_The Power of Darkness_, Tolstoy's first and greatest play, was not written until he was fifty-eight years of age, and it was not allowed to be performed in Russia till some years later. Both there and elsewhere abroad it was highly successful on the stage, as was also the comedy, _Fruits of Culture_, which he wrote three years later, to be performed by his own family and their friends. The only other play published during his lifetime, _The First Distiller_, is a very slight piece of no particular dramatic importance. It was written in the cause of temperance. Besides these, he left three other plays finished, or nearly finished, when he died. _The Live Corpse_ (which in English has also been called _The Man who was Dead_) is the one best adapted for the stage. _The Cause of it All_ is, like _The First Distiller_, a short and unimportant piece dealing with the effects of drink. The most interesting, not dramatically but psychologically, of the three is _The Light Shines in Darkness_, which was left in an unfinished state. In it Tolstoy presents his own case, and deals with the contradiction that existed and has so often been commented on, between practice and theory in his own life and teaching. For the purpose of the play he greatly simplified his own highly complex personality, and, though many of the details and characters are drawn from life with extraordinary exactitude, the picture presented is not one which all the people concerned are disposed to regard as quite fair to themselves. The play presents the terrible clash which resulted from the calls Tolstoy made on himself and on others to abandon all customary ways of life and to start afresh in a new direction. In his own case he was never allowed to test the effects of a life of extreme poverty and manual labour, such as he advocated; nor did those of his followers who adopted such a life achieve much success therein. Tolstoy's artistic sincerity is indeed shown by the fact that, despite his spiritual fervour and his profound conviction that he had really found the road to salvation for mankind, he has not, in this play, minimised the failure of his efforts to carry convictions to those about him, or to achieve any other success than that of obtaining an inward assurance that he was fulfilling the will of God. This assurance would, no doubt, have been more fully indicated in the last act, had he lived to complete it.