Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/16

 10 are a classic and understand the essence of the matter very deeply. I should like also to read Sophocles and Euripides."

The mood passed, and for another fifteen years one hears no more about it: Tolstoy being absorbed first in the production of an "ABC Book" for school-children, then with "Anna Karénina," then with his "Confession" and religious studies, as well as with field-work, hut-building, and bootmaking.

Early in 1886, noting the wretched character of the plays given in the booths at the Carnival shows on the Maidens' Field just outside Moscow, not far from his own house, and feeling how wrong it was that the dramatic food of the people should consist of the crudest melodramas, he was moved to turn into a play a small Temperance story he had written. This piece, called The First Distiller, is of no great importance in itself, but was the precursor of the splendid dramas he soon afterwards produced.

The following summer, while out ploughing, he hurts his leg, neglects it, and gets erysipelas, which almost leads to blood-poisoning. His life is in imminent danger, he has to undergo a painful operation, is laid up for weeks, and while ill writes most of The Power of Darkness, an immensely powerful play which serves as a touch-