The Complete Plays of Leo Tolstoy (Annotated) - Leo Tolstoy

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His sorrow is not indeed found in his plays, but surely it was found in his life. Think not, therefore, that the sportive, merry, joking Socrates was gay through all the seventy years of his life. Not from a gay heart came those words spoken at the end of his days, “We approach truth only in so far as we are removed from life.” And lastly, my friends, not from a gay heart flowed that gentle spirit, that boundless love, of the possessor of whom not once, in all the four Gospels, is recorded the fact that he ever laughed! Verily, only through sorrow can be reached the haven of the soul, that union with God which is free from pride of intellect and love of self. And so Tolstoy's life too, ere he attained that heavenly peace, was filled with sorrow immeasurable, sorrow unspeakable. For fifteen years of his life the thought of suicide was not out of his mind for a day; he upon whom Fortune had lavished every gift which in the opinion of the world can alone make man happy, he who had riches, fame, friends, position, admiration, appreciation,—this man Tolstoy has for years to hide his gun lest he shoot himself, and his towel lest he hang himself. Wherefore, then, such misery? Because, my friends, he was natively endowed with a heaven-aspiring soul, between which and the doctrine of the world there can be no peace. One must perish, or the other,—either the doctrine of the world, or his soul. His soul, indeed, was destined not to perish; but the devil in man dies hard, and for fifty years the doctrine of the world held in him the upper hand.

      26. Hence though the essence of Tolstoy is the preacher, he was during these fifty years never the preacher alone; but this very struggle in his soul between the powers of Light on the one hand and the powers of Darkness on the other is also the reason why he never remained the artist alone. Like the thread of Theseus in the labyrinth of Minos, the preacher's vein is seldom, if ever, absent from Tolstoy. Hence his “Morning of a Proprietor,” written in 1852, at the age of twenty-four, is as faithful an account of his experience as a visitor among the poor as his “Census of Moscow,” written twenty-five years later; hence his “Lutzen,” written when he was yet under thirty, is as powerful a plea for the beggar as his “What to Do,” written at the end of his career. The final detaching of the preacher from the artist is not therefore a sudden resolve, but the outcome of the life-long struggle of his spirit. The detaching of the preacher from the artist took place therefore in Tolstoy as the detaching of the nourishing kernel takes place from the castaway shell. When he found his haven and saw that the only meaning of life can be found solely in love of man, and in living and in toiling for him, when the doctrine of the world, in short, was defeated by the soul, then the severance of the preacher from the artist becomes complete, the shell is burst, and in all its native nourishingness there at last lies before us what is eternal of Tolstoy,—the writings, not of the artist Tolstoy, but the writings of the preacher Tolstoy.

      27. My hearers, my friends, I have now spoken unto ye for well-nigh six hours. From the manner in which you have listened unto me, I judge that ye have been entertained, perhaps even instructed. And yet I should feel that I have spoken unto ye to but little purpose, if my words have merely entertained, merely instructed you; for mere entertainment you can find already in abundance elsewhere,—in the circus, in the play-house, in the concert-room, in the magazine, in the wit of the diner-out, and not unto me is it given to compete with these. And mere instruction likewise you can find already in abundance elsewhere,—in the cyclopædias, in the universities, in the libraries, in the Browning-reader; and neither is it given wholly unto me to compete with these. Not, therefore, to amuse, not even wholly to instruct ye, have I come before ye these successive evenings, and asked you to lend me your ear. But I had hoped that on parting from me, as you will this evening, perhaps for aye, you might perhaps carry away with ye also that earnestness of purpose, the absence of which made so barren the muse of Pushkin; that sympathy for a soul struggling upward, the want of which made so cheerless the life of Gogol; that faith in God, the lack of which made so incomplete the life of Turgenef; and lastly, that faith in the commands of Christ, the living out of which makes so inspiring the life of Tolstoy.

      28. Would to God, my friends, ye might carry away with ye all these things besides the entertainment, besides even the instruction you may have found here. In the days of old the great God was ready to save from perdition a whole city of sinners if only ten righteous men could be found within its walls; and so shall I feel amply repaid for my toil, if of the large number who have listened unto me at least ten leave me with the feeling that they have got from my words something more than mere entertainment, something more than mere instruction.

      THE END.

       “Count Tolstoi and the Public Censor”

       by Isabel Hapgood

       Table of Contents

      It is a well-known fact that the sympathy between Count Lyof Tolstoi and the censor of the Russian press is the reverse of profound. Nevertheless, the manner in which the two men are working together, unwittingly, for the confusion of the count's future literary executors and editors, furnishes a subject of interest, not unmixed with amusement, to spectators in a land which is not burdened with an official censor. The extent of the censorship exercised over the first eleven volumes of his works will probably never be known. But the twelfth volume is a literary curiosity, which can be appreciated only after a comparison of its contents as printed there with the manuscript copies of works prohibited in Russia, or with copies of such works printed out of Russia.

      The contents of the volume are of a very miscellaneous character, and consist of sixteen short moral tales for popular reading, some of which are cast in the form of legends, folk-tales, and explanatory texts to accompany cheap chap-book pictures; a fragment entitled In What Happiness Consists; and article on the Census of Moscow, written in 1882; one written two year later, called Thoughts Evoked by the Moscow Census; a psychological study of death, - The Death of Ivan Ilitch; and an article on Popular Education, which was originally printed in a journal in 1875, and accidentally omitted from the fourth volume of the collected works, where it properly belongs, in company with a large number of the stories of popular reading. This last article serves, in some measure, to explain why so highly talented an author has devoted himself, of late years, to the production of the peculiar stories begun in his pedagogical journal, entitled Yasnaya Polyana, after the name of his estate, and continued to the present time in various publications. As he has added no qualifying notes, the article may be taken as still presenting his views. They may be summed up as follows: that the German method of elementary instruction (evidently the Kindergarten) may be suited to the capacities of "Hottentots, negroes, and small German children," but that it certainly is not to the little Russian muzhik, who knows more at the age of two years than all the elaborate puerilities of the two chief Russian authorities on the subject can teach him from their books. He believes that the peasant himself is the best judge of what he should be taught, even though the latter does hold the Dogberrian theory that schools need not be permanent institutions, since, if the parents once learn, the following generations will inherit their wisdom. Count Tolstoi's personal experience in the peasant schools has shown him that Russian, Slavonic (the language of the church), and mathematics, "and nothing else" should constitute the course of study in schools for the people, since these branches of learning are at the foundation of all others. In order that the people may have proper reading matter for due progress, he has prepared the simple stories contained in the present volume, as well as those referred to as preceding them. They are written in the simplest, most concise peasant language, and in accordance with his theory that the people always speak good Russian, while the educated classes do not. They are all ingenious, though, at times, the moral truth which he seeks to convey is rendered difficult of perception by the involved allegories by which it is obscured. "Love one another, resist not evil, despise money:" such is the burden of his exhortation, and as a rule, it is beautifully and touchingly expressed. If the peasants are observing, however, they will not fail to note some discrepancies in his arguments on the subject of money. In one of the tales, for instance, he represents the subjects of Ivan the Fool - who are fools like their ruler, yet the only wise in truth - as refusing money altogether except for the purpose of necklaces for the women and playthings for the children, since it is nothing but an invention of "the real gentleman, the old Devil," to lead men astray. In another, a man who finds a heap of

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