Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/134

110 Day as a pretext for eating and drinking to repletion, without the least reference to St. Tatyana.

The peasants eat striden'-jelly and vermicelli; the enlightened eat lobsters, cheeses, soups, fillets, and the like: the muzhiks drink beer and vodka; the enlightened drink liquors of various kinds—wines and brandies and liqueurs, dry and strong and sweet and bitter and red and white, and champagne.

The muzhiks' treat costs from twenty kopeks to a ruble; the entertainment of the enlightened comes to anywhere from six to twenty rubles apiece. The muzhiks speak of their love for their godparents, and sing Russian folksongs; the enlightened tell how much they love their alma mater, and with entangled tongues sing senseless Latin songs. The muzhiks fall into the mud; and the enlightened sprawl on velvet divans. The muzhiks are carried or led to their places by their wives and sons; the enlightened by lackeys, sober and derisive.

No, in reality this is horrible. It is horrible that men standing, according to their own notion, on the highest degree of human culture, are not able to signalize the festival of enlightenment in any other way than by eating, drinking, smoking, and shouting all manner of nonsense for several hours in succession. It is horrible that elderly men, the guides of the young, help poison them with alcohol—a poison which, like the poison of quicksilver, never entirely disappears, but leaves traces all their lives long. Hundreds and hundreds of young men, egged on by their teachers, have become dead drunk, and been ruined forever and debauched at this festival of enlightenment!

But more horrible than all else is the fact that men who do all this have to such a degree befogged themselves by their conceit, that they can no longer distinguish good from bad, the moral from the immoral. These men have so persuaded themselves that the situation in which they are placed is a situation of enlightenment and culture, and that enlightenment and culture confer the right of indulgence of all their weaknesses,