Before giving reason why.
Before entering upon a discussion as to why the government feared Tolstoy, we must first have a glimpse of his earlier years, and briefly follow his heroic self-extrication from the corruption of the aristocratic society into which he was born, and his gradual rise to the exalted station of greatest reformer in the history of Russia.
Must hear story of his life.
He was born eighty-two years ago of an ancient noble family. His childhood years were spent in the midst of the gay military life of Moscow. Yet more gay and more corrupt was the society that surrounded him during his university life. Experiencing a revulsion of feeling against the kind of life he was leading, he fled from the university before graduation, returned to his family estate at Yasnaya Polyana and took up the life of a farmer.
This impetuous flight, and a later one of which we shall hear presently, may throw some light upon his last flight, a few weeks ago, which came to a pathetic end, and of which we shall speak in our next discourse.
His early glory and shame.
Five years long he lived the life of a peasant, when a call to arms landed him on the battlefields of the Crimea, where he soon won distinction for heroic service. But the dissoluteness of campaign-life soon disclosed that the Tartar in him was not yet dead. He returned to the debaucheries of his former years, and, according to his own confession, with all the greater zest, because of the double glory that had come to him, that of a distinguished soldier and of a brilliant author. He had taken to story-writing, and displayed in it a talent that made success instantaneous. He became the lion of his day, and was courted by high and low. And the greater his glory the more unrestrained grew his libertinism.[1]
His reform.
But there were lucid intervals, now and then, during which he held up to himself the lofty ideals of his former peasant life, and bitterly he denounced himself, and even portrayed himself unsparingly in the character-sketches of some of his novels. His better self acquired mastery at last; he threw off the yoke that had held him fast to the corrupt society of his day, and for the second time he fled to his estate.
He himself told of the circumstance that led to that flight. He had attended a ball at the home of a prominent nobleman, and passed the night in dancing and feasting, leaving his peasant-coachman waiting for him outside, in an open sleigh, in a bitter cold night. When at four in the morning he wished to return home, he found the coachman seemingly frozen dead, and it required several hours of strenuous effort to restore him to consciousness and to save his life. "Why," he asked himself, "should I, a rich, young aristocrat, who has done nothing for society, spend the night amid warmth and luxuries and feastings, while this peasant who represents the class that has built our cities, given us our food and clothing and other necessities, be kept outside to freeze?" He resolved, then and there, to dedicate the remainder of his life to the righting of this and other wrongs. And he kept his promise.