Critics have not sufficiently remarked the moving appeal to women which terminates What shall we do? Tolstoy had no sympathy for modern feminism.[6] But of the type whom he calls "the mother-woman," the woman who knows the real meaning of life, he speaks in terms of pious admiration; he pronounces a magnificent eulogy of her pains and her joys, of pregnancy and maternity, of the terrible sufferings, the years without rest, the invisible, exhausting travail for which no reward is expected, and of that beatitude which floods the soul at the happy issue from labour, when the body has accomplished the Law. He draws the portrait of the valiant wife who is a help, not an obstacle, to her husband. She knows that "the vocation of man is the obscure, lonely sacrifice, unrewarded, for the life of others."
"Such a woman will not only not encourage her husband in factitious and meriticious work whose only end is to profit by and enjoy the labour of others; but she will regard such activity with horror and disgust, as a possible seduction for her children. She will demand of her companion a true labour, which will call for energy and does not fear danger.... She knows that the children, the generations to come, are given to men as their holiest vision, and that she exists to further, with all her being, this sacred task. She will develop in her children and in her husband the strength of sacrifice.... It is such women who rule men and serve as their guiding star.... O mother-women! In your hands is the salvation of the world!"[7]
This appeal of a voice of supplication, which still has hope—will it not be heard?
A few years later the last glimmer of hope was dead.
"Perhaps you will not believe me; but you cannot imagine how isolated I am, nor in what a degree my veritable I is despised and disregarded by all those about me."[8]
If those who loved him best so misunderstood the grandeur of the moral transformation which Tolstoy was undergoing, one could not look for more penetration or greater respect in others. Tourgenev with whom he had sought to effect a reconciliation, rather in a spirit of Christian humility than because his feelings towards him had suffered any change,[9] said ironically of Tolstoy: "I pity him greatly; but after all, as the French say, every one kills his own fleas in his own way."[10]
A few years later, when on the point of death, he wrote to Tolstoy the well-known letter in which he prayed "his friend, the great writer of the Russian world," to "return to literature."[11]
All the artists of Europe shared the anxiety and the prayer of the dying Tourgenev. Melchior de Vogüé, at the end of his study of Tolstoy, written in 1886, made a portrait of the writer in peasant costume, handling a drill, the pretext for an eloquent apostrophe:
"Craftsman, maker of masterpieces, this is not your tool!... Our tool is the pen; our field, the human soul, which we must shelter and nourish. Let us remind you of the words of a Russian peasant, of the the first printer of Moscow, when he was sent back to the plough: 'It is not my business to sow grains of corn, but to sow the seed of the spirit broadcast in the world.'"
As though Tolstoy had ever renounced his vocation as a sower of the seed of the mind! In the Introduction to What I Believe he wrote: