Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/707



HE obsession of certain types of intellect by sin deserves a study it has never received. One might expect to find it confined largely to men whose thinking was formulated before the development of the jungle of theories and observed facts which we call psychology, but Alexey Tolstoy offers a modern instance. He is overwhelmingly conscious of the sinful impulses in men's hearts, and the clear case he presents for the suggested study is not complicated by any discernible traces of the mystic or puritan. Rather he seems a weary, cynical man-about-town who, knowing all the vices well enough to label them, returns in the old age of his spirit to a delighted, open-mouthed contemplation of virtue. In assaying sin and virtue, it must be added, he is strictly orthodox, seeing morals rather as code of thou shalt nots let down on a scroll from heaven, than as an evolution of taboos and rules of conduct, changing not a little from one century to another.

Yet as a perfect specimen of an intellect concerned with sin one flaw may be found—his desire to prove the main thesis of his book. To him the Revolution is not the product of long accruing, intolerable social injustice, but a retribution for the sinful personal lives of Russian people in general and in particular of the Russian intellectuals, who in their degenerate and pitiable condition even flirted fatuously with the ideas of the pimply, womanish, thievish, and otherwise execrable revolutionaries.

For in addition to being the work of a man of letters with some claims on our attention, this is a refugee's lament, thrown together in almost frantic haste to tell the world what it should believe. Evidently the haste increased as the book proceeded. Some of the first scenes, and particularly those in which his straw-stuffed intellectuals huff and puff and blow the house down, are reasonably vivid, reminding the reader of the typical popular story satirizing the Greenwich Village of a few years ago. Later the scenes are