new generations, and the struggles, the aspirations and the thoughts
that engrossed the advanced youth of Russia; so that his collected
works form a remarkable literary record of the successive movements of
Russian society in a period of preparation, fraught with epochal
significance, which culminated in the overthrow of Czarism and the
inauguration of a new and true democracy, marking the beginning,
perhaps, of a radical transformation the world over.

"The greatest writer of Russia." That is Turgenev's estimate of
Tolstoy. "A second Shakespeare!" was Flaubert's enthusiastic outburst.
The Frenchman's comparison is not wholly illuminating. The one point
of resemblance between the two authors is simply in the tremendous
magnitude of their genius. Each is a Colossus. Each creates a whole
world of characters, from kings and princes and ladies to servants and
maids and peasants. But how vastly divergent the angle of approach!
Anna Karenina may have all the subtle womanly charm of an Olivia or a
Portia, but how different her trials. Shakespeare could not have
treated Anna's problems at all. Anna could not have appeared in his
pages except as a sinning Gertrude, the mother of Hamlet. Shakespeare
had all the prejudices of his age. He accepted the world as it is with
its absurd moralities, its conventions and institutions and social
classes. A gravedigger is naturally inferior to a lord, and if he is
to be presented at all, he must come on as a clown. The people are
always a mob, the rabble. Tolstoy, is the revolutionist, the
iconoclast. He has the completest independence of mind. He utterly
refuses to accept established opinions just because they are
established. He probes into the right and wrong of things. His is a
broad, generous universal democracy, his is a comprehensive sympathy,
his an absolute incapacity to evaluate human beings according to
station, rank or profession, or any standard but that of spiritual