TOLSTOI AND SHAKESPEARE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 9, 10 July 1909, Page 3

TOLSTOI AND SHAKESPEARE.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, — I have to thank you for the appreciative kindness of your notice in yefiteiday's issu-e, of my small effort at the last meeting of tho Philosophical bociety. I did not, however, mean to saythat Tolstoi sutlers from any want of familiarity with the English language. Like all cultivated Russians he is almost as much at home in English, French, and Herman, as in ins owu tongue. But one may be quite familiar with ordinary English and yet tail to appreciate Shakespeare, or even to understand him. "The play, I remember, pleated not the million ;* 'twas caviar* to the general" : thus Hamlet. May I be permitted to add that the correct transliteration of the great Russian's name is Tolstoi not Tolstoy ; and the accent, or stress of voice falls on the last syllabic, not on the first, as is the common practice here. To put the stress on the farst syllable is to confound the name with the woids "tolsto" (thickly) and tolstyi (stout, corpulent, thick-set) — the yin this latter word is used in accordance with the analogy of Polish 10 represent the Russian thickened i or 11 sound. Such a pronunciation sounds, therefore, like a satire on Tolstoi's ascetic habits, and appearance. There is no necessity, either, for the diare.«is over the final i which his translator Dole absurdly and quite incorrectly uses — - I am, etc., H. L. JAMES.