was trying to improve the condition of the serfs on his estate at Yasnaya Polyána, we have a description in "The Morning of a Landlord." Of the next few years, which were largely spent in idleness with a circle of his aristocratic friends, Tolstoy tells us in the "Notes of a Billiard Marker.” Suffering a moral revulsion from the shallow and trivial existence which he was then leading, he entered military service, and his extremely interesting experiences in a Cossack village are related in his novel, "The Cossacks." Later, he took part in the siege of Silistria and afterward in the battle of Balaklava, and this part of his life is told in his powerful Sevastopol sketches.

After his return from Sevastopol, "he was received,' Kropotkin says, "with open arms by all classes of society, both literary and worldly, as a 'Sevastopol hero' and as a rising great writer. But of the life he lived then he cannot speak now otherwise than with disgust: it was the life of hundreds of young men-officers of the Guard and jeunesse dorée of his own class-which was passed in the restaurants and cafés chantants of the Russian capital, amidst gamblers, horse dealers, Tsigane choirs, and French adventuresses." (1) But Tolstoy was never a hardened sinner. Always after giving way to some of his worst debauches, he was overcome with remorse. His inner pain was excruciating. His torment was unendurable. One of his friends, to whom he confessed his sins, once wrote: "He would tell me all: how he had caroused, gambled, and where he had spent his days and nights; and all the time, if you will believe me, he would condemn himself and suffer as though he were a real criminal. He was so distressed that it was pitiful to see him." (2)

Quickly succeeding such a state of remorse, there often came a new debauch. He stayed with Tourgênef in St. Petersburg for a short time after his return from Sevastopol, and Tourgênef described Tolstoy's life to a friend in these

words: "Sprees, gipsy-girls and cards all night long-and then he sleeps like a corpse till two in the afternoon. At first I tried to put the brake on, but now I've given it up, and let him do as he likes." (3) Years later Tolstoy wrote of this period in "My Confession": "I cannot now recall those years without a painful feeling of horror and loathing. I put men to death in war, I fought duels to slay others, I lost at cards, wasted my substance wrung from the sweat of peasants, punished the latter cruelly, rioted with loose women, and deceived men. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder. There was

...

not one crime which I did not commit, and yet I was not the less considered by my equals a comparatively moral man.” (4) This severe self-condemnation was not deserved. Tolstoy puts the worst possible interpretation upon some of his acts and when he speaks of robbery, he means, of course, that he profited by the labor of the peasants, and when he says murder, he means that he killed men in war.

At thirty-two Tolstoy was married and for nearly twenty years he remained almost without interruption upon his estate near Toûla. This was the most joyous and in many ways the most richly productive period of his life. During this time he produced his two great novels, "War and Peace" and "Anna Karénina." His married life was exceptionally happy, and the Countess's brother, Behrs, writes, "The nearness, amity and mutual love of the couple were always a model to me, and the ideal of conjugal happiness."* "* (5) During these years ten children were born to them, and the Count simply reveled with delight in his

* Merejkowski, Dmitri. “Tolstoi as Man and Artist,” p. 22. This and several quotations used later, were taken from Merejkowski before I obtained a copy of Behrs' recollections which have been translated into English by Charles Edward Turner and published under the title, "Recollections of Count Leo Tolstoy," by C. A. Behrs (William Heineman, London, 1893).

domestic relations and at the same time he pursued with boundless energy and enthusiasm his work on the estate and his literary projects. He said later that he wrote novels simply as a means of improving his material position and during this time he was of the opinion that "there was only one truth, that you must live in such a way as may be best for you and your family." He delighted in the productivity of his estate and he had a passionate fondness for his horses, pigs, nurseries, apiaries, wine presses, spirit distilleries, and all those things which signified to him a richly productive nature. Love of life seemed to run at this time almost unrestrained in Tolstoy and Behrs writes of this period: "Leo every day praises the day for its beauty, and often adds, quite in the spirit of the great heathen, 'How many riches God has! With Him, every day is set off by some beauty or other."" (6) "The wondrous dawn," Tolstoy writes, "the bathing, the wild fruit, have put me in the state of mental languor which I love; for two months I have not stained my hands with ink, or my mind with thinking. It is long since I have delighted in God's world as I have this year. I stand gaping, wonderstruck, afraid to stir for fear of missing anything." (7)

Even during this period, however, he was not without question as to his wider social responsibilities and in “Anna Karênina," written at this time, Levine reflects concerning the management of his property: "This matter is not merely my own personal concern, but the common welfare is at stake. There ought to be a radical change effected in the management of property, and particularly in the position of the lower classes. Instead of poverty, there should be general comfort; instead of hostility, concord. In a word, a bloodless revolution, yet the greatest of revolutions, at first within the narrow bounds of our district, then spreading over the Province, over Russia, and over the world." (8) However, like many wealthy Russians of this period-typi

fied in literature by his own Pierre and by Tourgênef's Rudin-Tolstoy did not act, although he was often tormented by doubts and questionings concerning his moral and social duties. If he arrived at any definite moral conclusions during this period, it is not unlikely that the explanation for his failure to live in accordance with them is given in the words of Nicolai Rostov, who says in the beginning of "War and Peace": "It is all sentimentality and old wives' fables, all this good of one's neighbour! I want our children not to be vagabonds on the face of the earth; I want to secure and protect the existence of my family so long as I am alive; that is all!" (9) But the moral doubts and questionings would not be put down, and after this long period of domestic delight, they came again to torment him in an even more determined way. Indeed, they took possession of him and during the late seventies and early eighties worked a profound change in Tolstoy's moral and religious beliefs.

At the summit of his fame, Tolstoy became more and more disturbed mentally until, at times, he was on the point of committing suicide. Before finishing “Anna Karenina," he began to realize how shallow and meaningless was his own life, and in "My Confession," he says: "It was then that I, a man favoured by fortune, hid a cord from myself lest I should hang myself from the crosspiece of the partition in my room, where I undressed alone every evening; and I ceased to go out shooting with a gun lest I should be tempted by so easy a way of ending my life. I did not myself know what I wanted. I feared life, desired to escape from it; yet still hoped something of it.

"And all this befell me at a time when all around me I had what is considered complete good fortune. I was not yet fifty; I had a good wife who loved me, and whom I loved; good children, and a large estate which without much. effort on my part improved and increased. I was respected

by my relations and acquaintances more than at any previous time. I was praised by others, and without much selfdeception could consider that my name was famous. And not only was I not insane or mentally unwell; on the contrary, I enjoyed a strength of mind and body such as I have seldom met with among men of my kind: physically I could keep up with the peasants at mowing, and mentally I could work continuously for eight to ten hours without experiencing any ill result from such exertion. . . . The question which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide was the simplest of questions lying in the soul of every man, from the foolish child to the wisest elder. It was a question without answering which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was, What will come of what I am doing to-day, or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?

"It had seemed to me that the narrow circle of rich, learned, and leisured people to whom I belonged formed the whole of humanity, and that the billions of others who have lived and are living were cattle of some sort-not real people. . . . And it was long before it dawned upon me to ask, 'But what meaning is, and has been given to their lives by all the billions of common folk who live and have lived in the world?' . . . I instinctively felt that, if I wished to live and understand the meaning of life, I must seek this meaning not among those who have lost it . . . but among those billions of the past and the present who know it, and who support the burden of their own lives and of ours also. . .

"And I began to draw near to the believers among the poor, simple, unlettered folk: pilgrims, monks, sectarians, and peasants. Among them, too, I found a great deal of superstition mixed with the Christian truths; but their superstitions seemed a necessary and natural part of their lives. ... And I began to look well into the life and faith