Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/35

 Rh the husband on the one side and the wife and family on the other. There is no mention of a friend urging the husband on in opposition to the wife; but those who closely followed Tolstoy's own fate well know that on this point also the play does not describe his own case.

Not the less on that account does the play most touchingly present to us the intense tragedy of Tolstoy's later years, and the impossibility in which he found himself of acting so as neither to violate his own conscience nor to evoke anger in the hearts of those nearest to him. His religion had brought "not peace, but a sword;" and it was because he believed in it so firmly, and yet shrank from treating those of his own household as his foes, that his struggle was so intense, and that for more than thirty years he hesitated before he decided to leave wife and home, the scenes endeared to him by childhood's memory, and the spot where he hoped to be (and eventually was) buried—the spot where his brother had hidden the green stick on which he said was inscribed the secret of how to banish from the world all sin, bitterness, discord, and evil—all, in short, that makes us sad or sorry.

Plays Tolstoy found more difficult to write than stories or novels; for in the novel or story it is