The Great Masters of Russian Literature

Lyof Tolstoï

I

Count L. N. Tolstoï was born on the 28th of August, 1828 (O.S.), at Yasnaya Polyana, a village near Tula, in the Government of Tula. He reckons among his direct ancestors one of the best servitors of the Tsar Peter the Great, Count Piotr Tolstoï. Early left an orphan, he studied at the University of Kazan, entered successively the departments of Oriental languages and of law, got tired of both, left the university, returned to his paternal estate, and one fine day set out for the Caucasus, where his eldest brother, Nikolaï Tolstoï, was serving with the rank of captain. He quickly became an officer, took part in the guerilla warfare in Circassia, returned to be shut up in Sevastópol, underwent the siege, was greatly distinguished by his bravery, and resigned at the conclusion of peace.

Count Lyof Tolstoï’s works have not been all published in the order in which they were written. “The Cossacks,” published after the “Military Scenes,” and after “Childhood and Youth,” it seems was written, in part, during his stay in the Caucasus. The romantic portion of the work may have been thought out towards the period when the book appeared, but the impressions which fill the book are the first which the writer took pains to note down. It is well to emphasize this fact from the very first moment: in the study of Tolstoï’s works, we can make it a starting-point in our investigation of the steps traced in the evolution accomplished by his mind.

The “Military Sketches,” collected into a volume in 1856, were produced in the form of articles in the Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”). These tales bear the following subtitles: “Sevastópol in December,” “Sevastópol in May,” “The Felling of the Forest,” “The Incursion.” They paint at once the energy with which the French invasion was resisted, and the monotony of the siege, more terrible than its dangers. The book narrowly escaped remaining in the censor’s hands: this suspicious and petty critic was offended by the most beautiful pages. There is, for example, an admirable passage where the soldiers, in order to escape the irksomeness whereby they have been overcome in the long days, listen with truly infantile excitement to the reading of fairy-stories. According to the censor’s opinion, it was a bad example. The author should have depicted the soldiers as engaged in reading some serious work, capable of exerting a good influence on their moral state, on their spirit of discipline. “The attention of the army should be called only to useful literature.” Fortunately the book escaped this rolling-mill, and roused the Russian public to enthusiasm.

As regards this album of impressions noted with incomparable vivacity of observation, vigor of tone, and energy of touch, Count Lyof Tolstoï gave another example, which is like a first confession, in his “Childhood and Youth.” The material of this biography is family life brought into the exact environment which the Russian nature, when very closely observed and very poetically described, can furnish. On one side external impressions, very accurately and very powerfully retained; on the other, profound reflections upon self, and a very keen view in regard to the most secret and the least explored regions of consciousness: these are the two sides of Tolstoï’s talent; these, from the very beginning of his literary career, are the two elements which will combine to form the great novels of the writer’s maturity, “War and Peace” and “Anna Karénina.”

These masterpieces having been once finished, Tolstoï turned aside from fiction to apply himself to pedagogy. The great painter of men becomes the instructor of children; the creator of heroes undertakes the mission of popularizing the alphabet.

At the present time we see him passing through a new transformation, and from pedagogue becoming preacher. He propagates a new dogma; or, rather, he is on his way to increase the number of Russian sectaries who seek in the Gospels a solution of the social problem.

Soldier, literarian, agriculturist, popular educator, and prophet of a new religion,—Count Lyof Tolstoï has been all these in succession. But the secret of these transformations is no longer far to seek: he has explained it to us in his latest work, entitled “My Confession,” the publication of which has been forbidden in Russia by the ecclesiastical censor. The work is read in spite of the interdiction, and it makes converts; copies are hawked about; it will not be slow in following the fortunes of “My Religion:” it will be printed abroad in some sheet edited by exiles, and will be translated, doubtless, in France.

Let us find in this “Confession” the commentary on the strange existence which we have sketched only in broad lines.

Every man has, so to speak, a moral physiognomy; and this physiognomy, like the face itself, is more or less characteristic. In Count Lyof Tolstoï, this characteristic is the need of a fixed principle, of a well-established rule of conduct. This principle has changed, and more than once changed, the formula which expresses the sum of his acts, and explains them, justifies them, which becomes enlarged, transformed, entirely reversed; but what remains immutable is his attachment to some formula, his absorption in the article of faith. Count Tolstoï’s soul is, before all things, the soul of a believer.

He begins by believing in the ego. He started with a sort of Darwinian conception of the world, of the struggle of individuals, with the conflict of egoisms. For Tolstoï, the ideal at this first period of his life was individual progress. The aim of existence was to get above other individuals, and to subjugate them in some degree by his own superiority. “I tried at first to cultivate the will in me; I laid down rules which I compelled myself to follow. Physically I strove towards perfection by developing, with all sorts of exercises, my strength and my skill, and by wonting myself by privations of every sort, to be neither wearied nor disheartened by any thing.” He pitilessly analyzes the feelings which he had at this time; after the fashion of La Rochefoucauld, he tells us to what a degree he was the dupe, the victim, of self-love. Under the pretext of discovering the progress made by the ego, and of advancing it towards perfection, “I gave in, above all, to the desire of finding that I was better not in my own eyes, not even in the eyes of God, but above all, but solely, in the eyes of others, in the judgment of the world.... And even this desire to seem better to other men quickly yielded to the single desire of being stronger than all others.” All these manifestations of individual force so much esteemed by men, and called “ambition, passion for power, cupidity, pleasure, pride, wrath, vengeance,”—Tolstoï also admired them, coveted them, and finally realized them to such a degree as to rouse admiration and envy. “Just as in my life I offered homage to strength and to the beauty of strength, so in my works I most often sang all the manifestations of individual force; and yet I pretended to love truth, and boasted of it! In reality I loved only force, and when I found it without alloy of folly, I took it for truth.” We shall see in studying “The Cossacks” to what a degree Tolstoï’s first ideal, followed and realized especially during his stay in the Caucacus, is reflected in this work, which is the actual product, if not the immediate outcome, of his residence there.

At the age of twenty-six Tolstoï changes his environment: he leaves the army and the bastions of Sevastópol, and passes directly into the circles of St. Petersburg where the famous writers are gathered. He is welcomed, fêted, placed at the very first in the front rank. He changes his whole manner of existence; but he changes it in the name of a new faith, the faith in the “mission of the men of thought.” This mission consists in teaching other men. “Teaching them what? I had not the slightest idea myself. But I was paid for it in ready money. I had a magnificent table, a sumptuous dwelling. I had women, I had society, I had glory. What I taught could not help being very good.” At the end of two or three years of this existence, Tolstoï begins to doubt the infallibility of his literary faith: he applies to the settling of the question his dissolvent analysis. He bethinks himself to discuss also the moral worth of the priests of this faith, of the writers. “They were almost all immoral men; and the great majority were bad men, of no character, and in no respect less so than the boon companions of yore, of the time when my life was only a round of gayety and disorder.” A sort of misanthropy seizes Tolstoï as the result of his inquiry. A new Alceste, he hotly tears himself away from the perverse environment of literary people, and begins to hunt up and down the world for the support of a new conviction.

After having visited foreign lands, interviewed philosophers, questioned the men of “the vanguard,” Tolstoï returns to his country, persuaded that progress must be realized, not within himself, but outside of himself. He becomes farmer, judge of the peace, magistrate, instructor; he founds a pedagogical review, and starts a school. “I got upon stilts to satisfy my desire for teaching.” In spite of its simple and calm appearance, this existence let all the inward trouble, all the moral anguish, remain. “I left every thing, and I departed for the steppe. I went forth among the Bashkirs to breathe the pure air, to drink kumis, and to lead an animal life.”

On his return from his visit to the Bashkirs, Tolstoï marries. The joy of family life at first takes all his will, absorbs all his reflective powers. “For a long time his life is centred in his wife and in his children: it is entirely monopolized by the anxiety of increasing their well being.” At the end of fifteen years, he finds that he is still the dupe of selfish illusion, that this sacrifice to the greatest advantage of his family has simply turned him aside from the search after the real meaning of life. Is not his present existence, in fact, full of contradictions? Long ago he has become convinced that literary activity is vanity, and yet he continues to write. What impels him to it? “The seduction of glory, the attraction of large pecuniary remuneration.” What moral principle is there at bottom of all that? Here begins a period of perplexity, of despondency, of bitter and morbid scepticism. The two questions, “Why?” and “What is to come?” force themselves more and more upon his mind. By reason of attacking the same problem, like dots on the same bit of paper, they finally “make a huge black blot.” And Tolstoï’s scepticism goes over from theory into practice: it is nihilism in the truest sense of the word. “Before I undertake the charge of my property at Samara, the education of my son, my literary work, I must know what is the good of doing it all. As long as I could not know the reason, I could do nothing.... Well, suppose I shall come to possess ten thousand acres and three hundred head of horses, what then? Suppose I become more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakspeare, and all the writers in the world, what then? I found no reply.” At this moment of strange trouble, Tolstoï seriously considers the question of suicide.

How did he succeed in escaping the entanglement of scepticism? He takes the back track in his ideas in regard to humanity. He had long believed, “like so many other cultivated and liberal minds, that the narrow circle of savants and wealthy people to which he belonged constituted his entire world. As to the thousands of beings who had lived, or were living still, outside of him, were they not animals rather than men? I can scarcely realize to-day, so strange do I find it, that I should have fallen into such a mistake as to believe that my own life, that the life of a Solomon, that the life of a Schopenhauer, was the true or normal life, while the life of all these thousands of human beings was a mere detail of no account.” Fortunately for Tolstoï, the taste for country life, and his intercourse with the field-hands, brought him to divine, that, “if he desired to live and comprehend the meaning of life, he must find this meaning, not among those who have lost it, who long to get rid of life, but among these thousands of men who create their life and ours, and who bear the burden of both.” Having found only the leaven of doubt or negation among the men of his own society, he goes to ask the germs of faith, the elements of religion, among the poor, the simple, the ignorant, pilgrims, monks, raskolniks, peasants. In them alone he finds agreement between faith and works. “Quite contrary to the men of our sphere, who rebel against fate, and are angry at every privation, at every pain, these believers endure sickness and sorrow without any complaint, without any resistance, with that firm and calm conviction that all must be as it is, or could not be otherwise, and that all this is a blessing. The more enlightened we are, the less we comprehend the meaning of life: we see only cruel mockery in the double accident of suffering and death. With tranquillity, and more often with joy, these obscure men live, suffer, and approach death.” Seeing these simple souls so unanimous in their interpretation of existence, so obstinately bent on seeking the good by means of calm labor and patience capable of enduring any trial, Tolstoï again begins to feel love for men; and he endeavors to imitate these models. After ten years of initiation into the holy life, he reaches the most perfect renunciation. No longer to think of self, and to love others only,—that is the moral scheme which can alone reconcile us to existence, and reveal to us the good concealed under this apparent evil. The question is, therefore, not to think well, as Pascal said, but to live well. And who shall tell us what it is to live well? “The thousand who create life, and get from it all their faith.”

This expression, “create life,” must be understood in all its senses. In the moral sense, it is explained only by its contrary. What do the wise men, the Solomons, the Sakyamunis, and the Schopenhauers do? They destroy life; they present it to us as an absurdity and as an evil. The calmness with which the humble, the simple, the pariahs of society, support existence, shows the falseness of the assertions of the thinker; and that which the philosophers in their supercilious speculation claim to annihilate, the modest practice of these virtuous men re-establishes, creates in a certain degree.

Once fixed on the rock of this faith, which seemed to him unassailable, Count Tolstoï felt that it was his duty to study its dogma and formulate its credo. He wrote “My Religion.” Later we shall return to this work, in which not only the propensities of the author’s mind are revealed, but also the tendencies of a considerable part of the Russian nation. It is enough for us to note here the fundamental article of this religious law, to which Count Tolstoï assents with all his heart, like thousands, nay millions, of his compatriots: “Resist not him that is evil.” This saying of Jesus sums up for him all duties, and gives us the secret of all the virtues. We shall see in detail the applications of this principle to the conduct of individual and social life; for the present, let us content ourselves with calling the reader’s attention to the path followed by the man whom we are studying. He started with this principle,—the exclusive development of the ego. In practice, this principle led him to conflict, to violence, and to hatred. He ended with this principle,—the absolute sacrifice of the ego. In practice, this principle leads him to a life of abnegation, of gentleness, and of love.

Between these two extreme limits of his development, we have seen all the mental states through which Tolstoï has passed. These varying dispositions will be found in his literary work. It would be running systemization into the ground to desire to show the writer going through this development, side by side with the man. But it is only just to remark to what a degree Tolstoï’s earlier writings, his “Kazaki,” for example, express his first ideal, that of the epoch in which he was taken up exclusively with force, and when he worshipped it in himself, giving it the name of truth. Later on in “Anna Karénina,” one of his favorite characters, Levin, will closely resemble Tolstoï changed into a farmer, and already, in his drawing towards the rural populace, advancing towards the abandonment of all egotism, towards the spirit of sacrifice, towards that simplicity of virtue personified by the peasant Feódor in the story of “Anna Karénina,” and the soldier Platon Karataïef in “War and Peace.”

II

Count Tolstoï’s literary life is divided very sharply into three periods; or, if the expression be preferred, his powerful talent, original from the very first, has passed through three phases. He began by writing works which are mainly the working up of reminiscences or illustrations of personal impressions. In the “War Sketches,” in “Childhood and Youth,” in “The Cossacks,” the writer confines himself to narration. Of these three writings, the one that best shows Tolstoï’s talent in the first part of his career is the romance entitled “Kazaki,” which, to use Turgénief’s words, is “an incomparable picture of men and things in the Caucasus.” In a detailed analysis of this masterpiece, we shall find the definition of Tolstoï’s manner at the time of his forceful youth.

The second period is that of ripe age; it is filled by the two great novels “War and Peace,” and “Anna Karénina.” The writer’s manner has singularly broadened; even the dimensions of the frame-work of the fiction have taken an almost exaggerated aspect. “War and Peace” makes not less than eighteen hundred pages. “Anna Karénina” appeared in the “Russki Vyestnik,” not in the course of months, but of years. It is true that between two parts of the work the author stopped, as though he had lost interest in its publication. But the public did not lose its interest by waiting; and when, after more than half a year, the narrator resumed the broken thread of his story, his readers found themselves, as it were, dazzled by the return of the brilliant characters of the romance, after this long and dismal eclipse.

In the novels of this second period, argument forces its way in under cover of fiction. Thus, in “Anna Karénina,” which is the story of an adultery, Tolstoï has not only tried to present us with a very accurate picture of aristocratic customs in Russia; he has not only wished to show as the centre and powerful fascination in this series of pictures, the very subtle, very penetrating, very accurate study of a soul wounded by love, the wound of which becomes more and more painful under the effect of the friction and worriments following her first fault: but he has also wished to attack, to settle in his own way, a problem in the social order; he wished to express his opinion about marriage, about separation, about divorce, about celibacy, about unions freely agreed upon and religiously maintained.

“War and Peace,” likewise, is a sort of semi-military, semi-domestic epos; or, if you like, it is a broad study of Russian life, and especially of aristocratic life, whether in the camps, whether in the parlors, whether in the residences of the proprietors during the first quarter of this century, and more especially at the time of the invasion. But within this ample scope the author expresses his theories on military art, his private opinions on the state of war and on the state of peace, his philosophic doctrine of destiny, or his religious fatalism. Some of the characters in “War and Peace” seem at certain times to give a prophetic hint of the dogma which Count Tolstoï will adopt a little later. In Pierre Bezukhof are seen the aspirations towards the ideal which the author of “My Religion” will soon be preaching to men.

If his teaching at this time encroaches on the romance, still it understood how to use marvellously well that vehicle for dissemination wherever the Russian language is spoken; and we shall see, in analyzing them, that the two works of Tolstoï’s second manner show a power and a brilliancy that are truly Shaksperian. But the mysticism, traces of which are found in these works, will develop in their author to such a degree as to make him look upon a novel as an object of scandal, as a “flood of oil thrown on the fire of erotic sensuality.” He will therefore renounce the inventions of romance; he will sacrifice fiction, which now he calls “licentious;” he will not take up the pen, except to perform the work of a doctor or an evangelist; he will write “My Confession,” “My Religion,” the “Commentary on the Gospels.” Of these three works which illustrate Count Lyof Tolstoï’s third manner, the reader will be interested especially in knowing about the first two. He will even find that we have already said enough about “My Confession,” and he will take it kindly if we reserve merely “My Religion” for analysis. In return, he will allow us to dwell upon it, and to speak of it entirely at our ease.

Before entering upon the study of “The Cossacks,” it will not be idle to run quickly over a little story which might serve in place of an introduction to a translation of this romance. This story, consisting of only a few pages, is entitled “Recollections of a Scorer.”47 It is the story of a rich young man, who, having full control of his fortune, is led by laziness in a short time to degradation and ruin. Nekliudof falls into the society of debauchees and professional gamblers. They pluck him, and ruin him. At his first appearance in this society, he has a feeble nature, but not vulgar. He had some honor: disgusted by the lowness of one of the gamblers, he demands reparation, calls him a coward when he refuses to fight, and compels him to leave the club forever. He had a sense of shame: on the day following a most debasing night, when he had been made intoxicated and initiated into all the depths of debauchery, he bursts into tears, declaring that he will never forgive either himself or his companions in the orgie. Passion for gambling keeps him bound to them; he sinks so low that soon he plays, not only with his habitual partners, but with the servant who fills the functions of scorer. One by one he descends all the steps of a sickening and abject degradation. He is ruined, and disappears.48

He returns one fine day, enters the club, asks for writing materials, and, having finished his letter, summons the scorer: “I would like to try one more game with you.” He gains. “Haven’t I learned to play well? Hey?”—“Very well.”—“Now go and order my carriage.” “He started to walk up and down the room. Not suspecting any thing, I went down to call his carriage; but there was no carriage there. I went up-stairs again; and, as I approached the billiard-room, I thought I heard a slight noise, like a knock with a cue. I went in. I noticed a strange smell. I looked around: what did I see? He was stretched out on the floor, bathed in his own blood... a pistol near him. I was so terror-struck that I could not make a sound. He gave a few signs of life; he stretched out his legs, gave the death-rattle, and all was over.”

If this young Russian had possessed a stronger nature or less enfeebled elasticity, he would have done like Olénin, the hero of “The Cossacks,” or like Tolstoï, who is himself represented under that name. He would have torn himself from his habits; he would have started for the Far East: he would have been certain to find there enough new impressions to refresh his weary brain; enough manly occupations or vivifying pleasures to strengthen his nerves, and build up his muscles; enough perils and accidents or proofs of every kind to regenerate his soul, purify it from the tares of vice, and again raise the wheat of more than one virtue.

Tolstoï was not the first of these superficially blasé emigrants who went off to Asia to find a powerful diversion from irksomeness, from the disgust of an idle and disorderly existence. Pushkin had pointed out the road for him; and the author of “The Gypsies” had himself followed the traces already marked through the desert by the britchka which carried Griboyédof, and the ox-cart which brought him back.49

“On the high river bank,” says Pushkin, “I saw before me the fortress of Herhera. Three torrents, with roar and foam, come tumbling down the banks. I had just crossed the river. Two oxen, hitched to an arba, were climbing the steep road. A few Georgians accompanied the arba. ‘Where from?’ I asked them. ‘From Teheran.’—‘What are you carrying?’—‘Griboyéd.’ It was the body of the assassinated Griboyédof, which they were taking back to Tiflis.”

More fortunate than Griboyédof, Tolstoï will come back alive, and, like Pushkin, will be able to describe this adventurous existence; but he will describe it without embellishments, above all without exalting it. He will let the people whom he finds there, and whom he studies entirely at his leisure, appear in all the bold relief of their natures. He will not take away the strange grace and the perfume of the wildflower from this nature in which he feels a voluptuous delight.

The evolution of the romance is rapid and fascinating. We are at Moscow. The night is done. The busy city is waking little by little. The indolent youth are finishing their evenings. At the Hotel Chevallier a light, the presence of which is against the rules, filters through the blinds. A carriage, sledges, and a travelling troïka, are before the door, near which the porter, muffled in his shuba, and a grumbling lackey with pale, drawn features, are waiting.

In the dining-room three young men are finishing a farewell supper. One of them, in short shuba, strides up and down the room, cracking almonds in his strong, thick, but well-cared-for hands. At first glance we feel moved by sympathy for him: there is such an expression of life in his smile, in his heated cheeks, in his brilliant eyes, in his fiery gestures, and in his animated voice. He is off for the Caucasus, in the capacity of yunker.50

Olénin found himself, without family and without curb, at the head of a great fortune, which at twenty-four he has already half wasted. The dominant trait of his character is scorn for all authority. Yet he remains capable of every impulse, even of the most generous. He has experimented with social relations, with service of the State, with farming occupations, with music, with love. He feels that he is blasé, but he believes that he is capable of beginning life anew. He is not one of those men “who, born for the bridle, put it on once, and never take it off till the day of their death.” He has the spirit and the vivacity which impel him to pick up and cast far from him all the weight of servitude.

After having followed a whole net-work of unknown and obscure streets, after having felt a softening of the heart during this drive, not about his friends, not about his mistresses, but about himself, as though his tears were homage rendered to all that he felt that was still good and beautiful and strong and hopeful in him, Olénin suddenly finds himself before the wide, snow-bound plain. He turns his mind to the past. He thinks about his farming, about his debts, about his follies; and he comes to the conclusion that he is, “in spite of all, a very, very clever young man.” Having made the first relay, he endeavors to bring about equilibrium in his budget, so as to pay up his creditors in the briefest possible time; and, his conscience being now eased, he falls asleep. He dreams of Circassian beauties, of battles, of glory, of passionate love, of some wild beauty tamed, civilized, and freed by his hand. His tailor Capelli, whom he owes nearly seven hundred rubles, comes across this gilded dream, which is rudely interrupted by the second relay. His journey is broken or filled only by these halts, by tea served at the station, by watching the rumps of the horses, by a few words with his valet Vanya, by a certain number of indefinite dreams, and, most of all, by the nights of sound sleep, such as is granted to youth alone.

According as Olénin advances towards the Caucasus, calm takes possession of his soul. The evidences of civilization which he sees on the route are a trial to him. At Stavropol he is disagreeably impressed to find fashionable attire, cabs, and round hats. But as soon as he is beyond the city the country assumes and retains a wild and warlike character. In the territory of the Don the air becomes already so mild that he has to ride without his furs. Nothing is so delightful as this unexpected spring. But here is something better: danger begins. At any moment they may be attacked by bandits. Then the mountains rise on the horizon. The first impression, at twilight, and from the distance, and through the clouds, is disappointing; but the next morning at early dawn, in the clearness of the sky, they take a new and superb aspect. “From this moment, all that he saw, all that he thought, all that he felt, took on the new and sternly majestic character of the mountains. All his recollections of Moscow, his shame and his regret, all his idle dreams about the Caucasus, departed, never to return.”

It is on the banks of the Terek that Olénin is going to dwell, to struggle, to love, to hate,—in a word, to live,—for a number of seasons. It is this river, therefore, that Tolstoï begins to describe for us, with its heaps of grayish sand, and its border of reeds on the right bank, with its low, steep left bank, gullied and crowned with oaks or “rotten plane-trees.” On the right are the villages of the Tcherkes, on the left the stanitsas (stations) of the Kazaki. “In old times the majority of these stanitsas were on the very bank; but the Terek, moving annually north of the mountain, has washed them away, and now only the traces can be seen of thickly-overgrown ancient ruins, abandoned gardens, pear-trees, lindens, and poplars, woven together with mulberries and wild vines. No one dwells there now; and on the sand only the tracks of stags, wolves, hares, and pheasants, which love these places, can be seen.”

A delicious impression of buoyant air and joyous light fills Olénin’s heart as soon as he sets foot in the Novomlinskaïa stanitsa, in the midst of the Kazak tribe of Grebna. His arrival in the clear twilight, when the whitish mass of the mountains stood out distinctly against the brilliant rays of the setting sun, is described with a vivacity of coloring which deliciously translates emotions never to be forgotten. “Young girls in tucked-up petticoats, with switches in their hands, ran, merrily chattering, to meet the cattle hurrying home in a cloud of dust and gnats from the steppe. The satiated cows and buffaloes scatter through the streets, followed by the Kazak children in their variegated Tatar tunics. Their loud conversation, merry bursts of laughter, and shouts are commingled with the lowing of the cattle. Here an armed Kazak on horseback, having leave of absence from his outpost, rides up to a cottage, and, leaning down from his horse, raps at the window; and in a moment the pretty young head of the Kazak girl appears, and one hears their gay, affectionate talk. Here comes a ragged, high-cheeked Nogai laborer back with reeds from the steppe. He turns his creaking arba into the captain’s broad, clean dvor, and throws off the yokes from the shaking heads of the oxen, and talks in Tatar with the esaul. Around the puddle which fills nearly the whole street, and by which people, all these years, have forced their way, crowding against the fence, a bare-legged Kazak girl is picking her way, bending under a bundle of fagots, and lifting her skirt high above her white ankles; and a Kazak horseman, returning from the chase, laughingly shouts out, ‘Lift it higher, wench!’ and he aims at her. The Kazak girl drops her skirt, throws down her wood. An old Kazak, with turned-up trousers and bare gray breast, on his way home from fishing, carries his silvery fish, still flopping in the net, and, in order to take a shorter path, crawls through his neighbor’s broken hedge, and tears a rent in his coat on the thorns. Here comes an old woman dragging a dry branch, and the blows of an axe are heard around the corner. Kazak children shout as they whip their tops wherever there are level places in the streets; women crawl through the fences so as to save going round. The pungent smoke of burning dung rises from all the chimneys. In every dvor is heard the sound of the increased bustle that precedes the silence of the night.”

Amid these new faces, there is one whom Olénin catches a glimpse of the very first thing: it is the girl to whom he is going to lose his heart. How she comes upon the scene, this wild young maiden, with her noble features, her statuesque form, her gloomy and burning eyes, with her red lips, her golden complexion, her supple and nervous muscles, her turbulent blood, her savage heart! She comes in with her cattle, which break their way through the open wicket, following a huge buffalo-cow driven wild by the gnats of the steppe. “Marianka’s face is half concealed by a kerchief tied round her head: she wears a pink shirt, and a green beshmet, or petticoat.” She hides under the pent-house of the dvor; and her voice is heard as she gently wheedles the buffalo-cow, which she is about to milk: “Now stand still! Here now! Come now, mátushka!” How could Olénin escape the impression of “the tall and stately figure,... her strong and virginal form, outlined by the thin calico shirt,” of those beautiful black eyes, which at first will shun him, but which later will gaze at him “with childish fright and savage curiosity.” Love will be born all the more easily from the fact that Marianka is the daughter of the people with whom Olénin is quartered, and that he will find her in his path at every step.

But this feeling is not destined to be met with return. If Marianka is Olénin’s ideal of maidenly beauty, this civilized Russian cannot arouse in the young girl’s heart any feeling of admiration, and, in consequence, no love. He is not ill-favored, or a weakling, or foolish, stupid, or cowardly; but he has not the triumphant beauty, or the marvellous vigor, or the ever-watchful shrewdness, or the pitiless courage, of the young Kazak, Lukashka. What woman would not love the latter? He is so tall and so well shaped; he wears his soldier’s rig so proudly, his torn kaftan, his woollen cap knocked in behind; he has such elegant weapons, and such unrivalled skill in the use of them! There is nothing sweet, nothing tender about him; but the ardor and the life of all the passions show on his face, with its black brows, with its falcon eyes, with teeth of dazzling whiteness. He appears to us for the first time at the Kazak post, near the Terek. His great hands are laying snares and traps for the pheasants, and he is whistling. His comrade (Nazarka), brings him a live pheasant, not daring to kill it. “‘Give it here!’ Lukashka took a small knife from under his dagger, and quickly cut the pheasant’s throat. The bird struggled, but did not have time to spread its wings before its bleeding head bent over and fell.”

Whatever character Tolstoï gave these young figures of Marianka and Lukashka, he does not find that they express all that ideal of strength and power with which at this time infatuated. Accordingly he calls up the image of a more striking savagery, in the person of the old Yeroshka, the colossal huntsman with his voice of thunder, his animal habits, his ogre-like appetites, and his childlike character. “Over his shoulders was thrown a ragged woven zipún, and his feet were shod in buck-skin porshni, or sandals, fastened by cords, which were twisted about his legs. On his head was a rumpled white fur cap. On his back, over one shoulder, he carried a kobuilka [an instrument to catch pheasants], and a sack with pullets and dried meat, to bring back the falcon; over the other shoulder a dead wild-cat was swinging by a strap; behind him, fastened to his belt, were a bag containing bullets, powder, and bread, a horse-tail for keeping off the gnats, a big dagger in a torn sheath, stained with blood, and two dead pheasants. This giant has, for distinctive traits, the discreet and silent way in which he walks in his soft sandals, and the odor which he exhales, “a strong, but not unpleasant odor mingled of fresh wine, of vodka, of powder, and of dried blood.” He has an inexhaustible fund of anecdotes, about his past life, his hunting, his exploits, his horse-thefts. Yet he is only a child, compared to what his father was, who carried on his back a four-hundred-pound wild boar, and drank at a draught two buckets of vodka. He likes to repeat this saw of a Western man, whom he knew: “We shall all die, the grass will grow on our grave, and that is all.” He is stout and hearty for his seventy years, although a witch had ruined him a little with her spell. On the chase, in the woods, he does not cease to whisper, God knows what mysterious monologue. When he returns, if he finds some host at whose table he can sit, and if he can only have wine furnished according to the measure of his thirst, he gets drunk, until he falls stiff on the floor. Hunting scenes, scenes of love, scenes of ambuscade or of combat, go to make up almost exclusively the matter of all this work. But all these scenes are so variously true, and so profoundly the result of experience, that the romantic thread designed to connect them seems almost needless. What reader, however, would have the courage to disengage it? I should like, for my part, to give by way of analysis, and by short quotations, an idea of the most powerful scenes here pictured. I will present them in the order in which they come.

Here we are in ambush, on the banks of the river: “They were hourly expecting the Abreks—as the hostile Tchetchens were called—to cross and attack them, from the Tatar side, especially during the month of May, when the woods along the Terek are so dense, that a man on foot has difficulty in breaking through, and when the river is so low that it can in many places be forded.” The Kazak Lukashka is gazing at the sky, with its flashing of heat lightning. He spreads down his kaftan at the foot of the reeds. “Occasionally the reeds, without any apparent reason, would all begin to wave and to whisper to each other. From below, the waving feathers of the sedge looked like the downy branches of trees, against the bright background of the sky.” He listens to all the noises of the night, the murmur of the reeds, the snoring of the three Kazaks who have come with him to keep his secret guard, the buzzing of the gnats, and the rippling of the water, from time to time a far-off shot, the fall of a part of the bank washed away, the splash of some big fish, the crashing of the underbrush as some animal forced its way through. “Once an owl, slowly flapping its wings, flew down the Terek; over the heads of the Kazaks, it turned and flew towards the forest, with faster flapping wings, and then fluttering settled down in the branches of an old tchinar (plane tree). At every such unusual sound the young Kazak pricked up his ears eagerly, snapped his eyes, and slowly examined his gun.”

Suddenly (it is now almost daybreak) a log with a dry branch floating in the river attracts his attention. He immediately notices that the log, instead of going according to the will of the current, and floating down stream, is crossing the river. Here follows several minutes of strange excitement: the whole inner drama which is enacting in this young savage’s soul is expressed with so much truth and force, that you come to follow with him the voice of the ferocious instinct which controls him. He puts his gun to his shoulder and waits, while his heart is violently beating at the thought that he may miss his human game; finally he draws a long breath and shoots, muttering, according to the Kazak custom, the “In the name of the Father and the Son.” The tree trunk, rocking and rolling over and over, swiftly floats down the stream, freed from the weight which it carried.

And when the Kazaks come hurrying down, both on foot and on horseback (the first thing, in case of a surprise, was to send for re-enforcements), what a scene is that where the lucky marksman plunges into the water to go and bring his fish from the sandbank, and flings the corpse on the bank “like a carp”! What barbarous coloring in the exclamations of the spectators! “How yellow he is!” says one. “He was evidently one of their best jigits,” says Lukashka: “his beard is dyed and trimmed.” While they are on the spot, the chief claims the jigit’s gun, one Kazak buys the kaftan for a ruble, another promises two gallons of vodka for the dagger.

But the marvellous fragment of this broad, animated, boldly lighted canvas is this group, this contrast between the living man triumphant in his nakedness, and the corpse lying on the ground, naked also, but rigid and terrible to see under the strange coloration and the disconcerting expression of death. “The cinnamon colored body, with nothing on but wet, dark-blue cotton drawers, girdled tightly about the fallen belly, was handsome and well built; the muscular arms lay stiffly along the sides; the livid, freshly shaven round head, with the clotted wound on one side, was thrown back; the smooth sunburned forehead made a sharp contrast with the shaven head; the glassy eyes were still open, showing their pupils, and seemed to look up beyond them all; a good-natured and shrewd smile seemed to hover on the thin and half-open lips under the reddish, half-cut mustache. The small bony hands were covered with hair; the fingers were clinched, and the nails had a red tinge. Lukashka was not yet dressed; he was still wet; his neck was redder, and his eyes were brighter, than usual; his broad cheeks trembled; and from his white and healthy body there seemed to rise into the cool morning air a visible vapor.”

As a reward for this expedition, the Kazaks who took part in it are permitted to go and spend the day at the village. The victorious Lukashka steps up to Marianka with the same feeling of faith in his strength and in his skill as he had had the evening before while lying in wait for the enemy. He asks her for some of the sunflower seeds which she has; she offers him her apron. He comes close to her, and whispers a request of her: she replies, “I shall not go! I have said so.” He follows her by the house, and there he urges her to love him. She laughs, and sends him off to his married mistress. He cries, “Suppose I have a sweetheart, the Devil take her.” She does not reply, but breaks the switch which she has in her hands. At last, “I will marry certainly, but don’t expect me to commit any follies for you, never!” He tenderly woos her. She leans against him, kisses him on the lips, calls him a sweet name, and, after pressing him warmly to her, suddenly tears herself from his arms and runs away. “You will marry,” he says to himself, “but the only thing that I want is that you love me!” He went off to find Nazarka at Yamka’s; “and, after drinking a while with him, he went to Duniashka’s, where he spent the night.”

In this struggle for existence, and in this battle for the possession of the beauty whom both love, why should not Olénin be worsted by Lukashka? The principal obstacle to the triumph of the son of civilization comes from I his intellectual advantages and from his moral perfection. Do the best he can, he can never get rid of all his prejudices. He will be able only to approach that barbaric ideal which his rival without effort realizes by his natural gifts. In Marianka’s eyes he could have only borrowed virtues, only the graces of a plagiarist.

Olénin cannot change his nature by changing his habits; still more he cannot succeed by formulating a theory of life, in conforming to it in all respects the practical facts of existence. The contradictions which result from this conflict between the past and the present, between long-settled ideas and present convictions, is strongly brought out by Tolstoï in many passages in the novel. Here is one example: The first time that the young Russian goes alone pheasant-hunting, he gets tired, and lies down on the ground in the midst of the forest. Myriads of gnats settle down upon him. The torment of it nettles him, discourages him. He is on the point of retracing his steps; an effort of the will keeps him where he is. Finally the feeling of pain is diminished, and at length it seems to him almost agreeable. “It even seemed to him that if this atmosphere of gnats surrounding him on all sides, this paste of gnats which rolled up under his hand when he wiped his sweaty face, and this itching over his whole body were missing, the forest would have lost for him its wild character and its charm.”

From this reflection he passes to others; and, lying “in the old stag’s bed,” he thinks about his whole surrounding,—the trees, the wild vine, the frightened pheasants, the complaining jackals, the gnats buzzing and dancing amid the leaves. “About me, flying among the leaves, which seem to them immense islands, the gnats are dancing in the air and humming,—one, two, three, four, a hundred, a thousand, a million gnats; and all these, for some reason or other, are buzzing around me, and each one of them is just as much a separate existence from all the rest as I am.” It began to seem clear to him what the gnats said in their humming. “Here, here, children, here is some one to eat,” they sing, and settle down upon him. And now this taught him that he was not a Russian nobleman, a person in Moscow society, a friend or a relative to this and that person. It came to him that he was just a mere gnat, a mere pheasant, a mere stag, like those around him. The conclusion which he draws from this is quite different from what would be expected. Instead of saying, “Let us struggle like these beings, and like them let us live to triumph, or let us triumph to live,” Olénin throws himself down on his knees, and beseeches God to let him live to accomplish some great deed of devotion; for “happiness,” he says, “consists in living for others.”

What did Tolstoï mean to insinuate? That Olénin was illogical, or that he lacked sincerity? It will be enough for him to find himself in Marianka’s presence to forget his vow, and to sacrifice his morals to his instincts.

How much happier the Kazak Lukashka is in having only instincts, and in not entangling them, in not fastening them down in this bird-lime of moral considerations! This is what Tolstoï seems to have wished to be understood in a marvellous scene, an analysis of which cannot give either the bold design or the sombre coloring or the proportions worthy of an epos. It is the wholly Homeric parley about the ransom of the corpse. The brother of the dead man and his murderer are face to face: the former tall, stalwart, with reddish trimmed beard, with an air of royalty under his ragged kaftan, honoring no one with a glance, not even looking at the corpse, and sitting on his crossed legs, with a short pipe in his mouth, doing nothing except occasionally giving an order in a guttural voice to his companion the interpreter; the latter with difficulty restraining the exultation into which he is thrown by the promise which has just been made of giving him the cross, and, in spite of his face reddened with pleasure, striving to preserve an impassive attitude, and whittling a stick of wood, out of which he will make a ramrod.

The Tchetchenets has merely asked, as he takes his departure, where the murderer is; and the interpreter points out Lukashka. “The Tchetchenets looked at him for a moment, and then, slowly turning away, fixed his eyes on the other bank. His eyes expressed, not hatred, but cold disdain.” They get into the boat; they rapidly push through the stream. Horsemen are waiting for them; they put the dead body across a saddle on a horse, which shies. Lukashka is told what a curt threat the Tchetchenets made as he went away. “You have killed us, but we will crush you.” Lukashka bursts out laughing. “Why do you laugh?” asked Olénin. “If they had killed your brother, would you be glad?” The Kazak looked at Olénin, and laughed. He seemed to have comprehended his idea, but he was above all prejudice. “Well, now, mayn’t that happen? Isn’t this necessary? Haven’t they sometimes killed some of our men?”

The time passes. Instead of drinking, of playing cards, of flirting with the Kazak women, of all the time calculating his chances of promotion, like the majority of the Russian yunkers in the Caucasus, Olénin plunges into the solitudes of the woods, and gathers indelible impressions. His love for Marianka has imperceptibly developed until it presents all the phenomena of a genuine passion. He has even blurted out a few hints of his affection, which a strange timidity or a scruple of candor keeps him from putting into more direct form; but at night he comes to the door of the room where the young girl is sleeping, in order to listen to her breathing.51 What shall he do? To take her for his mistress would be “horrible; it would be murder.” To marry her would be worse.

“Ah! if I could become a Kazak like Lukashka, could steal horses, could drink tchikhir wine, could sing songs, shoot people, creep under her window at night when drunk, without any thought of what I am, or why I exist, that would be another matter. Then we might understand each other; then I might be happy.... What is the most terrible and the most delightful thing in my position is the feeling that I understand her, and that she will never understand me. It is not because she is below me that she does not understand me: no, she could not possibly understand me. She is happy. She, like nature itself, is beautiful, calm, and absolutely self-contained.” What is to be done, then? Give her up? Sacrifice himself? What folly! Live for others? Why? It is the fate of men to love only the ego; that is to say, in this case, to conquer Marianka, “and live her life.” Olénin then makes himself drunk like a Kazak; and, in the madness of intoxication, he offers to marry the young girl. She perceives clearly that that is only the wine that speaks: she drives the wooer away, and escapes him.

Yet she feels somewhat moved in consequence of this offer; and on the day of the stanitsa festival she is rude to Lukashka, though she has already become his acknowledged “bride.” But a tragic event is about to bring forth abundantly the feeling which fills this young soul to overflowing. All Marianka’s deep love for Lukashka will suddenly gleam out with unexpected brilliancy, like the gloomy sheet of the Terek in the flashes of the storm.

The Kazaks have started out on an expedition against the Abreks. Olénin follows the band which is directed, but not commanded, by Lukashka. The engagement takes place. The Abreks are sitting in a swamp at the foot of a hillock of sand. The Kazaks approach them behind a cart loaded with hay. At first they do not reply to the enemy’s shots. They wait till they are within five paces from the Abreks, then they rush upon them. Olénin joins them. “Horror came over his eyes. He did not see any thing distinctly, but perceived that all was over. Lukashka, white as a sheet, had caught a wounded Tchetchenets, and was crying, ‘Do not kill him. I will take him alive.’ The Tchetchenets was the red-bearded Abrek, the brother of the one whom he had killed, he who had come to ransom his body. Lukashka was twisting his arms. Suddenly the Tchetchenets tore himself away, and his pistol went off. Lukashka fell. Blood showed on his abdomen. He leaped to his feet, but fell back again, swearing in Russian and Tatar. Still more blood appeared on him and under him. The Kazaks hurried up to him, and began to loosen his belt. One of them—it was Nazarka—for some time before coming to him could not sheathe his shashka. The blade of the shashka was covered with blood.”

“When Olénin came back to Marianka, and wanted to speak of his love for her, he found her grieving. She looked at him silently and defiantly.

“Olénin said, ‘Mariana, I have come.’...

“‘Stop,’ she said. Her face did not change in the least, but the tears poured from her eyes.

“‘What is the matter? What are you crying for?’

“‘Why?’ she repeated in a hoarse, deep voice. ‘They have been killing Kazaks, and that’s what the matter is!’

“‘Lukashka?’ asked Olénin.

“‘Go away. I don’t want to see you.’

“‘Mariana,’ said Olénin, coming nearer to her.

“‘You will never get any thing from me!”

“‘Mariana, don’t say so!’

“‘Go away, you hateful man!’ cried the young girl, stamping angrily, and starting towards him with a threatening gesture. Such anger, scorn, hatred, were expressed in her face that Olénin instantly saw that he had nothing more to hope for.”

He therefore goes away. The scene of his farewell with the old uncle Yeroshka has that exquisite pathos where smiles are mingled with tears. As a friendly gift at this solemn moment of separation, the old Kazak gives the young Russian some advice which will save his life in battles. He casts ridicule on the customs of the orthodox soldiers. “When you have to go into battle, or everywhere,—I am an old wolf, you see, who has seen every thing,—when they fire at you, don’t go into a crowd where there are many men. You see, when your fellows are a bit afraid, they all crowd together; and though it’s more sociable in a crowd, it is more dangerous, because a crowd gives a good mark.... I say sometimes, when I look at your soldiers, “I wonder at ’em. How stupid! They go straight on, all in a mass; and, what is worse, they wear red. How can they help getting killed?” And he breaks into tears as he kisses this young, “ever-wandering fool;” but he manages to extort from him a gun, to keep as a remembrance of him.

“Olénin looked round. Dyadya Yeroshka and Marianka were talking, evidently about their own affairs; and neither the old Kazak nor the young girl were looking at him.” (With these simple but pathetic words, the story ends.)

III

An analysis mingled with characteristic quotations might be able to give some slight idea of the romance “Kazaki,” might give the reader a hint of its interest, its color, and its flavor of originality. An analysis of “War and Peace” can have no other aim, no other pretension, than to point out Tolstoï’s design in this colossal work, and separate the moralist’s tendencies from the story itself, which every one will want to read, and read again, in detail.

In “War and Peace,” amid a multitude of thoroughly interesting figures, there are three heroes who in some measure occupy the foreground, and who stand out clearly against a background of great variety, carefully studied, and peopled with living beings. These three characters are Andréi Bolkonsky, Nikolaï Rostof, and Pierre Bezúkhof. The last mentioned is not at first glance the one who is most attractive in outward appearances; but it is the one whose moral nature is most curious, the one in whom the author has expressed his own inmost views, the one who, in his eyes, best illustrates the striking faults and the fundamental virtues of a Russian nature. Bezúkhof’s qualities are exactly those of the men of the Slav race: he is good, gentle, loyal, compassionate; his faults are indolence, apathy, fickleness in his tastes, incapability of following a given course, inaptitude in realizing his own volitions.

Thus after having given his word not to attend a soirée at Prince Anatol Kuragin’s, Pierre Bezúkhof goes there, becomes intoxicated, then with the aid of another gay spirit, Dolokhof, fastens a police-agent to the back of a tame young bear, and throws them both into the river. Dolokhof is degraded; Pierre escapes with a few months’ exile from the capital. In the same way Bezúkhof is perfectly convinced that Elen Kurágina’s beauty and the dazzling whiteness of her shoulders do not hinder her from being dangerous on account of her coquetry; he has heard mysterious rumors concerning her equivocal relations with his brother, the last of the debauchees; he is perfectly convinced that it would be foolish to the last degree to marry this admirable character, and that the best way of not committing this folly is to give up seeing her charming face, her seductive snowy complexion. Unhappily for him, her marble shoulders, neck, and bosom, one evening, came close to his poor near-sighted eyes, and all “is so near to his lips that he had scarcely to bend a hair’s breadth to impress them upon it.” Pierre Bezúkhof does not depart more: he allows himself to be married, partly through infatuation, partly through feebleness.

The marriage almost from the very first turns out ill. The rake Dolokhof has returned, and never leaves Bezúkhof’s house. Pierre long puts up with a situation, the meaning of which he does not suspect: the inevitable anonymous letter comes to open his eyes. At first he refuses to believe what he has been told; but at the club where he meets Dolokhof, it is sufficient for him to find himself face to face with his wife’s lover, for his jealousy to burst forth with a flash like a discharge of electricity. The first pretext gives Pierre cause for a quarrel, and a duel follows. Dolokhof is a crack marksman: he has no sort of feebleness. Pierre Bezúkhof is near-sighted, awkward: he has never fired a pistol in his life. But, as if by judgment of God, it is Dolokhof who falls.

Returning home, Pierre Bezúkhof tries vainly to sleep, so as to forget all that has just passed. He cannot close his eyes. “He got up, and began to pace up and down the room with uneven steps. Now he thought of the early days of their marriage, of her beautiful shoulders, of her languishing, passionate gaze; now he pictured Dolokhof standing by her, handsome, impudent, with his diabolic smile, just as he had seen him at the club dinner; now he saw him pale, shivering, vanquished, and sinking on the snow.

“‘And, after all, I have killed her lover,’ he said to himself; ‘yes, my wife’s lover! How could that be?’ ‘It happened because you married her,’ said an inward voice. ‘But in what respect am I to blame?’—‘You are to blame because you married her without loving her,’ continued the voice; ’you deceived her, since you willingly blinded yourself.’ At this instant, the moment when he said with so much difficulty, ‘I love you,’ came back to his memory. ‘Yes, there was the trouble. I felt then that I had not the right to say it.’”

If any one wishes to be assured of the passage which I have just quoted, he must open “My Religion,” and there read the commentary on adultery, and the condemnation of divorce according to the books of Matthew (xix.), Mark (x.), Luke (xvi.), and Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians. According to Tolstoï, marriage is indissoluble. Nothing, not even a wife’s unfaithfulness, authorizes a man to repudiate her; and, if he puts her away, he cannot marry another without himself committing the crime of adultery. We shall see this theory more clearly brought out in the romance of “Anna Karénina;” but even here Tolstoï makes his hero Bezúkhof conform to it. He will not allow him to claim the hand of another woman until the day when Elen’s unexpected death shall have broken the bond which he had imprudently allowed to be tied. He exalts this imprudence into a crime. He thinks that the chief culprit was he who did not fear to contract a loveless marriage, or to seek in this marriage mere gratification of pride and lust.

But Pierre acknowledges his fault to no purpose: his conscience will not speak as soon as his wrath is again stirred up by his wife’s impudent cynicism and truly mad provocations. Elen comes into her husband’s library in a rich and brilliant dishabille, with her calm and imposing air, “though on her slightly prominent forehead a deep line of fury was drawn.” She reproaches her husband for the scandal which he has caused, twits him as though he were an imbecile, and declares that the man of whom he was jealous was a thousand times his superior. She claims that she has the right to berate him; “for I can say up and down that a woman with such a husband as you who would not have a lover would be a rare exception, and I have none.” Pierre, as he listens, feels a moral discomfort, which torments him, the sting of physical pain.

“‘We had better part,’ he said, in a choking voice.

“‘Part? By all means, on condition that you give me enough of your fortune,’ replied Elen.

“Pierre leaped to his feet, and, losing control of himself, flew at her.

“‘I will kill you!’ he cried; and seizing a piece of marble from the table, he made a step towards Elen, brandishing it with a force which even startled himself.

“The countess’s face was frightful to see: she yelled like a wild beast, and fell back. Pierre felt all the fascination, all the intoxication, of fury. He threw the marble on the floor, breaking it into fragments, and advanced towards her with uplifted arms.

“‘Get out,’ he cried, in a voice of thunder, which sent a thrill of terror throughout the house. God knows what he would have done at that moment had Elen not fled.

“A week later Pierre left for Petersburg, having made over to his wife the full control of all his property in Russia proper, which constituted a good half of his fortune.”

In going from Moscow to Petersburg, Bezúkhof stops at Torzhok for relays, but horses are not to be had. He spends the night at the post-station. The bitterest reflections crowd upon his mind. “What is wrong? what is right? Whom must you love? whom must you hate? What is the end of life?” “Every thing within him and without seemed to him confused, uncertain, distasteful; but this very feeling of repugnance gave him an irritating sense of satisfaction.” At this moment a stranger arrives, an old man, whose “grave, intelligent, piercing gaze” strikes Pierre, and troubles him, in spite of its fascination. The new-comer knows Bezúkhof by sight, and has heard of his domestic grief. He expresses to Pierre his deep regret at this “misfortune.” Pierre, confused at the pity shown him, turns the conversation to the subject of a death’s-head ring which he notices on the stranger’s finger: he recognizes in it the mark of Free Masonry. The conversation takes up the moral views and the religious doctrine of those who belong to the order. The old man urges the young man to take a different view of life from that of looking at it with horror; not to escape from it, but to change it. “How have you spent your life? In orgies, in debauchery, in depravity, taking every thing from society, and giving nothing in return. How have you employed the fortune that was put into your hands? What have you done for your fellow-men? Have you thought of your tens of thousands of serfs? Have you ever helped them, morally or physically? No! Is it not true that you profited by their labor to lead a worthless life? That is what you have done. Have you striven to employ your abilities for the good of others? No, you have passed your life in idleness. Then you married. You undertook the responsibility of being a guide to a young woman. How did you acquit yourself? Instead of aiding her to find the path of truth, you cast her into an abyss of falsehood and misery. A man insulted you: you killed him. And you say that you don’t believe in God, that you look upon your life with horror. How could it be otherwise?”

In this programme of a new life sketched out by the old Free Mason, we recognize the one followed by Tolstoï himself, at a certain epoch of his life between the period of relentless struggle, of implacable egotism, and the period of absolute sacrifice, of humble renunciation. Pierre accordingly allows himself to be initiated into the order. I forbear to quote all the picturesque details of the ceremony. The novelist, using his rights, does not fail to throw a curious light on the mystic customs of the Russian aristocracy at the beginning of this century. What concerns us to note here, is the immediate benefit which Pierre Bezúkhof draws from this first transformation of his life. The simple prospect of devoting himself “to the regeneration of humanity” was sufficient to put meaning into a life which seemed to him impossible to travel. Unfortunately, in practice, his accomplishments fall below his dreams. He contents himself with giving his overseer orders concerning the emancipation of his serfs, the cessation of corporal punishment, the reasonable regulation of labor, the building of hospitals and schools. The overseer, who sees through his master’s naïveté, constantly plays it upon him, and imposes upon him in regard to the effect of the measures prescribed, but which he carefully refrains from undertaking. Pierre is not the man to descend to the details of the reform which he has vowed to carry out: he is, above all, not the man to make a bold stand against the difficulties of execution. At bottom, he would be very sorry if they had not been concealed from his sight. Accordingly he contents himself with a few apparent results, and is very careful not to look too closely into the lack which these appearances cover.

Besides, his new faith receives a terrible blow the day when he tries to make one of his friends, Prince Andréi Bolkonsky, share in his conviction. He encounters his bitter scepticism, which is the fruit of heredity (Andréi’s father having been a “grand seigneur,” of sharp temper and despotic soul), but it is also the result of the most painful collisions in life. Like Pierre Bezúkhof, Andréi Bolkonsky had been the husband of a woman whom he did not love. He always treated her like a brainless doll, and never showed any other feeling in her presence than lassitude. His only attitude towards her was that of disdain. This child, whom he did not have the patience to make into a helpmeet, died in child-birth. His young wife’s death has left in Andréi a sense of irremediable injustice, and he loves better to blame fate than himself; although at times he is seized with such a violent wish to repair his fault, that he is driven by it almost to express his belief in immortality. He hesitates to utter his assent to the dogma of the future life; but his wounded heart allows the exclamation to escape, “Oh, if it were so!”

To realize the distance traversed by Count Tolstoï since the time when he put this language into Bolkonsky’s mouth, we must look in “My Religion,” at the place where the writer—rather, let us say, the apostle—engages in such a vigorous combat with the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which he condemns as heresy. “Strange as it may seem, it is impossible to refrain from saying that the belief in a future life is a very low and degrading conception, founded on a confused notion of the resemblance between sleep and death, a notion common to all savage peoples. The Hebrew doctrine (and much more the Christian doctrine) was far above this conception.”

Prince Andréi Bolkonsky, as soon as he enters the stage, strikes us as one of the most distinguished examples of that Russian aristocracy to which Tolstoï belongs, and which he wished to make known to his readers in “War and Peace.” He has for his dominant features a clear, sharp, penetrating mind, and all the elegancies of his race, including a super-eminent pride. During the peace, and when his best qualities are not called into action, he wears some “affectation of indifference and ennui.” In time of war, and when “the weight of serious and real interests” will leave him no “leisure to consider the impression which he makes on others,” he will deserve all Kutuzof’s praise by his solidity, his desert, and his attachment to his duty. He will give offence by his disdain, but he will win over to his side the majority of the Russian officers; for his birth gives him a certain superiority over his chiefs, which they themselves tacitly acknowledge. Finally, he has a few rare friends, whom the distinction of his character has carried even to passionate admiration.

Andréi Bolkonsky’s faults and virtues are found, with more striking features, and exaggerated till they give an impression of humorous terribleness, in his father, the old proprietor, Nikolaï Bolkonsky. With his powdered wig, his withered hands, his arms of steel, his bushy, grizzled brows, under which shine his youthful and brilliant eyes; with his manias for mathematics, for turning wooden snuff-boxes, and for putting up buildings; with his brusque speech, his sardonic smile, his yellow teeth, his ill-shaven chin, his Tatar boots of soft leather, his arm-chair tainted with a musty odor of tobacco,—this despot is not to be forgotten. He teaches his daughter, the Princess Marya, the sciences. Before she goes into the room where her father is, to give him the morning greeting, the young woman, as she leaves the vestibule, “crossed herself, and prayed that courage would be given her.” On the day when his son Andréi comes to announce that he is going away to enter the service, and that he leaves in his father’s care his young wife, who is pregnant, and much troubled by a prediction which had been made to her after a dream, “the king of Prussia,” as the old man is nicknamed, replies only with the words,—

“‘Bad business, hey;’ and he smiled....

“‘What is bad business, father?’

“‘Your wife,’ replied the old man bluntly, accenting the word.

“‘I don’t understand you.’

“‘Well, my dear fellow, you can’t do any thing, you see; you can’t get unmarried. Don’t worry,... I won’t tell anyone: but—you know it as well as I do—it’s the truth.’ He seized his son’s hand with his lean, bony fingers, and pressed it, while his piercing eyes seemed to look to the very bottom of his being. His son answered with a silent confession,—a sigh.”

The weight of this paternal dictatorship, which constantly crushes the Princess Marya, has an effect upon her which it is important to note. She is thrown into a sort of mysticism, somewhat like that which we have seen come over Tolstoï himself. She has frequent interviews with beggars, pilgrims, the poor in spirit; she listens to them, and gets instruction, not from their coarse anecdotes about the wonder-working Virgin whose cheeks sweat blood, but from their resignation at the torments of life. Thus she succeeds in forgetting her most bitter disappointments, or at least in bearing them with a steadfastness which no stoicism can approach. She also gets from her faith, her gentleness in judging those who come near her.

“Akh, Andréi,” she says to her brother, “what a treasure of a wife you have!—a real child, gay, animated. How I love her!” Andréi had taken a seat by his sister: he did not speak; an ironical smile played on his lips. She noticed it, and went on: “Her little weaknesses call for indulgence.... Who is there without some?... To understand every thing is to forgive.” And she forgives every thing, even the most cruel insult, even the wound inflicted on the most sensitive part of her sensitive nature,—of her loving heart. The handsome Anatoli Kuragin comes with his father, Prince Vasíli, to ask her hand in marriage, she being an heiress. While waiting to carry off this dowry with a high hand, he plays, in the Bolkonsky house, as everywhere else, his game of seduction; and he has rendezvous with the demoiselle de compagnie, a young and pretty French girl. Marya catches them accidentally. She refuses the marriage which she had eagerly anticipated. “I shall be called to some other good fortune. I shall be happy in devotion, and in making others happy.” She dreams of seeing the man whom she loved marry the one who has so shamefully insulted her. “I should be so glad to see her his wife: she is so sad, so lonely, so abandoned! How she must love him when he forgets her so! Who knows? Perhaps I should have done the same.”

Andréi goes to war; and Tolstoï takes us with him into a world of action, which he describes with rare power. We are dazzled at first by the brilliant art with which the novelist moves armies, carries out the combinations of tacticians, shows the troops with their passionate dash or their senseless terrors, represents their leaders with their hesitations or their unconscionable activity, but all alive, true, recognizable, from the humblest of the German officers to Napoleon the great captain. We are singularly struck by certain of his preferred methods; like that, for instance, of being true to fact in his painting of what is always idealized. Napoleon has vulgarities of character and expression, and the unexpected meeting with them gives us at first a shock of admiration. Instead of saying simply, “What realism!” we exclaim, “What reality!” Yet I do not hesitate to consider this portion of “War and Peace” as inferior to others. The historian in Tolstoï inspires me with a certain feeling of distrust: it seems to me that the painter of battles, with his first-class ability, here and there takes advantage of our fairness. There is a tinsel effect in his painting; the details are far too numerous, and there is not so much variety among them as one would think.

What is incomparable in the war part of the romance are the descriptions of military customs, the scenes of camp-life, the impressions of certain hours of day and night, the reminiscences of evening conversations, the effects of groups lighted up by the weird light of the bivouac, the heart-rending aspects of the battle-field or the hospital-wards. The marvellous beauty of all this wealth of feelings felt and experienced adds its glory to the more commonplace and less valuable woof of the historical narration. Turgénief, who understood this, noted somewhere or other this difference; but there are very few readers who can thus bethink themselves, and take account of their illusions.

Wounded at Austerlitz, and taken to the French hospital, Andréi sees Napoleon approach his bedside; that is to say, he sees the one who, in his eyes, represents the ideal, the superhuman man, the hero, the demigod. At death’s door, Andréi sees all things in a light which reduces them to their real proportions. To him all Napoleon’s acts, all his words, all the motives which make him act and speak, seem empty of interest. He turns from the sight of what is only human, and, with his eyes fixed solely on the medal which Marya hung around his neck on the day of his departure, he endeavors to believe “in that ideal heaven which alone promises him peace.”

Scarcely recovered from his wound, Andréi returns to his father’s home, which he reaches in time to be present at his wife’s confinement. There is here an admirable scene, which will be surpassed only by the birth-scene described in the romance of “Anna Karénina.” All that is dramatic, august, mysterious, in the opening flower of maternity has been expressed by Tolstoï in these two passages. That of “Anna Karénina” is famous. We feel nothing of the equivocal impressions and the lugubrious effects, which, under the pretext of realism, the author of “La Joie de Vivre” will put into a similar description. But a parallel between the realism of Tolstoï and the realism of Zola would carry us too far from our subject.

The impression left upon Andréi Bolkonsky by the death of his wife has in no small degree contributed to develop in him the tendency toward dissatisfaction with life. But one day a young girl comes into the circle of shadow, and he instantly allows her to usurp its place. The memory of a luminous vision is brought into the depths of his soul. All the apparently sleeping springs of affection in his nature are stirred up by the appearance of Natasha Rostova. Chance brings Andréi to the young girl’s paternal mansion: he falls in love with her, and with this new love begins the renewal of life.

The house of the Rostofs is the third of the seignorial homes which Tolstoï opens to us, and it is the one where it is the easiest thing to forget one’s self. Songs only are heard, merry laughter, the chatter of fresh voices. The head of the family, Count Rostof, is a great proprietor, ostentatious, but free from arrogance, and is carelessly hurrying to his ruin; but no one better than he understands the duties of hospitality. His wife is a sweet, good woman, adoring her family, and by her family adored. There are two sons in the house. The youngest, Petya, is a child at the beginning of the story; but he will be seen in the ranks of the Russian army before the end of the book. And Tolstoï, in describing his heroic death, will write a few pages, the beauty and noble sadness of which, without any sense of detriment, recall Virgil and the episode of Euryalus dying beside Nisus. The elder brother, Nikolaï Rostof, is the typical young noble, born for military life, for whom the profession of soldier is the first in the world, who is too sound in mind, too healthy in body, not to carry everywhere with him his good-humor and his off-hand manners. But he returns to camp as to a second home, and weeps with joy to see his comrades again; and he has no regret when he is once more in his tent, and he submits to the yoke and habits of military life with the same sensation of pleasure that a weary man feels when at last he has the chance to lie down and go to sleep. Tolstoï makes use of Nikolaï Rostof just as he does of Prince Andréi, in order to make us present with him during a portion of the deeds of war which he wishes to relate. Rostof’s impressions are not, however, like Bolkonsky’s: they recall pretty closely the memories noted in the “Military Sketches” of Sevastópol. It is evident that Tolstoï, who has very largely put himself into each of his characters, has reflected himself in this peculiar side in this one.

In the house of the Rostofs, there is a whole swarm of young girls,—the prudent Viéra, methodical and tiresome; the gentle Sonya, a poor relation, who is loved by the son, and who worships him, even to sacrifice: she will forego marriage with him, so that he may be rich and happy. But a luminous face, dazzling with its freshness, gayety, and grace, is that shown us in Natasha, Andréi Bolkonsky’s “bride.” Natasha is so beautiful, that no one can see her without loving her. She is willing to be loved without returning it. Happy in the effect caused by her beauty, she mistakes all her coquettish, maidenly caprices for honest, serious sentiments. She has imagined that she was in love with her brother Nikolaï’s friend Boris, then with Denisof, then with Prince Andréi, all in succession; but her passion has never yet been really awakened. It is waiting for the appearance of the last aspirant, the only one unworthy of being chosen; and then it bursts forth with frightful violence. Natasha meets Anatoli Kuragin: she yields to the fascination of his beauty, his boldness. He shamelessly addresses a few coarse, flattering words to her; and she is intoxicated by this unrefined incense more than by delicate homage. She forgets that she is plighted to Prince Andréi: she allows herself to listen to words of love. She loves; and she loves so passionately, that, without hesitation, she consents to all that her seducer has planned to lead her to irretrievable ruin. She is willing to elope. A providential chance prevents her departure. Pierre Bezúkhof arrives in time to reveal to the unfortunate young woman that Kuragin is married: he gives him a pretty rough experience of his giant hand, and compels Lovelace to return Natasha’s letters, and to pack off.

Natasha52 falls ill with sorrow, shame, and remorse. The doctors cannot get the better of this moral suffering. Religion alone puts an end to it. A lady who lives in the country near the Rostofs comes to Moscow during Lent, and takes Natasha with her to perform their devotions. Each morning before daybreak they set out, and go to kneel before the Virgin, “the blackened painting of whom is lighted up by the candles and the first rays of the dawn.” Natasha prays with fervor, with humility. She feels that she is gradually becoming somewhat regenerated; and on the day when she is to receive the communion, she finds herself “at peace with herself, and reconciled to life.”

“‘Count,’ asked Natasha of Pierre, as she paused, ‘do I do wrong to sing?’ And she raised her eyes to his, and blushed.

“‘No. Wherein would lie the harm?... On the contrary. But why should you ask me?’

“‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ replied Natasha, speaking hurriedly. But it would grieve me to do any thing which might displease you. I saw,’ she went on, without noticing that Pierre was embarrassed, and reddening in his turn, ‘I saw his name in the order of the day.... Do you think that he will ever forgive me? Do you believe that he will always be angry with me? Do you?’

“‘I think,’ continued Pierre, ’that he has nothing to forgive. If I were in his place’—And the same words of love and pity which he had spoken to her once before were on his tongue’s end, but Natasha did not give him time to finish.

“‘Akh! you? That is a very different thing,’ she cried enthusiastically. ‘I don’t know a better and more generous man than you. Such a man does not exist. If you had not helped me then and now, I do not know what would have become of me.’ Her eyes filled with tears, which she hid behind her music; and, turning around abruptly, she began to practice her solfeggi, and to walk up and down.”

Thus begins the last romance in Natasha’s life. She loves Pierre Bezúkhof, not with the fanciful love which she felt for Andréi, nor the mad passion which Kuragin inspired in her, but with a pure, moral affection, founded on esteem, on the similarity of thoughts and feelings. This union is the only one which Tolstoï wishes to realize for Bezúkhof, for it is the only kind which seems to him legitimate. But, before it can be accomplished, it must needs be that the man to whom Natasha had plighted her troth should be no longer between her and the one whom she is to marry. Accordingly we are brought to witness Andréi Bolkonsky’s death.

The French invasion of 1812 has roused all the powers of Russia. From the muzhik to the velmozh, every one has felt the impulse of self-sacrifice. The Rostofs, whose second son Petya desires to go as a hussar, are surprised in the midst of moving, by the arrival of wounded, whom it is impossible to transport farther. They have some of the furniture unloaded, and arrange a train of wagons. Among the mortally wounded whom they have thus received is Prince Andréi. He was struck by a bursting shell on the same day as Kuragin, and chance has so brought it about that the wounded man can behold on his bed of agony the man who stole Natasha’s heart from him. This is a most powerfully dramatic scene. It is not the only one offered by this part of the book. Natasha discovers, during the journey, that Prince Andréi is in one of the wagons. She makes her way out during the night, and comes to kneel by his bedside. Natasha and the Princess Marya meet at this death-bed. The analysis of the wounded man’s last feelings and sensations at the supreme moment is a marvel of divination: the ecstasy of the evening hours, the delirium of the moments of somnolence, are expressed with a power of imagination which makes one shudder.

Meantime, beside the Rostofs’ carriage walks a man of lofty stature, in laborer’s attire. It is Pierre Bezúkhof, who also has desired to find a chance to sacrifice himself. He did not join the army, like Andréi Bolkonsky, Nikolaï Rostof, Petya, and the others. Does he think, then, like the author of “My Religion,” that he has no right to kill a man, even though it were an enemy of his country? He stays in Moscow, with vague projects, which Fate, that mighty actor in the dramas of mankind, according to the author of “War and Peace,” prevents him from putting into execution. He is captured by the French, and endures a most trying nomad captivity. But he finds among his comrades in misfortune a poor soldier with wounded feet, and body devoured by vermin, and from him he learns the great secret of existence. Platon Karataïef, in spite of his pitiable exterior, personifies the moral and religious ideal, which, as we have already seen, Count Tolstoï definitely came to accept. As soon as the hero of “War and Peace,” Pierre Bezúkhof, has reached this limit of his development, the story has only to proceed of its own inertia to the conclusion. I feel that there is no necessity of delaying over the final scenes. The Princess Marya, whose father is now dead, marries Nikolaï Rostof, who had saved her life by quelling a revolt among the serfs of Luisuia Gorui, the Bolkonsky’s domain. Bezúkhof, at last a widower, is free to marry Natasha.

IV

As in “War and Peace,” so in “Anna Karénina,” we shall find Count Lyof Tolstoï himself just as his own confessions have allowed us to point him out. As in “War and Peace,” all the chief personages will have some of his characteristics, and Vronsky and Konstantin Levin, in turn, represent him in some peculiar aspect, in the same way as Nikolaï Rostof, Prince Andréi, and Count Pierre. Thus, in the discourse where Count Vronsky proposes a re-organization of his landed property, and claims that it must be based on the agreement between the muzhik and his former lord, Count Tolstoï propounds a theory which he long held, but which he has since gone beyond; for, as we shall soon see, he has reached Communism.

In the same way we recognize the ideas of “My Religion” in Levin’s resistance of the patriotic outburst, or, to use his language, the unreflecting enthusiasm which rouses the Russian youth, and drives one of the characters of the story, Vronsky, to enlist of his own accord for the defence of the Serbian cause. While protesting by his own abstention, and also by his tirades against the Slav committees and the enlistment, Konstantin Levin is already applying the doctrine which Count Tolstoï will formulate in the maxim, “Do not engage in war,” and on which he will make the following comment: “Jesus has shown me that the fifth temptation that deprives me of my welfare is the distinction made by us between our compatriots and foreign nations. I must believe in that. Consequently, if in a moment of forgetfulness I experience a feeling of hostility against a man of another nationality, I must not fail to recognize, in my thoughtful moments, that this feeling is false. No longer, as formerly, can I justify myself by the superiority of my people to others; by the ignorance, the cruelty, or the barbarity of another people. I cannot refrain, at the first opportunity, from endeavoring to be more affable to a foreigner than to one of my countrymen.” And if Vronsky behaves differently from Konstantin Levin, it is not because Tolstoï wishes to offset the conduct of the one to the views of the other. In reality, it is not from conviction, it is from despair, that Vronsky enlists. He goes away so as to forget, amid the excitement—or, as Pascal said, the divertissement—of a soldier’s life the impression of the inward drama which has disturbed his soul to its foundation, and which, by a fatal, but unexpected, conclusion, has just bespattered him with blood.

The romance of “Anna Karénina” is the history of an adulterous amour: the climax of the amour is suicide. Is this suicide in the novelist’s mind a moral penalty? That would be a wholly barbarous conception, a sort of divine judgment such as would have been imagined by a story-teller in the Middle Ages, and Tolstoï seems to have wished to forestall such a vulgar interpretation of his narrative. There are in the romance other criminal amours, and it is without any sign of punishment that the wholly immoral relationship between the Princess Betsy and her lover leads them to scandalous conduct. On the other hand, the passion which unites Anna Karénina and Vronsky is a sincere, profound, almost solemn passion, in spite of the illegality of their behavior. The hearts of these two lovers are culpable but lofty. Besides, the more sympathy the author of the romance shows in their presentation, the more powerful is the lesson which he desires to draw from their moral torment. All the plan and all the interest of the work are here. What agonies of remorse this illegal union, so passionately desired, brings upon the guilty woman! What deep mortifications and what vulgar discomfitures, what deadly humiliations and what prosaic irksomeness, spring from this false situation, and ultimately make it so odious, so painful, that way of escape has to be found by an act of madness in a moment of despair!

Yet never were more conditions united to facilitate this union outside the law. Vronsky’s rank is too lofty for him to fear public opinion: he makes it, as it were, a point of honor to defy it, and he instals his mistress in his splendid domain as though she were his legitimate wife. Without much apparent difficulty, he makes his friends and his family treat his liaison with respect. Anna Karénina, on her part, loves Vronsky with a perfect passion, which is only intensified and not chilled by the feeling of sacrifices undergone. All that she asks from her lover in return is to be loved by him. She has made it a point of honor on her part to refuse the advantages of a divorce which her husband, Alekséi Karénin, at first offers to have pronounced against himself. She refused from a double reason of delicacy: she did not wish to add this gratuitous insult to the wrongs of which she is guilty towards this disagreeable, but upright, man; above all, she does not wish that a suspicion of calculation should cast its shadow over the feeling which she has towards the count.

A divorce, however, would put an end to many sentimental doubts causing misunderstandings, and to many subtleties of behavior resulting only in collisions. Vronsky demands the divorce with all the strength of his generous pride. Anna Karénina scouts the idea of it with such jealous anxiety as a naturally noble woman can feel in preserving the remains of her dignity, which a shock of passion has thrown down and broken to fragments like a costly vase. This antagonism creates between the two lovers a secret source of bitterness. There are other latent troubles. By her marriage, Anna Karénina has a son from whom she is separated, whom she worships; and the slightest remembrance of him causes her heart to thrill with that same strange feeling which is the precursor of motherhood. In consequence of her amour with Vronsky, she has a daughter. By a singular anomaly she does not love the child of the man whom she loves: she is vexed with her daughter for occupying in some measure a place usurped, for monopolizing with her the maternal cares which it seems to her that the other child so grievously needs. If as a mother she has her whimsical but touching fits of jealousy, as a woman she has other fears, the absurdity of which does not prevent them from being very painful. She spends her time and gnaws her heart in trying to divine her lover’s attitude towards her. She knows that for her sake he has renounced a most brilliant future; she is afraid that she cannot fill his objectless existence; she sees in each attempted return to any occupation, to any distraction whatsoever, a proof of weariness, a confession of irksomeness, a sign of regret.

Vronsky, who has made absolute renunciation without thought of return, at last begins to suffer from this distrust: the more it grows, the more disappointment and secret vexation he feels. Here the loftiness of character which attaches him to his mistress, and which has made it easy for him to brave every thing for her, turns against the unfortunate woman, and impels him to resist the efforts which she makes to get fuller possession of him. It is easy to imagine what will be the outcome of this incessant struggle. Each day the angles become sharper, feelings become more touchy, actions rankle more painfully; these two beings, starting on the bright and free pinnacles of love, have descended, without being themselves aware of it, into the dark and suffocating regions of hate. The result of this inevitable decay of passion is made not less cruel, but more evident, by a wholly external complication. The divorce which at one time Alekséi Karénin had offered, he refuses when his wife, weary of such suffering, at last decides to ask him for it. Here it is that the future author of “My Religion” appears with his precise theory of the immorality of divorce. The group of mystics to which the deserted husband has been led to ask consolation of a religious kind declare, through the mouth of the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, that Alekséi Karénin cannot accede to his wife’s wishes, and grant her liberty, without falling himself into a state of mortal sin.

From the day when they learn of his refusal, Anna Karénina and Vronsky, in spite of themselves, rush straight towards separation. Anna, in her dread of it, precipitates it. Vronsky is nettled at her ever increasing restlessness; and before what seems to him pure ingratitude, he affects an indifference which he does not feel. Discussions, once rare, come in quick succession, and become quarrelsome. This daily conflict brings about an explosion, followed by a rupture.

Vronsky leaves her. He goes to his mother, the natural enemy of his mistress. As soon as she is alone, Anna Karénina feels as though torn in every fibre of her being: he must come back; she will fall on her knees before him; she will humiliate herself like a naughty child. She has written him to return, but she has not the strength to wait for him; she hurries to meet him, and stops at an intermediate station, when by a telegram she informs him of her arrival. The train arrives. Only the count’s valet appears, bringing a note in which Vronsky dryly announces that he is coming back. The tone of the note is interpreted by Anna as a new proof of the death of a love which in her alone has grown with time and possession. She tells herself that there is no more reason to live, and a series of fatal circumstances unite at this critical moment to hasten her to her death. She wishes to escape the inquisitive eyes of the loiterers at the station, who are struck by her strange behavior: she leaves the platform, and steps down upon the track. She remembers the terrible accident which a train-hand had met with at Moscow on the very day of her first meeting with Vronsky. A sort of reflex action takes place in her brain: a freight-train is coming along; she goes to meet it.

“She looked under the cars, at the chains and the brake, and the high iron wheels; and she tried to estimate with her eye the distance between the fore and back wheels, and the moment when the middle would be in front of her.

“‘There,’ she said, looking at the shadow of the car thrown upon the black coal-dust which covered the sleepers, ‘there in the centre he will be punished, and I shall be delivered from it all,—and from myself.’

“Her little red travelling-bag caused her to lose the moment when she could throw herself under the wheels of the first car: she could not detach it from her arm. She awaited the second. A feeling like that she had experienced once, just before taking a dive in the river, came over her, and she made the sign of the cross. This familiar gesture called back to her soul memories of youth and childhood. Life, with its elusive joys, glowed for an instant before her, but she did not take her eyes from the car; and when the middle between the two wheels appeared, she threw away her red bag, drawing her head between her shoulders, and, with outstretched hands, threw herself on her knees under the car. She had time to feel afraid. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ thought she, trying to draw back; but a great, inflexible mass struck her head, and threw her upon her back. ‘Lord, forgive me all!’ she murmured, feeling the struggle to be in vain. A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard. And the candle by which she read, as in a book, the fulfilment of her life’s work, of its deceptions, its grief, and its torment, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness; then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever.”

Certainly when one reads this brutally frightful dénouement in the light of the motto of the book, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” one might be tempted to interpret Jesus’ word in its Judaic sense. Yet it would be a serious mistake. It is very certain that this sudden and tragic end in the novelist’s mind was meant for Anna Karénina’s deliverance: out of pity for her, he granted her the favor of death. Death alone could put an end to the torment of this soul, and this torment began with the sin. Here is the true punishment of guilty love: all the illusion which exalted the senses, as long as they are pastured in “love’s shadow,” as one of Shakspeare’s characters calls it, vanishes as soon as one is sated of love itself.

“What had been for Vronsky for nearly a year the only and absolute aim of his life, was for Anna a dream of happiness, all the more enchanting because it seemed to her unreal and terrible. It was like a dream. At last the waking came; and a new life began for her, with a sentiment of moral decadence. She felt the impossibility of expressing the shame, the horror, the joy, that were now her portion. Rather than put her feelings into idle and fleeting words, she preferred to keep silent. As time went on, words fit to express the complexity of her sensations still failed to come to her, and even her thoughts were incapable of translating the impressions of her heart. She hoped that calmness and peace would come to her, but they held aloof. Whenever she thought of the past, and thought of the future, and thought of her own fate, she was seized with fear, and tried to drive these thoughts away.

“‘By and by, by and by,’ she repeated, ‘when I am calmer.’

“On the other hand, when during sleep she lost all control of her imagination, her situation appeared in its frightful reality: almost every night she had the same dream. She dreamed that she was the wife both of Vronsky and of Alekséi Aleksandrovitch. And it seemed to her that Alekséi Aleksandrovitch kissed her hands, and said, weeping, ‘How happy we are now!’ And Alekséi Vronsky, he, also, was her husband. She was amazed that she could believe such a thing impossible; and she laughed when she seemed to explain to them that every thing would simplify itself, and that both would henceforth be satisfied and happy. But this dream weighed on her spirits like a nightmare, and she always awoke in a fright.”

That is the moral punishment. What keen psychology! What an admirable commentary, and what a powerful interpretation of the “surgit amari aliquid!” And it is not only her punishment as a woman which Tolstoï has described, it is also her punishment as a mother, when the separation, long postponed by the husband’s own will, becomes indispensable to the two paramours, both of whom have returned from the doors of death, and returned more morbidly, more hopelessly, in love with each other than ever before.

During the first part of this separation, Anna Karénina had wonted herself to think that it was her duty to give up all that had hitherto gone to make her happiness, and to leave in her husband’s hands as a compensation, such as it was, all the elements of her past happiness which she had exchanged for another kind. “I give up all that I love, all that I appreciate most in this world,—my son and my reputation!” She succeeds for some time in lulling, in deceiving, the maternal sentiment, in substituting in place of her affection for her son her tender and constant care for the daughter, the child of her liaison with Vronsky. But Vronsky is obliged suddenly to leave Italy where they have been together; he and Anna reach Petersburg; the mother is again in the neighborhood of the house where her son is living; she wishes to enter it, to see him; she begs for permission, and it is harshly refused; she determines to go to her husband’s at any cost, and make her way to the child by bribing the servants. The reader will not blame me for quoting this admirable scene.53

“She went to a neighboring shop and purchased some toys, and thus she formed her plan of action: she would start early in the morning before Alekséi Aleksandrovitch was up; she would have the money in her hand all ready to bribe the Swiss and the other servants to let her go up-stairs without raising her veil, under the pretext of laying on Serozha’s bed some presents sent by his god-father. As to what she should say to her son, she could not form the least idea: she could not make any preparation for that.

“The next morning, at eight o’clock, Anna got out of her hired carriage and rang the doorbell of her former home.

“‘Go and see what is wanted! It’s some baruina,’ said Kapitonuitch, in overcoat and galoshes, as he looked out of the window and saw a lady closely veiled standing on the porch. The Swiss’s assistant, a young man whom Anna did not know, had scarcely opened the door before Anna thrust a three-ruble note into his hand.

“‘Serozha—Sergéi Aleksiévitch,’ she stammered; then she went one or two steps down the hall.

“The Swiss’s assistant examined the note, and stopped the visitor at the inner glass door.

“‘Whom do you wish to see?’ he asked.

“She did not hear his words, and made no reply.

“Kapitonuitch, noticing the stranger’s confusion, came out from his office and asked her what she wanted.

“‘I come from Prince Skorodumof to see Sergéi Aleksiévitch.’

“‘He is not up yet,’ replied the Swiss, looking sharply at the veiled lady.

“Anna had never dreamed that she should be so troubled by the sight of this house where she had lived nine years. One after another, sweet and cruel memories arose in her mind, and for a moment she forgot why she was there.

“‘Will you wait?’ asked the Swiss, helping her to take off her shubka. When he saw her face, he recognized her, and bowed profoundly. ‘Will your ladyship54 be pleased to enter?’ he said to her.

“She tried to speak; but her voice failed her, and with an entreating look at the old servant she rapidly flew up the stairs. Kapitonuitch tried to overtake her, and followed after her, catching his galoshes at every step.

“‘Perhaps his tutor is not dressed yet: I will speak to him.’

“Anna kept on up the stairs which she knew so well, but she did not hear what the old man said.

“‘This way. Excuse it if all is in disorder. He sleeps in the front room now,’ said the Swiss, out of breath. ‘Will your ladyship be good enough to wait a moment? I will go and see,’ And opening the high door, he disappeared.

“Anna stopped and waited.

“‘He has just waked up,’ said the Swiss, coming back through the same door.

“And as he spoke, Anna heard the sound of a child yawning, and merely by the sound of the yawn she recognized her son, and seemed to see him alive before her.

“‘Let me go in—let me!’ she stammered, and hurriedly pushed through the door.

“At the right of the door was a bed, and on the bed a child was sitting up in his little open nightgown; his little body was leaning forward, and he was just finishing a yawn and stretching himself. His lips were just closing into a sleepy smile, and he fell back upon his pillow still smiling.

“‘Serozha!’ she murmured as she went towards him.

“Every time since their separation that she had felt an access of love for the absent son, Anna looked upon him as still a child of four, the age when he had been most charming. Now he no longer bore any resemblance to him whom she had left: he had grown tall and thin. How long his face seemed! How short his hair! What long arms! How he had changed! But it was still the same,—the shape of his head, his lips, little slender neck, and his broad shoulders.

“‘Serozha!’ she whispered in the child’s ear.

“He raised himself on his elbow, turned his frowzy head around, and, trying to put things together, opened wide his eyes. For several seconds he looked with an inquiring face at his mother, who stood motionless before him. Then he suddenly smiled with joy; and with his eyes still half-closed in sleep, he threw himself, not back upon his pillow, but into his mother’s arms.

“‘Serozha, my dear little boy!’ she stammered, choking with tears, and throwing her arms around his plump body.

“‘Mamma!’ he whispered, cuddling into his mother’s arms so as to feel their encircling pressure. Smiling sleepily, he took his hand from the head of the bed and put it on his mother’s shoulder and climbed into her lap, having that warm breath of sleep peculiar to children, and pressed his face to his mother’s neck and shoulders.

“‘I knew,’ he said, opening his eyes; ‘to-day is my birthday; I knew that you would come. I am going to get up now.’

“And as he spoke he fell asleep again. Anna devoured him with her eyes. She saw how he had changed during her absence. She would scarcely have known his long legs coming below his nightgown, his hollow cheeks, his short hair curled in the neck where she had so often kissed it. She pressed him to her heart, and the tears prevented her from speaking.

“‘What are you crying for, mamma?’ he asked, now entirely awake. ‘What makes you cry?’ he repeated, ready to weep himself.

“‘I? I will not cry any more—it is for joy. It is all over now,’ said she, drying her tears and turning around. ‘Nu! go and get dressed,’ she added, after she had grown a little calmer, but still holding Serozha’s hand. She sat down near the bed on a chair which held the child’s clothing. ‘How do you dress without me? How’—she wanted to speak simply and gayly, but she could not, and again she turned her head away.

“‘I don’t wash in cold water any more; papa has forbidden it: but you have not seen Vasíli Lukitch? Here he comes. But you are sitting on my things.’ And Serozha laughed heartily. She looked at him and smiled.

“‘Mamma! dúshenka, golúbtchika!’ [dear little soul, darling], he cried again, throwing himself into her arms, as though he now better understood what had happened to him, as he saw her smile.

“‘Take it off,’ said he, pulling off her hat. And seeing her head bare, he began to kiss her again.

“‘What did you think of me? Did you believe that I was dead?’

“‘I never believed it.’

“‘You believed me alive, my precious?’

“‘I knew it! I knew it!’ he replied, repeating his favorite phrase; and, seizing the hand which was smoothing his hair, he pressed the palm of it to his little mouth, and began to kiss it.”

“Vasíli Lukitch, meantime, not at first knowing who this lady was, but learning from their conversation that it was Serozha’s mother, the woman who had deserted her husband, and whom he did not know, as he had not come into the house till after her departure, was in great perplexity. Ought he to tell Alekséi Aleksandrovitch? On mature reflection he came to the conclusion that his duty consisted in going to dress Serozha at the usual hour, without paying any attention to a third person—his mother, or any one else. But as he reached the door and opened it, the sight of the caresses between the mother and child, the sound of their voices and their words, made him change his mind. He shook his head, sighed, and quietly closed the door. ‘I will wait ten minutes longer,’ he said to himself, coughing slightly, and wiping his eyes.

“There was great excitement among the servants; they all knew that the baruina had come, and that Kapitonuitch had let her in, and that she was in the child’s room; they knew, too, that their master was in the habit of going to Serozha every morning at nine o’clock: each one felt that the husband and wife ought not to meet, that it must be prevented.

“Kornéi, the valet, went down to the Swiss to ask why Anna had been let in; and finding that Kapitonuitch had taken her up-stairs, he reprimanded him severely. The Swiss maintained an obstinate silence till the valet declared that he deserved to lose his place, when the old man jumped at him, and shaking his fist in his face, said,—

“‘Da! Vot! you would not have let her in yourself? You’ve served here ten years, and had nothing but kindness from her, but you would have said, “Now, go away from here!” You know what policy is, you sly dog. What you don’t forget is to rob your master, and to carry off his raccoon-skin shubas!’

“‘Soldier!’ replied Kornéi scornfully; and he turned towards the nurse, who was coming in just at this moment. ‘What do you think, Marya Yefimovna? He has let in Anna Arkadyevna, without saying any thing to anybody, and just when Alekséi Aleksandrovitch, as soon as he is up, will be going to the nursery.’

“‘What a scrape! what a scrape!’ said the nurse. ‘But, Kornéi Vasilyévitch, find some way to keep your master, while I run to warn her, and get her out of the way. What a scrape!’

“When the nurse went into the child’s room, Serozha was telling his mother how Nádenka and he had fallen when sliding down a hill of ice, and turned three somersaults. Anna was listening to the sound of her son’s voice, looking at his face, watching the play of his features, feeling his little arms, but not hearing a word that he said. She must go away, she must leave him: this alone she understood and felt. She had heard Vasíli Lukitch’s steps, and his little discreet cough, as he came to the door, and now she heard the nurse coming in; but unable to move or to speak, she remained as fixed as a statue.

“‘Baruina! Golúbtchika!’ [mistress, darling], said the nurse, coming up to Anna, and kissing her hands and her shoulders. ‘God sent this joy for our birthday celebration! You are not changed at all.’

“‘Ach! nurse [nyanya], my dear: I did not know that you were in the house,’ said Anna, coming to herself.

“‘I don’t live here; I live with my daughter. I came to give my best wishes to Serozha, Anna Arkadyevna, golúbtchika.’

“The nurse suddenly began to weep, and to kiss Anna’s hand.

“Serozha, with bright, joyful eyes, and holding his mother with one hand and his nurse with the other, was dancing in his little bare feet on the carpet. His old nurse’s tenderness towards his mother was delightful to him.

“‘Mamma, she often comes to see me; and when she comes’—he began; but he stopped short when he perceived that the nurse whispered something in his mother’s ear, and that his mother’s face assumed an expression of fear, and at the same time of shame.

“Anna went to him.

“‘My precious!’ she said.

“She could not say the word ‘farewell’ [proshcháï]; but the expression of her face said it, and he understood.

“‘My precious, precious Kutik!’ she said, calling him by a pet name which she used when he was a baby. ‘You will not forget me; you’—but she could not say another word.

“Only then she began to remember the words which she wanted to say to him, but now it was impossible to say them. Serozha, however, understood all that she would have said: he understood that she was unhappy, and that she loved him. He even understood what the nurse whispered in her ear: he heard the words ‘always at nine o’clock;’ and he knew that they referred to his father, and that his mother must not meet him. He understood this, but one thing he could not understand: why did her face express fear and shame?... She was not to blame, but she was afraid of him, and seemed ashamed of something. He wanted to ask a question which would have explained this circumstance, but he did not dare: he saw that she was in sorrow, and he pitied her. He silently clung close to her, and then he whispered, ‘Don’t go yet! He will not come yet awhile.’

“His mother pushed him away from her a little, in order to see if he understood the meaning of what he had said; and in the frightened expression of his face she perceived that he not only spoke of his father, but seemed to ask her how he ought to think about him.

“‘Serozha, my dear,’ she said, ‘love him; he is better than I am; and I have been wicked to him. When you have grown up, you will understand.’

“‘No one is better than you,’ cried the child, with sobs of despair; and, clinging to his mother’s shoulders, he squeezed her with all the force of his little trembling arms.

“‘Dúshenka, my darling!’ stammered Anna; and, bursting into tears, she sobbed like a child, even as he sobbed.

“At this moment the door opened, and Vasíli Lukitch came in. Steps were heard at the other door; and, in a frightened whisper, he exclaimed, ‘He is coming,’ and gave Anna her hat.

“Serozha threw himself on the bed, sobbing, and covered his face with his hands. Anna took them away to kiss yet once again his tear-stained cheeks, and then with quick steps hurried from the room. Alekséi Aleksandrovitch met her at the door. When he saw her, he stopped and bowed his head.

“Though she had declared a moment before that he was better than she, the swift glance that she gave him, taking in his whole person, awoke in her only a feeling of hatred and scorn for him, and jealousy on account of her son. She hurriedly lowered her veil, and, quickening her step, almost ran from the room. She had entirely forgotten in her haste the playthings which, on the evening before, she had bought with so much love and sadness; and she took them back with her to the hotel.”

In such scenes, in such moral analyses, as these, it is necessary to look for the meaning and the drift of “Anna Karénina.” There is also in the conduct of the husband, the statesman, Alekséi Karénin, a constant lesson and significance which it would be easy to verify with “My Religion” in hand. He is punished for having sacrificed every thing to his ambition, even the love and the care of her whom he took to be his wife. He does not fight a duel with Vronsky because he lacks courage, but, above all, because religion lays it upon him as a duty not to strive to kill his neighbor. He hates his guilty wife, even to the point of wishing for her death, and of feeling disappointment when he finds her alive after the travail which she dreaded so keenly; but his heart softens at her delirium, at the words of repentance which she speaks at the moment which she thinks is her last: he forgives her. From the day when he has tasted the divine sweetness of mercy, he is another man: he has found the meaning of life. Henceforth he will apply the doctrine of Jesus: “‘I offer my other cheek to the smiter; I give my last cloak to him who has robbed me; I ask only one thing of God, that he will not take from me the joy of forgiving.’... Karénin rose: sobs choked his voice. Vronsky rose too, and standing with bowed head and humble attitude, looked up at Karénin without a word to say. He was incapable of understanding Alekséi Aleksandrovitch’s feelings; but he felt that such magnanimity was above him, and irreconcilable with his conception of life.”

V

The astonishment felt by Vronsky at hearing Karénin’s words, we also have some right to feel in reading Tolstoï’s work entitled “My Religion.” This work is a socialistic and communistic interpretation of the gospel. The censorship has put an end to the publication and sale of it; but it cannot prevent the manuscript from passing from hand to hand; and, when it shall have succeeded in destroying it, it will be forever unable to suppress the state of mind of which this work is only a manifestation, and which will possibly be before long the state of mind of a whole people.

It is possible now, if it ever was, by looking towards Russia, to find in the spectacle of the moral phenomena there going on an answer to the question, “How are dogmas born?”

It was remarked long ago that all the great convulsions of a nation are followed by an increased tendency towards mysticism: this is manifested in Russia more than elsewhere. For example, after the invasion in 1812, a sort of sectarian eruption followed the patriotic fever. The muzhik had bravely burned his harvest, and had taken arms to drive out the foreigner. He had done a man’s work, and had been given to understand, that, as soon as the enemy were out of the way, the grateful country would recognize him as a son and give him his freedom. The French, burned out by fire, cut down by frost,55 retire, sowing the path of their journey back with corpses. But the hour of liberty does not yet strike. The affairs of Europe must be put in order before taking hold of the muzhik’s. After the treaties have been signed, after the armies have gone home, the rights of the muzhik remain neglected, and his complaints are stifled. His despair is seen in emigrations, in deeds of violence, in his affiliation with existing sects, in the formation of a new social and religious dogma. At that moment we see arise for the first time the bogomól, or praying men.

In the last quarter of the century, Russia has experienced a storm more tremendous than that of the invasion of 1812: it might be said that the face of the country was transformed by the upheaval in the condition of the people.

The single reign of Alexander II. saw such facts accomplished as the abolition of serfdom; the redivision of the land; above all, the increase in the taxes, which has touched the people in a very different way from all the reforms. The dominating influence of wealth has grown more and more; a great net-work of railroads has extended over the country; the maxim of laissez faire and laissez passer has made its way into the Russian village. None of these changes has fully succeeded, or, in better words, none has succeeded as yet. In periods of transition, it is the feature of inconvenience that, above all, attracts attention, and more often than not causes the advantageous to be overlooked. Now, here, the ill has often surpassed the good. Thus in the regulation of landed property, the insufficiency of the lots of land granted the muzhik, and the lack of proportion between the revenue and the tax imposed, have quickly brought the small cultivator back into dependence upon the great proprietor, and serfage has re-appeared in disguise.

As to the administrative reforms, the zemstvo, the tribunal, the school, all this has scarcely made any impression upon the people except as bringing an increase in the tax, expressed by the immemorial formula so much per soul. The taxes coming in much less than the increase in the rates, extreme measures have to be taken to obtain the payment of them. The muzhik has only one way of escaping prosecution, and that is to give himself over, body and soul, to the usurer. In short space of time the misery is universal. A single man gets rich at the expense of all the others: it is the kulak (the fist), the monopolist.

Bread is lacking in many places. In its place they eat, not cake, but preparations of straw, bark, or grass, all that which is called by the expressive term cheat-hunger.56 It is plain to see that the muzhiks, reduced to these extremities, lose their interest in a society which treats them a little less kindly than if they were common cattle. All that they know of public affairs is that it is necessary to pay the tax. The most palpable advantage which they get from the time spent in discussing the common interests is the bumper of vodka with which discussions are kept alive: thus they forget themselves for a few hours.

Then, in hatred of the present, minds turn back to the past, and, above all, yearn eagerly for the future. The peasant’s naïve imagination is consoled by his dreams; the ardor of his desires is spent in Utopias. The idea of free lands haunts these enthusiastic minds. The story is secretly whispered about of the promises made by the Shah of Persia to emigrants who will come and settle in his dominions: his subjects shall pay no taxes and have no superiors. Solid masses of people set out suddenly, and depart for “the country of the white waters.” There it is that the popular ideal is to be realized. Many outlaw themselves without leaving their residences, and refuse to answer any of their obligations towards the commune or the mir. Others take refuge in the neighboring forest, go and settle in the desert, in the steppe. A considerable number go on pilgrimages to the holy places. Finally, there are those who go to swell the class of true Nihilists; that is to say, people who make their lives even a bold negation of all that is accepted, affirmed, around them,—the class of wanderers, or that of occults.

The attitude of these refractory men and women strikes the people, and is not slow to inspire them with a respect which is thus explained. The Russian people’s heads are stuffed with legends. One of the widest spread is that of the centenarian who lives in the desert, taking no other food than a consecrated wafer once a week; and, though he has not the slightest notion of the alphabet, yet he reads the Holy Book, the book with the leaves of gold, where is found the answer to every question, the rule for all conduct. We see now how reality and legend can come to be confounded. In the lonely hut where this hermit dwells apart, fitted as he is ordinarily by his intelligence and his will for the exceptional part which he is going to perform, he allows himself endlessly to reflect on all sorts of subjects. He ruminates at his leisure, in the solitude, over all the difficulties of the life from which he has torn himself away. He gropes after his definition of things good and of things evil; he slowly builds up his solemn casuistry.

The peasants one after another take the road to his hermitage. They are sure of bringing away good advice about disputed cases. Their cases include every subject,—family affairs, commune affairs, church affairs. Every thing is discussed, exposed to the cenobite’s criticism, to his interpretation. It is a matter of course that religious questions fill a large part in this programme, worked up by the anxieties of the throng, and the prophetic explanations of the hermit. But the programme also takes up economic or social questions. It prepares for the coming of a new law. This law is the outcome of a duty, and this duty is summed up in the formula, “To live according to justice;” or, in other words, “according to the will of God.”

The schisms formed, as we have just seen, are those of unimportant people. They have nothing in common with those which the irksomeness of living develops, in similar lines, in Russia, among the upper classes of the nation. Quite contrary to the sects born in the aristocracy, the schisms among the common people take their rise in the need of existence. They serve the instinct which impels the creature to seek not only life, but the best form of life. That is why they act so powerfully on the masses; that is why they cross time and space, making proselytes, apostles, martyrs.

The surprising thing is that the rich and aristocratic Count Tolstoï should become the apostle of such a religion. Like the sectaries of the rustic class, he builds a complete religious, political, and social system upon a new interpretation of the Gospels.

His religion, properly speaking, takes as its foundation the maxim of the Evangelist, “Resist not the one that is evil.” And it is not in an allegorical sense, it is by the letter, that these words of Jesus must be understood. The law laid down by Jesus’ disciples is precisely the opposite of that of the disciples of this world, which is the law of conflict. This doctrine of Jesus, which is sure to give peace to the world, is contained wholly in five commandments:—

1. Be at peace with everybody. Do not allow yourself to consider any one as low or stupid.

2. Do not violate the rights of wedlock. Do not commit adultery.

3. The oath impels men to sin. Know that it is wrong, and bind not yourselves by any promise.

4. Human vengeance or justice is an evil. Do not, under any pretext, practise it. Bear with insults, and render not evil for evil.

5. Know that all men are brothers, the sons of one father. Do not break the peace with any on account of difference of nationality.

By putting this doctrine into practice, man can realize a happiness in life, and there is no happiness in life except in this path. There is no immortality. The conception of the resurrection of the dead, according to Tolstoï, is the greatest piece of barbarism.

The political doctrine derived from this religious doctrine admits of no tribunals or armies or national frontiers.

The social doctrine to which we must be led by this religious and political dogma is the suppression of property, and the proclamation of communism. Man is not put into the world that others should work for him, but that he himself should work for others. He alone who works shall have daily bread.

The most dangerous enemy of society is the Church, because it supports with all its power the errors which it has read into its interpretation of Jesus’ doctrine. In place of this false light of Church dogma, which misleads believers and lets them “go into the pit,” must be substituted the light of conscience; one’s whole conduct must be irradiated by it, by submitting each of his acts to the approbation of the judge which we feel within us, “in our inner tribunal.”

To succeed in leading the life which conscience may approve, what is, above all, necessary? “Do not lead a life which makes it so difficult to refrain from wrath, from not committing adultery, from not taking oaths, from not defending yourself by violence, from not carrying on war: lead a life which would make all that difficult to do.” Do not crush at pleasure the very conditions of earthly happiness; do not break the bond which unites man to nature: that is to say, lead lives so as to enjoy “the sky, the sun, the pure air, the earth covered with vegetation and peopled with animals;” become a rustic instead of being the busy, weary, sickly urban. Return to the natural law of labor,—of labor freely chosen and accomplished with pleasure, of physical labor, the source of appetite and sleep. Have a family, but have the joys of it as well as the cares: that is, keep your children near you; do not intrust their education to strangers; do not imprison them; do not drive them “into physical, moral, and intellectual corruption.” Have free and affectionate intercourse with all men, whatever their rank, their nationality. “The peasant and wife are free to enter into brotherly relations with eighty millions of working-men, from Arkhangel to Astrakhan, without waiting for ceremony or introduction. A clerk and his wife find hundreds of people who are their equals; but the clerks of higher station do not recognize them as their equals, and they in their turn exclude their inferiors. A wealthy man of society and his wife have only a few score families of equal distinction, all the others are unknown to them. The cabinet minister and the millionaire have only a dozen people as rich and as important as they are. For emperors and kings, the circle is still narrower. Is it not like a prison, where each prisoner in his cell has relations only with one or two jailers?” Finally, live in a community, in hygienic conditions, with moral habits, which bring you the nearest possible to that ideal which is the very foundation of happiness, health as long as you live, death without disease, when existence has reached its limit.

The higher one rises in the social scale, the farther one departs from this ideal. The picture, which Tolstoï paints of the physical pains and tortures of the wealthy and of the aristocratic, of those whom he calls “the martyrs of the religion of the world,” is remarkably vigorous. Rousseau’s declamation against the pretended benefits of civilization here finds a powerful interpreter.

Does that mean that Tolstoï declaims? No one is more in earnest. It is not only in words that he declares war on the organization of society recognized and defended by the government of his country. He puts the doctrine into practice; he is ready to suffer all things to affirm the cause of Jesus. His refusal to take an oath, which is one of the articles of his creed, has already brought upon him a condemnation from one of those tribunals which he himself condemns in the name of the maxim of the Gospels, “Judge not.” It is not credible that the old hero of the wars of the Caucasus and Crimea compels his son to refuse military service, as was done once by the son of Sutaïef, the raskolnik of Tver. He would have liked to strip himself of his property, in order to conform to the socialistic dogma forbidding inheritance and property. He was hindered only by the fear of trampling upon the liberty and the conscience of others. But amid the luxury of his family Count Tolstoï lives the life of a poor man. He has dropped his pen as a novelist.57 Clad like a muzhik, he wields the scythe or drives the plough; between seedtime and harvest, he preaches his evangel.

I do not wish either to spread or to confute his teaching: for me it is sufficient to have given the reader an idea of it. Let him not show the characteristic behavior of a French reader; let him not hasten to see in Count Tolstoï’s latest attitude a sign of aberration. This attitude in his country is shared by a multitude of men. The single religious sect of Shalaputui (Extravagants), preaching and practising a communistic gospel like Tolstoï, has, within a score of years, won over all the common people, all the rustic class, of the south and south-west of Russia. Judicious observers, well-informed economists, foresee the complete and immediate spread of the doctrine in the lower classes throughout the empire.58 The day when the work of propagation shall be finished, the raskolniks of a special socialistic dogma will be counted: their number will suffice to show their power. That day, if they take it into their heads to act, will only have—using the popular expression—“to blow” on the old order of things, to see it vanish away.

Footnotes:

47 Zapiski Markera.

48 Count Tolstoï himself apparently narrowly escaped a similar fate. His brother-in-law induced him to give up gambling; but, after he went to Teheran, he fell into his old habits, and incurred such debts that he was unable to pay them. He tells how full of despair he was at the thought of a certain note falling due when he had nothing wherewith to meet it. He began to pray; and, as though in answer to his prayer, he received a playfully sarcastic letter from his brother, enclosing the dreaded note which a brother officer had generously refused to press or even collect. Yashvin’s passion for the gaming-table, in Anna Karénina, is also a reminiscence of this wild-oats period in Count Tolstoï’s life. All true fiction must be fact.—N. H. D.

49 Aleksander Sergeyévitch Griboyédof was born in January, 1795, and died in 1829. He studied law at first, but at the age of seventeen entered the army, and afterwards the college of foreign affairs, the service of which took him to Persia and Georgia, where a part of his great comedy, The Misfortune of having Brains (Gore ot Uma), was written.—N. H. D.

50 Cadet, or ensign.

51 M. Dupuy, in his condensation of the story, loses the perspective. Olénin taps lightly on the window. “He ran to the door, and actually heard Marianka’s deep sigh and her steps. He took hold of the latch, and shook it softly. Bare, cautious feet, scarcely making the boards creak, drew near the door. The latch was lifted: the door was pushed ajar. There was a breath of gourds and marjoram, and suddenly Marianka’s full form appeared on the threshold.” But the prospective interview is broken by the appearance of Lukashka’s friend Nazarka, who has to be bought off. The next day Olénin writes a letter, which, being more like a diary, he does not send, “because no one would understand what he meant to say.” In this letter occurs the passage which M. Dupuy quotes.—N. H. D.

52 She takes a dose of arsenic, but prompt means save her life.—N. H. D.

53 M. Dupuy adds, that he borrows “the inelegant but expressive translation of this scene” from the Journal de Saint Pétersbourg. In the present case, as in nearly all other quotations in the book, the originals have been used, which will account for greater or less variations from the literal version of the French text.—N. H. D.

54 Vasha prevoskhodítelstvo; literally, Your Excellency.

55 The Russians, after the retreat of the French, conferred the epaulets on Jack Frost: it was said that General Morozof won the victory for them.—N. H. D.

56 The word podspórye might be rendered by the much less expressive periphrasis “the succedanea of bread.”—Author’s note.

57 At last accounts, the reports about Count Tolstoï’s vagaries were found to be idle exaggerations: he is living on his estate, like a reasonable man, studying Greek and Hebrew, and writing short stories.—N. H. D.

58 In 1882 a Russian writer, Mr. Abramof, published, in The Annals of the Country, a very curious study of the Shalaputui. Turgénief was greatly struck by it. He said in regard to it: “There is the peasant getting up steam; before long he will make a general up-turning.”—Author’s Note.