al and temporal, in an epoch of reaction, and such was his
prestige that official Russia raised no finger. His authority was too
great, and this is perhaps the first great victory of the liberty of
individual thought over official tyranny in Russia. There had been
martyrs in plenty before, but no conquerors.

After _Anna Karenina_, Tolstoy, who gave up literature for a time, but
for a time only, nevertheless continued to write; at first he only
wrote stories for children and theological and polemical pamphlets;
but in 1886 he published the terribly powerful peasant drama: _The
Powers of Darkness_. Later came the _Kreutzer Sonata_, the _Death of
Ivan Ilitch_, and _Resurrection_. Here the hero Nehludov is a lifeless
phantom of Tolstoy himself; the episodes and details have the reality
of his early work, so has Maslova, the heroine; but in the squalor
and misery of the prisons he shows no precious balms of humanity and
love, as Dostoyevsky did; and the book has neither the sweep and epic
swing of _War and Peace_, nor the satisfying completeness of _Anna
Karenina_. Since his death, some posthumous works have been published,
among them a novel, and a play: _The Living Corpse_. He died, as he
had lived, still searching, and perhaps at the end he found the object
of his quest.

Tolstoy, even more than Pushkin, was rooted to the soil; all that is
not of the soil--anything mystic or supernatural--was totally alien to
him. He was the oak which could not bend; and being, as he was, the
king of realistic fiction, an unsurpassed painter of pictures,
portraits, men and things, a penetrating analyst of the human heart, a
genius cast in a colossal mould, his work, both by its substance and
its artistic power, exercised an influence beyond his own country,
affected all European nations, and gives him a place among the great
creators of the world. Tolstoy was not a rebel but a heretic, a
heretic not only to religion and the Church, but in philosophy,
opinions, art, and even in food; but what the world will remember of
him are not his heretical theories but his faithful practice, which is
orthodox in its obedience to the highest canons, orthodox as Homer and
Shakespeare are orthodox, and like theirs, one of the greatest earthly
examples of the normal and the sane.

To say that DOSTOYEVSKY is the antithesis to Tolstoy, and the second
great pillar of Russian prose literature, will surprise nobody now.
Had one been writing ten years ago,