the evening when the children have gone to bed he tells me of his plans.”[1] But after five years of labour Tolstoi abandoned the idea altogether, because he had arrived at an estimate of Peter’s character diametrically opposite to that which generally obtains, and discovered that he had no sympathy whatever with the Petrine period itself. “Not only do I find nothing great in the personality and the acts of Peter I., but I find that everything on the contrary was very bad,” writes Tolstoi “In all his so-called reforms he only looked after his own personal profit and not after the interests of the State. In consequence of his disagreement with the Boyars as to his reforms, he founded St. Petersburg simply in order to be further away from them and to live his immoral life more freely.” The sentence I have under-lined is a characteristic specimen of Tolstoi’s unconscious one-sidedness, and of his inability to do justice to systems antagonistic to his own. Peter the Great undoubtedly transferred his capital to St. Petersburg in order to be further away from his Boyars. But why? Because he rightly perceived that reactionary Moscow would inevitably throw obstacles in the way of the reforms he judged to be indispensable to the civilising of ignorant and superstitious Russia, whereas St. Petersburg, with the command of the sea, was a window thrown open to the humanizing influences of the West. The prospect of greater license on the Neva than on the Moskva never entered into Peter’s thoughts. Peter was always and everywhere frankly sensual; his strong
- ↑ While in the throes of composition Tolstoi demanded absolute quiet, not even his wife being allowed to interrupt him.
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