One of these issues--Mihailóvskiy continued--would be to write for the people. Of course, very few are so happy as to possess the talent and the faculties which are necessary for that: “But once he (Tolstóy) is persuaded that the nation consists of two halves, and that even the ‘innocent’ pleasures of the one half are to the disadvantage of the other half--why should he not devote his formidable forces to this immense task? It is even difficult to imagine that any other theme could interest the writer who carries in his soul such a terrible drama as the one that Count Tolstóy carries. So deep and so serious is it, so deeply does it go to the root of all literary activity, that it must presumably destroy all other interests, just as the creeper suffocates all other plants. And, is it not a sufficiently high aim in life, always to remind ‘Society’ that its pleasures and amusements are not the pleasures and the amusements of all mankind, to explain to ‘Society’ the true sense of the phenomena of progress, to wake up, be it only in the few, the more impressionable, the conscience and the feeling of justice? And is not this field wide enough for poetical creation?... “The drama which is going on in Count Tolstóy’s soul is my hypothesis,” Mihailóvskiy concluded, “but it is a legitimate hypothesis without which it is impossible to understand his writings.” (_Works_, III, 496.) It is now known how much Mihailóvskiy’s hypothesis was a prevision. In the years 1875-76, as Tolstóy was finishing _Anna Karénina_, he began fully to realise the shallowness and the duality of the life that he had hitherto led. “Something strange,” he says, “began to happen within me: I began to experience minutes of bewilderment, of arrest of life, as if I did not know how to live and what to do.” “What for? What next?” were the questions which began to rise before him. “Well,” he said to himself, “you will have 15,000 acres of land in Samara, 3000 horses--but what of that? And I was bewildered, and did not know what to think next.” Literary fame had lost for him its attraction, now that he had reached the great heights to which _War and Peace_ had brought him. The little picture of Philistine family-happiness which he had pictured in a novel before his marriage (_Family Happiness_) he had now lived through, but it no longer satisfied him. The life of Epicureanism which he had led hitherto had lost all sense for him. “I felt,” he writes in _Confession_, “that what I had stood upon had broken down; that there was nothing for me to stand upon; that what I had lived by was no more, and that there was nothing left me to live by. My life had come to a stop.” The so-called “family duties” had lost their interest. When he thought of the education of his children, he asked himself, “What for?” and very probably he felt that in his landlord’s surroundings he never would be able to give them a better education