Tolstoi married, and raised a large family upon this estate. His wife was a devoted admirer of his literary work, and copied his manuscripts many times over with infinite pains. During the years 1865-69 he wrote “War and Peace,” which most critics consider one of the great novels of the world. I will merely record my regrets. There are a vast number of characters, scattered all over Russia; each character has several long Russian names, and, according to Russian custom, will be called different names by different groups of persons--to say nothing of diminutives and nick-names. I labored diligently to keep track of these characters, to remember which was which and what each was doing; but I failed. Next came “Anna Karenina”: a sort of Russian high-society version of “The Scarlet Letter.” Anna is a woman who has been sold in the usual way to an elderly gentleman; she is a contented wife, until she meets a young cavalry officer whom she truly loves. Instead of engaging in a polite intrigue, according to the custom of her time, Anna takes the new love affair more seriously than she takes her marriage, and so Tolstoi drives her and her lover to suicide. This harshness greatly shocked the critics of the time, who said that Tolstoi was “killing flies with an ax.” There are several attitudes one can take to the problem of the “eternal triangle.” You can say, as polite society said all over Europe, and still says, that adulterous intrigue is a small matter, provided you make a pretense of hiding it. Or you may say with me, that when a married woman finds she truly and deeply loves another man, it is her duty to get a divorce and marry the man she loves. Or you may say, with most of the “heavy” novelists, that there is nothing for the various characters to do but to die horrid deaths. Tolstoi was on the way to the great crisis of his life, a spiritual conversion which involved a complete repudiation of the sexual element in love. He decided that it was the duty of men and women to repress their physical desires and become inspired Christian ascetics. When people asked him how, in that event, the human race was to continue to be propagated, his answer was that we didn’t have to worry about that, because so few people would be able to practice the code he laid down. It is difficult to see how a moral teacher could advance a doctrine more obviously absurd than that. The better elements of the race are to sterilize themselves, and posterity is to be begotten by weaklings and conscious sinners! There is only one possible explanation of such a doctrine; it is the reaction of a man whose passions are beyond his control. We know that such was the case with Tolstoi; he was a gross man, and Gorki reports that even in his old age his conversation was unbearably obscene, and his attitude toward women low. Such a man can conceive of asceticism, but he cannot conceive of true idealism in the sex relationship.