Tolstoy (1828-1910), in the early fifties, when an author was safe from the rigors of reprisals only in the realm of "pure Art," proclaims in a personal outpouring, "I shall write, but not as you do, for I know wherefore I shall write."
His "Sebastopol" sketches conclude as follows: "Where is the embodiment of evil which is to be avoided? Where, in this story, is the embodiment of good which is to be imitated? Who is its villain and who the hero? All are good and all are bad. But the hero of my story whom I love with all the powers of my soul, whom I have striven to reproduce in all his beauty and who always has been, is, and will be beautiful, is truth."
Or elsewhere, in the preface which Tolstoy wrote for the Russian translation of Amiel's "Journal": "For we love and need an author only in proportion as he reveals to us the inner process of his soul, of course if this process is new and has not been gone through before. Whatever he may write—a play, scientific work, novel, philosophical treatise, lyric poem, critique, satire—what is dear to us in the writer's work is but this inner working of his soul and not the architectural edifice, into which most of the time (and I even think, always) he lays his maimed thought and feeling."
As for the folk-novel movement of the period of "going to the people," suffice it to quote a letter of Ryeshetnikoff (1841-1871) to Nyekrasoff: "I conceived the idea of describing the life of the burlaks (bargemen on the Volga) in order that I might, even in the slightest degree, help these poor toilers." It may be pointed out here that this view had permeated all branches of Russian art at the time. Thus the composer Dargomyzhski wrote in 1857: "I have no intention to degrade music to the level of a pastime. I want the sound to express the word directly. I want truth." He strove for the impression of truth and realistic representation, while Musorgski, the follower of this "great teacher of musical truth," laid this down as the articles of his own realistic faith: "artistic rep-
