LEO TOLSTOY, FROM A PORTRAIT PAINTED IN 1884
MASLOVA’S RETURN TO THE WARD AFTER THE SENTENCE
“She could bear it no longer; her face quivered and she burst into sobs” (From an illustration by Pasternak in the English Edition of “Resurrection” reproduced by kind permission of Mr. F. R. Henderson)
relegates to the lumber-room, as unlife-like and hopelessly limited, all those theatrical glorifications of war which men of letters, romantic poets, and grave historians alike have been busily piling up on humanity’s shelves from generation to generation. And more: we feel that in ‘Sebastopol’ we have at last the sceptical modern spirit, absorbed in actual life, demonstrating what war is, and expressing at length the confused sensations of countless men, who have heretofore never found a genius who can make humanity realise what it knows half-consciously and consciously evades. We cannot help, therefore, recognising this man Tolstoy as the most advanced product of our civilisation, and likening him to a great surgeon, who, not deceived by the world s presentation of its own life, penetrates into the essential joy and suffering, health and disease of multitudes of men; a surgeon who, face to face with the strangest of Nature’s laws in the constitution of human society, puzzled by all the illusions, fatuities, and conventions of the human mind, resolutely sets himself to lay bare the roots of all its passions, appetites, and incentives in the struggle for life, so that at least human reason may advance farther along the path of self-knowledge in advancing towards a general sociological study of man.”
