Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 06 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/366

vi foibles, show and sham, simple, undemonstrative courage, gay recklessness, unrewarded, uncomplaining devotion, the awful, degrading passion of gambling, are seen displayed by the comrades who go out to fight the Cherkess in the wild mountain gorges amid the dangerous forests of the Kapkas! And Death, which occupies Count Tolstoï more than any other great novelist, appears as the foil against which the superabundant life of man and beast is always contrasted—Death, which cuts down the flower of the army, made the crowning episode, but not the climax. The climax is the life which goes on just the same, after as before, with all its pettinesses and details.

In spite of a certain episodic scrappiness, inevitable where not one but several characters are picked out for delineation and contrast, these narratives hold the attention with wonderful tenacity: they are so vivid, so vital, so true; they make, as it were, a part of the history of man. The same vagueness, but also the same atmosphere of reality, are seen in the story entitled "Metyol," or the "Snowstorm." Here various phases of peasant character, as displayed by the yamshchiks, or postilions of the steppe, are shown in the nebulous thickness of a Russian blizzard, where courage and devotion and constancy and intelligence are required in the battle with cold and death.

"Polikushka" is a far more intense, consistent, and dramatic production. The interest is here concentrated on the tragic finale of the poor, weak, yet heroic peasant whose victory over himself ends so pitifully in suicide. Yet even here there is a foil; the end of Polikushka does not end the tale; it has its reflex action in the hard-won conquest of Dutlof's miserliness. Like "Anna Karenina," it is a double story.

"Kholstomer" is a Russian "Black Beauty." The horse tells his experiences with an eloquence which only one who had entered into the very soul of a horse could have caught. This, too, like the life of Polikushka, has a tragic dénouement. The racer, so proud of his strength, his swiftness, his beauty, his pedigree, goes