Page:Gorky - Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi.djvu/48

 indomitable resistance to the evil of life. What is called Tolstoi's "anarchism," essentially and fundamentally, expresses our Slav anti-stateism, which, again, is really a national characteristic and desire, ingrained in our flesh from old times, to scatter nomadically. Up to now we have indulged that desire passionately, as you and everyone else know. We Russians know it, too, but we break away, always along the line of least resistance; we see that this is pernicious, but still we crawl further and further away from one another—and these mournful cockroach journeyings are called "the history of Russia," of a State which has been established almost incidentally, mechanically, to the surprise of the majority of its honest-minded citizens, by the forces of the Variags, Tartars, Baltic Germans, and petty constables. To their surprise, because all the time "scattering," and only when we reached places beyond which we could find nothing worse—for we could go no further—well, then we stopped and settled down. This is the lot, the destiny to which we are doomed—to settle in the snows and marshes by the side of the wild Erza, Tchood, Merey, Vess, and Muroma. Yet men arose who realized that light must come to us not from the East but from the West; and now he, the crown of our ancient history, wishes, consciously or unconsciously, to stretch himself like a vast mountain across our nation's path to Europe, to the active life which sternly demands of man the supreme effort of his spiritual forces. His attitude towards science is, too,