Page:Tolstoy - Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/42

Biography brute force. Mere achievement, however impressive, could never blind Tolstoi to the absence of moral greatness. We cannot, for instance, imagine him making a hero of a successful political freebooter like Frederick II. of Prussia.

"Anna Karenina," Tolstoi's second great work (his greatest in the opinion of many), was written between 1873 and 1876. The first seven parts appeared originally in the leading Moscow magazine, Russky Vyestnik, which, under the editorship of the eminent publicist, Michael Katkov, was a power in Russia. When, however, Katkov objected to certain portions of the eighth part of "Anna Karenina," which was diametrically opposed to his reactionary views, Tolstoi was greatly incensed, and cancelled his engagement with Katkov. "How dare a mere journalist alter a single line of my work?" he cried. Tolstoi indeed never had any great love for newspapers or gazettes. "I never read anything but classics," he once replied to a person who inquired what he usually read. Yet very few classics really satisfied him. It was only after considerable hesitation that he allowed that that incomparable master of style, Pushkin, for instance, deserved the name of a classic at all, and even then Tolstoi was never tired of accusing the author of "Eugene Onyegin" of an excessive lightness of touch and a tendency to sacrifice truth and even intelligibility to brilliant and dramatic effects; Goethe, too, was never one of his favourites. "Righteous God!" he cried, with an emphasis that was anything but profane, "Goethe always forgets morality in his pursuit of beauty, and without the xxxiv.