This is not fiction, but a positive fact, which any one who cares may verify by asking the permanent inhabitants of the Schweizerhof, and by looking up the newspaper lists of foreign visitors at the Schweizerhof on 7 July.
It is an event which the historians of our times should inscribe in indelible letters of fire.
In the story, Prince Nehlúdof, indignant at such treatment of a man who was a real artist and whose songs all had enjoyed, brought the singer into the hotel and treated him to a bottle of wine. He goes on to ask himself:
Which is more a man, and which more a barbarian: the lord who, on seeing the singer's worn-out clothes, angrily left the table, and for his service did not give him a millionth part of his property, and who now sits satiated, in a well-lit, comfortable room, calmly discussing the affairs of China and approving the murders that are being committed there—or the little singer who with a franc in his pocket, risking imprisonment, has tramped over hill and dale for twenty years, harming no one but cheering many by his songs, and whom they insulted to-day and all but turned out, leaving him—weary, hungry and humiliated—to make his bed somewhere on rotting straw?
After passing a few weeks at Lucerne, Tolstoy returned to Russia viâ Stuttgart, Berlin, and Stettin, from which port he took steamer to Petersburg, and after staying a week there to see Nekrásof and meet his colleagues of the Contemporary, he went through Moscow to Yásnaya, where he arrived in August. In his Diary we find this note:
This is how, on my journey, I planned my future occupations: first, literary work; next, family duties; then, estate management. But the estate I must leave as far as possible to the steward, softening him and making improvements, and spending only Rs. 2000 a year [then equal to about £270], and using the rest for the serfs. Above all, my stumbling-block is Liberal vanity. To live for oneself and do a good deed a day, is sufficient.
Further on he says: 'Self-sacrifice does not lie in saying "Take what you like from me," but in labouring and thinking, and contriving how to give oneself.'
At this time he read (in translation) the Iliad and the Gospels, which both impressed him greatly. 'I have finished reading the indescribably beautiful end of the Iliad,' he notes, and expresses his regret that there is no connection between those two wonderful works.
In October he first accompanied his brother Nicholas and his sister Mary to Moscow, and then spent a few days in Petersburg, where he found that he had been forgotten by a world absorbed in the great measures of public reform then in course of preparation. Here is a sentence from his Diary: