A Russian writer, M. Kurbski, describes how, when he first met Tolstoy, he was overwhelmed by the look in Tolstoy’s eyes. They were more than eyes, he said; they were like electric searchlights, which penetrated into the depths of your mind, and, like a photographic lens, seized and retained for ever a positive picture. In his _Childhood and Youth_, Tolstoy gives us the most vivid, the most natural, the most sensitive picture of childhood and youth that has ever been penned by the hand of man. And yet, after reading it, one is left half-unconsciously with the impression that the author feels there is something wrong, something unsatisfactory behind it all. Tolstoy then passes on to describe the life of a grown-up man, in _The Morning of a Landowner_, in which he tells how he tried to work in his own home, on his property, and to teach the peasants, and how nothing came of his experiments. And again we have the feeling of something unsatisfactory, and something wanting, something towards which the man is straining, and which escapes him. A little later, Tolstoy goes to the Caucasus, to the war, where life is primitive and simple, where he is nearer to nature, and where man himself is more natural. And then we have _The Cossacks_, in which Tolstoy’s searchlights are thrown upon the primitive life of the old huntsman, the Cossack, Yeroshka, who lives as the grass lives, without care, without grief, and without reflection. Once more we feel that the soul of the writer is dissatisfied, still searching for something he has not found. In 1854, Tolstoy took part in the Crimean War, which supplied him with the stuff for what are perhaps the most truthful pictures of war that have ever been written. But even here, we feel he has not yet found his heart’s desire. Something is wrong. He was recommended for the St. George’s Cross, but owing to his being without some necessary official document at the time of his recommendation, he failed to receive it. This incident is a symbol of the greater failure, the failure to achieve the inward happiness that he is seeking--a solid ground to tread on, a bridge to the infinite, a final place of peace. In his private diary there is an entry made at the commencement of the war, while he was at Silistria, which runs as follows: