[Transcriber’s Note: Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. Blank representing omitted text is represented as a line of underscores: ______.] THE JOURNAL OF LEO TOLSTOI (_First Volume--1895–1899_) THE NEWEST BORZOI BOOKS ASPHALT _By Orrick Johns_ BACKWATER _By Dorothy Richardson_ DANDELIONS _By Coulson T. Cade_ CENTRAL EUROPE _By Friedrich Naumann_ CRIMES OF CHARITY _By Konrad Bercovici_ RUSSIA’S MESSAGE _By William English Walling_ THE BOOK OF SELF _By James Oppenheim_ THE BOOK OF CAMPING _By A. Hyatt Verrill_ MODERN RUSSIAN HISTORY _By Alexander Kornilov_ THE RUSSIAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING _By Alexandre Benois_ THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP _By William H. Davies_ _With a Preface by Bernard Shaw_ THE JOURNAL OF LEO TOLSTOI (_First Volume--1895–1899_) TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN By ROSE STRUNSKY [Illustration: Publisher’s logo] ALFRED A. KNOPF NEW YORK · MCMXVII COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA INTRODUCTION The ultimate meaning of the Russian Revolution which took place in March, 1917, can be best understood through the pages of the Journal of Leo Tolstoi which is here printed. The spiritual qualities which make up the mind and personality of Tolstoi are the spiritual qualities which make up the new era among men which is being waged so painfully and so uncompromisingly at the present moment on the soil of Russia. One holds the key to the other, for no land but Russia could have produced a Tolstoi, and in no land but Russia could Tolstoi have been so embraced and so absorbed. They are both flesh of each other’s flesh, and I place them equally in greatness against each other. Great and wonderful as is the Russian people, so Tolstoi was as great and wonderful as the Russian people. I say this knowing well the pain and impatience both felt for each other in the long eighty-two years of Tolstoi’s life here, but it was the pain and the impatience of great love and infinite understanding, of feeling and knowing each other’s pulse-beats, and not the misunderstanding of strangers. It was the wise father doubting the impatient methods of his children; it was the ardent children desiring and struggling to accomplish the wishes of the father and being lost in the maelstrom of an insistent reality.