"But look to it, you rascal, that you don't drown us!" said the Generals, when they saw the craft pitching on the waves. "Be easy, Generals, this is not my first experience," replied the peasant, and began to make preparations for departure. The peasant collected soft swansdown, and lined the bottom of the boat with it; having done this, he placed the Generals on the bottom, made the sign of the cross over them, and set sail. The pen cannot describe, neither can the tongue relate, what terror the Generals suffered during their journey, from storms and divers winds. But the peasant kept on rowing and rowing, and fed the Generals on herrings. At last, behold Mother Neva, and the splendid Katherine Canal, and great Pettifoggers Street! The cook-maids clasped their hands in amazement at the sight of their Generals, so fat, white, and merry! The Generals drank their coffee, ate rolls made with milk, eggs, and butter, and put on their uniforms. Then they went to the treasury, and the pen cannot describe, neither can the tongue relate, how much money they received there. But they did not forget the peasant; they sent him a wineglass of vodka and a silver five-kopek piece.[41] "Make merry, big, coarse peasant!" While Turgeneff represented the "western" and liberal element (with a tinge of the "red") in the school of the '40's, and Gontcharoff stood for the bourgeois and opportunist ideals of the St. Petersburg bureaucrats, Count Lyeff Nikolaevitch Tolstoy penetrated more profoundly into the depths of the spirit of the times than any other writer of the period in the matter of analysis and skepticism which characterized that school, and carried them to the extremes of pitiless logic and radicalness, approaching more closely than any other to democratic and national ideals. But notwithstanding all his genius, Count Tolstoy was not able to free himself to any great extent from his epoch, his environment, his contemporaries. His special talents merely caused him to find it impossible to reconcile himself to the state of affairs existing around him; and so, instead of progressing, he turned back and sought peace of mind and a firm doctrine in the distant past of primitive Christianity. Sincere as he undoubtedly is in his propaganda of self-simplification and self-perfection--one might almost call it "self-annihilation"--his new attitude has wrought great and most regrettable havoc with his later literary work, with some few exceptions. And yet, in pursuing this course, he did not strike out an entirely new path for himself; his youth was passed in an epoch when the ideal of personal perfection and self-surrender stood in the foreground, and constituted the very essence of Russian progress.