I have also heard another argument from persons who would have preferred, for the sake of their vanity, that Tolstoy's family tragedy should have remained secret. They said that Leo Nikolaevitch himself never defended himself against those who slandered him. He preferred to bear the censure of public opinion rather than reveal the painful conditions of his life and allow others to be blamed instead of himself. And therefore, they say, after his death his friends ought to follow his example. It is impossible to agree with this. One may well understand that Leo Nikolaevitch concealed his sufferings. He drew strength and derived satisfaction from the consciousness that he was living not before men, but before God. Far from standing in need of human approbation, he thought that unjust condemnation on the part of men was good for him in so far as it forcibly drove him to that road upon which one has nothing but the voice of God in one's own soul for guidance. But does this mean that we too must say nothing about Tolstoy's heroic life and conceal his moral rectitude now, when he is not among us? We have not, cannot have, and ought not to have, the same motives which in this respect influenced him. It is good for me, for my soul, to be unjustly condemned owing to the fact that I do not want to justify myself and am sparing the real culprit. But there is nothing good in my being silent when another person is unjustly condemned or slandered in my presence, while I have the means of proving his innocence. Leo Nikolaevitch had grounds for not justifying himself before men; but we have no grounds whatever for concealing that which does justify him. In the present case we ought to be guided, not by the thought of ourselves in his place if he were alive, but by the immediate voice of our own heart and reason, which demands that we should defend the friend whose memory is being reviled before our eyes. These are the reasons that have led me to undertake the biographical work of which the present narrative of Tolstoy's going away forms, so to speak, only one separate chapter. All the events of cosmic life are so inextricably interwoven that, were it possible to change in the past some one of them, even the apparently most insignificant, it would be necessary to change at the same time absolutely all the other concurrent and preceding circumstances. Therefore in order to investigate fully the conditions which have occasioned this or that event in a person's life, one would have to consider the whole past history of mankind, both the external and the internal or spiritual. And since it is impossible even in thought to embrace all this infinite number of facts, it must be admitted that it is utterly beyond our power to determine all the causes that have produced this or that event in the life of a particular individual.