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188 whose invisible summit is lost in the mists. Tolstoy is seventy years old. He contemplates the world, his life, his past mistakes, his faith, his righteous anger.

He sees them from a height. We find the same ideals as in his previous books; the same warring upon hypocrisy; but the spirit of the artist, as in War and Peace, soars above his subject. To the sombre irony, the mental tumult of the Kreutzen Sonata and The Death of Ivan Ilyitch he adds a religious serenity, a detachment from the world, which is faithfully reflected in himself. One is reminded, at times, of a Christian Goethe.

All the literary characteristics which we have noted in the works of his later period are to be found here, and of these especially the concentration of the narrative, which is even more striking in a long novel than in a short story. There is a wonderful unity about the book; in which respect it differs widely from War and Peace and Anna Karenin. There are hardly any digressions of an episodic nature. A single train of action, tenaciously