[9] This tale bears the sub-title, Does a Man need much Soil? (1886).
[10] The Fire that flames does not go out (1885).
[11] The Wax Taper (1885); The Story of Ivan the Idiot.
[12] The Godson (1886).
[13] The love of the theatre came to him somewhat late in life. It was a discovery of his, and he made this discovery during the winter of 1869-70. According to his custom, he was at once afire with enthusiasm.
"All this winter I have busied myself exclusively with the drama; and, as always happens to men who have never, up to the age of forty, thought about such or such a subject, when they suddenly turn their attention to this neglected subject, it seems to them that they perceive a number of new and wonderful things.... I have read Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Gogol, and Molière.... I want to read Sophocles and Euripides.... I have kept my bed a long time, being unwell—and when I am unwell a host of comic or dramatic characters begin to struggle for life within me ... and they do it with much success."—Letters to Fet, February 17-21, 1870 (Further Letters).
[14] A variant of Act iv.
[15] The creation of this heart-breaking drama must have been a strain. He writes to Teneromo: "I am well and happy. I have been working all this time at my play. It is finished." (January, 1887. Further Letters.)
[16] A French translation of this Epilogue (Postface), by M. Halpérine-Kaminsky was published in the volume Plaisirs vicieux, under the title Des relations entre les sexes.
[17] Let us take notice that Tolstoy was never guilty of the simplicity of believing that the ideal of celibacy and absolute chastity was capable of realisation by humanity as we know it. But according to him an ideal is incapable of realisation by its very definition: it is an appeal to the heroic energies of the soul.