Page:Gorky - Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi.djvu/57

 image, smoothing away the militant elements and bringing into the foreground the humble "will of Him that sent Him." No doubt Tolstoi's Gospel is the more easily accepted because it is "soothing to the malady" of the Russian people. He had to give them something, for they complain and trouble the earth with their groaning and distract him from "the essential." But War and Peace and all the other things of the same kind will not soothe the sorrow and despair of the grey Russian land. Of War and Peace he himself said: "Without false modesty, it is like the Iliad." M. Y. Tchaikovsky heard from his lips exactly the same appreciation of Childhood, Youth.

Journalists have just arrived from Naples; one even hurried from Rome. They ask me to say what I think of Tolstoi's "flight"—"flight" is the word they use. I would not talk to them. You, of course, understand that inwardly I am terribly disturbed: I do not want to see Tolstoi a saint: let him remain a sinner close to the heart of the all-sinful world, even close to the heart of each one of us. Poushkin and he—there is nothing more sublime or dearer to us.

Leo Tolstoi is dead.

A telegram came containing the commonest of words—is dead.

It struck me to the heart: I cried with pain and anger, and now, half crazy, I imagine him as I know and saw him—I am tormented by a desire to speak with him. I imagine him in his coffin—he lies