* * * * * From Tolstoy's diary in 1855: ... a great, a stupendous idea, to the realization of which I feel myself capable of devoting all my life. The idea is the foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind--_the religion of Jesus, but purified from dogma and mysticism; a practical religion, not promising bliss in future, but giving happiness on earth_.... To work consciously for _the union on earth_ by religion.... From a letter to the poet Fet in 1898: I am so different to things of this life that life becomes uninteresting.... I hope you will love me though I be black. From the fragment _There are no guilty people_: There was a time when I tried to change my position which was not in harmony with my conscience, but the conditions created by the past, by my family and its claims upon me, were so complicated that I did not know how to free myself. I had not the strength. Now that I am over eighty and have become feeble I have given up trying to free myself. Strange to say, as my feebleness increases I realize more and more strongly the wrongfulness of my position, and it grows more and more intolerable to me. On his death-bed at the railroad station Astapovo, November, 1910: I am tired of this world of men. Tolstoy's failure was inevitable, for he had approached life with the uncompromising logic of a child or a god. For fifty years he preached his religion, and during all that time he remained splendidly inconsistent. He opposed private property and proceeded to live on his estate; he had denounced marriage and was a father to thirteen children. Notwithstanding his deadly hatred for the Russian government, he bitterly denounced the liberals and the revolutionists for their "un-Christian" ways of fighting the enemy; but his greatest contradiction, to the joy of the intellectual world, consisted in the victory of the artist over the moralist as manifested in his numerous novels and plays. The work of Edward Garnett is conscientious and is, to my knowledge, the best short biography of Tolstoy. It was a happy idea to discard the traditional portrait and use a reproduction of Kramskoy's painting, which dates back to the sixties, if I am not mistaken. It is when looking at this portrait, a great piece of art in itself, that we envisage the author of _War and Peace_. A few words from the description of Tolstoy's face by P. A. Terzeyeonvo: His face was a true peasant's face: simple, rustic, with a broad nose, a weather-beaten skin, and thick overhanging brows, from beneath which small, keen, grey eyes peered sharply forth.... One instantly divines in Tolstoy a man of the highest society--with polished, unconstrained manners. ... On the one hand an insatiable thirst for power over people, and on the other an unconquerable ardor for inward purity and the sweetness of meekness....