Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/414

vi In one of his educational articles Count Tolstoí speaks of a hitherto unrealized plan of writing a story or a play on some proverb, such as is to be found in Snegiref's Collection. He afterward carried out the idea in the play entitled "Vlast Tmui," the Power (or Dominion) of Darkness (or Evil), which has a proverb for its secondary title. This drama, written wholly in the crabbed staccato speech of the Tula peasant, has, nevertheless, an enormous tragic impulse, which places it on a level with the ancient Greek tragedies. There are certain scenes also, as that, for instance, where the reformed drunkard—the laborer, Mitritch—and the little girl, Anyutka, are talking, while the father and grandmother of the illegitimate baby are murdering it, which in their weird and gruesome suggestiveness remind one of the work of Maeterlinck or Ibsen. If this play could be translated into the Cornish or Dorset dialect, or even into the dialect of New England, it would gain immensely. But even then, while there would be increased and perhaps adequate quaintness, the conciseness of the peasant speech could not be given, and Akim's halting utterance, with its amusing repetition of 'tayo and znatchit, would fare but ill. Yet it is Akim, the God-fearing, simple-minded peasant, whom Tolstoï makes the moral figure of the play, and his principles triumph in the end.

In the comedy which follows and ends the volume Count Tolstoï holds up to ridicule the empirical weaknesses of medicine and such fads as hypnotism, spiritualism, and the like. As usual he contrasts the absurdities of a narrow and superficial culture with the sterling sense and unaffected reason of the man of the people living near to nature, and not worried over microbes and bacilli. The humor of the play is legitimate and characteristic; one can easily believe that it was effective when presented on the stage.