sexual instincts had no respect whatever for either persons or places.
I suspect myself that Tolstoi’s real quarrel with Peter was due to the fact that the great Tsar was an unanswerable confutation of the novelist’s pet theory of the uselessness of independent individuality, for if ever a man was superior to his age and his environment, and moulded them both to his will, it was Peter the Great. And yet there is a moral grandeur in Tolstoi’s refusal to admire the exploits of the great national regenerator who owed so much of his success to the unflinching application of mere brute force. Mere achievement, however impressive, could never blind Tolstoi to the absence of moral greatness. We cannot, for instance, imagine him making a hero of a successful political freebooter like Frederick II. of Prussia.
“Anna Karenina,” Tolstoi’s second a work (his greatest in the opinion of many), was written between 1873 and 1876. The first seven parts appeared originally in the leading Moscow magazine, Russky Vyestnik, which, under the editorship of the eminent publicist, Michael Katkov, was a power in Russia. When, however, Katkov objected to certain portions of the eighth part of “Anna Karenina,” which was diametrically opposed to his reactionary views, Tolstoi was greatly incensed, and cancelled his engagement with Katkov. “How dare a mere journalist alter a single line of my work?” he cried. Tolstoi indeed never had any great love for newspapers or gazettes. “I never read anything but classics,” he once replied to a person who inquired what he usually
38
