The end is voluntary expiation. Nikita, accompanied by his father, the old Hakim, enters barefooted, in the midst of a wedding. He kneels, asks pardon of all, and accuses himself of every crime. Old Hakim encourages him, looks upon him with a smile of ecstatic suffering. "God! Oh, look at him, God!" The drama gains quite a special artistic flavour by the use of the peasant dialect. "I ransacked my notebooks in order to write _The Power of Darkness_," Tolstoy told M. Paul Boyer. The unexpected images, flowing from the lyrical yet humorous soul of the Russian people, have a swing and a vigour about them beside which images of the more literary quality seem tame and colourless. Tolstoy revelled in them; we feel, in reading the play, that the artist while writing it amused himself by noting these expressions, these turns of thought; the comic side of them by no means escapes him,[15] even while the apostle is mourning amidst the dark places of the human soul. While he was studying the people, and sending into their darkness a ray of light from his station above them, he was also devoting two tragic romances to the still darker night of the middle classes and the wealthy. At this period the dramatic form was predominant over his ideas of art. The _Death of Ivan Ilyitch_ and _The Kreutzer Sonata_ are both true dramas of the inner soul, of the soul turned upon itself and concentrated upon itself, and in _The Kreutzer Sonata_ it is the hero of the drama himself who unfolds it by narration. _The Death of Ivan Ilyitch_ (1884-86) has impressed the French public as few Russian works have done. At the beginning of this study I mentioned that I had witnessed the sensation caused by this book among the middle-class readers in the French provinces, a class apparently indifferent to literature and art. I think the explanation lies in the fact that the book represents, with a painful realism, a type of the average, mediocre man; a conscientious functionary, without religion, without ideals, almost without thought; the man who is absorbed in his duties, in his mechanical life, until the hour of his death, when he sees with terror that he has not lived. Ivan Ilyitch is the representative type of the European _bourgeoisie_ of 1880 which reads Zola, goes to hear Bernhardt, and, without holding any faith, is not even irreligious; for it does not take the trouble either to believe or to disbelieve; it simply never thinks of such matters.