So the writer, a servant of pure art, sometimes becomes an accuser even unconsciously, and despite his own will. I allow myself, Count, to cite you as an example. You consciously follow a definite road faithfully and undeviatingly; but are you really completely alien to the literature of indictment? Were it but in the picture of a consumptive post-boy, dying on top of a stove amid a crowd of comrades apparently indifferent to his sufferings [this refers to _Three Deaths_] have you not indicated some social disease, some evil? When describing that death, is it possible that you did not suffer from the horny indifference of good but unawakened human souls? Yes, you too have been and will be an involuntary indicter! This question of the true position of literary art and its relation to the rest of life, was one which occupied Tolstoy for many years, and on which before the century closed he expressed himself in a book which must be reckoned with by all who may hereafter deal with the subject. The attitude he maintained at the time he entered the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, was in striking contrast with that of the Slavophils, such as Homyakóf, and of the great majority of the leading Russian writers of that day, who were fired with the hope of Emancipation, just as in America at the same time, Lowell, Emerson, Whittier, Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Longfellow, Channing, Lloyd Garrison, and others, were stirred by the Anti-Slavery movement. In April Tolstoy went to Petersburg and spent ten days very pleasantly with his aunt the Countess A. A. Tolstoy. By the end of the month he was back at Yásnaya. In July, Tourgénef, from France, wrote Fet a long letter in blank verse, a few lines of which indicate the relation between Leo Tolstoy and himself at this time: 'Kiss Nicholas Tolstoy on my behalf And to his brother Leo make my bow, --As to his sister also. He rightly says in his postscriptum: "There is no cause" for me to write to him, Indeed, I know he bears me little love And I love him as little. Too differently Are mixed those elements of which we're formed.' 1859-1860 During this winter Tolstoy devoted much time to an attempt to organise schools on and near his estate. The education of its peasant children was one of the things Russia most needed, and most terribly neglected. Tolstoy recognised this, and set himself strenuously and eagerly to show how the great need could be met. The work he did at this time was, however, only preliminary to what he undertook after his next visit to Western Europe, and he was far from being mentally at peace. At the commencement of the New Year he noted in his Diary: 'The burden of the estate, the burden of bachelor life, and all sorts of doubts and pessimistic feelings agitate my mind.'