty. On the evening of October 29th (November 11th) he went to the monastery of
Chamordino, where his sister Marie was a nun. He dined with her, and spoke of how he would have
wished to pass the end of his life at Optina, "performing the humblest tasks, on condition that he was
not forced to go to church." He slept at Chamordino, and next morning took a walk through the
neighbouring village, where he thought of taking a lodging; returning to his sister in the afternoon. At
five o'clock his daughter Alexandra unexpectedly arrived. She doubtless told him that his retreat was
known, and that he was being followed; they left at once in the night. "Tolstoy, Alexandra, and
Makovitski were making for the Koselk station, probably intending to gain the southern provinces, or
perhaps the Doukhobor colonies in the Caucasus." On the way Tolstoy fell ill at the railway-station of
Astapovo and was forced to take to his bed. It was there that he died.

CHAPTER XVIII

CONCLUSION

The struggle was ended; the struggle that had lasted for eighty-two years,
whose battlefield was this life of ours. A tragic and glorious mellay, in
which all the forces of life took part; all the vices and all the virtues.—All
the vices excepting one: untruth, which he pursued incessantly, tracking it
into its last resort and refuge.
In the beginning intoxicated liberty, the conflict of passions in the stormy
darkness, illuminated from time to time by dazzling flashes of light—crises
of love and ecstasy and visions of the Eternal. Years of the Caucasus, of
Sebastopol; years of tumultuous and restless youth. Then the great peace of
the first years of marriage. The happiness of love, of art, of nature—War
and Peace. The broad daylight of genius, which bathed the whole human
horizon, and the spectacle of those struggles which for the soul of the artist
were already things of the past. He dominated them, was master of them,
and already they were not enough. Like Prince Andrei, his eyes were turned
towards the vast skies which shone above the battlefield. It was this sky that
attracted him:
"There are men with powerful wings whom pleasure leads to alight in the
midst of the crowd, when their pinions are broken; such, for instance, am I.
Then they beat their broken wings; they launch themselves desperately, but
fall anew. The wings will mend. I shall fly high. May God help me!"[1]
These words were written in the midst of a terrible spiritual tempest, of
which the Confessions are the memory and echo. More than once was
Tolstoy thrown to earth, his pinions shattered. But he always persevered. He
started afresh. We see him hovering in "the vast, profound heavens," with
his two great wings, of which one is reason and the other faith. But he does
not find the peace he looked for. Heaven is not without us, but within us.
Tolstoy fills it with the tempest of his passions. There he perceives the
apostles of renunciation, and he brings to renunciation the same ardour that
he brought to life. But it is always life that he strains to him, with the
violence of a lover. He is "maddened with life." He is "intoxicated with

life." He cannot live without this madness.[2] He is drunk at once with
happiness and with unhappiness, with death and with immortality.[3] His
renunciation of individual life is only a cry of exalted passion towards the
eternal life. The peace which he finds, the peace of the soul which he
invokes, is not the peace of death. It is rather the calm of those burning
worlds which sail by the forces of gravity through the infinite spaces. With
him anger is calm,[4]and the calm is blazing. Faith has given him new
weapons with which to wage, even more implacably, unceasing war upon
the lies of modern society. He no longer confines himself to a few types of
romance; he attacks all the great idols: the hypocrisies of religion, the State,
science, art, liberalism, socialism, popular education, benevolence,
pacificism.[5] He strikes at all, delivers his desperate attacks upon all.
From time to time the world has sight of these great rebellious spirits, who,
like John the Forerunner, hurl anathemas against a corrupted civilisation.
The last of these was Rousseau. By his love of nature,[6] by his hatred of
modern society, by his jealous independence, by his fervent adoration of the
Gospel and for Christian morals, Rousseau is a precursor of Tolstoy, who
says of him:
"Pages like this go to my heart; I feel that I should have written them."[7]
But what a difference between the two minds, and how much more purely
Christian is Tolstoy's! What a lack of humility, what Pharisee-like
arrogance, in this insolent cry from the Confessions of the Genevese:
"Eternal Being! Let a single man tell me, if he dare: I was better than that
man!"
Or in this defiance of the world:
"I say it loudly and fearlessly: whosoever could believe me a dishonest man
is himself a man to be suppressed."
Tolstoy wept tears of blood over the "crimes" of his past life:
"I suffer the pangs of hell. I recall all my past baseness, and these memories
do not leave me; they poison my life. Usually men regret that they cannot
remember after death. What happiness if it should be so! What suffering it
would mean if, in that other life, I were to recall all the evil I have done
down here!"[8]

Tolstoy was not the man to write his confessions, as did Rousseau, because,
as the latter said, "feeling that the good exceeded the evil it was in my
interest to tell everything."[9] Tolstoy, after having made the attempt,
decided not to write his Memoirs; the pen fell from his hands; he did not
wish to be an object of offence and scandal to those who would read it.
"People would say: There, then, is the man whom many set so high! And
what a shameful fellow he was! Then with us mere mortals it is God who
ordains us to be shameful."[10]
Never did Rousseau know the Christian faith, the fine modesty, and the
humility that produced the ineffable candour of the aged Tolstoy. Behind
Rousseau we see the Rome of Calvin. In Tolstoy we see the pilgrims, the
innocents, whose tears and naive confessions had touched him as a child.
But beyond and above the struggle with the world, which was common to
him and to Rousseau, another kind of warfare filled the last thirty years of
Tolstoy's life; a magnificent warfare between the highest powers of his
mind: Truth and Love.
Truth—"that look which goes straight to the heart," the penetrating light of
"those grey eyes which pierce you through"—Truth was his earliest faith,
and the empress of his art.
"The heroine of my writings, she whom I love with all the forces of my
being, she who always was, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth."[11]
The truth alone escaped shipwreck after the death of his brother.[12] The
truth, the pivot of his life, the rock in the midst of an ocean.
But very soon the "horrible truth"[13] was no longer enough for him. Love
had supplanted it. It was the living spring of his childhood; "the natural
state of his soul."[14] When the moral crisis of 1880 came he never
relinquished the truth; he made way for love.[15]
Love is "the basis of energy."[16] Love is the "reason of life; the only reason,
with beauty."[17] Love is the essence of Tolstoy ripened by life, of the author
of War and Peace and the Letter to the Holy Synod.[18]
This interpenetration of the truth by love makes the unique value of the
masterpieces he wrote in the middle part of his life—nel mezzo del cammin

—and distinguishes his realism from the realism of Flaubert. The latter
places his faith in refraining from loving his characters. Great as he may be,
he lacks the Fiat lux! The light of the sun is not enough: we must have the
light of the heart. The realism of Tolstoy is incarnate in each of his
creatures, and seeing them with their own eyes he finds in the vilest reasons
for loving them and for making us feel the chain of brotherhood which
unites us to all.[19] By love he penetrates to the roots of life.
But this union is a difficult one to maintain. There are hours in which the
spectacle of life and its suffering are so bitter that they appear an affront to
love, and in order to save it, and to save his faith, a man must withdraw to
such a height above the world that faith is in danger of losing truth as well.
What shall he do, moreover, who has received at the hands of fate the fatal,
magnificent gift of seeing the truth—the gift of being unable to escape from
seeing it? Who shall say what Tolstoy suffered from the continual discord of
his latter years—the discord between his unpitying vision, which saw the
horror of reality, and his impassioned heart, which continued to expect love
and to affirm it?
We have all known these tragic conflicts. How often have we had to face
the alternative—not to see, or to hate! And how often does an artist—an
artist worthy of the name, a writer who knows the terrible, magnificent
power of the written word—feel himself weighed down by anguish as he
writes the truth![20] This truth, sane and virile, necessary in the midst of
modern lies, this vital truth seems to him as the air we breathe.... But then
we perceive that this air is more than the lungs of many can bear. It is too
strong for the many beings enfeebled by civilisation; too strong for those
who are weak simply in the kindness of their hearts. Are we to take no
account of this, and plunge them implacably into the truth that kills them?
Is there not above all a truth which, as Tolstoy says, "is open to love"? Or is
the artist to soothe mankind with consoling lies, as Peer Gynt, with his
tales, soothes his old dying mother? Society is always face to face with this
dilemma: the truth, or love. It resolves it in general by sacrificing both.
Tolstoy has never betrayed either of his two faiths. In the works of his
maturity love is the torch of truth. In the works of his later years it is a light
shining on high, a ray of mercy which falls upon life, but does not mingle
with it. We have seen this in Resurrection, wherein faith dominates the
reality, but remains external to it. The people, whom Tolstoy depicts as

commonplace and mean when he regards the isolated figures that compose
it, takes on a divine sanctity so soon as he considers it in the abstract.[21]
In his everyday life appears the same discord as in his art, but the contrast is
even more cruel. It was in vain that he knew what love required of him; he
acted otherwise; he lived not according to God but according to the world.
And love itself: how was he to behave with regard to love? How distinguish
between its many aspects, its contradictory orders? Was love of family, to
come first, or love of all humanity? To his last day he was perplexed by
these alternatives.
What was the solution? He did not find it. Let us leave the self-sufficient,
the coldly intellectual, to judge him with disdain. They, to be sure, have
found the truth; they hold it with assurance. For them, Tolstoy was a
sentimentalist, a weakling, who could only be of use as a warning. Certainly
he is not an example that they can follow: they are not sufficiently alive.
Tolstoy did not belong to the self-satisfied elect; he was of no Church; of no
sect; he was no more a Scribe, to borrow his terms, than a Pharisee of this
faith or that. He was the highest type of the free Christian, who strives all
his life long towards an ideal that is always more remote.[22]
Tolstoy does not speak to the privileged, the enfranchised of the world of
thought; he speaks to ordinary men—hominibus bonæ voluntatis. He is our
conscience. He says what we all think, we average people, and what we all
fear to read in ourselves. He is not a master full of pride: one of those
haughty geniuses who are throned above humanity upon their art and their
intelligence. He is—as he loved to style himself in his letters, by that most
beautiful of titles, the most pleasant of all—"our brother."

[1] Journal, dated October 28, 1879. Here is the entire passage:
"There are in this world heavy folk, without wings. They struggle down below. There are strong men
among them: as Napoleon. He leaves terrible traces among humanity. He sows discord.—There are
men who let their wings grow, slowly launch themselves, and hover: the monks. There are light
fliers, who easily mount and fall: the worthy idealists. There are men with powerful wings.... There
are the celestial ones, who out of their love of men descend to earth and fold their wings, and teach
others how to fly. Then, when they are no longer needed, they re-ascend: as did Christ."
[2] "One can live only while one is drunken with life." (Confessions, 1879). "I am mad with living....
It is summer, the delicious summer. This year. I have struggled for a long time; but the beauty of
nature has conquered me. I rejoice in life." (Letter to Fet, July, 1880.) These lines were written at the
height of the religious crisis.

[3] In his Journal, dated May 1, 1863: "The thought of death." ... "I desire and love immortality."
[4] "I was intoxicated with that boiling anger and indignation which I love to feel, which I excite
even when I feel it naturally, because it acts upon me in such a way as to calm me, and gives me, at
least for a few moments, an extraordinary elasticity, and the full fire and energy of all the physical
and moral capacities." (Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov, Lucerne, 1857.)
[5] His article on War, written on the occasion of the Universal Peace Congress in London in 1891, is
a rude satire on the peacemakers who believe in international arbitration:
"This is the story of the bird which is caught after a pinch of salt has been put on his tail. It is quite as
easy to catch him without it. They laugh at us who speak of arbitration and disarmament by consent
of the Powers. Mere verbiage, this! Naturally the Governments approve: worthy apostles! They know
very well that their approval will never prevent their doing as they will." (Cruel Pleasures.)
[6] Nature was always "the best friend" of Tolstoy, as he loved to say: "A friend is good; but he will
die, or he will go abroad, and one cannot follow him; while Nature, to which one may be united by
an act of purchase or by inheritance, is better. Nature to me is cold and exacting, repulses me and
hinders me; yet Nature is a friend whom we keep until death, and into whom we shall enter when we
die." (Letter to Fet, May 19, 1861. Further Letters.) He shared in the life of nature; he was born again
in the spring. "March and April are my best months for work." Towards the end of autumn he became
more torpid. "To me it is the most dead of all the seasons; I do not think; I do not write; I feel
agreeably stupid." (To Fet, October, 1869.) But the Nature that spoke so intimately to his heart was
that of his own home, Yasnaya Polyana. Although he wrote some very charming notes upon the Lake
of Geneva when travelling in Switzerland, and especially on the Clarens district, whither the memory
of Rousseau attracted him, he felt himself a stranger amid the Swiss landscape; and the ties of his
native land appeared more closely drawn and sweeter: "I love Nature when she surrounds me on
every side, when on every hand the warm air envelopes me which extends through the infinite
distance; when the very same lush grasses that I have crushed in throwing myself on the ground
make the verdure of the infinite meadows; when the same leaves which, shaken by the wind, throw
the shadow on my face, make the sombre blue of the distant forest; when the very air I breathe makes
the light-blue background of the infinite sky; when not I alone am delighting in nature; when around
me whirl and hum millions of insects and the birds are singing. The greatest delight in nature is when
I feel myself making a part of all. Here (in Switzerland) the infinite distance is beautiful, but I have
nothing in common with it." (May, 1851.)
[7] Conversations with M. Paul Boyer (Le Temps, August 28, 1901).
The similarity is really very striking at times, and might well deceive one. Take the profession of
faith of the dying Julie:
"I could not say that I believed what it was impossible for me to believe, and I have always believed
what I said I believed. This was as much as rested with me."
Compare Tolstoy's letter to the Holy Synod:
"It may be that my beliefs are embarrassing or displeasing. It is not within my power to change them,
just as it is not in my power to change my body. I cannot believe anything but what I believe, at this
hour when I am preparing to return to that God from whom I came."
Or this passage from the Réponse à Christophe de Beaumont, which seems pure Tolstoy:
"I am a disciple of Jesus Christ. My Master has told me that he who loves his brother accomplishes
the law."
Or again:

"The whole of the Lord's Prayer is expressed in these words: 'Thy Will be done!'" (Troisième lettre de
la Montague.)
Compare with:
"I am replacing all my prayers with the Pater Nosier. All the requests I can make of God are
expressed with greater moral elevation by these words: 'Thy Will be done!'" (Tolstoy's Journal, in the
Caucasus, 1852-3.)
The similarity of thought is no less striking in the province of art:
"The first rule of the art of writing," said Rousseau, "is to speak plainly and to express one's thought
exactly."
And Tolstoy:
"Think what you will, but in such a manner that every word may be understood by all. One cannot
write anything bad in perfectly plain language."
I have demonstrated elsewhere that the satirical descriptions of the Paris Opera in the Nouvelle
Héloise have much in common with Tolstoy's criticisms in What is Art?
[8] Journal, January 6, 1903.
[9] Quatrième Promenade.
[10] Letter to Birukov.
[11] Sebastopol in May, 1853.
[12] "The truth.... the only thing that has been left me of my moral conceptions, the sole thing that I
shall still fulfil." (October 17, 1860.)
[13] Ibid.
[14] "The love of men is the natural state of the soul, and we do not observe it." (Journal, while he
was a student at Kazan.)
[15]"The truth will make way for love." (Confessions.)
[16] "'You are always talking of energy? But the basis of energy is love,' said Anna, 'and love does
not come at will.'" (Anna Karenin.)
[17] "Beauty and love, those two sole reasons for human existence." (War and Peace.)
[18] "I believe in God, who for me is Love." (To the Holy Synod, 1901.)
"'Yes, love!... Not selfish love, but love as I knew it, for the first time in my life, when I saw my
enemy dying at my side, and loved him.... It is the very essence of the soul. To love his neighbour, to
love his enemies, to love all and each, is to love God in all His manifestations!... To love a creature
who is dear to us is human love: to love an enemy is almost divine love!'" (Prince Andrei in War and
Peace.)
[19] "The passionate love of the artist for his subject is the soul of art. Without love no work of art is
possible." (Letter of September, 1889.)
[20] "I write books, which is why I know all the evil they do." ... (Letter to P. V. Veriguin, leader of
the Doukhobors, 1898. Further Letters.)
[21] See the Russian Proprietor, or see in Confessions, the strongly idealised view of these men,
simple, good, content with their lot, living serenely and having the sense of life: or, at the end of the

second part of Resurrection, that vision "of a new humanity, a new world," which appeared to
Nekhludov when he met the workers returning from their toil.
[22] "A Christian should not think whether he is morally superior or inferior to others; but he is the
better Christian as he travels more rapidly along the road to perfection, whatever may be his position
upon it at any particular moment. Thus the stationary virtue of the Pharisee is less Christian than that
of the thief, whose soul is moving rapidly towards the ideal, and who repents upon his cross." (Cruel
Pleasures.)

INDEX

(The names of characters and titles of books are in italics.)

ALEXANDRA, Tolstoy's aunt, 18

Ancestry, Tolstoy's, 14, 15
Analysis, self-, 29
Andrei Bolkonsky, Prince, 88-90, 94, 100
Anna Karenin (novel), 76, 84, 99, 102, 203
Anna Karenin (character), 103, 104
Arabian Nights, 19, 169
Art—
Attacks on modern, 145, 146
Tolstoy's conception of, 147-150
His ignorance of, 151
His religious ideal of art, 156
Christian art extinct, 157
The art of the future, 159
Endowment of, 159
Mission of, 160
Austerlitz, 89, 90

BACH, 153
Bachkirs, the, 102
Bagration, 88
Beethoven, 151, 155, 181,183

Bers family, the, 75
Bers, S. A., 179
Bers, Sophie, see Countess Tolstoy
Besoukhov, Pierre, 88, 91-94, 100
Bloody Sunday, 212
Böcklin, 151
Boyer, Paul, 167
Boyhood, 42
Brahms, 151
Breton, Jules, 151
Brothers, Tolstoy's, 17
Brush with the Enemy, A, 44
Bylines, 19, 168

CAUCASUS, Tolstoy joins Army of the, 33
Census, the, Tolstoy assists in taking, 127
Chavannes, P. de, 151
Childhood, Tolstoy's, 17-19
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, 15, 16, 19, 23
Begun in the Caucasus, 35; 39
Tolstoy's later opinion of, 40; 84
See Boyhood and Youth
China, Tolstoy's admiration for,
Christ, Tolstoy's conception of, 119
Concordance and Translation of the Four Gospels, 118
Confessions, 106, 120, 238
Cossacks, The, 44
Countess Tolstoy—
Character and abilities, 83
As model, 84; 100, 135-138, 226-227
Letter to, 229-231
Creed, Tolstoy's, 123-124
Crimea, transference to the, 49
Criticism of Dogmatic Theology, 118
Criticism of art, destructive,
Cycle of Readings, 200

DEATH OF IVAN ILYITCH, THE, 6, 68, 165, 174-175
Decembrists, The (a projected novel), 91
Diary of a Sportsman, 68, 75
Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov, 65
Dmitri Tolstoy, 17
Death of, 106-107
Don Quixote, 158
Dostoyevsky, 158, 193
Dreyfus Affair, the, 154
Droujinine, 61

EDUCATION, Tolstoy's ideas concerning, 23-25, 66
End of a World, The, 201
England, Tolstoy contemplates retiring to, 103
Erochta, the old Cossack, 45
Execution, effect of a public 64

FAITH, Tolstoy's, brings no happiness, 128
Family, Tolstoy's, 16
Family dissensions, 228
Family Happiness, 75-77, 84
Father, Tolstoy's, 16
Feminism, Tolstoy's attitude towards, 138
Flaubert's opinion of Tolstoy's work, 99, 245

GAPON, FATHER, 212
George, Henry, 225
Georgians, the, 213
Goethe, 156
Gontcharov, 61
Great Crime, The, 201, 210
Greek, Tolstoy studies, 101
Gricha, the idiot, 18
Grigorovitch, 61

HADJI MOURAD, 199
Hebrew, Tolstoy studies, 137

Home, Tolstoy's, see Yasnaya Polyana
Hugo, Victor, 158
Hunting, renounced, 132

IBSEN, 151
Introspection, Tolstoy's faculty of, 29
Invasion, The, 35, 42
Irtenieff, Nikolas, 15

JOSEPH, the History of, 19, 159
Journal, Tolstoy's, 14, 27, 34

KARENIN, 106
Karatayev, 91
Kazan, 23
Khlopoff, Captain, 43
Kitty Levine, 84, 103
Klinger, Max; 151
Kozeltoff, brothers, in Sebastopol in August, 1855, 56-57
Kreutzer Sonata, The, 165, 174, 176-177, 181
Kutuzov, 88, 90-91

LEVINE, 103,106-108, in Lhermitte, 151

Liberal Party, Tolstoy's disdain of the, 66, 202-203
Life, 120
Literary Society of St. Petersburg,
Tolstoy's dislike of, 61-67

Logic, heroic, 129-130
Love—
Definition of, 122
Tolstoy's attitude towards sexual, 177
Law of, 211
Lucerne, incident of the singer, 65

MANET, 151

Marriage, Tolstoy's views concerning, 100, 177
Marie, Princess, 88-89
Marie Tolstoy, 16, 94
Maslova, 191
Master and Servant, 165
Michelangelo, 151
Millet, 151
Molière, 158
Moscow, effect of visit to, 127, 130, 147
Music—
Love of, 28-29
Ignorance of modern music, 151-152; 153
In the Kreutzer Sonata, 178
Dread of, 179
Suggested State control over, 182-183

NATASHA, 90, 93-94,179-180
Nekhludov, 26-28, 33, 68, 181, 191
Nekhludov, Diary of Prince D., 65
Nikolas Tolstoy, 17, 33
Dies of phthisis, 69
Non-Resistance, 211, 225

OLD BELIEVERS, the, 212
Olenin, 45
Orthodox Church, Tolstoy's relations with the, 117
Ostrovsky, 61

PAKHOM THE PEASANT, 169-170
Parents, Tolstoy's, 15-16
Pascal, 120
Pedagogy, 135
Polikushka, 70, 78
Popular Tales, 42, 165, 168
Popular idiom, 167-168
Portraits of Tolstoy—
Of 1848, 26 (note)

Of 1851, 35
Of 1856, 61
Of 1885, 129; 140
Posdnicheff, 177, 182
Power of Darkness, The, 165, 170-173
Prashhoukhin, death of, 54

REASON (letter upon), 121
Reason, Tolstoy's distrust of, 108; 120-121
Religion—
Tolstoy's vague agnosticism as a youth, 24
Revival of, in the Caucasus, 33-39; 100, 123-124, 135, 209,
215-216
Rembrandt, 151
Resurrection, 166, 187-195, 224, 247
Revolution, Tolstoy prophesies, 209-210
Roumania, Tolstoy joins Army of, 49
Rousseau, J. J., worship of, 27; 240-243
Rules of Life, 25
Russian Proprietor, A, 27
Written in the Caucasus, 35; 42
Russo-Japanese War, 201

ST. PETERSBURG, Tolstoy's dislike of literary society of, 61, 67
Samara, 192
Schopenhauer, 101 (note)
Science, Tolstoy attacks, 145
Sebastopol in December, 1854, 52
Sebastopol in May, 1855, 52-56
Sebastopol in August, 1855, 52, 54-57
Sebastopol, the siege of, 49-57
Sexual morality, 177
Shakespeare, 166
Shakespeare, no artist, 152-153, 155-156
Siegfried, hasty judgment on, 152
"Smartness," Tolstoy's worship of, 27
Socialism, Tolstoy's hatred of, 205-208

Society, pictures of Russian, 103
Sophia Bers, see Countess Tolstoy
Sovremennik, the (Russian review), 40
Spelling-book, Tolstoy's, 135
State, the, a murderous entity, 130
Stepan Arcadievitch, 105
Sterne, influence of, 41
Story-teller, a blind, 19
Strauss, 151
Stuck, 151
Suarès, 6, 61
Suicidal tendencies, 107, 111, 113

TATIANA, Tolstoy's aunt, 17
Tchaikowsky, 151
Terror, attack of nervous, 100
Three Deaths, 68
Three Old Men, 168
Tolstoy, Countess, 75, 83, 84, 100, 135-138, 226-227, 229-231
Tolstoy, Dmitri, 17
Death of, 106-107
Tolstoy, Leo—
Reception of his work in France, 6
Influence of Rousseau and Stendhal, 7
Organic unity of his life, 13
Ancestry and inheritances,
Childhood, 17-19
Student days, 23-25
Personal appearance (see Portraits), 25-26
Joins Army of Caucasus, 33
Religious experiences, 33-34
First literary work, 35
Effects of illness, 39
Early work, 41-45
Love of life, 46
Transferred to Crimea, 49
Narratives of Sebastopol, 52

Enters St. Petersburg literary society, 61
Quarrels with Tourgenev, 63
Travels in Europe, 64
Studies pedagogy, 66
Effect of his brother's death 70
Courtship, 75
Marriage, 76-83
War and Peace, 83-95
Anna Karenina, 99
Effect of Dmitri's death, 107
Suicidal tendencies, 111
His "conversion," 115-16
Joins the Orthodox Church, 117
Leaves it, 117
Visits Moscow, 127
Commences to write on religious
subjects, 136
Differences with Countess Tolstoy, 136-137
Spiritual loneliness, 140
Attacks upon modern art and science, 145
His ignorance of art, 151
Ignorance of modern music, 152
Attack upon Shakespeare, 153-157
Religious and æsthetic ideals, 156-161
His fear of music, 178-180
Political ideals, 214
Religious ideals, 215-216
Old age, 219
Political hopes, 220
Loneliness, 228
Intends leaving his family, 229
Death, 234
Tolstoy, Nikolas, 17, 33, 69
Töppfer, influence of, 41
Tourgenev, 17, 61-63
Criticism of Tolstoy, 95, 140, 202
Turkey, war declared upon, 49

Two Hussars, The, 68

VOLODYA, see Kozeltoff
Vogüé, Melchior de, 140
Vronsky, 103-104

WAGNER, Tolstoy's hasty judgment of, 152, 155
War and Peace, 15, 43, 84, 95, 99-101, 103-105
What I Believe, 141
What is Art t 149-150, 166
What shall we do? 129, 138
Woman, Tolstoy's ideal of, 138-139
Woodcutters, The, 44

YASNAYA POLYANA, 16, 33
Tolstoy returns to, 65
Experiments at, 66-67; 224,228
Youth—
Written during the siege of Sebastopol, 50
Lyrical beauty of, 51

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