whether on the literary movements of the day or on the merits of Goethe
or the humour of Gogol, were welcome interruptions to his ever-absorbing
metaphysical studies. In later life, also, though never in touch with
the rising generation of authors, we find him corresponding with them,
criticising their style and subject matter. When Andreev, the most
modern of all modern Russian writers, came to pay his respects to
Tolstoy some months before his death, he was received with cordiality,
although Tolstoy, as he expressed himself afterwards, felt that there
was a great gulf fixed between them.

Literature, as literature, had lost its charm for him. "You are
perfectly right," he writes to a friend; "I care only for the idea, and
I pay no attention to my style." The idea was the important thing to
Tolstoy in everything that he read or wrote. When his attention was
drawn to an illuminating essay on the poet Lermontov he was pleased with
it, not because it demonstrated Lermontov's position in the literary
history of Russia, but because it pointed out the moral aims which
underlay the wild Byronism of his works. He reproached the novelist
Leskov, who had sent him his latest novel, for the "exuberance" of his
flowers of speech and for his florid sentences--beautiful in their way,
he says, but inexpedient and unnecessary. He even counselled the younger
generation to give up poetry as a form of expression and to use prose
instead. Poetry, he maintained, was always artificial and obscure.
His attitude towards the art of writing remained to the end one of
hostility. Whenever he caught himself working for art he was wont to
reproach himself, and his diaries contain many recriminations against
his own weakness in yielding to this besetting temptation. Yet to these
very lapses we are indebted for this collection of fragments.

The greater number of stories and plays contained in these volumes