did. With him, it is the child itself which expresses its childish

feelings, and it does this so as to compel the reader to judge full-grown people with the child’s point of view. Such is the realism of _Childhood_ and _Boyhood_--that is, their richness in facts caught from real life--that a Russian critic, Písareff, developed quite a theory of education chiefly on the basis of the data contained in these two stories of Tolstóy’s.

It is related somewhere that one day, during their rambles in the country, Turguéneff and Tolstóy came across an old hack of a horse which was finishing its days in a lonely field. Tolstóy entered at once into the feelings of the horse and began to describe its sad reflections so vividly, that Turguéneff, alluding to the then new ideas of Darwinism, could not help exclaiming, “I am sure, Lyov Nikoláevitch, that you _must_ have had horses among your ancestors!” In the capacity of entirely identifying himself with the feelings and the thoughts of the beings of whom he speaks, Tolstóy has but few rivals; but with children this power of identification attains its highest degree. The moment he speaks of children, Tolstóy becomes himself a child.

_Childhood_ and _Boyhood_ are, it is now known, autobiographical stories, in which only small details are altered, and in the boy Irténeff we have a glimpse of what L. N. Tolstóy was in his childhood. He was born in 1828, in the estate of Yásnaya Polyána, which now enjoys universal fame, and for the first fifteen years of his life he remained, almost without interruption, an inhabitant of the country. His father and grandfather--so we are told by the Russian critic, S. Venguéroff--are described in _War and Peace_, in Nicholas Róstoff and the old Count Róstoff respectively; while his mother, who was born a Princess Volkhónskaya, is represented as Mary Bolkónskaya. Leo Tolstóy lost his mother at the age of two, and his father at the age of nine, and after that time his education was taken care of by a woman relative, T. A. Ergólskaya, in Yásnaya Polyána, and after 1840, at Kazáñ, by his aunt P. I. Yúshkova, whose house, we are told, must have been very much the same as the house of the Róstoffs in _War and Peace_.

Leo Tolstóy was only fifteen when he entered the Kazáñ University, where he spent two years in the Oriental faculty and two years in the faculty of Law. However, the teaching-staff of both faculties was so feeble at that time that only a single professor was able to awaken in the young man some passing interest in his subject. Four years later, that is in 1847, when he was only nineteen, Leo Tolstóy had already left the University and was making at Yásnaya Polyána some attempts at improving the conditions of his peasant serfs, of which attempts he has told us later on, with such a striking sincerity, in _The Morning of a Landlord_.

The next four years of his life he spent, externally, like most young men of his aristocratic circle, but internally, in a continual reaction against the life he was leading. An insight into what he was then--slightly exaggerated, of course, and dramatised--we can get from the _Notes of a Billiard Marker_. Happily he could not put up with such paltry surroundings and in 1851, he suddenly renounced the life he had hitherto led--that of an idle aristocratic youth--and following his brother Nicholas, he went to the Caucasus, in order to enter military service. There he stayed first at Pyatigórsk--the place so full of reminiscences of Lérmontoff--until, having passed the necessary examinations, he was received as a non-commissioned officer (_yunker_) in the artillery and went to serve in a Cossack village on the banks of the Térek.

His experiences and reflections in these new surroundings, we know from his _Cossacks_. But it was there also that in the face of the beautiful nature which had so powerfully inspired Púshkin and Lérmontoff he found his true vocation. He sent to the _Contemporary_ his first literary experiment, _Childhood_, and this first story, as he soon learned from a letter of the poet Nekrásoff, editor of the review, and from the critical notes of Grigórieff, Annenkoff, Druzhínin, and Tchernyshévskiy (they belonged to four different æsthetical schools), proved to be a _chef d’œuvre_.

DURING AND AFTER THE CRIMEAN WAR

However, the great Crimean war began towards the end of the next year (1853), and L. N. Tolstóy did not want to remain inactive in the Caucasus army. He obtained his transfer to the Danube army, took part in the siege of Silistria, and later on in the battle of Balakláva, and from November, 1854, till August, 1855, remained besieged in Sebastopol--partly in the terrible “Fourth bastion,” where he lived through all the dreadful experiences of the heroic defenders of that fortress. He has therefore the right to speak of War: he knows it from within. He knows what it is, even under its very best aspects, in such a significant and inspired phase as was the defence of these forts and bastions which had grown up under the enemy’s shells. He obstinately refused during the siege to become an officer of the Staff, and remained with his battery in the most dangerous spots.

I perfectly well remember, although I was only twelve or thirteen, the profound impression which his sketch, _Sebastopol in December, 1854_, followed, after the fall of the fortress, by two more Sebastopol sketches--produced in Russia. The very character of these sketches was original. They were not leaves from a diary, and yet they were as true to reality as such leaves could be; in fact, even more true, because they were not representing one corner only of real life--the corner which accidentally fell under the writer’s observations--but the whole life, the prevailing modes of thought and the habits of life in the besieged fortress. They represented--and this is characteristic of all subsequent works of Tolstóy--an interweaving of _Dichtung_ and _Wahrheit_, of poetry and truth, truth and poetry, containing much more truth than is usually found in a novel, and more poetry, more poetical creation, than occurs in most works of pure fiction.

Tolstóy apparently never wrote in verse; but during the siege of Sebastopol he composed, in the usual metre and language of soldiers’ songs, a satirical song in which he described the blunders of the commanders which ended in the Balakláva disaster. The song, written in an admirable popular style, could not be printed, but it spread over Russia in thousands of copies and was widely sung, both during and immediately after the campaign. The name of the author also leaked out, but there was some uncertainty as to whether it was the author of the Sebastopol sketches or some other Tolstóy.

On his return from Sebastopol and the conclusion of peace (1856) Tolstóy stayed partly at St. Petersburg and partly at Yásnaya Polyána. In the capital he was received with open arms by all classes of society, both literary and worldly, as a “Sebastopol hero” and as a rising great writer. But of the life he lived then he cannot speak now otherwise than with disgust: it was the life of hundreds of young men--officers of the Guard and _jeunesse dorée_ of his own class--which was passed in the restaurants and _cafés chantants_ of the Russian capital, amidst gamblers, horse dealers, Tsigane choirs, and French adventuresses. He became at that time friendly with Turguéneff and saw much of him, both at St. Petersburg and at Yásnaya Polyána--the estates of the two great writers being not very far from each other; but, although his friend Turguéneff was taking then a lively part in co-editing with Hérzen the famous revolutionary paper, _The Bell_ (see