Page:Gorky - Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi.djvu/67

 so wild, so terrifying that we all fell silent for a while.

He had in him, I think, the inquisitive, mischievous wildness of a Vaska Buslayev, and also something of the stubbornness of soul of the Protopop Avvakum, while above or at his side lay hidden the scepticism of a Tchaadayev. The Avvakumian element harried and tormented with its preachings the artist in him; the Novgorod wildness upset Shakespeare and Dante, while the Tchaadayevian element scoffed at his soul's amusements and, by the way, at its agonies. And the old Russian man in him dealt a blow at science and the State, the Russian driven to the passivity of anarchism by the barrenness of all his efforts to build up a more human life.

Strange! This Buslayev characteristic in Tolstoi was perceived through some mysterious intuition by Olaf Gulbranson, the caricaturist of Simplicissimus: look closely at his drawing and you will see how startlingly he has got the likeness of the real Tolstoi, what intellectual daring there is in that face with its veiled and hidden eyes, for which nothing is sacred and which believe "neither in a sneeze, nor a dream, nor the cawing of a bird."

The old magician stands before me, alien to all, a solitary traveller through all the deserts of thought in search of an all-embracing truth which he has not found—I look at him and, although I feel sorrow for the loss, I feel pride at having seen the man, and that pride alleviates my pain and grief.