Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/31

 Rh to rank among the best kinds of music, on account of its genuine spontaneity, the depth of feeling in it, and the exquisite perfection with which it is rendered by the gipsies. His own daughters used to play and sing gipsy songs admirably.

The main plot of this play, like that of The Power of Darkness, was supplied to Tolstoy by his friend N. V. Davýdov, a Judge and a Lecturer on Criminal Law at Moscow University, who frequently drew his attention to cases that occurred in the Law Courts, and which Davýdov thought might provide suitable subjects for a story or a drama.

Curiously enough, after Tolstoy had written this play, he was visited first by the stepson of the "live corpse," and then by the "live corpse" himself. The latter had been convicted, had served his time, and had returned to Moscow. He had given up drink and was seeking means of subsistence, when he heard of the play Tolstoy was writing, and that it was founded on his own case. Tolstoy questioned him carefully, and as a result of the conversation rewrote the play in order to set the conduct of the corpse in a more favourable light than before. In this revised version Tolstoy makes him finally commit suicide, whereas in an earlier version the law took its course as it did in real life, and matters only settled down and adjusted them-