Count Tolstoi.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 21, 23 November 1910, Page 2

Count Tolstoi.

The Interpreter of Russian Life and the Russians. .4 St. Petersburg cablegram. dated November :20th, stated that Count Leo Tolstoi died on that morning at the Aslapoe railtcay station, tehere he had been lying since he was stricken down by illness, which teas due to exposure. Tha Countess and her son and daughter were present.

IT was an apt illustration of the contrariness of the great Russian novelist that he rejoiced over that which his friends and admirers lamented and mourned over that which gave them delight (wrote a personal friend in a tribute to Tolstoi recently). The Russian hierarchy solemnly condemned the celebration of his eightieth birthdav, and

the Russian bureaucracy seconded the censures of the Church by the authority of the secular arm. This tribute to his influence naturally pleased Count Tolstoi, who, having failed to induce the Government to fit round his aged neck a well-soaped rope, was grateful for smaller mercies as these ecclesiastical and official censures against which everybody was protesting. The indignation of his friends at his condemnation was nothing to their joy and relief that he had recovered from what threatened to be a fatal illness. Count Tolstoi is probably the only man living to-day who regrets that recovery. For he has long been impatient to die. Twenty years ago, when I was staying at Yasnaia Poliana, he said to me: “It is' with difficulty that I can tear my thoughts away from the next world. I regret every moment in which I do not feel that I am dying. If men could fully realise the truth and nature of the next world, there would be no keeping them in this. I long to depart—l should be patient, and wait. Yet the thought of death is growing so unceasingly pleasant that I need to struggle against the fascination of its approach.” That was in 1888. For him. no doubt, as for Prinee Andrei in “War and Peace.” death would be an awakening. “I died —I woke up. Yes. that was death.” “He felt as if it were a deliverance from the bonds which before had fastened him down.” For us it would be as if a

great light that had been shining in the darkness all our lives had at last gone, out. Tolstoi is the best—nay, to most Westerns. the only—interpreter of Russia, and the Russians. He is the latest articulate expression of a race to us singularly inarticulate. In nothing is ho more Russian than in his paradoxes. For Russia is a colossal paradox; nor

is Tolstoi less colossal and incomprehensible. A compost of contraries, a bundle of contradictions, uncompromising in his logie, and appalling in his inconsistencies, he is a true type of tho nation which has long recognised him as her greatest son. Like his peasant hero. Paton Karatazef. “who for ever remained in Pierre's mind as a most powerful and precious recollection, the very embodiment of all that was good and worthy and truly, Russian,” he has often “said things that were diametrically opposed to what he said before, but yet each statement would be correct. When he talked, it would appear, he had no idea where, having onee begun, it would bring him out.” But wherever it brought him out, everything has always appeared to him “so clear, so clear,” that it almost must have been so, and he marvelled that everyone could not see it in the sama light. It is a rebuke to those who superciliously ask whether any good can come out of Nazareth that the most eloquent and passionate preacher of the Gospel of Pity, the most extreme exponent of the doctrines of Humanitarianism, should have been an officer in the Russian Armjj who took part in his youth in the defence of Sebastopol. Like the Prophet of Nazareth, he found more sympathy: pud support from the people than from the Chief Priests, although in his case, let it be remembered to the credit of

tke rulers of Russia, they have refused to allow Tolstoi to be molested, even although in his last diatribe he adjured them to hang him, and provided them ■with ample e\ idente to justify his prosecution. r The Orthodox Church excommunicated bim, as in truth it was bound to do. for Tolstoi had excommunicated it long before, holding up its sacraments, its dogmas, and its most sacred mysteries to ridicule and contempt. But although he has been a ribald scoffer who denied the Resurrection and rejected the miracles, and impugned the sinlessness of Jesus, Tolstoi is, of all men of our day and generation, the most passionate and uncompromising preacher of what he calls “Christ's Christianity.’’ In the midst of a materialistic age. he proclaimed, in opposition alike to Socialists ■who assailed and Conservatives who defended the existing distribution of wealth as if it were all-important, that “it is only the spreading and confirmation of religious truth which improves the position of men." lie won worldwide fame as a writer of novels, and then poured contempt on all his best Work. He has ever railed against the absurdity of the idea that Governmentcould do any good, and yet he has ever and anon addressed the Government in terms of objurgation or of entreaty, in order to induce them to do the "very little things" required to give peace to the people. The “very little" things were “ the abolition of property. State. Church, and Government —for these are doomed, and all other barbarisms which humanity has left behind.” Tolstoi has been called the Russian Rousseau, not altogether without cause. But he is a Rousseau crossed with a Buddhist christened in the Russian Church, and educated in the modern scientific world. He combines the functions of being the last survivor of the famous novelists of the nineteenth century and the spiritual representative of the Hebrew prophets. He is a great artist. His “War and Peace," that stupendous cinematographic panorama of Russian life during the Napoleonic invasion, reminds one of the Galleries of the Hermitage, in which one finds every phase of human and animal life depicted by consummate artists with such splendour and almost barbaric profusion that one feels bewildered by the vastness of the display. As a man, Tolstoi is lovable; in his family he is full of talk and good humour. His daughters idolise him. His wife watches over him like a guardian angel. But for her constant interposing with authority, her affectionate common sense between the count and his theories, he would have died twenty years since. She has saved his property : checked his wilful attempts to put his theories into practice; and so preserved him alive till his eightieth birthday. Tolstoi speaks English fluently and reads English and American books voraciously. He is always ill at ease owing to the contrast between the life he has persuaded himself he ought to lead and the life which, by compulsion of his wife, lie has been induced to lead. His latest revolt found expression in his last manifesto, in which he implored the Government to deliver him from his false position by prison or hangman. But all these things will soon lie forgotten. What will not be forgotten are iiis pictures of Russian life, and his interpretation of the soul of the Russian people, their simplicity, and their nobility of soul—for in many tilings they are a little children, of whom it was said by Him of old time, “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” , Tolstoi himself does not wish to be remembered for any of these things. His last message to the world, as to the supreme importance of religious truth, represents what he desires us to remember. “The essence of religious truth consists in this: That man is a spiritual being, similar to his source. God; that the creation of man is the fulfilment of the will of this source. God; that the will of God is the welfare of men; that the welfare of men is attained by love; that love is manifested by one’s doing unto others what one wishes others to do unto him. In this is all the religious teaching which the work! needs.”