[12] Referring to a modern independent art movement in Europe.
[13] Ubermenschenthum. Cf. philosophy of Nietzsche
XXVIII A VISIT TO TOLSTOÏ
From Moscow an accommodation train goes in one night to Tula, capital of the government of the same name. The infallible Baedeker advises the traveller to leave the train there, because it is hard to get a team at the next station, Kozlovka, though Kozlovka is nearer to Yasnaya Polyana, the estate of the poet, than is Tula. I follow my Baedeker blindly, because I have always had to repent when I departed from its advice. The German Baedeker deserves the highest credit for taking the trouble to give this information to the few travellers that make the pilgrimage to Leo Tolstoï. For it is not to be supposed that Tolstoï is overrun. His family guard his retirement, and do not grant admittance to every one. I was, in fact, the only stranger who found his way there during the entire week. It was, indeed, a very special introduction which opened the gates to me.
The train reaches Tula at eight in the morning. Thoughtful friends had given me a card in Russian to the station-master to help me to find a driver who knew the way. The station-master could not, however, decipher the card, and did not understand my French. A colonel of Cossacks then helped me out. He had already been talking with the official, and now asked me if I could not speak German a little. When I assented he immediately played the interpreter. In a few minutes a muzhik was found who, with his small sleigh and shaggy, big-boned pony, had made the journey many times. The amiable Cossack then accepted an invitation to breakfast in the clean station, and we chatted for a while over our tea. He was a tall, fair-haired man, with kindly blue eyes and the short Slavonic nose. His conversation, however, emphatically contradicted his appearance. He was on his way to the Ural, where he was to meet his regiment, and talked about the bayonets of his Cossacks being bent because the men spit the "Kakamakis" (Japanese) and threw them over their shoulders. He was delighted that I was a German, for the Russians think the Germans very good fellows at present. Only the English are a bad lot—"Jew Englishmen!" Leo Tolstoï, he said, was a man of great genius, but it wasn't nice that he was an atheist. I interrupted him, laughing:
"I don't wish to be personal, colonel, but Leo Tolstoï is a much better Christian than you."
"How's that?"
I explained to him that Tolstoï wishes to reestablish the primitive Christianity and is the enemy only of the church and of the priests. The good fellow was immediately satisfied. If it were nothing worse than that—no Russian could endure the priests. They were all rascals. The missionaries in China had turned all their girls' schools into harems. Only the dissenting priests led a moral life.