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Title: Leo Tolstoy

Author: G. K. Chesterton
Edward Garnett
G. H. Perris

Release date: May 6, 2020 [eBook #62045]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEO TOLSTOY
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Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy as Writer
Tolstoy’s Place in European
Literature
Biographical Note
List of Illustrations
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LEO TOLSTOY

LEO TOLSTOY
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON, G. H. PERRIS
Etc.

WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS

TORONTO
COPP CLARK COMPANY
LONDON: HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Leo Tolstoy Frontispiece
Tolstoy as an Officer 1
Tolstoy in his Student Days 2
Yasnaya Polyana, the Country Home of Count Tolstoy 3
The Approach to the Park at Yasnaya Polyana 4
The Gateway-Entrance to Yasnaya Polyana 5
Tolstoy with his Bicycle 6
“The Tree of the Poor” 7
Tolstoy, an Early Portrait 7
Count and Countess Tolstoy 8
Leo Tolstoy (from a Sketch by Victor Prout) 9
Count Tolstoy at Work in the Fields 10
Facsimile of a Portion of Tolstoy’s MS. 11
Count Tolstoy, his Wife, and Daughters 12
Tolstoy at Work in his Study at Yasnaya Polyana 13
Tolstoy Writing at his Desk 14
One of H. R. Millar’s Illustrations 15
Count Tolstoy 16
A Famous Painting of Tolstoy 17
A Photograph of Count Tolstoy taken at Yasnaya
Polyana 18
Russian Jailer and Woman Warder 19
A Tolstoy Medallion 20
The Cover of the Tract “Where Love is, there God is
also” 20
One of the Postcards Issued in Moscow in 1898 to
Commemorate Tolstoy’s Literary Jubilee 21
Two of the Postcards Issued at Moscow in 1898 to
Commemorate Tolstoy’s Literary Jubilee 22

Count Tolstoy at Rest (from a Painting by Répin) 23
Tolstoy in the Grounds of Yasnaya Polyana 24
One of H. R. Millar’s Illustrations 25
One of many Busts of Count Tolstoy 26
A Recent Portrait of Count Tolstoy 27
The Defendants 29
Tolstoy and his Daughter Tatyana 30
Count Tolstoy and his Family 31
Leo Tolstoy (from a Portrait painted in 1884) 33
Maslova’s Return to the Ward after the Sentence 34
Leo Tolstoy, 1896 (from a Photograph) 35

TOLSTOY
I F any one wishes to form the fullest estimate of
the real character and influence of the great man
whose name is prefixed to these remarks, he will
not find it in his novels, splendid as they are, or in
his ethical views, clearly and finely as they are
conceived and expanded. He will find it best
expressed in the news that has recently come from
Canada, that a sect of Russian Christian anarchists
has turned all its animals loose, on the ground that it
is immoral to possess them or control them. About
TOLSTOY AS AN such an incident as this there is a quality altogether
OFFICER
independent of the rightness or wrongness, the
sanity or insanity, of the view. It is first and
foremost a reminder that the world is still young. There are still theories of
life as insanely reasonable as those which were disputed under the clear
blue skies of Athens. There are still examples of a faith as fierce and
practical as that of the Mahometans, who swept across Africa and Europe,
shouting a single word. To the languid contemporary politician and
philosopher it seems doubtless like something out of a dream, that in this
iron-bound, homogeneous, and clockwork age, a company of European

men in boots and waistcoats should begin to insist on taking the horse out
of the shafts of the omnibus, and lift the pig out of his pig-sty, and the dog
out of his kennel, because of a moral scruple or theory. It is like a page from
some fairy farce to imagine the Doukhabor solemnly escorting a hen to the
door of the yard and bidding it a benevolent farewell as it sets out on its
travels.

TOLSTOY
IN
HIS
STUDENT
DAYS

All this, as I say, seems mere muddle-headed absurdity to the typical leader
of human society in this decade, to a man like Mr. Balfour, or Mr.
Wyndham. But there is nevertheless a further thing to be said, and that is
that, if Mr. Balfour could be converted to a religion which taught him that
he was morally bound to walk into the House of Commons on his hands,
and he did walk on his hands, if Mr. Wyndham could accept a creed which
taught that he ought to dye his hair blue, and he did dye his hair blue, they
would both of them be, almost beyond description, better and happier men
than they are. For there is only one happiness possible or conceivable under
the sun, and that is enthusiasm—that strange and splendid word that has
passed through so many vicissitudes, which meant, in the eighteenth
century the condition of a lunatic, and in ancient Greece the presence of a
god.

YASNAYA POLYANA, THE COUNTRY HOME OF COUNT
TOLSTOY

This great act of heroic consistency which has taken place in Canada is
the best example of the work of Tolstoy. It is true (as I believe) that the
Doukhabors have an origin quite independent of the great Russian moralist,
but there can surely be little doubt that their emergence into importance and
the growth and mental distinction of their sect, is due to his admirable
summary and justification of their scheme of ethics. Tolstoy, besides being a
magnificent novelist, is one of the very few men alive who have a real,
solid, and serious view of life. He is a Catholic church, of which he is the
only member, the somewhat arrogant Pope and the somewhat submissive
layman. He is one of the two or three men in Europe, who have an attitude
towards things so entirely their own, that we could supply their inevitable
view on anything—a silk hat, a Home Rule Bill, an Indian poem, or a
pound of tobacco. There are three men in existence who have such an
attitude: Tolstoy, Mr. Bernard Shaw, and my friend Mr. Hilaire Belloc. They
are all diametrically opposed to each other, but they all have this essential
resemblance, that, given their basis of thought, their soil of conviction, their
opinions on every earthly subject grow there naturally, like flowers in a
field. There are certain views of certain things that they must take: they do
not form opinions, the opinions form themselves. Take, for instance, in the
case of Tolstoy, the mere list of miscellaneous objects which I wrote down
at random above, a silk hat, a Home Rule Bill, an Indian poem, and a pound
of tobacco. Tolstoy would say: “I believe in the utmost possible
simplification of life; therefore, this silk hat is a black abortion.” He would
say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, this

Home Rule Bill is a mere peddling compromise; it is no good to break up a
centralised empire into nations, you must break the nation up into
individuals.” He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification
of life; therefore, I am interested in this Indian poem, for Eastern ethics,
under all their apparent gorgeousness, are far simpler and more Tolstoyan
than Western.” He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible
simplification of life; therefore, this pound of tobacco is a thing of evil; take
it away.” Everything in the world, from the Bible to a bootjack, can be, and
is, reduced by Tolstoy to this great fundamental Tolstoyan principle, the
simplification of life. When we deal with a body of opinion like this we are
dealing with an incident in the history of Europe infinitely more important
than the appearance of Napoleon Buonaparte.

THE APPROACH TO THE
PARK AT YASNAYA
POLYANA

This emergence of Tolstoy, with his awful and simple ethics, is important
in more ways than one. Among other things it is a very interesting
commentary on an attitude which has been taken up for the matter of half a
century by all the avowed opponents of religion. The secularist and the
sceptic have denounced Christianity first and

THE GATEWAY-ENTRANCE TO YASNAYA
POLYANA

foremost, because of its encouragement of fanaticism; because religious
excitement led men to burn their neighbours, and to dance naked down the
street. How queer it all sounds now. Religion can be swept out of the matter
altogether, and still there are philosophical and ethical theories which can
produce fanaticism enough to fill the world. Fanaticism has nothing at all to
do with religion. There are grave scientific theories which, if carried out
logically, would result in the same fires in the market-place and the same
nakedness in the street. There are modern æsthetes who would expose
themselves like the Adamites if they could do it in elegant attitudes. There
are modern scientific moralists who would burn their opponents alive, and
would be quite contented if they were burnt by some new chemical process.
And if any one doubts this proposition—that fanaticism has nothing to do
with religion, but has only to do with human nature—let him take this case
of Tolstoy and the Doukhabors. A sect of men start with no theology at all,
but with the simple doctrine that we ought to love our neighbour and use no
force against him, and they end in thinking it wicked to carry a leather
handbag, or to ride in a cart. A great modern writer who erases theology
altogether, denies the validity of the Scriptures and the Churches alike,
forms a purely ethical theory that love should be the instrument of reform,
and ends by maintaining that we have no right to strike a man if he is
torturing a child before our eyes. He goes on, he develops a theory of the
mind and the emotions, which might be held by the most rigid atheist, and
he ends by maintaining that the sexual relation out of which all humanity
has come, is not only not moral, but is positively not natural. This is
fanaticism as it has been and as it will always be. Destroy the last copy of
the Bible, and persecution and insane orgies will be founded on Mr. Herbert

Spencer’s “Synthetic Philosophy.” Some of the broadest thinkers of the
Middle Ages believed in faggots, and some of the broadest thinkers in the
nineteenth century believe in dynamite.

TOLSTOY WITH HIS BICYCLE
(Photographed in 1896)

The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal
faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in
one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic: and therefore he has a
tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have
been produced by mysticism: they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the
main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The
thing that has driven them mad was logic. It is significant that, with all that
has been said about the excitability of poets, only one English poet ever
went mad, and he went mad from a logical system of theology. He was
Cowper, and his poetry retarded his insanity for many years. So poetry, in
which Tolstoy is deficient, has always been a tonic and sanative thing. The
only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the
convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has
been mysticism—the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not
what they seem.
G. K. Chesterton.

“THE TREE OF THE POOR”
Where Tolstoy receives the peasants and listens with
unwearying patience to their tales of distress

TOLSTOY, AN EARLY
PORTRAIT

LEO TOLSTOY AS WRITER

H ALF the ignorance or misunderstanding of this greatest living figure in
literature comes of the attempt to judge him as we judge the specialised
Western novelist—an utterly futile method of approach. He is a
Russian, in the first place. Had he come to Paris with Turguenieff, he might
have been similarly de-nationalised, might possibly have developed into a
writer pure and simple; the world might so have gained a few great
romances—it would have lost infinitely in other directions. Turguenieff
wished it so. “My friend,” he wrote to Tolstoy from his deathbed, “return to
literature! Reflect that that gift comes to you whence everything comes to
us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could think that my prayer would
influence you.... My friend, great writer of our Russian land, hear my
entreaty!” For

COUNT
AND
COUNTESS
TOLSTOY

From a
Portrait taken
in
September 1895

(Reproduced
by kind permission
from
“How Count Tolstoy
Lives and Works,”
by
P. A. Sergyeenko)

once, the second greatest of modern Russians took a narrow view of
character and destiny. Genius must work itself out on its own lines. Tolstoy
remained a Russian from tip to toe—that is one of his supreme values for
us; and he remained an indivisible personality. The artist and the moralist
are inseparable in his works. “We are not to take ‘Anna Karènina’ as a work
of art,” said Matthew

LEO TOLSTOY, FROM A SKETCH BY
VICTOR PROUT
(Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. F. R.
Henderson)

Arnold; “we are to take it as a piece of life.” The distinction is not very
satisfactorily stated, but the meaning is clear. So, too, W. D. Howells, in his
introduction to an American edition of the “Sebastopol Sketches”: “I do not
know how it is with others to whom these books of Tolstoy’s have come,
but for my part I cannot think of them as literature in the artistic sense at all.
Some people complain to me when I praise them that they are too long, too
diffuse, too confused, that the characters’ names are hard to pronounce, and
that the life they portray is very sad and not amusing. In the presence of
these criticisms I can only say that I find them nothing of the kind, but that
each history of Tolstoy’s is as clear, as orderly, as brief, as something I have
lived through myself.... I cannot think of any service which imaginative
literature has done the race so great as that which Tolstoy has done in his

conception of Karènina at that crucial moment when the cruelly outraged
man sees that he cannot be good with dignity. This leaves all tricks of fancy,
all effects of art, immeasurably behind.” So much being said, however, we
may be allowed to emphasise in this small space the great qualities and
achievements of Tolstoy as artist, rather than the expositions of Christian
Anarchism and the social philippics under which those achievements have
been somewhat hidden in recent years.

COUNT TOLSTOY AT WORK IN THE FIELDS

Morbid introspectiveness and the spirit of revolt inevitably colour what
is best in nineteenth-century Russia. Born at Yasnaya Polyana (“Clear
Field”), Tula, in 1828, and early orphaned, Tolstoy’s youth

FACSIMILE OF A PORTION OF TOLSTOY’S MS.
(Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Nisbet & Co., from
“How Count Tolstoy Lives and Works,” by P. A. Sergyeenko)

synchronised with the period of reaction that brought the Empire to the
humiliating disasters of the Crimean War. No hope was left in the thin layer
of society lying between the two mill-stones of the Court and the serfs;
none in the little sphere of art where Byronic romanticism was ready to
expire. The boy saw from the first the rottenness of the patriarchal
aristocracy in which his lot seemed to be cast. Precocious, abnormally
sensitive and observant, impatient of discipline and formal learning,
awkward and bashful, always brooding, not a little conceited, he was a
sceptic at fifteen, and left the University of Kazan in disgust at the stupid
conventions of the time and place, without taking his degree. “Childhood,
Boyhood, and Youth”—which appeared in three sections between 1852 and
1857—tells the story of this period, though the figure of Irtenieff is
probably a projection rather than a portrait of himself, to whom he is always
less fair, not to say merciful, than to others. This book is a most
uncompromising exercise in self-analysis. It is of great length, there is no
plot, and few outer events are recorded.
The realism is generally morbid, but is varied by some passages of great
descriptive power, such as the account of the storm, and occasionally with
tender pathos, as in the story of the soldier’s death, as well as by grimly
vivid pages, such as the narrative of the mother’s death. In this earliest work
will be found the seeds both of Tolstoy’s artistic genius and of his ethical
gospel.

After five years of mildly benevolent efforts
among his serfs at Yasnaya Polyana (the
disappointments of which he related a few years
later in “A Landlord’s Morning,” intended to have
been part of a full novel to be called “A Russian
Proprietor”), his elder brother Nicholas persuaded
him to join the army, and in 1851 he was drafted to
the Caucasus as an artillery officer. On this
favourite stage of classic Russian romance, where
for the first time he saw the towering mountains
and the tropical sun, and met the rugged
adventurous highlanders, Tolstoy felt his
imagination stirred as Byron among the isles of
Greece, and his early revulsion against city life
confirmed as Wordsworth amid the Lakes, as
Thoreau at Walden, by a direct call from Nature to
his own heart. The largest result of this experience
COUNT TOLSTOY, HIS was “The Cossacks” (1852). Turguenieff described
WIFE, AND DAUGHTERS this fine prose epic of the contact of civilised and

savage man as “the best novel written in our
language.” “The Raid” (or “The Invaders,” as Mr. Dole’s translation is
entitled), dating from the same year, “The Wood-Cutting Expedition”
(1855), “Meeting an Old Acquaintance” (1856), and “A

TOLSTOY AT WORK IN HIS STUDY AT YASNAYA POLYANA

Prisoner in the Caucasus” (1862) are also drawn from recollections of
this sojourn, and show the same descriptive and romantic power. Upon the
outbreak of the Crimean War the Count was called to Sebastopol, where he
had command of a battery, and took part in the defence of the citadel. The
immediate product of these dark months of bloodshed was the thrilling
series of impressions reprinted from one of the leading Russian reviews as
“Sebastopol Sketches” (1856). From that day onward Tolstoy knew and told
the hateful truth about war and the thoughtless pseudo-patriotism which
hurries nations into fratricidal slaughter. From that day there was expunged
from his mind all the cheap romanticism which depends upon the
glorification of the savage side of human nature. These wonderful pictures
of the routine of the battlefield established his position in Russia as a writer,
and later on created in Western countries an impression like that of the
canvases of Verestchagin.

TOLSTOY WRITING AT HIS DESK.

For a brief time Tolstoy became a figure in the old and new capitals of
Russia by right of talent as well as birth. His very chequered friendship with
Turguenieff, one of the oddest chapters in literary history, can only be
mentioned here. In 1857 he travelled in Germany, France, and Italy. It was
of these years that he declared in “My Confession” that he could not think
of them without horror, disgust, and pain of heart. The catalogue of crime
which he charged against himself in his salvationist crisis of twenty years
later must not be taken literally; but that there was some ground for it we
may guess from the scenic and incidental realism of the “Recollections of a
Billiard Marker” (1856), and of many a later page. Several other powerful
short novels date from about this time, including “Albert” and “Lucerne,”
both of which remind us of the Count’s susceptibility to music;
“Polikushka,” a tale of peasant life; and “Family Happiness,” the story of a
marriage that failed, a most clear, consistent, forceful, and in parts beautiful
piece of work, anticipating in essentials “The Kreutzer Sonata” that was to
scandalise the world thirty years afterward.
After all, it was family happiness that saved Leo Tolstoy. For the third
time the hand of death had snatched away one of the nearest to him—his
brother Nicholas. Two years later, in 1862, he married Miss Behrs, daughter
of the army surgeon in Tula—the most fortunate thing that has happened to
him in his whole life, I should think. Family responsibilities, those novel
and daring experiments in peasant education which are recorded in several
volumes of the highest interest, the supervision of the estate, magisterial

work, and last,
but not least,
the prolonged
labours upon
“War and
Peace” and
“Anna
Karènina” fill
up the next
fifteen years.
“War and
Peace” (1864-9)
is a huge
panorama of the
Napoleonic One of H. R. Millar’s
campaign of illustrations in the English
1812, with edition of “Where Love is,
there God is also,”
COUNT TOLSTOY preceding and reproduced by kind
succeeding permission of Messrs.
episodes in Russian society. These four volumes Walter Scott, Ltd., the
publishers
display in their superlative degree Tolstoy’s
indifference to plot and his absorption in individual
character; they are rather a series of scenes threaded upon the fortunes of
several families than a set novel; but they contain passages of penetrating
psychology and vivid description, as well as a certain amount of anarchist
theorising. Of this work, by which its author became known in the West,
Flaubert (how the name carries us backward!) wrote: “It is of the first order.
What a painter and what a psychologist! The two first volumes are sublime,
but the third drags frightfully. There are some quite Shakespearean things in
it.” The artist’s hand was now strengthening for his highest attainment. In
1876 appeared “Anna Karènina,” his greatest, and as he intended at the time
(but Art is not so easily jilted), his last novel.

A FAMOUS PAINTING OF TOLSTOY

The fine qualities of this book, which, though long, is dramatically unified
and vitally coherent, have been so fully recognised that I need not attempt
to describe them. Mr. George Meredith has described Anna as “the most
perfectly depicted female character in all fiction,” which, from the author of
“Diana, is praise indeed.”

A
PHOTOGRAPH
OF
COUNT TOLSTOY
TAKEN AT
YASNAYA POLYANA

(Reproduced
from “Anna Karènina”
by kind permission
of
Messrs Walter Scott Ltd.)

Parallel with the main subject of the illicit love of Anna and Vronsky there
is a minor subject in the fortunes of Levin and Kitty, wherein the reader will
discover many of Tolstoy’s own experiences. Matthew Arnold complained
that the book contained too many characters and a burdensome multiplicity
of actions, but praised its author’s extraordinarily fine perception and no
less extraordinary truthfulness, and frankly revelled in Anna’s

RUSSIAN JAILER AND WOMAN WARDER
“The jailer, rattling the iron padlock, opened the door of the
cell.”
(From an illustration by Pasternak in the English Edition of
“Resurrection,” reproduced by kind permission of Mr. F. R.
Henderson)

“large, fresh, rich, generous, delightful nature.” “When I had ended my
work ‘Anna Karènina,’ ” said Tolstoy in “My Confession” (1879-82), “my
despair reached such a height that I could do nothing but think of the
horrible condition in which I found myself.... I saw only one thing—Death.
Everything else was a lie.” Of that spiritual crisis nothing need be said here
except that it only intensified, and did not really, as it seemed to do, vitally
change, principles and instincts which had possessed Tolstoy from the
beginning. His subsequent ethical and religious development may be traced
in a long series of books and pamphlets, of which the most important are
“The Gospels Translated, Compared, and Harmonised” (1880-2), “What I
Believe” [“My Religion”], produced abroad in 1884, “What is to be Done?”
(1884-5), “Life” (1887), “Work” (1888), “The Kingdom of God is Within
You” (1893), “Non-Action” (1894), “Patriotism and Christianity” (1896)—
a
scathing attack upon
militarism in general
and the Franco-
Russian Alliance in
particular—“The
Christian Teaching”
(1898), and “The
Slavery of our
Times” (1900).
Various letters on the
A TOLSTOY MEDALLION
successive famines
and on the religious
persecutions in Russia deserve separate
mention; they remind us that since the failure of
the revolutionary movement miscalled THE COVER OF THE TRACT
“Nihilism,” Tolstoy has gradually risen to the “WHERE LOVE IS, THERE
GOD IS ALSO”
position of the one man who can continue with

impunity a public crusade, in the foreign and the clandestine presses at
least, against all Imperial authority and social maladjustments. Mr.
Tchertkoff, Mr. Aylmer Maude, the “Brotherhood Publishing Co.,” and the
“Free Age Press” deserve praise for their efforts to popularise these and
other works of the Count in thoroughly good translations. In “What is Art?”
(1898), not content with the bare utilitarian argument that it is merely a
means of social union, he launched a jehad against all modern ideas of Art
which rely upon a conception of beauty and all ideas of beauty into which
pleasure enters as a leading constituent. A short but luminous essay on “Guy
de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction” is a more satisfactory contribution to
the subject.
It is more to our purpose to note that
in this volcanic and fecund if
fundamentally simple personality the
artist has dogged the steps of the
evangelist to the last. “Master and Man”
(1895) is one of the most exquisite
short stories ever written. “The Death of
Ivan Ilyitch” (1884) and “Resurrection”
(1899) are in some ways the most
powerful of all his works. The much-
condemned “Dominion of Darkness”
(1886) and “Kreutzer Sonata” (1889)
will be more fairly judged when the
average Englishman has learned the
supreme merit of that uncompromising MOSCOW ONE OF THE POSTCARDS ISSUED IN
IN 1898 TO COMMEMORATE
truthfulness which gives nobility to TOLSTOY’S LITERARY JUBILEE
every line the grand Russian ever wrote.
To submit a work like “Resurrection” to
the summary treatment which the ordinary novel receives and merits is
absurd. It is a large picture of the fall and rise of man done by the swift and
restless hand of a master who stands in a category apart, with an eye that
sees externals and essentials with like accuracy and rapidity. Because the
dramatic quality of these living pictures lies, not in their organisation into a
conventionally limited plot, but first in the challenging idea upon which
they are founded, then the inexorable development of individual characters,
and ever and anon in the grip of particular episodes, the little critics scoff.

The idea, the characters, the episodes are all too real and vital for their
precious British self-complacency. The grandmotherly Athenæum

TWO OF THE POSTCARDS ISSUED AT MOSCOW IN 1898 TO
COMMEMORATE TOLSTOY’S LITERARY JUBILEE

permits some person to describe this Promethean figure as “a precious vase
that has been broken,” and can now only be pieced together to make “the
ornament of a museum,”—which reminds me that I heard a lecturer before
a well-known literary society in London describe him lately as a
“scavenger,” and that a city bookseller assured me the other day that there
was something almost amounting to a boycott against his fiction in the
shops. The publisher who is preparing a complete edition of Tolstoy—
enormous work!—knows better, knows that Tolstoy is one of the world-
spirits whose advance out of the obscurity of a benighted land into the
largest contemporary circulation is but a foretaste of an influence that will
soon be co-extensive with the commonwealth of thinking men and women.

COUNT TOLSTOY
AT REST.

From a Painting
by Répin.

(Reproduced by kind
permission from
“How Tolstoy Lives
and Works,”
by
P. A. Sergyeenko)

His service to literature is precisely the same as his service to morals.
Like Bunyan and Burns, Dickens and Whitman, he throws down in a world
of decadent conventions the gauge of the democratic ideal. As he calls the
politician and the social reformer back to the land and the common people,
so he calls the artist back to the elemental forces ever at work beneath the
surface-show of nature and humanity. With an extraordinary penetration
into the hidden recesses of character, he joins a terrible truthfulness, and
that absolute
simplicity of manner which we generally associate with genius. He is a
realist, not merely of the outer, but more especially of the inner life. There
is no staginess, no sentimentality, in his work. He has no heroes in our
Western sense, none, even, of those sensational types of personality which
glorify the name of his Northern contemporary, Ibsen. His style is always
natural, direct, irresistible as a physical process. He has rarely strayed
beyond the channel of his own experience, and the reader who prefers
breadth to depth of knowledge must seek elsewhere. He has little humour,
but a grimly satiric note has sometimes crept into his writing, as
Archdeacon Farrar will remember. Of artifice designed for vulgar
entertainment he knows nothing; in the world of true art, which is the wine-
press of the soul of man, he stands, a princely figure. Theories,
prescriptions, and discussions are forgotten, and we think only with love

and reverence of this modern patriarch, so lonely
amid the daily enlarging congregation of the
hearts he has awakened to a sense of the mystery,
the terror, the joy, the splendour of human
destinies.
G. H. Perris.

TOLSTOY IN THE
GROUNDS OF YASNAYA
POLYANA

TOLSTOY’S PLACE IN EUROPEAN
LITERATURE

T HE justness of the word great applied to a nation’s writers is perhaps
best tested by simply taking each writer in turn from out his Age, and
seeing how far our conception of his Age remains unaffected. We may
take away hundreds of clever writers, scores of distinguished creators, and
the Age remains before our eyes, solidly unaffected by their absence; but
touch one or two central figures, and lo! the whole framework of the Age
gives in your hands, and you realise that the World’s insight into, and
understanding of that Age’s life has been supplied us by the special
interpretation offered by two or three great minds. In fact, every Age seems
dwarfed, chaotic, full of confused tendencies and general contradiction till
the few great men have arisen, and symbolised in themselves what their
nation’s growth or strife signifies. How many dumb ages are there in which
no great writer has appeared, ages to whose inner life in consequence we
have no key!
Tolstoy’s significance as the great writer of
modern Russia can scarcely be augmented in
Russian eyes by his exceeding significance to
Europe as symbolising the spiritual unrest of the
modern world. Yet so inevitably

One of H. R. Millar’s
illustrations in the English

edition of “What Men Live
By” (written in 1881),
reproduced by kind permission
of Messrs. Walter Scott, Ltd.,
the publishers

ONE
OF THE
MOST
STRIKING
OF THE
MANY
BUSTS OF
COUNT
TOLSTOY

must the main stream of each age’s tendency and the main movement of the
world’s thought be discovered for us by the great writers, whenever they
appear, that Russia can no more keep Tolstoy’s significance to herself than
could Germany keep Goethe’s to herself. True it is that Tolstoy, as great
novelist, has been absorbed in mirroring the peculiar world of half-feudal,
modern

From Photo by Rek Matild, Zsolna
A RECENT PORTRAIT OF COUNT TOLSTOY

Russia, a world strange to Western Europe, but the spirit of analysis with
which the creator of “Anna Karènina” and “War and Peace” has confronted
the modern world is more truly representative of our Age’s outlook than is
the spirit of any other of his great contemporaries. Between the days of
“Wilhelm Meister” and of “Resurrection” what an extraordinary volume of
the rushing tide of modern life has swept by! A century of that “liberation of
modern Europe from the old routine” has passed since Goethe stood forth
for “the awakening of the modern spirit.” A century of emancipation, of
Science, of unbelief, of incessant shock, change, and Progress all over the
face of Europe, and even as Goethe a hundred years ago typified the
triumph of the new intelligence of Europe over the shackles of its old

institutions, routine, and dogma (as Matthew Arnold affirms), so Tolstoy to-
day stands for the triumph of the European soul against civilisation’s
routine and dogma. The peculiar modernness of Tolstoy’s attitude, however,
as we shall presently show, is that he is inspired largely by the modern
scientific spirit in his searching analysis of modern life. Apparently at war
with Science and Progress, his extraordinary fascination for the mind of
Europe lies in the fact that he of all great contemporary writers has come
nearest to demonstrating, to realising what the life of the modern man is.
He of all the analysts of the civilised man’s thoughts, emotions, and actions
has least idealised, least beautified, and least distorted the complex daily
life of the European world. With a marked moral bias, driven onward in his
search for truth by his passionate religious temperament, Tolstoy, in his
pictures of life, has constructed a truer whole, a human world less bounded
by the artist’s individual limitations, more mysteriously living in its vast
flux and flow than is the world of any writer of the century. “War and
Peace” and “Anna Karènina,” those great worlds where the physical
environment, mental outlook, emotional aspiration, and moral code of the
whole community of Russia are reproduced by his art, as some mighty
cunning phantasmagoria of changing life, are superior in the sense of
containing a whole nation’s life, to the worlds of Goethe, Byron, Scott,
Victor Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Maupassant, or any latter day
creator we can name. And not only so, but Tolstoy’s analysis of life throws
more light on the main currents of thought in our Age, raises deeper
problems, and explores more untouched territories of the mind than does
any corresponding analysis by his European contemporaries.

THE
DEFENDANTS

“The third prisoner
was Maslova”

(From an illustration
by Pasternak
in the
English Edition of
“Resurrection,”
reproduced by
kind permission of
Mr. F. R.
Henderson)

It is by Tolstoy’s passionate seeking of the life of the soul that the

TOLSTOY AND HIS DAUGHTER TATYANA

great Russian writer towers above the men of our day, and it is because his
hunger for spiritual truth has led him to probe contemporary life, to
examine all modern formulas and appearances, to penetrate into the secret
thought and emotion of men of all grades in our complex society, that his
work is charged with the essence of nearly all that modernity thinks and
feels, believes and suffers, hopes and fears as it evolves in more and more
complex forms of our terribly complex civilisation. The soul of humanity is,
however, always the appeal of men from the life that environs, moulds, and
burdens them, to instincts that go beyond and transcend their present life.
Tolstoy is the appeal of the modern world, the cry of the modern conscience
against the blinded fate of its own progress. To the eye of science
everything is possible in human life, the sacrifice of the innocent for the
sake of the progress of the guilty,

COUNT TOLSTOY AND HIS FAMILY
(Reproduced from The Review of Reviews by kind permission of the Editor)

the crushing and deforming of the weak so that the strong may triumph over
them, the evolution of new serf classes at the dictates of a ruling class. All
this the nineteenth century has seen accomplished, and not seen alone in

Russia. It is Tolstoy’s distinction to have combined in his life-work more
than any other great artist two main conflicting points of view. He has fused
by his art the science that defines the way Humanity is forced forward
blindly and irresponsibly from century to century by the mere pressure of
events, he has fused with this science of our modern world the soul’s protest
against the earthly fate of man which leads the generations into taking the
ceaseless roads of evil which every age unwinds.
Let us cite Tolstoy’s treatment of War as an instance of how this great
artist symbolises the Age for us and so marks the advance in self-
consciousness of the modern mind, and as a nearer approximation to a
realisation of what life is. We have only got to compare Tolstoy’s
“Sebastopol” (1856) with any other document on war by other European
writers to perceive that Tolstoy alone among artists has realised war, his
fellows have idealised it. To quote a passage from a former article let us say
that “ ‘Sebastopol’ gives us war under all aspects—war as a squalid,
honourable, daily affair of mud and glory, of vanity, disease, hard work,
stupidity, patriotism, and inhuman agony. Tolstoy gets the complex effects
of ‘Sebastopol’ by keenly analysing the effect of the sights and sounds,
dangers and pleasures, of war on the brains of a variety of typical men, and
by placing a special valuation of his own on these men’s actions, thoughts,
and emotions, on their courage, altruism, and show of indifference in the
face of death. He lifts up, in fact, the veil of appearances conventionally
drawn by society over the actualities of the glorious trade of killing men,
and he does this chiefly by analysing keenly the insensitiveness and
indifference of the average mind, which says of the worst of war’s realities,
‘I felt so and so, and did so and so: but as to what those other thousands
may have felt in their agony, that I did not enter into at all. ‘Sebastopol,’
therefore, though an exceedingly short and exceedingly simple narrative, is
a psychological document on modern war of extraordinary value, for it
simply

LEO TOLSTOY, FROM A PORTRAIT PAINTED IN
1884

MASLOVA’S RETURN TO THE WARD AFTER THE
SENTENCE
“She could bear it no longer; her face quivered and she burst into
sobs” (From an illustration by Pasternak in the English Edition of
“Resurrection” reproduced by kind permission of Mr. F. R.
Henderson)

relegates to the lumber-room, as unlife-like and hopelessly limited, all those
theatrical glorifications of war which men of letters, romantic poets, and
grave historians alike have been busily piling up on humanity’s shelves
from generation to generation. And more: we feel that in ‘Sebastopol’ we
have at last the sceptical modern spirit, absorbed in actual life,
demonstrating what war is, and expressing at length the confused sensations
of countless men, who have heretofore never found a genius who can make
humanity realise what it knows half-consciously and consciously evades.
We cannot help, therefore, recognising this man Tolstoy as the most
advanced product of our civilisation, and likening him to a great surgeon,
who, not deceived by the world s presentation of its own life, penetrates
into the essential joy and suffering, health and disease of multitudes of men;
a surgeon who, face to face with the strangest of Nature’s laws in the
constitution of human society, puzzled by all the illusions, fatuities, and
conventions of the human mind, resolutely sets himself to lay bare the roots
of all its passions, appetites, and incentives in the struggle for life, so that at
least human reason may advance farther along the path of self-knowledge in
advancing towards a general sociological study of man.”

Tolstoy’s place in nineteenth-
century literature is, therefore, in our
view, no less fixed and certain than is
Voltaire’s place in the eighteenth
century. Both of these writers focus for
us in a marvellously complete manner
the respective methods of analysing life
by which the rationalism of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and the science and humanitarianism of
the nineteenth century have moulded
for us the modern world. All the
movements, all the problems, all the
speculation, all the agitations of the
world of to-day in contrast with the
immense materialistic civilisation that
science has hastily built up for us in
three or four generations, all the spirit LEO TOLSTOY, 1896.
of modern life is condensed in the (From a Photograph)
pages of Tolstoy’s writings, because, as
we have said, he typifies the soul of the modern man gazing, now
undaunted, and now in alarm, at the formidable array of the newly-tabulated
cause and effect of humanity’s progress, at the appalling cheapness and
waste of human life in Nature’s hands. Tolstoy thus stands for the modern
soul’s alarm in contact with science. And just as science’s work after its first
destruction of the past ages’ formalism, superstition, and dogma is directed
more and more to the examination and amelioration of human life, so
Tolstoy’s work has been throughout inspired by a passionate love of
humanity, and by his ceaseless struggle against conventional religion,
dogmatic science, and society’s mechanical influence on the minds of its
members. To make man more conscious of his acts, to show society its real
motives and what it is feeling, and not cry out in admiration at what it
pretends to feel—this has been the great novelist’s aim in his delineation of
Russia’s life. Ever seeking the one truth—to arrive at men’s thoughts and
sensations under the daily pressure of life—never flinching from his
exploration of the dark world of man’s animalism and incessant self-
deception, Tolstoy’s realism in art is symbolical of our absorption in the

world of fact, in the modern study of natural law, a study ultimately without
loss of spirituality, nay, resulting in immense gain to the spiritual life. The
realism of the great Russian’s novels is, therefore, more in line with the
modern tendency and outlook than is the general tendency of other schools
of Continental literature. And Tolstoy must be finally looked on, not merely
as the conscience of the Russian world revolting against the too heavy
burden which the Russian people have now to bear in Holy Russia’s onward
march towards the building-up of her great Asiatic Empire, but also as the
soul of the modern world seeking to replace in its love of humanity the life
of those old religions which science is destroying day by day. In this sense
Tolstoy will stand in European literature as the conscience of the modern
world.
Edward Garnett.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Lyeff Nikolaevitch Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana
Count on August 28th (September 9th new style), 1828. His father,
Tolstoy
Count Nicholas Tolstoy, was a member of the old Russian
see
Frontispiece nobility. In 1813, after the siege of Erfurt, he was taken
prisoner by the French and afterwards retired from the army
holding the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Having assumed the burden of
many family debts, he succeeded in paying his creditors in full, thus gaining
a reputation for unfailing perseverance. Tolstoy has described his character
in “Childhood and Youth.” “He was a man of the last century,” he wrote,
“and, like all his contemporaries, he had in him something chivalrous,
enterprising, self-possessed, amiable, a passion for pleasure.... His life was
so full of all kinds of impulse that he had no time to think about
convictions; and besides, he had been so happy all his life that he did not
feel it necessary to do so.” His father died before Tolstoy reached the age of
ten years, seven years after the death of his mother, of whom he wrote:
“When I try to recall to mind my mother as she was then, only her brown
eyes arise before me, always the same look of love and kindness in them. If
during the most trying moments of my life I could have caught a glimpse of
her smile, I should not have known what grief is.”
Tolstoy’s early years were passed in the country on the
Tolstoy in his old-fashioned Russian estate, which resembled somewhat in
Student days
patriarchal habits, aristocratic manners, democratic
see page 2
familiarity, shiftlessness, and superstition, a Southern
Plantation in the days of slavery. After the death of his father
Yasnaya in 1837 the family was taken charge of by an aunt, the
Polyana
see page 3
Countess Alexandra Osten-Saken, and three years later by
relatives of his mother who lived at Kazan. In 1843 Tolstoy
entered the University of Kazan, where “Impervious to the ambitions of
scholarship and research, unimpressed by the provincial aristocracy, too
nice to enjoy the rough revels of the students, and repelled alike from
aristocrats, professors, and students by an unsocial and what, with our
English emphasis on government, we should call an unregulated
disposition, he seems to have had during these two or three years a

thoroughly unhappy and unprofitable experience.”[1] Having left the
University in 1846 without graduating he returned to the old country home.
Yasnaya Polyana descended to Tolstoy from his mother. The estate, which
covers an area of some 2,500 acres, partly arable and partly wooded, lies a
hundred miles due south of Moscow. It was at one time Tolstoy’s intention
to dispossess himself entirely of his property and live as a peasant. Instead
of this, however, he has made over the whole of the land to his wife and
children, and lives in the house nominally as a guest.
[1] “Leo Tolstoy,” by G. H. Perris.
At the entrance to the park are two towers, medieval in
The Gateway style, which were erected by Tolstoy’s maternal grandfather.
to Yasnaya
Polyana
From them the road runs through the park, rising as it
see page 5 approaches the house, and becomes merged in a level
avenue of birch trees. Glimpses of a pond are caught through
the dense foliage and of a square smoothly rolled space used as a tennis-
ground, the game being one in which Count Tolstoy participates with great
enjoyment. It will be noticed that in the photograph on page 31 he is
holding a tennis racket in his hand.
The house itself is a plain white rectangular two-storied
The building of stuccoed brick, and it would be hard to imagine a
Approach to
the Park
simpler and less pretentious place than the home in which
see page 4 Tolstoy has spent the greater part of his life. It boasts neither
piazzas nor towers; indeed, no architectural ornaments of
any kind, nor are vines or other creepers trained upon the flat
“The Tree of
the Poor” walls to relieve their striking whiteness or soften their
see page 7 rectangular outlines. The house was not completed all at
once, but was enlarged in proportion to the needs of the
family. On one side, devoid of windows, there is a low porch, near which
stands an old elm tree, called “The Tree of the Poor.” Close to its trunk is a
bench on which the peasants sit to await the coming of Count Tolstoy. Here
he listens with unwearying patience to many stories of distress and
difficulty, and gives in return, not only sympathy and advice, but such
material assistance as may lie at his command.
It was during the period following upon his University career that
Tolstoy threw all his energies into the task of raising both the economical
and moral standard of peasant life, and suffered much disappointment at the
hands of the peasants, who refused to allow him to pull down their

dilapidated hovels even that he might erect new and convenient ones at his
own cost. The result was that Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana for St.
Petersburg in the autumn of 1847, resolved to prosecute his studies with the
intention of taking a degree in law. With this choice of a career, however, he
was dissatisfied, and returned again to his estate in 1848.
For a few years he lived the ordinary life of the Russian
Tolstoy as an nobleman, enlisting at the age of 23 as cadet in a regiment of
Officer
artillery in which his elder brother Nicholas was captain.
see page 1
Discontented with the idle life he was leading and out of
harmony with his gay surroundings, he decided to jot down his
recollections of the homeland he loved so well, and it was at this time that
he commenced writing “Childhood and Youth” (which, however, was not
published in its complete form until six years later) and “The Cossacks.”
Subsequently Tolstoy was appointed to a post on Prince Gortchakoff’s
staff in Turkey, and was present at Sevastopol in 1855, having attained the
rank of divisional commander. His experiences during the war are pictured
in his three sketches, “Sevastopol in December 1854,” “In May 1855,” and
“In August 1855.” These were published the following year and at once
made his literary reputation. At the end of the campaign he left the army
and visited Western Europe, in order to study various school systems, and
upon his return to Yasnaya Polyana he established several schools of his
own.
In September 1862 Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna
Count Behrs, the daughter of a military doctor. He was at this time
Tolstoy and
his wife
thirty-four years of age, his bride being sixteen years
see page 8 younger. Miss Behrs was not only beautiful, she was an
exceedingly cultured girl, having passed various
examinations at the Moscow University. According to her brother, the
manner of their courtship was practically identical with that of Levin and
Kitty in “Anna Karènina.” Countess Tolstoy at the age of forty-eight is
described by Sergyeenko in “How Count Tolstoy Lives and Works,” as
having “An open, expressive countenance, with vivacious, fearless eyes,
which she constantly brings near to the objects at which she is looking. At
her very first words one feels her straightforward nature. In her manner
there is not even a shadow of truckling to suit the tone of any one
whomsoever; her own individual note is always audible.”

About the time of his marriage, Tolstoy was described as “a tall, wide-
shouldered thin-waisted man, with a moustache, but without a beard, with a
serious, even a gloomy expression of face, which, however, was softened by
a gleam of kindliness whenever he smiled.”
Living at Yasnaya Polyana winter and summer, with but
Count rare intervening visits to Moscow, Tolstoy interested himself
Tolstoy at
work in the
in all the practical details of farming. Probably his own
fields experiences of the physical labour of mowing are depicted
see page 10 as those of Levin in “Anna Karènina.” “The work went on
and on. Levin absolutely lost all idea of time, and did not
know whether it was early or late. Though the sweat stood on his face, and
dropped from his nose, and all his back was wet as though he had been
plunged in water, still he felt very well. His work now seemed to him full of
pleasure. It was a state of unconsciousness: he did not know what he was
doing, or how much he was doing, or how the hours and moments were
flying, but only felt that at this time his work was good.”
Tolstoy was also an enthusiastic sportsman—a diversion which
occasioned him two serious accidents—and, in addition to fulfilling the
duties of a Justice of the Peace, he set himself to grapple with the novel
conditions of land-owning, a complicated and arduous task to which he
applied himself with characteristic energy and shrewdness. Indeed, his
interests were manifold and exacting. Yet during this busy period he by no
means neglected his literary work. The composition of his novel “War and
Peace” began immediately after his marriage, and extended over a period of
eight years. His wife copied out the manuscript of this work no less than
seven times as he altered and improved it. “War and Peace” was followed
by “Anna Karènina,” which was not completed until 1876.
In his method of working, Tolstoy may be likened to the
Facsimile of old painters. Having settled upon a plan of work, and
a portion of
Tolstoy’s MS.
collected a large number of studies, he first makes a charcoal
see page 11 sketch, as it were, and writes rapidly without thinking of
particulars. He then has a clean copy of the work made by
his wife or one of his daughters, and this is again subjected to careful
remodelling. It is still in the nature of a charcoal sketch. The MS. is
speedily covered with erasures and interpolations. Whole sentences replace
others. The work is then copied again, and some chapters Tolstoy writes
more than ten times. He usually writes on quarto sheets of cheap plain

paper in a large involved hand, and sometimes covers as many as twenty
pages in one day. He regards the interval between nine o’clock and three as
the best time for work.
His study at Yasnaya Polyana is a small room with an
Tolstoy at uncarpeted floor, a vaulted ceiling, and thick stone walls.
work in his
study at
Formerly it was a store-room, and on the ceiling are heavy
Yasnaya black iron rings, on which hams used to hang and which
Polyana were used later for gymnastic exercises. The study is very
see page 13 cool and quiet, and contains various implements of labour,
such as a scythe, a saw, pincers, tiles, etc.
After his morning labours, Tolstoy generally goes out,
Tolstoy with often riding on horseback or on his bicycle, according to the
his bicycle
state of the weather. He is strict vegetarian, eating only the
see page 6
simplest food and avoiding all stimulants. He long ago
ceased to smoke. Attaching great importance to manual labour, he takes a
share in the housework, lighting his own fire and carrying water. At one
time he learned bootmaking, and it is wonderful what an amount of physical
exertion he was able to undergo at the age of seventy in the way of heavy
labour in the field, of riding scores of versts on his bicycle, or of playing for
hours at lawn tennis.
Tolstoy has always dressed extremely simply, and when
A portrait of at home his costume consisted of a grey flannel blouse,
Tolstoy
which in summer he exchanged for a canvas one of a very
see page 16
original cut, as may be judged from the fact that there was in
the whole district only one old woman who could make it
Tolstoy in the according to his orders. In this blouse Tolstoy sat for his
grounds of
Yasnaya portrait to Kramsky and Répin, the painters. His over-dress
Polyana was composed of a caftan and half-shouba, made of the
see page 24 simplest materials, and, like the blouse, eccentric in their
cut, being made evidently not for show but to stand bad
weather. The Hon. Ernest Howard Crosby has given an interesting
description of Count Tolstoy’s appearance. “He is dressed like a peasant in
a grey-white blouse of thin, coarse, canvas-like material, with a leather belt;
but his toilet differs from a peasant’s in being scrupulously clean. His
features are irregular and plain, and yet his figure is so strong and massive
that the tout ensemble is striking and fine-looking. His little blue eyes peer
out from under his bushy eyebrows with the kindliest of expressions.”

Count and Countess Tolstoy have had fifteen children of
Count whom only seven survived. The system of their upbringing
Tolstoy and
his family
has been fully dealt with by M. C. A. Behrs in his
see page 31 “Recollections of Count Leo Tolstoy.” Toys and playthings
were rigorously banished from the nursery. With the first
child the trial was made to dispense altogether with a nurse. But later it was
thought well to yield to the requirements of their social position and to the
habits of contemporary life, and the children were put under the care of
nurses, bonnes, and governesses. The parents, however, exercised a strict
and unremittent surveillance over both the children and those who had the
care of them.
The greatest possible liberty was allowed to the children, and all put in
authority over them were strictly forbidden to have resort under any pretext
to violent or severe punishments.
Tolstoy believed that these principles were nowhere so generally
accepted as in England, and, accordingly, from their third to their ninth
year, the children were placed under the charge of young English
governesses engaged directly from London.
Countess Tolstoy is an excellent housewife, attentive and
Count hospitable. All the complicated and troublesome
Tolstoy, his
wife, and
management of the housekeeping and direction of household
daughters affairs is under her charge. She is indefatigable, and brings
see page 12 her brisk energy, thriftiness, and activity to bear in every
direction, and this she does without help. Her three eldest
sons live apart, each occupied with his own business matters. Her daughters
have their own interests and duties, which take up the greater part of their
time.
Tolstoy’s eldest daughter, Tatyana Lvovna, a girl of
Tolstoy and exceptional talent, in particular works very hard. In addition
his eldest
daughter
to copying much of her father’s manuscript, she conducts his
Tatyana vast correspondence, consisting of an almost incredible
see page 30 number of letters received in all languages from every part
of the globe.
This is probably the most striking of all the portraits of
Leo Tolstoy, Count Tolstoy, representing him when at the height of his
from a
portrait
popularity and power. In 1884 he was at work on the Popular

painted in Tales and Sketches which sold by millions throughout
1884
see page 33
Russia, and from which we reproduce two or three
illustrations—viz., one by H. R. Millar from the English
edition of “What Men Live By,” written in 1881; another by
Illustrations the same artist from the English edition of “Where Love is
by H. R.
Millar to there God is also,” and a third showing the cover of this
“What Men tract, which was written in 1885, and issued in rough
Live By”—
pamphlet form at the price of a few farthings.
see page 25
During the last twenty years Tolstoy has written the
following books:—“My Confession,” “A Criticism of
—and to
“Where Love
Dogmatic Theology,” which has never been translated, “The
is there God Four Gospels, Harmonized and Translated,” “What I
is also” Believe,” “The Gospel in Brief,” “What to Do,” “On Life”
see page 15 (also called “Life”), “The Kreutzer Sonata,” “The Kingdom
of God is Within You,” “The Christian Teaching,” “What is
Cover of Art?” which in Tolstoy’s own opinion is the best constructed
“Where Love of his books, “Resurrection,” his last novel, begun about
is there God
is also” 1894, and then laid aside in favour of what seemed more
see page 20 important work to be completely rewritten and published in
1899 for the benefit of the Doukhabors, and latterly “What is
Pasternak’s
Religion and what is Its Essence,” published in February
illustrations 1902. The illustrations reproduced from “Resurrection” on
to pages 19, 29, and 34 are from the remarkable drawings by
“Resurrection
”
Pasternak. Concerning these pictures there is an interesting
see pages 19, note in the preface of the French edition of the novel from
29 and 34 which it may be gathered that the drawings tallied very
closely with Tolstoy’s own conception of the appearance of
his characters. It was the artist’s usual custom to submit each design on its
completion to the eminent novelist for his opinion. Invariably Tolstoy
showed his approval of the clever realisation of his ideas. But when it came
to the sketch of Prince Nekhludov, Tolstoy went so far as to enquire of M.
Pasternak whether he was acquainted with the person who had served him
as a model. At this the artist showed extreme surprise—he had not even
been aware that the character was copied from an original.

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