The Project Gutenberg EBook of Leo Tolstoy, by
G. K. Chesterton and George Herbert Perris and Edward Garnett
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Title: Leo Tolstoy
Author: G. K. Chesterton
George Herbert Perris
Edward Garnett
Release Date: May 6, 2020 [EBook #62045]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
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[Illustration: LEO TOLSTOY]
LEO TOLSTOY
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON, G. H. PERRIS
ETC.
WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS
TORONTO
COPP CLARK COMPANY
LONDON: HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
LEO TOLSTOY _Frontispiece_
TOLSTOY AS AN OFFICER 1
TOLSTOY IN HIS STUDENT DAYS 2
YASNAYA POLYANA, THE COUNTRY HOME OF COUNT TOLSTOY 3
THE APPROACH TO THE PARK AT YASNAYA POLYANA 4
THE GATEWAY-ENTRANCE TO YASNAYA POLYANA 5
TOLSTOY WITH HIS BICYCLE 6
“THE TREE OF THE POOR” 7
TOLSTOY, AN EARLY PORTRAIT 7
COUNT AND COUNTESS TOLSTOY 8
LEO TOLSTOY (from a Sketch by Victor Prout) 9
COUNT TOLSTOY AT WORK IN THE FIELDS 10
FACSIMILE OF A PORTION OF TOLSTOY’S MS. 11
COUNT TOLSTOY, HIS WIFE, AND DAUGHTERS 12
TOLSTOY AT WORK IN HIS STUDY AT YASNAYA POLYANA 13
TOLSTOY WRITING AT HIS DESK 14
ONE OF H. R. MILLAR’S ILLUSTRATIONS 15
COUNT TOLSTOY 16
A FAMOUS PAINTING OF TOLSTOY 17
A PHOTOGRAPH OF COUNT TOLSTOY TAKEN AT YASNAYA POLYANA 18
RUSSIAN JAILER AND WOMAN WARDER 19
A TOLSTOY MEDALLION 20
THE COVER OF THE TRACT “WHERE LOVE IS, THERE GOD IS ALSO” 20
ONE OF THE POSTCARDS ISSUED IN MOSCOW IN 1898 TO COMMEMORATE
TOLSTOY’S LITERARY JUBILEE 21
TWO OF THE POSTCARDS ISSUED AT MOSCOW IN 1898 TO COMMEMORATE
TOLSTOY’S LITERARY JUBILEE 22
COUNT TOLSTOY AT REST (from a Painting by Répin) 23
TOLSTOY IN THE GROUNDS OF YASNAYA POLYANA 24
ONE OF H. R. MILLAR’S ILLUSTRATIONS 25
ONE OF MANY BUSTS OF COUNT TOLSTOY 26
A RECENT PORTRAIT OF COUNT TOLSTOY 27
THE DEFENDANTS 29
TOLSTOY AND HIS DAUGHTER TATYANA 30
COUNT TOLSTOY AND HIS FAMILY 31
LEO TOLSTOY (from a Portrait painted in 1884) 33
MASLOVA’S RETURN TO THE WARD AFTER THE SENTENCE 34
LEO TOLSTOY, 1896 (from a Photograph) 35
TOLSTOY
[Illustration: TOLSTOY AS AN OFFICER]
If any one wishes to form the fullest estimate of the real character and
influence of the great man whose name is prefixed to these remarks, he
will not find it in his novels, splendid as they are, or in his ethical
views, clearly and finely as they are conceived and expanded. He will
find it best expressed in the news that has recently come from Canada,
that a sect of Russian Christian anarchists has turned all its animals
loose, on the ground that it is immoral to possess them or control them.
About such an incident as this there is a quality altogether independent
of the rightness or wrongness, the sanity or insanity, of the view. It
is first and foremost a reminder that the world is still young. There
are still theories of life as insanely reasonable as those which were
disputed under the clear blue skies of Athens. There are still examples
of a faith as fierce and practical as that of the Mahometans, who swept
across Africa and Europe, shouting a single word. To the languid
contemporary politician and philosopher it seems doubtless like
something out of a dream, that in this iron-bound, homogeneous, and
clockwork age, a company of European men in boots and waistcoats should
begin to insist on taking the horse out of the shafts of the omnibus,
and lift the pig out of his pig-sty, and the dog out of his kennel,
because of a moral scruple or theory. It is like a page from some fairy
farce to imagine the Doukhabor solemnly escorting a hen to the door of
the yard and bidding it a benevolent farewell as it sets out on its
travels. All this, as I
[Illustration: TOLSTOY IN HIS STUDENT DAYS]
say, seems mere muddle-headed absurdity to the typical leader of human
society in this decade, to a man like Mr. Balfour, or Mr. Wyndham. But
there is nevertheless a further thing to be said, and that is that, if
Mr. Balfour could be converted to a religion which taught him that he
was morally bound to walk into the House of Commons on his hands, and he
did walk on his hands, if Mr. Wyndham could accept a creed which taught
that he ought to dye his hair blue, and he did dye his hair blue, they
would both of them be, almost beyond description, better and happier men
than they are. For there is only one happiness possible or conceivable
under the sun, and that is enthusiasm--that strange and splendid word
that has passed through so many vicissitudes, which meant, in the
eighteenth century the condition of a lunatic, and in ancient Greece the
presence of a god.
[Illustration: YASNAYA POLYANA, THE COUNTRY HOME OF COUNT TOLSTOY]
This great act of heroic consistency which has taken place in Canada is
the best example of the work of Tolstoy. It is true (as I believe) that
the Doukhabors have an origin quite independent of the great Russian
moralist, but there can surely be little doubt that their emergence into
importance and the growth and mental distinction of their sect, is due
to his admirable summary and justification of their scheme of ethics.
Tolstoy, besides being a magnificent novelist, is one of the very few
men alive who have a real, solid, and serious view of life. He is a
Catholic church, of which he is the only member, the somewhat arrogant
Pope and the somewhat submissive layman. He is one of the two or three
men in Europe, who have an attitude towards things so entirely their
own, that we could supply their inevitable view on anything--a silk hat,
a Home Rule Bill, an Indian poem, or a pound of tobacco. There are three
men in existence who have such an attitude: Tolstoy, Mr. Bernard Shaw,
and my friend Mr. Hilaire Belloc. They are all diametrically opposed to
each other, but they all have this essential resemblance, that, given
their basis of thought, their soil of conviction, their opinions on
every earthly subject grow there naturally, like flowers in a field.
There are certain views of certain things that they must take: they do
not form opinions, the opinions form themselves. Take, for instance, in
the case of Tolstoy, the mere list of miscellaneous objects which I
wrote down at random above, a silk hat, a Home Rule Bill, an Indian
poem, and a pound of tobacco. Tolstoy would say: “I believe in the
utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, this silk hat is a
black abortion.” He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible
simplification of life; therefore, this Home Rule Bill is a mere
peddling compromise; it is no good to break up a centralised empire into
nations, you must break the nation up into individuals.” He would say:
“I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, I
am interested in this Indian poem, for Eastern ethics, under all their
apparent gorgeousness, are far simpler and more Tolstoyan than Western.”
He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life;
therefore, this pound of tobacco is a thing of evil; take it away.”
Everything in the world, from the Bible to a bootjack, can be, and is,
reduced by Tolstoy to this great fundamental Tolstoyan principle, the
simplification of life. When we deal with a body of opinion like this we
are dealing with an incident in the history of Europe infinitely more
important than the appearance of Napoleon Buonaparte.
[Illustration: THE APPROACH TO THE PARK AT YASNAYA POLYANA]
This emergence of Tolstoy, with his awful and simple ethics, is
important in more ways than one. Among other things it is a very
interesting commentary on an attitude which has been taken up for the
matter of half a century by all the avowed opponents of religion. The
secularist and the sceptic have denounced Christianity first and
[Illustration: THE GATEWAY-ENTRANCE TO YASNAYA POLYANA]
foremost, because of its encouragement of fanaticism; because religious
excitement led men to burn their neighbours, and to dance naked down the
street. How queer it all sounds now. Religion can be swept out of the
matter altogether, and still there are philosophical and ethical
theories which can produce fanaticism enough to fill the world.
Fanaticism has nothing at all to do with religion. There are grave
scientific theories which, if carried out logically, would result in the
same fires in the market-place and the same nakedness in the street.
There are modern æsthetes who would expose themselves like the Adamites
if they could do it in elegant attitudes. There are modern scientific
moralists who would burn their opponents alive, and would be quite
contented if they were burnt by some new chemical process. And if any
one doubts this proposition--that fanaticism has nothing to do with
religion, but has only to do with human nature--let him take this case
of Tolstoy and the Doukhabors. A sect of men start with no theology at
all, but with the simple doctrine that we ought to love our neighbour
and use no force against him, and they end in thinking it wicked to
carry a leather handbag, or to ride in a cart. A great modern writer who
erases theology altogether, denies the validity of the Scriptures and
the Churches alike, forms a purely ethical theory that love should be
the instrument of reform, and ends by maintaining that we have no right
to strike a man if he is torturing a child before our eyes. He goes on,
he develops a theory of the mind and the emotions, which might be held
by the most rigid atheist, and he ends by maintaining that the sexual
relation out of which all humanity has come, is not only not moral, but
is positively not natural. This is fanaticism as it has been and as it
will always be. Destroy the last copy of the Bible, and persecution and
insane orgies will be founded on Mr. Herbert Spencer’s “Synthetic
Philosophy.” Some of the broadest thinkers of the Middle Ages believed
in faggots, and some of the broadest thinkers in the nineteenth century
believe in dynamite.
[Illustration: TOLSTOY WITH HIS BICYCLE
(Photographed in 1896)]
The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal
faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is
deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic: and
therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and
frenzies that have been produced by mysticism: they are a mere drop in
the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has
kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic. It is
significant that, with all that has been said about the excitability of
poets, only one English poet ever went mad, and he went mad from a
logical system of theology. He was Cowper, and his poetry retarded his
insanity for many years. So poetry, in which Tolstoy is deficient, has
always been a tonic and sanative thing. The only thing that has kept the
race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley,
the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism--the belief
that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
[Illustration: “THE TREE OF THE POOR”
Where Tolstoy receives the peasants and listens with unwearying patience
to their tales of distress]
[Illustration: TOLSTOY, AN EARLY PORTRAIT]
LEO TOLSTOY AS WRITER
Half the ignorance or misunderstanding of this greatest living figure in
literature comes of the attempt to judge him as we judge the specialised
Western novelist--an utterly futile method of approach. He is a Russian,
in the first place. Had he come to Paris with Turguenieff, he might have
been similarly de-nationalised, might possibly have developed into a
writer pure and simple; the world might so have gained a few great
romances--it would have lost infinitely in other directions. Turguenieff
wished it so. “My friend,” he wrote to Tolstoy from his deathbed,
“return to literature! Reflect that that gift comes to you whence
everything comes to us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could think that
my prayer would influence you.... My friend, great writer of our Russian
land, hear my entreaty!” For
[Illustration:
COUNT
AND
COUNTESS
TOLSTOY
From a
Portrait taken
in
September 1895
(Reproduced
by kind permission
from
“How Count Tolstoy
Lives and Works,”
by
P. A. Sergyeenko)
]
once, the second greatest of modern Russians took a narrow view of
character and destiny. Genius must work itself out on its own lines.
Tolstoy remained a Russian from tip to toe--that is one of his supreme
values for us; and he remained an indivisible personality. The artist
and the moralist are inseparable in his works. “We are not to take ‘Anna
Karènina’ as a work of art,” said Matthew
[Illustration: LEO TOLSTOY, FROM A SKETCH BY VICTOR PROUT
(Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. F. R. Henderson)]
Arnold; “we are to take it as a piece of life.” The distinction is not
very satisfactorily stated, but the meaning is clear. So, too, W. D.
Howells, in his introduction to an American edition of the “Sebastopol
Sketches”: “I do not know how it is with others to whom these books of
Tolstoy’s have come, but for my part I cannot think of them as
literature in the artistic sense at all. Some people complain to me when
I praise them that they are too long, too diffuse, too confused, that
the characters’ names are hard to pronounce, and that the life they
portray is very sad and not amusing. In the presence of these criticisms
I can only say that I find them nothing of the kind, but that each
history of Tolstoy’s is as clear, as orderly, as brief, as something I
have lived through myself.... I cannot think of any service which
imaginative literature has done the race so great as that which Tolstoy
has done in his conception of Karènina at that crucial moment when the
cruelly outraged man sees that he cannot be good with dignity. This
leaves all tricks of fancy, all effects of art, immeasurably behind.” So
much being said, however, we may be allowed to emphasise in this small
space the great qualities and achievements of Tolstoy as artist, rather
than the expositions of Christian Anarchism and the social philippics
under which those achievements have been somewhat hidden in recent
years.
[Illustration: COUNT TOLSTOY AT WORK IN THE FIELDS]
Morbid introspectiveness and the spirit of revolt inevitably colour what
is best in nineteenth-century Russia. Born at Yasnaya Polyana (“Clear
Field”), Tula, in 1828, and early orphaned, Tolstoy’s youth
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF A PORTION OF TOLSTOY’S MS.
(Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Nisbet & Co., from “How Count
Tolstoy Lives and Works,” by P. A. Sergyeenko)]
synchronised with the period of reaction that brought the Empire to the
humiliating disasters of the Crimean War. No hope was left in the thin
layer of society lying between the two mill-stones of the Court and the
serfs; none in the little sphere of art where Byronic romanticism was
ready to expire. The boy saw from the first the rottenness of the
patriarchal aristocracy in which his lot seemed to be cast. Precocious,
abnormally sensitive and observant, impatient of discipline and formal
learning, awkward and bashful, always brooding, not a little conceited,
he was a sceptic at fifteen, and left the University of Kazan in disgust
at the stupid conventions of the time and place, without taking his
degree. “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth”--which appeared in three
sections between 1852 and 1857--tells the story of this period, though
the figure of Irtenieff is probably a projection rather than a portrait
of himself, to whom he is always less fair, not to say merciful, than to
others. This book is a most uncompromising exercise in self-analysis. It
is of great length, there is no plot, and few outer events are
recorded.
[Illustration: COUNT TOLSTOY, HIS WIFE, AND DAUGHTERS]
The realism is generally morbid, but is varied by some passages of great
descriptive power, such as the account of the storm, and occasionally
with tender pathos, as in the story of the soldier’s death, as well as
by grimly vivid pages, such as the narrative of the mother’s death. In
this earliest work will be found the seeds both of Tolstoy’s artistic
genius and of his ethical gospel.
After five years of mildly benevolent efforts among his serfs at Yasnaya
Polyana (the disappointments of which he related a few years later in “A
Landlord’s Morning,” intended to have been part of a full novel to be
called “A Russian Proprietor”), his elder brother Nicholas persuaded him
to join the army, and in 1851 he was drafted to the Caucasus as an
artillery officer. On this favourite stage of classic Russian romance,
where for the first time he saw the towering mountains and the tropical
sun, and met the rugged adventurous highlanders, Tolstoy felt his
imagination stirred as Byron among the isles of Greece, and his early
revulsion against city life confirmed as Wordsworth amid the Lakes, as
Thoreau at Walden, by a direct call from Nature to his own heart. The
largest result of this experience was “The Cossacks” (1852). Turguenieff
described this fine prose epic of the contact of civilised and savage
man as “the best novel written in our language.” “The Raid” (or “The
Invaders,” as Mr. Dole’s translation is entitled), dating from the same
year, “The Wood-Cutting Expedition” (1855), “Meeting an Old
Acquaintance” (1856), and “A
[Illustration: TOLSTOY AT WORK IN HIS STUDY AT YASNAYA POLYANA]
Prisoner in the Caucasus” (1862) are also drawn from recollections of
this sojourn, and show the same descriptive and romantic power. Upon the
outbreak of the Crimean War the Count was called to Sebastopol, where he
had command of a battery, and took part in the defence of the citadel.
The immediate product of these dark months of bloodshed was the
thrilling series of impressions reprinted from one of the leading
Russian reviews as “Sebastopol Sketches” (1856). From that day onward
Tolstoy knew and told the hateful truth about war and the thoughtless
pseudo-patriotism which hurries nations into fratricidal slaughter. From
that day there was expunged from his mind all the cheap romanticism
which depends upon the glorification of the savage side of human nature.
These wonderful pictures of the routine of the battlefield established
his position in Russia as a writer, and later on created in Western
countries an impression like that of the canvases of Verestchagin.
[Illustration: TOLSTOY WRITING AT HIS DESK.]
For a brief time Tolstoy became a figure in the old and new capitals of
Russia by right of talent as well as birth. His very chequered
friendship with Turguenieff, one of the oddest chapters in literary
history, can only be mentioned here. In 1857 he travelled in Germany,
France, and Italy. It was of these years that he declared in “My
Confession” that he could not think of them without horror, disgust, and
pain of heart. The catalogue of crime which he charged against himself
in his salvationist crisis of twenty years later must not be taken
literally; but that there was some ground for it we may guess from the
scenic and incidental realism of the “Recollections of a Billiard
Marker” (1856), and of many a later page. Several other powerful short
novels date from about this time, including “Albert” and “Lucerne,” both
of which remind us of the Count’s susceptibility to music; “Polikushka,”
a tale of peasant life; and “Family Happiness,” the story of a marriage
that failed, a most clear, consistent, forceful, and in parts beautiful
piece of work, anticipating in essentials “The Kreutzer Sonata” that was
to scandalise the world thirty years afterward.
[Illustration: One of H. R. Millar’s illustrations in the English
edition of “Where Love is, there God is also,” reproduced by kind
permission of Messrs. Walter Scott, Ltd., the publishers]
After all, it was family happiness that saved Leo Tolstoy. For the third
time the hand of death had snatched away one of the nearest to him--his
brother Nicholas. Two years later, in 1862, he married Miss Behrs,
daughter of the army surgeon in Tula--the most fortunate thing that has
happened to him in his whole life, I should think. Family
responsibilities, those novel and daring experiments in peasant
education which are recorded in several volumes of the highest interest,
the supervision of the estate, magisterial
[Illustration: COUNT TOLSTOY]
work, and last, but not least, the prolonged labours upon “War and
Peace” and “Anna Karènina” fill up the next fifteen years. “War and
Peace” (1864-9) is a huge panorama of the Napoleonic campaign of 1812,
with preceding and succeeding episodes in Russian society. These four
volumes display in their superlative degree Tolstoy’s indifference to
plot and his absorption in individual character; they are rather a
series of scenes threaded upon the fortunes of several families than a
set novel; but they contain passages of penetrating psychology and vivid
description, as well as a certain amount of anarchist theorising. Of
this work, by which its author became known in the West, Flaubert (how
the name carries us backward!) wrote: “It is of the first order. What a
painter and what a psychologist! The two first volumes are sublime, but
the third drags frightfully. There are some quite Shakespearean things
in it.” The artist’s hand was now strengthening for his highest
attainment. In 1876 appeared “Anna Karènina,” his greatest, and as he
intended at the time (but Art is not so easily jilted), his last novel.
The fine qualities of this book, which, though long, is
[Illustration: A FAMOUS PAINTING OF TOLSTOY]
dramatically unified and vitally coherent, have been so fully recognised
that I need not attempt to describe them. Mr. George Meredith has
described Anna as “the most perfectly depicted female character in all
fiction,” which, from the author of “Diana,”
[Illustration:
A
PHOTOGRAPH
OF
COUNT TOLSTOY
TAKEN AT
YASNAYA POLYANA
(Reproduced
from “Anna Karènina”
by kind permission
of
Messrs Walter Scott Ltd.)
]
is praise indeed. Parallel with the main subject of the illicit love of
Anna and Vronsky there is a minor subject in the fortunes of Levin and
Kitty, wherein the reader will discover many of Tolstoy’s own
experiences. Matthew Arnold complained that the book contained too many
characters and a burdensome multiplicity of actions, but praised its
author’s extraordinarily fine perception and no less extraordinary
truthfulness, and frankly revelled in Anna’s
[Illustration: RUSSIAN JAILER AND WOMAN WARDER
“The jailer, rattling the iron padlock, opened the door of the cell.”
(From an illustration by Pasternak in the English Edition of
“Resurrection,” reproduced by kind permission of Mr. F. R. Henderson)]
“large, fresh, rich, generous, delightful nature.” “When I had ended my
work ‘Anna Karènina,’” said Tolstoy in “My Confession” (1879-82), “my
despair reached such a height that I could do nothing but think of the
horrible condition in which I found myself.... I saw only one
thing--Death. Everything else was a lie.” Of that spiritual crisis
nothing need be said here except that it only intensified, and did not
really, as it seemed to do, vitally change, principles and instincts
which had possessed Tolstoy from the beginning. His subsequent ethical
and religious development may be traced in a long series of books and
pamphlets, of which the most important are “The Gospels Translated,
Compared, and Harmonised” (1880-2), “What I Believe” [“My Religion”],
produced abroad in 1884, “What is to be Done?” (1884-5), “Life” (1887),
“Work” (1888), “The Kingdom of God is Within You” (1893), “Non-Action”
(1894), “Patriotism and Christianity” (1896)--a
[Illustration: A TOLSTOY MEDALLION]
[Illustration: THE COVER OF THE TRACT “WHERE LOVE IS, THERE GOD IS
ALSO”]
scathing attack upon militarism in general and the Franco-Russian
Alliance in particular--“The Christian Teaching” (1898), and “The
Slavery of our Times” (1900). Various letters on the successive famines
and on the religious persecutions in Russia deserve separate mention;
they remind us that since the failure of the revolutionary movement
miscalled “Nihilism,” Tolstoy has gradually risen to the position of the
one man who can continue with impunity a public crusade, in the foreign
and the clandestine presses at least, against all Imperial authority and
social maladjustments. Mr. Tchertkoff, Mr. Aylmer Maude, the
“Brotherhood Publishing Co.,” and the “Free Age Press” deserve praise
for their efforts to popularise these and other works of the Count in
thoroughly good translations. In “What is Art?” (1898), not content with
the bare utilitarian argument that it is merely a means of social union,
he launched a _jehad_ against all modern ideas of Art which rely upon a
conception of beauty and all ideas of beauty into which pleasure enters
as a leading constituent. A short but luminous essay on “Guy de
Maupassant and the Art of Fiction” is a more satisfactory contribution
to the subject.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE POSTCARDS ISSUED IN MOSCOW IN 1898 TO
COMMEMORATE TOLSTOY’S LITERARY JUBILEE]
It is more to our purpose to note that in this volcanic and fecund if
fundamentally simple personality the artist has dogged the steps of the
evangelist to the last. “Master and Man” (1895) is one of the most
exquisite short stories ever written. “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch” (1884)
and “Resurrection” (1899) are in some ways the most powerful of all his
works. The much-condemned “Dominion of Darkness” (1886) and “Kreutzer
Sonata” (1889) will be more fairly judged when the average Englishman
has learned the supreme merit of that uncompromising truthfulness which
gives nobility to every line the grand Russian ever wrote. To submit a
work like “Resurrection” to the summary treatment which the ordinary
novel receives and merits is absurd. It is a large picture of the fall
and rise of man done by the swift and restless hand of a master who
stands in a category apart, with an eye that sees externals and
essentials with like accuracy and rapidity. Because the dramatic quality
of these living pictures lies, not in their organisation into a
conventionally limited plot, but first in the challenging idea upon
which they are founded, then the inexorable development of individual
characters, and ever and anon in the grip of particular episodes, the
little critics scoff. The idea, the characters, the episodes are all too
real and vital for their precious British self-complacency. The
grandmotherly _Athenæum_
[Illustration: TWO OF THE POSTCARDS ISSUED AT MOSCOW IN 1898 TO
COMMEMORATE TOLSTOY’S LITERARY JUBILEE]
permits some person to describe this Promethean figure as “a precious
vase that has been broken,” and can now only be pieced together to make
“the ornament of a museum,”--which reminds me that I heard a lecturer
before a well-known literary society in London describe him lately as a
“scavenger,” and that a city bookseller assured me the other day that
there was something almost amounting to a boycott against his fiction in
the shops. The publisher who is preparing a complete edition of
Tolstoy--enormous work!--knows better, knows that Tolstoy is one of the
world-spirits whose advance out of the obscurity of a benighted land
into the largest contemporary circulation is but a foretaste of an
influence that will soon be co-extensive with the commonwealth of
thinking men and women.
[Illustration:
COUNT TOLSTOY
AT REST.
From a Painting
by Répin.
(Reproduced by kind
permission from
“How Tolstoy Lives
and Works,”
by
P. A. Sergyeenko)
]
His service to literature is precisely the same as his service to
morals. Like Bunyan and Burns, Dickens and Whitman, he throws down in a
world of decadent conventions the gauge of the democratic ideal. As he
calls the politician and the social reformer back to the land and the
common people, so he calls the artist back to the elemental forces ever
at work beneath the surface-show of nature and humanity. With an
extraordinary penetration into the hidden recesses of character, he
joins a terrible truthfulness, and that absolute
[Illustration: TOLSTOY IN THE GROUNDS OF YASNAYA POLYANA]
simplicity of manner which we generally associate with genius. He is a
realist, not merely of the outer, but more especially of the inner life.
There is no staginess, no sentimentality, in his work. He has no heroes
in our Western sense, none, even, of those sensational types of
personality which glorify the name of his Northern contemporary, Ibsen.
His style is always natural, direct, irresistible as a physical process.
He has rarely strayed beyond the channel of his own experience, and the
reader who prefers breadth to depth of knowledge must seek elsewhere. He
has little humour, but a grimly satiric note has sometimes crept into
his writing, as Archdeacon Farrar will remember. Of artifice designed
for vulgar entertainment he knows nothing; in the world of true art,
which is the wine-press of the soul of man, he stands, a princely
figure. Theories, prescriptions, and discussions are forgotten, and we
think only with love and reverence of this modern patriarch, so lonely
amid the daily enlarging congregation of the hearts he has awakened to a
sense of the mystery, the terror, the joy, the splendour of human
destinies.
G. H. PERRIS.
TOLSTOY’S PLACE IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE
The justness of the word _great_ applied to a nation’s writers is
perhaps best tested by simply taking each writer in turn from out his
Age, and seeing how far our conception of his Age remains unaffected. We
may take away hundreds of clever writers, scores of distinguished
creators, and the Age remains before our eyes, solidly unaffected by
their absence; but touch one or two central figures, and lo! the whole
framework of the Age gives in your hands, and you realise that the
World’s insight into, and understanding of that Age’s life has been
supplied us by the special interpretation offered by two or three great
minds. In fact, every Age seems dwarfed, chaotic, full of confused
tendencies and general contradiction till the few great men have arisen,
and symbolised in themselves what their nation’s growth or strife
_signifies_. How many dumb ages are there in which no great writer has
appeared, ages to whose inner life in consequence we have no key!
[Illustration: One of H. R. Millar’s illustrations in the English
edition of “What Men Live By” (written in 1881), reproduced by kind
permission of Messrs. Walter Scott, Ltd., the publishers]
Tolstoy’s significance as the great writer of modern Russia can scarcely
be augmented in Russian eyes by his exceeding significance to Europe as
symbolising the spiritual unrest of the modern world. Yet so inevitably
[Illustration:
ONE
OF THE
MOST
STRIKING
OF THE
MANY
BUSTS OF
COUNT
TOLSTOY
]
must the main stream of each age’s tendency and the main movement of the
world’s thought be discovered for us by the great writers, whenever they
appear, that Russia can no more keep Tolstoy’s significance to herself
than could Germany keep Goethe’s to herself. True it is that Tolstoy, as
great novelist, has been absorbed in mirroring the peculiar world of
half-feudal, modern
[Illustration: A RECENT PORTRAIT OF COUNT TOLSTOY
_From Photo by_] [_Rek Matild, Zsolna_]
Russia, a world strange to Western Europe, but the spirit of analysis
with which the creator of “Anna Karènina” and “War and Peace” has
confronted the modern world is more truly representative of our Age’s
outlook than is the spirit of any other of his great contemporaries.
Between the days of “Wilhelm Meister” and of “Resurrection” what an
extraordinary volume of the rushing tide of modern life has swept by! A
century of that “liberation of modern Europe from the old routine” has
passed since Goethe stood forth for “the awakening of the modern
spirit.” A century of emancipation, of Science, of unbelief, of
incessant shock, change, and Progress all over the face of Europe, and
even as Goethe a hundred years ago typified the triumph of the new
intelligence of Europe over the shackles of its old institutions,
routine, and dogma (as Matthew Arnold affirms), so Tolstoy to-day stands
for the triumph of the European _soul_ against civilisation’s routine
and dogma. The peculiar modernness of Tolstoy’s attitude, however, as we
shall presently show, is that he is inspired largely by the modern
scientific spirit in his searching analysis of modern life. Apparently
at war with Science and Progress, his extraordinary fascination for the
mind of Europe lies in the fact that he of all great contemporary
writers has come nearest to demonstrating, to _realising_ what the life
of the modern man _is_. He of all the analysts of the civilised man’s
thoughts, emotions, and actions has least idealised, least beautified,
and least distorted the complex daily life of the European world. With a
marked moral bias, driven onward in his search for truth by his
passionate religious temperament, Tolstoy, in his pictures of life, has
constructed a truer _whole_, a human world less bounded by the artist’s
individual limitations, more mysteriously living in its vast flux and
flow than is the world of any writer of the century. “War and Peace” and
“Anna Karènina,” those great worlds where the physical environment,
mental outlook, emotional aspiration, and moral code of the whole
community of Russia are reproduced by his art, as some mighty cunning
phantasmagoria of changing life, are superior in the sense of containing
a whole nation’s life, to the worlds of Goethe, Byron, Scott, Victor
Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Maupassant, or any latter day creator
we can name. And not only so, but Tolstoy’s analysis of life throws
more light on the main currents of thought in our Age, raises deeper
problems, and explores more untouched territories of the mind than does
any corresponding analysis by his European contemporaries.
[Illustration:
THE
DEFENDANTS
“The third prisoner
was Maslova”
(From an illustration
by Pasternak
in the
English Edition of
“Resurrection,”
reproduced by
kind permission of
Mr. F. R.
Henderson)
]
It is by Tolstoy’s passionate seeking of the life of the soul that the
[Illustration: TOLSTOY AND HIS DAUGHTER TATYANA]
great Russian writer towers above the men of our day, and it is because
his hunger for spiritual truth has led him to probe contemporary life,
to examine all modern formulas and appearances, to penetrate into the
secret thought and emotion of men of all grades in our complex society,
that his work is charged with the essence of nearly all that modernity
thinks and feels, believes and suffers, hopes and fears as it evolves in
more and more complex forms of our terribly complex civilisation. The
soul of humanity is, however, always the appeal of men from the life
that environs, moulds, and burdens them, to instincts that go beyond and
transcend their present life. Tolstoy is the _appeal_ of the modern
world, the cry of the modern conscience against the blinded fate of its
own _progress_. To the eye of science everything is possible in human
life, the sacrifice of the innocent for the sake of the progress of the
guilty,
[Illustration: COUNT TOLSTOY AND HIS FAMILY
(Reproduced from _The Review of Reviews_ by kind permission of the
Editor)] the crushing and deforming of the weak so that the strong may
triumph over them, the evolution of new serf classes at the dictates of
a ruling class. All this the nineteenth century has seen accomplished,
and not seen alone in Russia. It is Tolstoy’s distinction to have
combined in his life-work more than any other great artist two main
conflicting points of view. He has fused by his art the science that
defines _the way_ Humanity is forced forward blindly and irresponsibly
from century to century by the mere pressure of events, he has fused
with this science of our modern world the soul’s protest against the
earthly fate of man which leads the generations into taking the
ceaseless roads of evil which every age unwinds.
Let us cite Tolstoy’s treatment of War as an instance of how this great
artist symbolises the Age for us and so marks the advance in
self-consciousness of the modern mind, and as a nearer approximation to
a realisation of what life is. We have only got to compare Tolstoy’s
“Sebastopol” (1856) with any other document on war by other European
writers to perceive that Tolstoy alone among artists has _realised_ war,
his fellows have _idealised_ it. To quote a passage from a former
article let us say that “‘Sebastopol’ gives us war under _all_
aspects--war as a squalid, honourable, daily affair of mud and glory, of
vanity, disease, hard work, stupidity, patriotism, and inhuman agony.
Tolstoy gets the complex effects of ‘Sebastopol’ by keenly analysing the
effect of the sights and sounds, dangers and pleasures, of war on the
brains of a variety of typical men, and by placing a special valuation
of his own on these men’s actions, thoughts, and emotions, on their
courage, altruism, and show of indifference in the face of death. He
lifts up, in fact, the veil of appearances conventionally drawn by
society over the actualities of the glorious trade of killing men, and
he does this chiefly by analysing keenly the insensitiveness and
indifference of the average mind, which says of the worst of war’s
realities, ‘I felt so and so, and did so and so: but as to what those
other thousands may have felt in their agony, that I did not enter into
at all. ‘Sebastopol,’ therefore, though an exceedingly short and
exceedingly simple narrative, is a psychological document on modern war
of extraordinary value, for it simply
[Illustration: LEO TOLSTOY, FROM A PORTRAIT PAINTED IN 1884]
[Illustration: MASLOVA’S RETURN TO THE WARD AFTER THE SENTENCE
“She could bear it no longer; her face quivered and she burst into sobs”
(From an illustration by Pasternak in the English Edition of
“Resurrection” reproduced by kind permission of Mr. F. R. Henderson)]
relegates to the lumber-room, as unlife-like and hopelessly limited, all
those theatrical glorifications of war which men of letters, romantic
poets, and grave historians alike have been busily piling up on
humanity’s shelves from generation to generation. And more: we feel that
in ‘Sebastopol’ we have at last the sceptical modern spirit, absorbed in
actual life, demonstrating what war is, and expressing at length the
confused sensations of countless men, who have heretofore never found a
genius who can make humanity realise what it knows half-consciously and
consciously evades. We cannot help, therefore, recognising this man
Tolstoy as the most advanced product of our civilisation, and likening
him to a great surgeon, who, not deceived by the world s presentation of
its own life, penetrates into the essential joy and suffering, health
and disease of multitudes of men; a surgeon who, face to face with the
strangest of Nature’s laws in the constitution of human society,
puzzled by all the illusions, fatuities, and conventions of the human
mind, resolutely sets himself to lay bare the roots of all its passions,
appetites, and incentives in the struggle for life, so that at least
human reason may advance farther along the path of self-knowledge in
advancing towards a general sociological study of man.”
[Illustration: LEO TOLSTOY, 1896.
(From a Photograph)]
Tolstoy’s place in nineteenth-century literature is, therefore, in our
view, no less fixed and certain than is Voltaire’s place in the
eighteenth century. Both of these writers focus for us in a marvellously
complete manner the respective methods of analysing life by which the
rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the science
and humanitarianism of the nineteenth century have moulded for us the
modern world. All the movements, all the problems, all the speculation,
all the agitations of the world of to-day in contrast with the immense
materialistic civilisation that science has hastily built up for us in
three or four generations, all the _spirit_ of modern life is condensed
in the pages of Tolstoy’s writings, because, as we have said, he
typifies the soul of the modern man gazing, now undaunted, and now in
alarm, at the formidable array of the newly-tabulated _cause and
effect_ of humanity’s progress, at the appalling cheapness and waste of
human life in Nature’s hands. Tolstoy thus stands for _the modern soul’s
alarm in contact with science_. And just as science’s _work_ after its
first destruction of the past ages’ formalism, superstition, and dogma
is directed more and more to the examination and amelioration of human
life, so Tolstoy’s work has been throughout inspired by a passionate
love of humanity, and by his ceaseless struggle against conventional
religion, dogmatic science, and society’s mechanical influence on the
minds of its members. To make man more _conscious_ of his acts, to show
society its real motives and what it _is_ feeling, and not cry out in
admiration at what it pretends to feel--this has been the great
novelist’s aim in his delineation of Russia’s life. Ever seeking the one
truth--to arrive at men’s thoughts and sensations under the daily
pressure of life--never flinching from his exploration of the dark world
of man’s animalism and incessant self-deception, Tolstoy’s _realism_ in
art is symbolical of our absorption in the world of fact, in the modern
study of natural law, a study ultimately without loss of spirituality,
nay, resulting in immense gain to the spiritual life. The _realism_ of
the great Russian’s novels is, therefore, more in line with the modern
tendency and outlook than is the general tendency of other schools of
Continental literature. And Tolstoy must be finally looked on, not
merely as _the conscience of the Russian world_ revolting against the
too heavy burden which the Russian people have now to bear in Holy
Russia’s onward march towards the building-up of her great Asiatic
Empire, but also as the soul of the modern world seeking to replace in
its love of humanity the life of those old religions which science is
destroying day by day. In this sense Tolstoy will stand in European
literature as the conscience of the modern world.
EDWARD GARNETT.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
[Sidenote: =Count Tolstoy=
_see Frontispiece_]
Lyeff Nikolaevitch Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana on August 28th
(September 9th new style), 1828. His father, Count Nicholas Tolstoy, was
a member of the old Russian nobility. In 1813, after the siege of
Erfurt, he was taken prisoner by the French and afterwards retired from
the army holding the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Having assumed the
burden of many family debts, he succeeded in paying his creditors in
full, thus gaining a reputation for unfailing perseverance. Tolstoy has
described his character in “Childhood and Youth.” “He was a man of the
last century,” he wrote, “and, like all his contemporaries, he had in
him something chivalrous, enterprising, self-possessed, amiable, a
passion for pleasure.... His life was so full of all kinds of impulse
that he had no time to think about convictions; and besides, he had been
so happy all his life that he did not feel it necessary to do so.” His
father died before Tolstoy reached the age of ten years, seven years
after the death of his mother, of whom he wrote: “When I try to recall
to mind my mother as she was then, only her brown eyes arise before me,
always the same look of love and kindness in them. If during the most
trying moments of my life I could have caught a glimpse of her smile, I
should not have known what grief is.”
[Sidenote: =Tolstoy in his Student days=
_see page_ 2]
[Sidenote: =Yasnaya Polyana=
_see page_ 3]
Tolstoy’s early years were passed in the country on the old-fashioned
Russian estate, which resembled somewhat in patriarchal habits,
aristocratic manners, democratic familiarity, shiftlessness, and
superstition, a Southern Plantation in the days of slavery. After the
death of his father in 1837 the family was taken charge of by an aunt,
the Countess Alexandra Osten-Saken, and three years later by relatives
of his mother who lived at Kazan. In 1843 Tolstoy entered the University
of Kazan, where “Impervious to the ambitions of scholarship and
research, unimpressed by the provincial aristocracy, too nice to enjoy
the rough revels of the students, and repelled alike from aristocrats,
professors, and students by an unsocial and what, with our English
emphasis on government, we should call an unregulated disposition, he
seems to have had during these two or three years a thoroughly unhappy
and unprofitable experience.”[1] Having left the University in 1846
without graduating he returned to the old country home. Yasnaya Polyana
descended to Tolstoy from his mother. The estate, which covers an area
of some 2,500 acres, partly arable and partly wooded, lies a hundred
miles due south of Moscow. It was at one time Tolstoy’s intention to
dispossess himself entirely of his property and live as a peasant.
Instead of this, however, he has made over the whole of the land to his
wife and children, and lives in the house nominally as a guest.
[1] “Leo Tolstoy,” by G. H. Perris.
[Sidenote: =The Gateway to Yasnaya Polyana=
_see page_ 5]
At the entrance to the park are two towers, medieval in style, which
were erected by Tolstoy’s maternal grandfather. From them the road runs
through the park, rising as it approaches the house, and becomes merged
in a level avenue of birch trees. Glimpses of a pond are caught through
the dense foliage and of a square smoothly rolled space used as a
tennis-ground, the game being one in which Count Tolstoy participates
with great enjoyment. It will be noticed that in the photograph on page
31 he is holding a tennis racket in his hand.
[Sidenote: =The Approach to the Park=
_see page_ 4]
[Sidenote: =“The Tree of the Poor”=
_see page_ 7]
The house itself is a plain white rectangular two-storied building of
stuccoed brick, and it would be hard to imagine a simpler and less
pretentious place than the home in which Tolstoy has spent the greater
part of his life. It boasts neither piazzas nor towers; indeed, no
architectural ornaments of any kind, nor are vines or other creepers
trained upon the flat walls to relieve their striking whiteness or
soften their rectangular outlines. The house was not completed all at
once, but was enlarged in proportion to the needs of the family. On one
side, devoid of windows, there is a low porch, near which stands an old
elm tree, called “The Tree of the Poor.” Close to its trunk is a bench
on which the peasants sit to await the coming of Count Tolstoy. Here he
listens with unwearying patience to many stories of distress and
difficulty, and gives in return, not only sympathy and advice, but such
material assistance as may lie at his command.
It was during the period following upon his University career that
Tolstoy threw all his energies into the task of raising both the
economical and moral standard of peasant life, and suffered much
disappointment at the hands of the peasants, who refused to allow him to
pull down their dilapidated hovels even that he might erect new and
convenient ones at his own cost. The result was that Tolstoy left
Yasnaya Polyana for St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1847, resolved to
prosecute his studies with the intention of taking a degree in law. With
this choice of a career, however, he was dissatisfied, and returned
again to his estate in 1848.
[Sidenote: =Tolstoy as an Officer=
_see page_ 1]
For a few years he lived the ordinary life of the Russian nobleman,
enlisting at the age of 23 as cadet in a regiment of artillery in which
his elder brother Nicholas was captain. Discontented with the idle life
he was leading and out of harmony with his gay surroundings, he decided
to jot down his recollections of the homeland he loved so well, and it
was at this time that he commenced writing “Childhood and Youth” (which,
however, was not published in its complete form until six years later)
and “The Cossacks.”
Subsequently Tolstoy was appointed to a post on Prince Gortchakoff’s
staff in Turkey, and was present at Sevastopol in 1855, having attained
the rank of divisional commander. His experiences during the war are
pictured in his three sketches, “Sevastopol in December 1854,” “In May
1855,” and “In August 1855.” These were published the following year and
at once made his literary reputation. At the end of the campaign he left
the army and visited Western Europe, in order to study various school
systems, and upon his return to Yasnaya Polyana he established several
schools of his own.
[Sidenote: =Count Tolstoy and his wife=
_see page_ 8]
In September 1862 Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna Behrs, the daughter
of a military doctor. He was at this time thirty-four years of age, his
bride being sixteen years younger. Miss Behrs was not only beautiful,
she was an exceedingly cultured girl, having passed various examinations
at the Moscow University. According to her brother, the manner of their
courtship was practically identical with that of Levin and Kitty in
“Anna Karènina.” Countess Tolstoy at the age of forty-eight is described
by Sergyeenko in “How Count Tolstoy Lives and Works,” as having “An
open, expressive countenance, with vivacious, fearless eyes, which she
constantly brings near to the objects at which she is looking. At her
very first words one feels her straightforward nature. In her manner
there is not even a shadow of truckling to suit the tone of any one
whomsoever; her own individual note is always audible.”
About the time of his marriage, Tolstoy was described as “a tall,
wide-shouldered thin-waisted man, with a moustache, but without a beard,
with a serious, even a gloomy expression of face, which, however, was
softened by a gleam of kindliness whenever he smiled.”
[Sidenote: =Count Tolstoy at work in the fields=
_see page_ 10]
Living at Yasnaya Polyana winter and summer, with but rare intervening
visits to Moscow, Tolstoy interested himself in all the practical
details of farming. Probably his own experiences of the physical labour
of mowing are depicted as those of Levin in “Anna Karènina.” “The work
went on and on. Levin absolutely lost all idea of time, and did not know
whether it was early or late. Though the sweat stood on his face, and
dropped from his nose, and all his back was wet as though he had been
plunged in water, still he felt very well. His work now seemed to him
full of pleasure. It was a state of unconsciousness: he did not know
what he was doing, or how much he was doing, or how the hours and
moments were flying, but only felt that at this time his work was
good.”
Tolstoy was also an enthusiastic sportsman--a diversion which occasioned
him two serious accidents--and, in addition to fulfilling the duties of
a Justice of the Peace, he set himself to grapple with the novel
conditions of land-owning, a complicated and arduous task to which he
applied himself with characteristic energy and shrewdness. Indeed, his
interests were manifold and exacting. Yet during this busy period he by
no means neglected his literary work. The composition of his novel “War
and Peace” began immediately after his marriage, and extended over a
period of eight years. His wife copied out the manuscript of this work
no less than seven times as he altered and improved it. “War and Peace”
was followed by “Anna Karènina,” which was not completed until 1876.
[Sidenote: =Facsimile of a portion of Tolstoy’s MS.=
_see page_ 11]
In his method of working, Tolstoy may be likened to the old painters.
Having settled upon a plan of work, and collected a large number of
studies, he first makes a charcoal sketch, as it were, and writes
rapidly without thinking of particulars. He then has a clean copy of the
work made by his wife or one of his daughters, and this is again
subjected to careful remodelling. It is still in the nature of a
charcoal sketch. The MS. is speedily covered with erasures and
interpolations. Whole sentences replace others. The work is then copied
again, and some chapters Tolstoy writes more than ten times. He usually
writes on quarto sheets of cheap plain paper in a large involved hand,
and sometimes covers as many as twenty pages in one day. He regards the
interval between nine o’clock and three as the best time for work.
[Sidenote: =Tolstoy at work in his study at Yasnaya Polyana=
_see page_ 13]
His study at Yasnaya Polyana is a small room with an uncarpeted floor, a
vaulted ceiling, and thick stone walls. Formerly it was a store-room,
and on the ceiling are heavy black iron rings, on which hams used to
hang and which were used later for gymnastic exercises. The study is
very cool and quiet, and contains various implements of labour, such as
a scythe, a saw, pincers, tiles, etc.
[Sidenote: =Tolstoy with his bicycle=
_see page_ 6]
After his morning labours, Tolstoy generally goes out, often riding on
horseback or on his bicycle, according to the state of the weather. He
is strict vegetarian, eating only the simplest food and avoiding all
stimulants. He long ago ceased to smoke. Attaching great importance to
manual labour, he takes a share in the housework, lighting his own fire
and carrying water. At one time he learned bootmaking, and it is
wonderful what an amount of physical exertion he was able to undergo at
the age of seventy in the way of heavy labour in the field, of riding
scores of versts on his bicycle, or of playing for hours at lawn tennis.
[Sidenote: =A portrait of Tolstoy=
_see page_ 16]
[Sidenote: =Tolstoy in the grounds of Yasnaya Polyana=
_see page_ 24]
Tolstoy has always dressed extremely simply, and when at home his
costume consisted of a grey flannel blouse, which in summer he exchanged
for a canvas one of a very original cut, as may be judged from the fact
that there was in the whole district only one old woman who could make
it according to his orders. In this blouse Tolstoy sat for his portrait
to Kramsky and Répin, the painters. His over-dress was composed of a
caftan and half-shouba, made of the simplest materials, and, like the
blouse, eccentric in their cut, being made evidently not for show but to
stand bad weather. The Hon. Ernest Howard Crosby has given an
interesting description of Count Tolstoy’s appearance. “He is dressed
like a peasant in a grey-white blouse of thin, coarse, canvas-like
material, with a leather belt; but his toilet differs from a peasant’s
in being scrupulously clean. His features are irregular and plain, and
yet his figure is so strong and massive that the _tout ensemble_ is
striking and fine-looking. His little blue eyes peer out from under his
bushy eyebrows with the kindliest of expressions.”
[Sidenote: =Count Tolstoy and his family=
_see page_ 31]
Count and Countess Tolstoy have had fifteen children of whom only seven
survived. The system of their upbringing has been fully dealt with by M.
C. A. Behrs in his “Recollections of Count Leo Tolstoy.” Toys and
playthings were rigorously banished from the nursery. With the first
child the trial was made to dispense altogether with a nurse. But later
it was thought well to yield to the requirements of their social
position and to the habits of contemporary life, and the children were
put under the care of nurses, bonnes, and governesses. The parents,
however, exercised a strict and unremittent surveillance over both the
children and those who had the care of them.
The greatest possible liberty was allowed to the children, and all put
in authority over them were strictly forbidden to have resort under any
pretext to violent or severe punishments.
Tolstoy believed that these principles were nowhere so generally
accepted as in England, and, accordingly, from their third to their
ninth year, the children were placed under the charge of young English
governesses engaged directly from London.
[Sidenote: =Count Tolstoy, his wife, and daughters=
_see page_ 12]
Countess Tolstoy is an excellent housewife, attentive and hospitable.
All the complicated and troublesome management of the housekeeping and
direction of household affairs is under her charge. She is
indefatigable, and brings her brisk energy, thriftiness, and activity to
bear in every direction, and this she does without help. Her three
eldest sons live apart, each occupied with his own business matters. Her
daughters have their own interests and duties, which take up the greater
part of their time.
[Sidenote: =Tolstoy and his eldest daughter Tatyana=
_see page_ 30]
Tolstoy’s eldest daughter, Tatyana Lvovna, a girl of exceptional talent,
in particular works very hard. In addition to copying much of her
father’s manuscript, she conducts his vast correspondence, consisting of
an almost incredible number of letters received in all languages from
every part of the globe.
[Sidenote: =Leo Tolstoy, from a portrait painted in 1884=
_see page_ 33]
[Sidenote: =Illustrations by H. R. Millar to “What Men Live By”--=
_see page_ 25]
This is probably the most striking of all the portraits of Count
Tolstoy, representing him when at the height of his popularity and
power. In 1884 he was at work on the Popular Tales and Sketches which
sold by millions throughout Russia, and from which we reproduce two or
three illustrations--viz., one by H. R. Millar from the English edition
of “What Men Live By,” written in 1881; another by the same artist from
the English edition of “Where Love is there God is also,” and a third
showing the cover of this tract, which was written in 1885, and issued
in rough pamphlet form at the price of a few farthings.
[Sidenote: =--and to “Where Love is there God is also”=
_see page_ 15]
[Sidenote: =Cover of “Where Love is there God is also”=
_see page_ 20]
[Sidenote: =Pasternak’s illustrations to “Resurrection”=
_see pages_ 19, 29 and 34]
During the last twenty years Tolstoy has written the following
books:--“My Confession,” “A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology,” which has
never been translated, “The Four Gospels, Harmonized and Translated,”
“What I Believe,” “The Gospel in Brief,” “What to Do,” “On Life” (also
called “Life”), “The Kreutzer Sonata,” “The Kingdom of God is Within
You,” “The Christian Teaching,” “What is Art?” which in Tolstoy’s own
opinion is the best constructed of his books, “Resurrection,” his last
novel, begun about 1894, and then laid aside in favour of what seemed
more important work to be completely rewritten and published in 1899 for
the benefit of the Doukhabors, and latterly “What is Religion and what
is Its Essence,” published in February 1902. The illustrations
reproduced from “Resurrection” on pages 19, 29, and 34 are from the
remarkable drawings by Pasternak. Concerning these pictures there is an
interesting note in the preface of the French edition of the novel from
which it may be gathered that the drawings tallied very closely with
Tolstoy’s own conception of the appearance of his characters. It was the
artist’s usual custom to submit each design on its completion to the
eminent novelist for his opinion. Invariably Tolstoy showed his approval
of the clever realisation of his ideas. But when it came to the sketch
of Prince Nekhludov, Tolstoy went so far as to enquire of M. Pasternak
whether he was acquainted with the person who had served him as a model.
At this the artist showed extreme surprise--he had not even been aware
that the character was copied from an original.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Leo Tolstoy, by
G. K. Chesterton and George Herbert Perris and Edward Garnett
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