Page:The American Review of Reviews - Volume 24.djvu/49

 differing from them only in that he is more fearless. But this view is really not in accord with Tolstoy's life. He has always been a very practical man, in whom the struggle between his own ideas and the immediate needs of the world around him has been very keen. In his letter to the Czar he is merely a practical liberal Russian who wishes, first of all, for an improvement in the present method of government. But it is certain that when the stress of present circumstances is past he will return to his role of academic denunciation. That he is able to personate both roles without impairing his efficiency in either indicates a very strange dualism in his character.

In view of the interest awakened, however, by the recent events which have centered chiefly around Tolstoy's name, some impressions gained during a number of visits to the count in his Moscow home may not be without value.

I .—COUNT TOLSTOY IN MOSCOW.

We have heard a great deal of Tolstoy as a practical sympathizer with the revolting elements of Russian society within the last few weeks. But what is the most general conception of Tolstoy and of his daily life ? It is as a worker in the field, as he is depicted in Repin's sketches, plowing on his own estate, or gathering in his crops, or helping his beloved peasants to gather in theirs. Tolstoy as a farmer is familiar to every one. Tolstoy as a townsman is quite an unfamiliar figure. The innumerable accounts which have been written of Tolstoy on his estate near Tula, the perpetual repetition of the words Yasnaya Polyana until they seemed to be an essential part of Tolstoy himself, and Tolstoy's own insistence upon the merits of the peasant, have given rise in most men's minds to an unchanging vision of Tolstoy the countryman, who avoids all towns as he would the pest, and regards the very purposes for which great cities exist as abominations. That Tolstoy for half the year is a more settled townsman than the Lord Mayor of London few people imagine. And so far as his own beliefs and inclinations are concerned, the picture is true. Yet it is equally true that the practical working Tolstoy is, a great part of his time, a dweller in cities.

It is a remarkable thing, considering the comparative accessibility of Moscow and Yasnaya Polyana, that so little has been written about Tolstoy in Moscow. Yet the cause is explicable. In Moscow, Tolstoy is only an abstraction and a shadow of himself. In the city he preaches, but it is in the country mainly that he practises. And Tolstoy the man who lives