The dislike Tolstoy felt of the artificially stimulated war fever (though, to do Katkóf and his friends justice, one must admit that no European Power during the last fifty years has had more justification for war than Russia had for intervening in defence of the Slav population of Turkey) was connected with the religious impulse that was beginning to reshape his whole life; but it does not appear that he actually disapproved of the war after Russia had officially commenced it. What he primarily objected to was, that private individuals should push the Government into a war.
An influence which has left its traces in the latter part of Anna Karénina (particularly Part VII, Chap. 21) was Tolstoy's intercourse, about this time, with some of the most prominent followers of Lord Radstock, who frequently visited Russia and obtained considerable influence with a number of people in certain aristocratic Petersburg circles. One of these people, Count A. P. Bóbrinsky, who had been Minister of Ways of Communication, made Tolstoy's acquaintance and had animated religious discussions with him. Both Bóbrinsky and Colonel Páshkof (another very prominent Radstockite) for a while cherished hopes of winning Tolstoy over to Evangelical Christianity, and making him the spokesman of their cause. Tolstoy, as the event proved, was quite capable of throwing himself whole-heartedly into a religious movement; but he needed a faith much more clear-cut than the scheme of Redemption by the blood of Jesus: one that faced the facts of life, dealt explicitly with the bread-and-butter problem, and told men how to regard the fact that some people have to overtax their strength without ever reaching an assured maintenance, while others have a superabundance provided for them from their birth without ever needing to do a stroke of work. His profound contempt for Evangelical doctrines flashed out twenty years later, in the 17th Chapter of Book II of Resurrection.
It was a little before this that Fet told Tolstoy the following story. Sauntering in a churchyard, he had come upon an inscription which touched him more than any epitaph he had ever read. The tombstone was in the form of an obelisk of plain grey sandstone. On one of its four sides were deeply cut the words:
Here is buried the body of the peasant girl Mary;
on another side:
Here also is buried an infant of the female sex.
On the side opposite the name of the deceased stood these words ill-spelt:
This, my dear, is the last adornment I can give thee;
and below stood the name of
Retired non-commissioned officer So-and-so.