Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/27

 CHAPTER II

HAT great master, Leo Tolstoy, during the period of his life when he was perfectly frank and candid, described with ruthless sincerity the weird twilight which broods over the peasant soul, although at a later epoch he devoted himself to search and to find the rejuvenating and ennobling elements that lie in the depths of the mind.

Savage, brutish instincts, primitive passion and hatred, a hand ready to murder, the love-seeking dusk reminiscent of the murkmess of the low, smoke-filled cottages, silent, ill-boding hatred resembling the combat of two enraged stags in misty dawn upon a marsh dotted with tufts of brown-black, rank grass cut down by winds and frosts. When betimes the conscience, the almost listless conscience, of that savage stirs, and begins to give utterance to words that whip and scourge of an almost pagan mysticism, then, in his frenzy of self-mortification, that savage man is ready of his own free will to submit to every martyrdom that shall purge with the torment of the sinful body the mire and dirt deposited upon his soul.

Tolstoy was the first of Russian novelists to give