Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/47

Rh I slipped on a dark staircase and fell through a glass roof into a ventilator. I sustained a few injuries, but I might easily have broken my neck. I saw a symbolical meaning im this fall. I realised that my overtures towards the orthodox church could not lead to any good results.

In the summer of 1904 I travelled with my wife to Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy received us in a very friendly mnner. We stayed with him overnight and discussed religious questions at great length. When we took our leave, he looked at me searchingly with his good-natured, rather uncanny little bear-like eyes, the eyes of the forest man, Uncle Yeroshka, and said: "I have heard that you do not like me. I am glad that it is not so"

I already had a feeling that I had not been quite fair to him in my book, and that in spite of the radical variance of our opinions, I am, after all, more fond of Tolstoy than of Dostoyevsky.

Everything that I reflected upon, and above all, that I experienced, in the revolutionary years of 1905-06, was of critical importance in its effect on the course of my inner development. I realised, and, once again, not abstractly, but with body and soul, that in Russia, orthodoxy and the existing order of things are inseparably united, and that before both—autocracy and orthodoxy—are rejected together, a new conception of Christianity must first be arrived at.