“‘Astafi Ivanich!—’
“I looked at him, saw that he wished to tell me something more, tried to raise himself, and was moving his lips.—He reddened and looked at me.—Suddenly I saw that he began to grow paler and paler; in a moment he fell with his head thrown back, breathed once, and gave his soul into God’s keeping.”
Tolstoi
THE LONG EXILE
BY COUNT LEO NIKOLAIEVITCH TOLSTOI
Count Tolstoi, the son of a Russian nobleman, was born in 1828, so he is to-day an old man. The greatest book that has come out of Russia is the tragic but intensely lifelike “Anna Karenina,” published when Tolstoi was forty-seven years old. Much of his early work is extremely interesting and valuable, for artistic reasons, but his late years have been devoted almost entirely to moralising and speculating. A consensus of opinion among students of Russian literature shows that they consider “The Long Exile” to be the author’s best short story.
