Shakespeare (1564–1616). See Tolstoi’s article about him “On Shakespeare” and “On The Drama” and the opinion in his journal March 15, 1897.
[95.] Declaration of Faith.
[96.] Henry George (1839–1897), noted American social worker and writer on economic questions. In his numerous works, chiefly on agrarian questions, he was a warm defender of the destitute and the oppressed. George considered the existence of private land ownership as the principal cause of the existence of poverty; appearing as its opponent, he suggested the abolition of all existing taxes, substituting for them a single tax on the value of land; by means of this reform, land would pass into the hands of people cultivating it by their own labour, because for people who did not work it, it would be unprofitable to own great stretches of land, since they would have to pay a large amount of taxes on them.
Tolstoi sympathised very much with George’s scheme and wrote much about it (The Great Sin, The Only Possible Solution of the Land Question, A Letter to a Peasant and some chapters in Resurrection and others). Of the works of George, Tolstoi recognised as the best his Social Problems, to the Russian translation of which he wrote a preface. In the last years of George’s life, Tolstoi was in correspondence with him; in his letter to him of 1894 Tolstoi among other things wrote: “The reading of each one of your books clarifies for me much which formerly was not clear to me and convinces me more and more of the truth and practicality of your system” [translated from the Russian from a translation from the English.—Translator’s note]. On the occasion of George’s death, Tolstoi wrote to Countess S. A. Tolstoi on October 24, 1897: “Serezha told me yesterday that Henry George was dead. Strange to say, his death struck me as the death of a very close friend. The death of Alexandre Dumas produced the same impression upon me. One feels as if it were the loss of a real comrade and friend.” Many works of George’s are translated into the Russian; there is a splendid biography of him written by S. D. Nicholaev, and published by Posrednik: The Great Fighter for Land Liberation, Henry George, Moscow, 1906.
[97.] Anna Constantinovna Chertkov.
[98.] In the letter to Count L. L. Tolstoi of June 7, 1896, Tolstoi related the incident as follows: “Yesterday a remarkable event happened to me. Two or three times there came to me a young civilian from Tula asking me to give him books. I gave him some of my articles and spoke with him. He was, according to his convictions, a Nihilist and an Atheist. I told him from the bottom of my heart all that I thought. Yesterday he came and gave me a note: ‘Read it,’ he said, ‘then tell me what you think of me.’ In the note it was written that he was a junior officer in the gendarmerie, a spy, sent to me to find out what is going on here, and that he became unbearably conscience-stricken and that is why he disclosed himself to me. I felt pity and disgust and pleasure.”
[99.] The priest, John Ilich Sergiev (of Kronstadt) (1829–1908), who enjoyed great fame as “The supplicator for the sick.” In his preaching and his books he many times made sharp attacks against Tolstoi and his views.
[100.] Declaration of Faith.
[101.] Zakaz, a piece of Yasnaya Polyana forest, not far from the house. Tolstoi was afterwards buried there.
[102.] Tolstoi had the opportunity to closely observe the nomadic life of the Bashkirs in the province of Samara, where he went in the Sixties to drink kumyss, and in the Seventies and Eighties to his own estates (see The Biography of L. N. Tolstoi written by P. I. Biriukov (Moscow, 1913) published by Posrednik, Volume II, Chapter VIII; and also the Recollections in the Children’s Magazine, Mayak, 1913, by V. S. Morosov, a former pupil of the Yasnaya Polyana school in the beginning of the Sixties).