Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/133

Rh Kazanskaya. What these terms mean no one knows. They know one thing, that there is an altar and that they must celebrate. And they look forward to this festivity, and after a burdensome life of toil are glad to fall greedily on the food.

Yes, this is one of the very rare expressions of savagery on the part of the working-people. The wine and carousing constitute for them such a temptation that they cannot resist it. The festival comes, and almost every one of them is ready to stupefy himself, and even lose all semblance of human form.

Yes, the people are savage.

But here comes the twenty-fourth of January, and in the newspapers is printed the following notice:— "The social dinner of the former students of the Imperial Moscow University will take place on the anniversary of its establishment, January 24, at five o'clock in the afternoon, in the restaurant of the Bolshaya Moskovskaya Hotel, at the principal entrance. Tickets for the dinner, at six rubles, may be obtained " Then follows a list of places where the tickets may be purchased.

But this is not the only dinner; there will be a dozen others in Moscow, and in Petersburg, and in the provinces. The twenty-fourth of January is the festival of the oldest Russian University, is the festival of Russian enlightenment. The flower of enlightenment celebrates its festival.

It would seem that men standing on the two extreme boundaries of enlightenment—the savage muzhiks and the most cultivated men of Russia—the muzhiks celebrating the "Presentation," or the Virgin of Kazan, and the cultivated men celebrating the festival of enlightenment itself, ought to celebrate their celebrations in an entirely different way. But in reality, it proves that the festival of the most cultivated of men differs in no respect, save in external form, from the festival of the most barbarous of men. The muzhiks seize the church festival without any relation to its meaning, as a pretext for eating and drinking; the enlightened take St.