Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/33

 Rh prince who refused military service. But, like some of his other writings, the play is semi-autobiographical. In it not only has Tolstoy utilized personal experiences, but, more than that, he answers the question so often asked: Why, holding his views, did he not free himself from property before he grew old?

Some people, and especially some of those most devoted to Tolstoy's memory, are sure to suppose, and to declare, that he intends Nicholas Ivanovich Sarintsev to be taken as a faithful portrait of himself. But to understand Tolstoy one has to recognize the duality of his character, which he never concealed and often mentioned; and the hero of The Light that shines in Darkness has none of this duality. He represents only one side of Tolstoy, and is not at all the sort of man, for instance, who would have written or enjoyed Fruits of Culture.

Not only are the facts different to the real ones, and the character of the hero much simpler than Tolstoy's own, but the problem at issue between Sarintsev and his wife is not quite the same as the one at issue between Tolstoy and the Countess. With that unerring artistic tact which Tolstoy never lost, he causes Nicholas Ivanovich Sarintsev to make a definite proposal to retain "fifty acres and the kitchen garden and the flooded meadow," which would "bring in about £50 a year." Now