[131.] Further in Tolstoi’s manuscript, one page has been crossed out. A note by M. L. Obolensky in the copy in possession of the editors.
[132.] This letter was printed at first in an issue of The Free Press, No. 8, 1898, England, and later in Russia in Obnovlenia, Petrograd, 1906, and was confiscated.
[133.] Brother of Tolstoi, Count S. N. Tolstoi.
[134.] A peasant of the province of Kharkov in the district of Sumsk, Peter Vasilevich Olkhovik. Refused military service October 15, 1895, at recruiting, in the city of Bielopolie, province of Kharkov. Was sentenced by the Vladivostok military court to three years in a disciplinary battalion. The letters of Olkhovik to his relatives and acquaintances about his refusal were published by The Free Press, 1897, England, and in 1906 in Russia by Obnoblenia (and were confiscated). Influenced by Olkhovic, the private, Cyril Sereda, also refused military service, with whom Olkhovic became friendly on the steamer on the way to Siberia, where he was appointed for service. Both of them were turned over to the Irkutsk disciplinary battalions. Tolstoi’s letter to the commanding officer of the regiment, in which he asks him “as a Christian and as a kind man to have pity on these people ...” was printed at first also in The Free Press and afterwards in various publications in Russia. (See the Complete Works of Tolstoi, published by Sytin: subscribed edition, Volume XX, popular edition, Volume XXII.) On the effect that Tolstoi’s letter produced on the officer of the regiment, Tolstoi himself wrote the following in a letter to P. A. Boulanger, March 29, 1898: “Recently I was surprised, and very pleasantly, by a letter from a man exiled administratively from Verkholensk, who writes that the commanding officer of the disciplinary battalion in Irkutsk openly told Olkhovich and Sereda that my appeal for them saved them from corporal punishment and shortened their sentence. Let a thousand letters pass in vain: if but one has such a result, then one ought to write unceasingly.” The fate of P. V. Olkhovich was as follows: From the disciplinary battalion he was exiled for eighteen years to the district of Yakutsk, where he lived together with the exiled Dukhobors until 1905, when together with them he went to America. At the present moment he is living in California.
[135.] Edward Carpenter, a noted contemporary English thinker, some of whose works Tolstoi valued highly. Carpenter’s article, “Contemporary Science,” was later translated into Russian by Countess Tolstoi and printed with a preface by Tolstoi in the magazine Sieverni Viestnik (1898, No. 3), later it was issued separately (Posrednik, Moscow, 1911).
[136.] Count Sergei Lvovich Tolstoi (born, 1863), eldest son of Tolstoi.
[137.] To the Ekaterinograd disciplinary battalion were sentenced the Dukhobors (41 in number) who had refused military service, while being in actual military service ... See The Dukhobors in the Disciplinary Regiment, published by The Free Press, 1902, England, where was printed also the letter of Tolstoi to the commanding officer of the regiment. Stating those religious convictions of the Dukhobors for which they suffered persecutions and calling their acts ..., Tolstoi asked the commanding officer to do all that he could to lighten their fate. The letter of Tolstoi produced a softening effect on the commanding officer.
[138.] Vladimir Vasilevich Stasov (1824–1906), a critic of art and music and the librarian of the Imperial Public Library in Petrograd, a friend of the Tolstoi family. When, after Stasov’s death, his friend, the sculptor, I. Y. Ginzburg, asked Tolstoi to write his recollections of him, in the compilation, “To The Memory of V. V. Stasov,” Tolstoi in his letter of November 7, 1907, replied that it was difficult for him to write about Stasov on account of “the misunderstanding” which had taken place between them: “the misunderstanding consisted in that Vladimir Vasilevich Stasov loved and valued prejudicially in me that which I did not value and could not value in myself, and in his goodness forgave me that which I valued and value in myself above everything else,—that by which I lived and live. With every other man such a misunderstanding would lead, if not to hostility then to a coolness, but the gentle, kind, spontaneous, warm nature of Vladimir Vasilevich and at the same time, his childlike clarity, was such, that I could not help succumbing to his influence and loving him without any thought of the difference of our points of view. I shall always remember our good friendly relationship with emotion.”
[139.] Nicholai Nicholaievich Gay, the son of the old friend of Tolstoi, N. N. Gay.