One of H. R. Millar’s illustrations in the English edition of “Where Love is, there God is also,” reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Walter Scott, Ltd., the publishers
After all, it was family happiness that saved Leo Tolstoy. For the third time the hand of death had snatched away one of the nearest to him—his brother Nicholas. Two years later, in 1862, he married Miss Behrs, daughter of the army surgeon in Tula—the most fortunate thing that has happened to him in his whole life, I should think. Family responsibilities, those novel and daring experiments in peasant education which are recorded in several volumes of the highest interest, the supervision of the estate, magisterial
COUNT TOLSTOY
work, and last, but not least, the prolonged labours upon “War and Peace” and “Anna Karènina” fill up the next fifteen years. “War and Peace” (1864-9) is a huge panorama of the Napoleonic campaign of 1812, with preceding and succeeding episodes in Russian society. These four volumes display in their superlative degree Tolstoy’s indifference to plot and his absorption in individual character; they are rather a series of scenes threaded upon the fortunes of several families than a set novel; but they contain passages of penetrating psychology and vivid description, as well as a certain amount of anarchist theorising. Of this work, by which its author became known in the West, Flaubert (how the name carries us backward!) wrote: “It is of the first order. What a painter and what a psychologist! The two first volumes are sublime, but the third drags frightfully. There are some quite Shakespearean things in it.” The artist’s hand was now strengthening for his highest attainment. In 1876 appeared “Anna Karènina,” his greatest, and as he intended at the time (but Art is not so easily jilted), his last novel.
A FAMOUS PAINTING OF TOLSTOY