Tolstoy as Man and Artist with an Essay on Dostoyevsky

IN the case of both Tolstoi and Dostoievski, but especially in the case of Tolstoi, their works are so bound up with their lives, with the personality of each author, that we cannot speak of the one without the other. Before studying them as artists, thinkers, or preachers, we must know what manner of men they are. In Russian society, and to some extent among critics, the opinion has taken root that about 1878, and in the early years of the next decade, there took place in Tolstoi a deep-seated moral and religious change; a change which radically transformed not only the whole of his own life, but also his intellectual and literary activity, and as it were snapped his existence into halves. In the first period, people say, he was only a great writer, perhaps too a great man, but at any rate a man of this world with human and Russian passions, grievances, doubts, and foibles; in the second he shook off all the trammels of historical life and culture. Some say that he is a Christian champion, others an atheist, others still that he is a fanatic, a fourth party that he is a sage who has attained the highest moral illumination.