Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/29

 Rh So the whirligig of time brought it about that Tolstoy, who twenty-three years before had just missed his chance of acting at the Imperial Court, now had a play of his own performed there, while he himself was being mistaken for a peasant, and on that account treated with gross indignity.

We have Tolstoy's word for it that he would have written more plays had it not been for the Censor. He once said: "I feel certain the Censor would not pass my plays. You would not believe how, from the very commencement of my activity, that horrible Censor question has tormented me! I wanted to write what I felt; but at the same time it occurred to me that what I wrote would not be permitted, and involuntarily I had to abandon the work. I abandoned, and went on abandoning, and meanwhile the years passed away."

He once expressed surprise that in Fruits of Culture the drunken man-cook's monologue on the ways of the rich folk was allowed to be performed.

Of the three plays left by Tolstoy for publication after his death, one is a short two-act Temperance play called in English The Cause of it All (the Russian title is a colloquialism difficult to render, but "From it all evil flows" is as near as one can get to it). It does not claim to be a