A terrible conflict must have been going on then in the mind of the great writer. The communistic feeling which had induced him to put in italics the fact about the singer at _Lucerne_, and to add to it a hot indictment against the civilisation of the moneyed classes; the trend of thought which had dictated his severe criticisms against private property in _Holstomyér: the History of a Horse_; the anarchistic ideas which had brought him, in his Yásnaya Polyána educational articles, to a negation of a civilisation based on Capitalism and State; and, on the other hand, his individual property conceptions, which he tried to conciliate with his communistic leanings (see the conversation between the two brothers Lévin in _Anna Karénina_); his want of sympathy with the parties which stood in opposition to the Russian Government and, at the same time, his profound, deeply rooted dislike of that Government, all these tendencies must have been in an irreconcilable conflict in the mind of the great writer, with all the passionate intensity which is characteristic of Tolstóy, as with all men of genius. These constant contradictions were so apparent that while less perspicacious Russian critics and the _Moscow Gazette_ defenders of serfdom considered Tolstóy as having joined their reactionary camp, a gifted Russian critic, Mihailóvskiy, published in 1875 a series of remarkable articles, entitled _The Right Hand and the Left Hand of Count Tolstóy_, in which he pointed out the two men who constantly were in conflict in the great writer. In these articles, the young critic, a great admirer of Tolstóy, analysed the advanced ideas which he had developed in his educational articles, which were almost quite unknown at that time, and contrasted them with the strangely conservative ideas which he had expressed in his later writings. As a consequence, Mihailóvskiy predicted a crisis to which the great writer was inevitably coming. “I will not speak,” he wrote, “of _Anna Karénina_, first of all because it is not yet terminated, and second, because one must speak of it very much, or not at all. I shall only remark that in this novel--much more superficially, but for that very reason perhaps even more distinctly than anywhere else--one sees the traces of the drama which is going on in the soul of the author. One asks oneself what such a man is to do, how can he live, how shall he avoid that poisoning of his consciousness which at every step intrudes into the pleasures of a satisfied need? Most certainly he must, even though it may be instinctively, seek for a means to put an end to the inner drama of his soul, to drop the curtain; but how to do it? I think that if an ordinary man were in such a position, he would have ended in suicide or in drunkenness. A man of value will, on the contrary, seek for other issues, and of such issues there are several.” (_Otéchestvennyia Zapíski_, a review, June, 1875; also Mihailóvskiy’s _Works_, Vol. III, p. 491.)