Page:Tolstoy - Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/41

Biography and not after the interests of the State. In consequence of his disagreement with his Boyars as to his reforms, he founded St. Petersburg simply in order to be further away from them and to live his immoral life more freely." The sentence I have under-lined is a characteristic specimen of Tolstoi's unconscious one-sidedness, and of his inability to do justice to systems antagonistic to his own. Peter the Great undoubtedly transferred his capital to St. Petersburg in order to be further away from his Boyars. But why? Because he rightly perceived that reactionary Moscow would inevitably throw obstacles in the way of the reforms he judged to be indispensable to the civilising of ignorant and superstitious Russia, whereas St. Petersburg, with the command of the sea, was a window thrown open to the humanizing influences of the west. The prospect of greater license on the Neva than on the Moskva never entered into Peter's thoughts. Peter was always and everywhere frankly sensual; his strong sexual instincts had no respect whatever for either persons or places.

I suspect myself that Tolstoi's real quarrel with Peter was due to the fact that the great Tsar was an unanswerable confutation of the novelist's pet theory of the uselessness of independent individuality, for if ever a man was superior to his age and his environment, and moulded them both to his will, it was Peter the Great. And yet there is a moral grandeur in Tolstoi's refusal to admire the exploits of the great national regenerator who owed so much of his success to the unflinching application of mere xxxiii.