Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 06 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/365



F the half-dozen stories or narratives comprising the present volume, three are directly inspired by Count Tolstoï's experience as a yunker serving in the Caucasus in the early fifties. While they give vivid pictures of the adventurous life led by the Russian soldier in his expeditions against the warlike mountaineers, description is not introduced for its own sake, but to furnish a realistic background or environment in which to place the human beings in whose thoughts, feelings, and personality, in whose relation to other men and to God and death, the author has always taken a deeper interest than in the dramatic evolution of a plot. They are like portraits in which the persons depicted occupy the foreground, and the accessories, though beautiful and suggestive, do not distract attention from the purpose of the painting.

The Russian novelists have always been fain to describe types rather than individual characters. In these stories there is nothing to indicate that the imagination of the author consciously or unconsciously clothed a virtue or a vice with human lineaments. The various officers and men may possibly be recognized as typical; one would feel sure that out of every regiment some such man or men would be found. The military training puts, on the outside at least, the marks of the stern mold. But they are live men and not masks. Realism triumphs in these vivid pen-pictures; the author must have met them, known them, entered into their hearts and souls.

It is reporting rather than creating—reporting so accurately that, as in everything else of Tolstoï's, you echo the sentiment, "This is life." Weaknesses and