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“Anna Karénina,” where it even weakens the result.
The moral lesson which we should deduce appears quite
too distinctly in his sketches. In other words: the fixed
idea of the generations of the past is traced here; the
idea of punishment: thus it goes, when, etc. Cause and
effect, without its being expressly so stated, become
transformed to guilt and punishment.
Of late Tolstoï has devoted his efforts to writing
for the people. He has determined to turn to the
hundred million instead of to the upper ten thousand.
He has written a series of short narrative legends, symbolical
stories and tales, which from his disinterestedness
are sold for about one cent (1½ kopeks) for each
number, and which are intended to give to the Russian
peasants and workmen, who are now, for the first time,
awakening from a sleep of a thousand years, the food
which is suited to their minds and the ideas which they
need.
These brief writings are not reading for us who have
a different culture. But the great peasant drama of last
year, “The Power of Darkness,” stands far above these
didactic sheets. Perhaps it is the masterpiece of this
great eccentric and independent thinker. By its poetic
meaning it belongs to the literature of the world, nay,
so far as the dramatic literature is concerned, marks the
discovery of a new world of material.
Although this play has the wonderful quality that
there is not a single repartee which cannot be
understood by the ignorant and untaught, it is food for the
most cultured.
It is a peculiarity of Tolstoï, with his lack of
scientific endowments, that his thought is not able to
penetrate the economical causes of unhappiness and misery.
No one who has read his essay “On the Importance of
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