But in his mind he absolutely discriminated in favour of the intelligent, religious woman whom seldom he happened to meet in life and who always attracted his attention. So, for instance, he valued very highly the distant relative who brought him up, T. A. Ergolsky, for her self-sacrificing life; Mmes. M. A. Schmidt and L. F. Annenkov he respected for their true religious lives, and among the women writers he especially valued an American, Lucy Mallory, for her exceptional writings, from which he selected many thoughts for The Reading Circle. For women of this type he always had the greatest respect, recognising fully their merits and their great significance to humanity. In his literary works, Tolstoi, as is known, frequently reproduced the highest type of woman (for instance, Pashenka in Father Sergius, or the old woman, Maria Semenovna in The Forged Coupon). Also in his other writings, Tolstoi did not always express himself adversely about women, as can be seen, for instance, from the following extracts:
“Oh, how I would like to show to woman the whole significance of chaste women. The chaste woman (not in vain is the legend of Mary) will save the world.” (Journal, [August 3, 1898].)
“One of the most necessary tasks of humanity consists in the bringing up of chaste women.” (Journal, [August 24, 1898].)
“The virtues of men and women are the same; temperance, truthfulness, kindness; but in the woman, these same virtues attain a special charm.” (The Reading Circle, June 2.)
“Men cannot do that highest, best work, which brings men more than anything else nearer to God—the work of love, the work of complete self-surrender to him whom you love, which good women have done so well and so naturally, are doing, and will do. What would happen to the world, what would happen to us men, if women had not that quality and if they did not exercise it ... Without mothers, helpers, friends, comforters, who love in a man all that is best in him, and who with a suggestion hardly to be noticed, call forth and support all the best in him—without such women it would be bad to live in this world. Christ would not have had Mary and Magdalene; Francis of Assisi would not have had Clara; the Decembrists would not have had their wives with them in exile; the Dukhobors would not have had their wives who did not hold their husbands back, but supported them in their martyrdom for truth, there would not have been those thousands and thousands of unknown women, the very best, as everything that is unknown, the comforters of the drunken, the weak, the debauched, those for whom the consolations of love are more necessary than for any one else. In this love, whether it is directed to Kukin or to Christ, is the principal, great and irreplaceable strength of women.” (Appendix to Chekhov’s story, Dushechka.)
[178.] On Life—a religious-philosophic work by Tolstoi, written by him in 1887 and printed in all his collected works. An abbreviation of this work and an exposition of it written in simple language for plain readers was made by an American, Bolton Hall, and was approved by Tolstoi and printed under the title, Life, Love and Death. Later a translation of this under the title, True Life, appeared in an issue of the Ethical Artistic Library, Moscow, 1899. See article of Bolton Hall in the International Tolstoi Almanac compiled by P. A. Sergienko (Kniga, 1909).
[179.] See Letters of L. N. Tolstoi to his Wife, Moscow, 1913, pages 518 to 519.
[180.] Tolstoi made a mistake of one year: the battle against the Caucasian mountaineers in which he took part in the capacity of an artillerist, took place February 18, 1853. (See P. Biriukov’s Biography of Tolstoi, Volume I, page 226.) Nine years after the above mentioned note, February 18, 1903, Tolstoi wrote to Rusanov: “To-day it is fifty-three years since hostile enemy shells struck the wheel of that cannon which I directed. If the muzzle of the gun from which the shell emerged had deviated 1-10,000ths of an inch to one side or another, I would have been killed and I would no longer have lived. What nonsense. I would have existed in a form now inconceivable to me.”
[181.] What Is Art?