on its
production is absolutely forbidden in Russia. A word may be said here on
Tolstoy's so-called Anarchy, a term admitting of grave misconstruction.
In that he denied the benefit of existing governments to the people
over whom they ruled, and in that he stigmatised standing armies as
"collections of disciplined murderers," Tolstoy was an Anarchist; but in
that he reprobated the methods of violence, no matter how righteous
the cause at stake, and upheld by word and deed the gospel of Love
and submission, he cannot be judged guilty of Anarchism in its full
significance. He could not, however, suppress the sympathy which he
felt with those whose resistance to oppression brought them into deadly
conflict with autocracy. He found in the Caucasian chieftain, Hadji
Murat, a subject full of human interest and dramatic possibilities; and
though some eight years passed before he corrected the manuscript for
the last time (in 1903), it is evident from the numbers of entries in
his diary that it had greatly occupied his thoughts so far back even
as the period which he spent in Tiflis prior to the Crimean war. It was
then that the final subjugation of the Caucasus took place, and Shamil
and his devoted band made their last struggle for freedom. After the
lapse of half a century, Tolstoy gave vent in "Hadji Murat" to the
resentment which the military despotism of Nicholas I. had roused in his
sensitive and fearless spirit.

Courage was the dominant note in Tolstoy's character, and none have
excelled him in portraying brave men. His own fearlessness was of the
rarest, in that it was both physical and moral. The mettle tried and
proved at Sebastopol sustained him when he had drawn on himself the
bitter animosity of "Holy Synod" and the relentless anger of Czardom.
In spite of his nonresistance doctrine, Tolstoy's courage was not of
the passive order. It was his natural bent to rouse his foes to combat,
rather than wait for their attack, to put on the defensive every
falsehood and every wrong of which he was cognisant. Truth in himself
and in others was what he most desired, and that to which he strove at
all costs to attain. He was his own severest critic, weighing his own
actions, analysing his own thoughts, and baring himself to the eyes
of the world with unflinching candour. Greatest of autobiographers, he
extenuates nothing: you see the whole man with his worst faults and
best qualities; weaknesses accentuated by the energy with