d the Tolstoy legend, as did Richard Wagner the Wagner legend,
Victor Hugo the Hugo legend. Men of genius and imagination are nearly
all play-actors in matters autobiographical.

It is to Dostoievsky, once the despised outcast, that we must go for
the human documents of misery, the naked soul, the heart of man
buffeted by fate. If you think Resurrection strong, then read
Dostoievsky's The House of the Dead. If Anna Karenina has wooed
you--as it must--take up The Idiot; and if you are impressed by the
epical magnitude of War and Peace, study that other epic of souls, The
Brothers Karamazov, which illuminates, as if with ghastly flashes of
lightning, the stormy hearts of mankind. Tolstoy wrote of life;
Dostoievsky lived it, drank its sour dregs--for he was a man accursed
by luck and, like the apocalyptic dreamer of Patmos, a seer of visions
denied to the robust, ever fleshly Tolstoy. His influence on Tolstoy
was more than Stendhal's--Stendhal whom Tolstoy called his master.

Tolstoy denies life, even hates it after having enjoyed it to the
full. His religion in the last analysis is nihilism, and if carried to
its logical conclusion would turn the civilised world into a desert.
Our great man, after his family was in bed, sometimes ate forbidden
slices of beef, and he had been seen enjoying a sly cigarette, all of
which should endear him to us, for it proves his unquenchable
humanity. Yet that roast-beef sandwich shook the faith of thousands.
No--it will not do to take Tolstoy seriously in his attempts at
evolving a parody of early Christianity. He is doubtlessly sincere,
but sincerity is often the cloak for a multitude of errors.

His Katusha--Maslova, as she is more familiarly known in
Resurrection--is a far less appealing figure than the street-walker
Sonia in Dostoievsky's Crime and Punishment. The latter lives, while
poor Maslova, a crude silhouette in comparison, as soon as she begins
the march to Siberia is transformed into a clothes-horse upon which
Tolstoy drapes his moral platitudes. She is at first much more vital
than her betrayer, who is an unreal bundle of theories; but in company
with the rest of the characters she soon goes up in metaphysical
smoke. Walizewski asserts that all Tolstoy's later life was a
regrettable pose. "But this is the usual price of every kind of human
greatness, and in the case of this very great man, it is an atavistic
feature of the national ... education, which in his case was
orig