Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/333

Rh in its place, and lays the washed and girdled body "under the Saints." And you see those images, all that sleepless night, till dawn, as if you yourself had gone through with it, as the boy went through with it, looking out from under his kaftan: with all its details that night also remains in your imagination.

In the third chapter my influence is still less. All the individuality of the elder sister belongs to him. Even in the first chapter by a single touch the relationship of the sister to the family is indicated:—"She worked for what she wore; she was getting ready to be married."

And this one touch sketches out the girl completely: unable to take part and actually taking no part in the joys and sorrows of the family. She had her legitimate interest, her individual purpose, given to her by Providence—her coming marriage, her future family. Any professional writer, especially any one desirous of instructing the people, presenting before them examples of morality worthy of imitation, would infallibly have approached this sister with a question as to her participation in the common necessity and sorrow of the family. He would have made her either a shameful example of indifference, or a model of love and self-sacrifice, and the result would have been a notion, and there would have been no living personage, no sister. Only a man who had profoundly studied and known life would have understood that for such a girl the question of the sorrow of the family and her father's enlistment was legitimately only secondary; she was going to be married! And this an artist, though only a child, sees in the simplicity of his soul.

If we had depicted the sister as a most touching, self-sacrificing maiden we should not have imagined her at all, and should not have loved her as we do now. To me now that fat-cheeked, ruddy-faced maiden is so sweet and full of life as she goes out in the evening to the choral dances in shoes bought with the money she has earned, and her red kumatch dress, loving her family, although oppressed by the poverty and squalor which