Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Transcript (PDF)

The 19th Century
Presentation 13 of 13

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
The Master Spirit of the 19th Century.
Transformations Back to Spiritual Man.
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, February 28, 1984

Transcript:

“[Dear Mr Ryerson Jennings,
In answer to your letter of 24 August I can sincerely say that I wish Mr. Bryan success in his candidature to the Presidency of the United States. From my own] …standpoint, repudiating as it does all coercive Government, I naturally cannot acquiesce with the position of president of the Republic but since such functions exist it is obviously best that they should be occupied by individuals worthy of confidence. Mr. Bryan, I greatly respect and sympathize with, and know that the basis of his activity is kindred to mine and his sympathy with the interests of the working masses, his anti-militarism and his recognition of the fallacies produced by capitalism. I do not know, but hope Mr. Bryan will stand for land reform according to the single tax system of Henry George, which I regard as being at the present time of the most insistent necessity and which every progressive reformer should place to the fore.”

William Jennings Bryan had visited Yasnaya Polyana some time before and they had got along very well. And of course Mr. Bryan’s granddaughter is in the audience so I thought I’d just get to that before we got any further along. Tolstoy is like a grandfather to me, literarily – Tolstoy and Yeats are my antecedents in the West. Tolstoy is also the master spirit of the 19th century. He is also formative in that he carries this lecture series into the 20th century for the first time.

We’ve been working for four years, twice a week, to try and trace an outline in a single voice, with a single mind, some idea of how we got to where we are. And we now approach for the first time the 20th century. This is a watershed. It will take the rest of the year to catch up in the Philosophical Research Society lectures to the point that we reach tonight here. The series there, dealing with the age of Cervantes and Shakespeare, that first revolution of personality which broached the modern mind will end at the end of March. And then April, May, and June will be The Age of Revolution: Shelley and Beethoven, Goethe, Hegel. Then from June, July, and August, this summer, July, August, September, I guess it is, we’ll take the lead into the 20th century where we take Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Cezanne, Tchaikovsky, those individuals that led into the 20th century. So that by September of this year we should finally be in a position to have the early 20th century the last quarter of this year which will probably start with Einstein. And so, we’ll finish up this year into the 20th century and it will take us probably some time to digest the quality of this century. Probably, the first half of 1985.

The reason for all this is that we cannot think about our situation today without a context. We were given either no context, or too many contexts for our own good. And those of us who have come into maturity since the Second World War have been at a distinct disadvantage from all other times. We have not understood what a viable tradition really was except if we learned it in one or more disciplines, or in a profession, or from a family tradition. But generally, the civilization which should sustain the personality has progressively unravelled to the extent to where today, in the mid 1980s, it can’t sustain personality at all. The only way that anyone could ever hone themselves into a viable human being is to withdraw from the society. So to reinstate this somewhat, that is to say, to reinstate the context within which one could actually come to terms with oneself. We’ve been doing this whole series.

The Tuesday night series of course moves to Hyperion to Whirling Rainbow and what we’re doing there, starting next Tuesday night, is we’re beginning a new kind of a movement. These courses, these presentations, these lecture series – however you like to call them – have been moving in quarters three months at a time. Now we’re going to take broad swaths of six months at a time to try and make the tone of a broad cultural epoch. We’re going to take Christianity which was formed, roughly in the thousand years from 300 AD to 1300 AD. After Christianity was formed after it was made into a viable religion, it was then used by power groups for their own ends. There has been no real Christianity since the 13th century. There has only been organizations which have used that banner for their own self-aggrandizement. From time to time there have been Westerners who have been real Christians and they have always excerpted themselves from the churches of the time.

Our man tonight Tolstoy is a case in point. We’ll see that Tolstoy at the peak of world fame as the moral leader of Western civilization will be excommunicated by the Greek Orthodox Church and his wife will write a letter to the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church and say do you think that I will let my husband be buried without the proper ceremonies? Do you think I will not find some priest who is really a Christian who will perform them, or some bad priest who isn’t a Christian who will do it for pay? Kierkegaard, another individual, who said it’s very difficult to be a Christian because the whole civilization is against that. It is geared like shark’s teeth not to let you become individuated in that mode.

So we’re going to Tuesday night try to bring into shape the mystical entity that can be described and known as Christianity. After that series which will end in August we’ll then do a second six month series which will take Alexandria – the thousand years of Western civilization that was made in Alexandria, because Christianity is the child of Alexandria. Christianity is not the child of the Old Testament. It is the child of Hellenistic civilization and it is a gross misunderstanding to think that the New Testament follows the Old Testament. Christianity is a product, a child, of the Hellenistic civilization that preceded it. And when we understand that then we understand why the rejection of the ancient Greco-Roman world was necessary for the birth of Christianity, and why the rejection of Christianity led to the esoteric rebirth of the ancient world in the occult Hermetic traditions that came up in the 13th century. They began to come back. Then sometime in 1985 Basil and I will do a six month course called Greek Buddhism, and we will show that there was a world civilization from 100 BC to about 300 AD and that all peoples participated in it: the Chinese, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, everybody. And that there were even emissaries sent to the New World to those ancestors of the Mayans, to those Toltecs, to those the last survivors of the Olmecs, the American Indians record it. So that we’ll take then the world civilization that was dismembered in the third century AD for the same reason that most civilizations have been dismembered: because power groups have sought to aggrandize their own position with the working dynamics and core of the organizations set up.

So we have big game in mind and it doesn’t really matter whether there are many people in attendance or not. I have a favorite dharma teacher in Los Angeles who’s been teaching here for fifty-six years. He has about 9 or 10 people come to hear him after all that time. But anybody who knows anything knows that he is the carrier of a lineage which is still intact. And he’s the number one man. So it’s not incumbent upon populations or popularity for significance. But the reason that this is done is to air a little bit of the laundry that needs airing. As I said once before, I wish somebody else had done it, but when I got to be in my forties and saw that nobody else had done it I had to shoulder it myself.

Tolstoy is a descendant, on both sides, from the oldest families in Russia. Tolstoy is the embodiment, the epitome of the Russian person, the Russian psyche. Early in the Russian career more than a thousand years ago the Norman invasions had produced a interlocking directorate of royal houses in Europe so that the descendants of the Norman kings ruled Russia and Ireland and France and Sicily. And so there was a very interesting circle of Norman descended kings and royal families. In Russia, Rurik was– R-U-R-I-K – was the first ruler of this line and the descendants of Rurik number a bunch of royal families in the Russian tradition one of which was the Volkonsky’s. And Tolstoy’s mother was a Volkonsky. Tolstoy’s grandfather Volkonsky became the model for one of the major figures in War and Peace.

Tolstoy himself is an interesting personage. He was born in 1828. The date always given is August 28th but actually this is the old-style Russian calendar and transposed to our modern calendar that would be about the 10th of September, there’s about 12 days difference which makes him a Virgo for those who think in those terms. Tolstoy held a very poignant psyche. That is to say – since I’m acquainted with that phenomenon myself, I can describe it somewhat accurately – whenever he experienced something as a baby it was, if we can use the term, totalistic. That is to say, the experience carried with it the whole tone of observation as if someone had been already a master Yogi. Whether this bodes for reincarnation or not is another issue. But Tolstoy’s first recollections, which he wrote down, and which he said he could not verify the exact order but that the recollections were pristine. And here are some of them. He says:

“I lie bound and wish to stretch out my arms but cannot. I scream and cry and my screams are disagreeable to myself but I cannot stop. Someone, I do not remember who, bends over me. This all happens in Semi-darkness. I only know there were two people there. My cries affect them. They are agitated by my screams. But do not untie me as I want them to and I scream still louder. To them it seems necessary that I should be bound, but I know it is unnecessary and I wish to prove this to them. And I again burst into cries which are unpleasant to myself but are yet unrestrainable. I feel the injustice and cruelty, not of people for they pity me, but of fate and I pity myself. I do not know and shall never know what it was all about. Whether I was swaddled while still a baby at the breast and struggled to free my hands.”

Russian babies at this time, the– the new ones were often wrapped with linen – they looked almost like little mummies – to preserve them. Infant mortality rate has always been a human problem until just this century. In countries like the United States we have lost sight of the fact that infant mortality was a real problem. The 1983 World Census showed that in Africa ninety-four of every thousand babies die in black Africa, which means a ten percent infant mortality rate. Almost all of the world was like this at one time. Well if your chances are one in ten of dying as an infant as a baby the concern is– is to protect that child right away when they’ve come out. The Russian way was to swaddle them almost like little mummies, tightly wound.

Okay that’s one memory. The next impression.

“I am sitting in a tub and am surrounded by a new and not unpleasant smell of something with which they are rubbing my tiny body. Probably it was bran put into the water of my bath. The novelty of the sensation caused by the bran aroused me and for the first time I became aware of and liked my own little body with the visible ribs on my breast and the smooth dark wooden tub, the bared arms of my nurse, the warm steaming swirling water, the noise it made, and especially the smooth feel of the wet rim of the tub as I passed my hands along it.”

So that the experience happens rather like when one strikes a match in the darkness and the flame comes up and you see all but it’s only a glimpse. But the glimpse is not fragmentary, it’s total. It’s simply that the duration is like a meteor or like a match being lit and then it goes out. But the connection, the web of relationality is all intact and all there. What remains later on are the sensate levels of connections because the neural circuitry of an infant is actually unconnected to the brain at this time and all that remains is the impressed memory of the sensate occurrence the meditative eye – of course, not being a part either of the neurocircuitry or of the brain – remains present and intact. And so, when recalling this, there’s a flavor along with the sensate material, the information. And this is what Tolstoy is in effect demonstrating that he was capable of recalling as a baby.

He recalls being in a bed. He says, “I am in bed and feel well and happy as usual and I should not remember it but that suddenly the nurse, or some one of those who made up my life, says something in a voice new to me and then goes away. And in addition to being happy I am also frightened. And besides me there was someone else like me. He had a little baby sister Mary who was about a year a little over a year younger than he so that both of them probably were in this crib and someone was playing a little game with them. And the game was the Russian version of the boogeyman is going to get you so you better be good little kids. And they remember the joy of the contact and also the joy of the fright because it was a fictive fright and they were companions and he remembers this. And he remembers that they– “and I hide in my pillow. Hide and glance at the door from behind which I expect something new and merry. We laugh and hide and wait. And then someone appears in a dress and cap quite unknown to me but I recognize that it is the same person who was always with us.” So these are the earliest memories of Tolstoy and they give us an indication of the enormous quality to this person who was entering into the life known as Leo Tolstoy.

The family home, Yasnaya Polyana, means ‘bright glade’. It was a large estate, many hundreds of acres, about seven hundred serfs, all of it fenced, all of it walled, with lanes leading up to the main house that were rimmed with lime trees originally and then Tolstoy planted oaks which are still there. I was going to bring tonight a beautiful painting by the Russian artist Repin of Tolstoy reading leaning against one of his oaks with his book. On one of his visits to Yasnaya Polyana, Yevgeny Yevtushenko said that he had, in San Francisco, he said he had the odd experience as he walked down this lane sauntered down this lane that the roots of the trees which were sticking up above ground and going down were almost like the fingers in the hands of Tolstoy holding the earth together that it was just an eerie sensation. And when he thought about it, it was not there. It was not true. But when he didn’t think about it the feeling was haunting and constantly there. And he said when he left Yasnaya Polyana he– he felt that someone was waving goodbye in feeling-tone, that there was a presence there quality there.

“Bright Glade” – Yasnaya Polyana – the children were educated there. They were given a very good education. Tutors were brought there. His first major tutor there Theodore Roussel figures later on in the first published work by Tolstoy called Childhood and he becomes Karl Mauer. He learned German and French and English. Tolstoy was very adept at languages. He learned Hebrew. He was not so good in Latin. He learned a little Italian. Later on in his life he surprised everyone by learning classical Greek in three months. And people doubted that he could have done this. And a professor of classics in Moscow sought to test Tolstoy and thrust in front of him a copy of Xenophon in Greek. And Tolstoy read it straight out. And then they argued for several hours over the interpretation of Xenophon and finally the professor realized that Tolstoy was arguing in classical Greek.

He was an extraordinary mind, and I think we have to keep in mind that as one moves up in levels of intelligence one doesn’t just arithmetically add capacities they multiply. So that there’s a geometric increase in perspective. So that at certain plateaus, intelligence jumps quantumly in capacity. One can do this through discipline and meditation. There are stages in high meditation where one realizes that the whole context that one was working with is just but a thesis within an even larger context. It’s not quite like a Hegelian universe, but it’s interestingly parallel. So that Tolstoy, as an individual that we’re dealing with, is one of the really great minds of human history. He not only is a better writer than Dostoevsky but he is centuries ahead of him in terms of human understanding.

So these young tutors that were brought for the children – there were four Tolstoy boys and a sister Mary who was the youngest – Leo– and his name actually should be Tolstoy. The emphasis should be on the second syllable – Tolstoy. And it’s not an I, the I – T-O-L-S-T-O-I – comes from the French translation from the Russian. The Y is correct. There were four brothers and Leo was the youngest. His oldest brother was about five and a half years older. Then the next one was two years older. The next one, one year older. The oldest one, Nicolinya, as he used to call him, was the favorite, he was the model. Nicolinya, all through his life, was an extraordinarily kind individual, did not take to writing because he did not even have that fault which writers need above all: vanity, the need to be published, the need to be read. In fact, when Tolstoy’s first works were coming out and they were unsigned Turgenev – who was a friend of Tolstoy’s sister Mary, living in the same part of Russia – Turgenev was reading out loud some incidents from the work and Mary knew that it had to be one of her brothers and she thought it was Nicolinya rather than Leo. Dmitry, the next son, was quite a fine individual. Sergey who was the closest to Leo, was the mischievous boy, the one who always got into trouble, the one who went to the gypsy girls first. And he lived longest. He lived until 1904. The other two brothers would die before they got to middle age.

Leo himself would live until 1910 which gave him a very very long life. He was quite interesting. The home, Yasnaya Polyana, filled with visitors all the time. For some reason or other a lot of monks and half mad pilgrims, God-intoxicated people, would come to Yasnaya Polyana and be put up. In the Russian tradition, in the Greek Orthodox tradition, coming from the old Greek mystery school tradition, there are people whose experience with divinity leads them off the deep end. They are of course welcomed into one’s home just as the old tradition used to be in more ancient etiquettes of understanding to always set another place for dinner in case one of these kinds of roving people, one of these hobos for God, came by one could offer this place for them. We of course today with our Safeway lines and NBC News minds hardly believe that this could be so. But generally human nature is such that there are usually about a tenth of a percent of the population who are kindly mad and room should be made for them. Almost every civilization has always made room for them.

By the summer of 1840 Russia experienced a great famine. It was not as great a famine as would happen fifty years later but at this time the young Leo Tolstoy, just twelve years old, was an onlooker and the family had to leave the estate. And in fact his mother, who had died very– when he was very young, probably less than two years old. His father had passed on and he had been given into charge of an aunt and when she passed on, just after the famine was over, the whole Tolstoy family was moved into the interior of Russia to Kazan. Kazan is on the Volga River. I don’t know how well you can think of geography. Moscow, position Moscow in your imagination; draw a line straight to the east towards the Ural Mountains; after about three or four hundred miles the first large city you get to is Gorky which is on the Volga; and then the Volga runs almost due east and where it begins to make a huge turn to the south that’s where Kazan is – probably eight or nine hundred miles from Moscow. The Volga then goes almost due south eventually emptying into the Caspian Sea at Astrakhan. Quite a long ways down. That’s roughly the– the geography.

So that the Tolstoy family was moved to Kazan and the boys were entered into the university there at Kazan. Tolstoy never seemed to have to study. Whenever exams were coming up he would take a week and read all the books and pass. They graded you one through five and often Tolstoy would get five plus. In geography he got one because he had never been curious. No one had ever told him about things. And the next time he took the exam he got a five. He just simply would fill in what he needed. But Tolstoy’s problem was never intelligence. Tolstoy’s problem was always character. The bone that he had to chew on given him was the development of character. And this is why Tolstoy becomes one of the great ethical writers of the world. He is on par with Plato. The reason is– is that he had to grind out every realization, scratch out every understanding inch by inch in his own life. It was never easy for him to be moral. It was never easy for him to understand why one had to do it this way because great intelligence often is facile. It simply does not recognize rules or boundaries as categorical necessities.

From 1841 to 1847 they lived in Kazan, and at the age of nineteen, without taking a degree, Leo Tolstoy left and he had in fact created quite a stir for himself. He had originally gone into Oriental languages and then had had an argument with the head professor of oriental languages and he knew that he wasn’t going to get his degree from this man. So he shifted over to law and he decided that he just didn’t even want to bother with a degree. Went back to Yasnaya Polyana for a few months to recover. He would have this pattern all through his life.

I’m going to have to skip a lot of that, but just imagine that the punctuation of most of his life was returning back to Bright Glade and getting back into the land, getting back into the trees, the sunlight, the shadow, the great house. And you have to imagine a huge estate now – it had seven hundred serfs, thousands of acres.

Then he went to Saint Petersburg. He was going to take a quickie degree in Saint Petersburg, which he got. But all the time he was living the dissipated life of the young aristocrat: gambling, womanizing – if we can use that term. One could not address oneself to the women of one’s own class. So one went to the gypsy girls. This led of course to drinking and partying which coupled with the gambling led to a total dissipation. Tolstoy later in his life could hardly believe the kind of life that he had been capable of and he lamented most profoundly. When we get to the confession that he wrote in 1879 he almost threw himself away in terms of moral judgment and said that I was so bad that it’s almost impossible for someone like me to resuscitate themselves. This will of course come up a few years after that in Compulsions toward Suicide and we’ll get to that.

By the time that he finished his work in Petersburg and came back again to Yasnaya Polyana another characteristic of Tolstoy – he began to make lists of what he must do. He loved to sit down and make lists to revise his whole life. Here are some rules that he set himself at this time:

1 – To fulfill what I set myself despite all obstacles.
2 – To fulfill well what I do undertake.
3 – Never to refer to a book for what I had forgotten but always try to recall it to mind myself.
4 – Always to make my mind work with its utmost power.
5 – Always to read and think aloud.

In classical times one read aloud. The reason for this is that mnemonic– mnemonics and diction are related. If you learn something to declaim it out loud you really learn it whereas if you learn it silently the composition is done graphically and that fades very quickly unless your mind is trained to recall a graphic setup. The audio is much easier for– for the mind to work. And,

6 – Not to be ashamed of telling people who interrupt me that they are hindering me. Letting them first feel it. But if they do not understand, telling them with an apology.

Now these are all rules for some bright young man who’s leaning on his mind. These are rules for the reform of life using the mind as the master of the situation, almost making the mind a tyrant. He decided that he would spend two years at Yasnaya Polyana and he would fill in all of the studying that he had not gotten to. So he drew up a list for that. He decided to study the whole course of law; to study all of medicine and its theory; to perfect French, Russian, German, English, Italian, and Latin; to study agriculture, both theoretically and practically; to study all of history, geography, and statistics; to study mathematics; to write his university thesis; to reach the highest perfection I can in music and painting. Nine. Very interesting to write down rules for my conduct. To acquire some knowledge of the natural sciences and to write essays on all the subjects I study for – two years!

A precocious giant having no sense that there are bounds or limitations. What are bounds and limitations to such a man? He spent the time at Yasnaya Polyana in fact beginning to work with educating the serfs, the serf children. He, in 1849, at the age of twenty-one, while educating himself began to realize almost like an intelligent mind will always pick up the– the recursive penumbras of an activity. That is to say, you will– you will notice what– why other people are not doing what you’re doing and what bad effect it’s having on them. So you want to extend what you’re doing to include them.

So in 1849 he made his first attempt at education. Tolstoy incidentally is a very great educator, very important. He is as important as Rousseau or Dewey in education. In fact he is the link between Rousseau and Dewey in education. He attempted to educate the serf children and for two years he worked at it. And then in 1851, actually in the winter of 1850/1851, he spent his time in Moscow probably for the concert season that sort of thing – the party season – and he piled up an enormous gambling debt – more than four thousand rubles – which was an enormous debt. One could have lived very comfortably on five hundred rubles a year.

In order to flee this condition, break himself of this habit, he decided to join his brother who was going off to enroll himself in the military at the furthest southern reaches of Russia in the Caucasian Mountains. And so Tolstoy, as these blessings usually will have it, was seized by circumstance and carried by this blessed circumstances in the claws of the great bird of Mother Nature’s freedom from Moscow down to the Caucasian Mountains and dropped into the situation there.

In the 1850s the Russians were trying to consolidate their empire. They have always been after consolidating their empire and at this point it was reaching into the Caucasian Mountains. And in order to secure the Caucasian Mountains they realize that you have to go over the mountains and secure the other side so that the whole of the Caucasian range was brought into Russia. That area is known as Georgia – used to be known as Georgia. The major city in fact, strategically is on the southern side of the Caucasian Mountains. It’s called today Tbilisi, it used to be called Tiflis, and it will be in Tiflis that Tolstoy will write his first work on the very northern edges of Armenia, a mountain range away from Russia, breathing the fresh air of freedom.

At twenty-four Tolstoy will recall his childhood because he was put into a situation where the freshness of the circumstances, the manly forthrightness of life and death as a daily happening among the troops and the raids and the Cossacks and so forth, suited Tolstoy’s intelligence and openness of character. The Russian soul is happy when it is forthright. When deviousness is called for, the Russian psyche seeks to defend itself by labyrinths. When the Russian psyche is free to explore and express itself it becomes lost because those labyrinths are made for itself. If any of these tapes get to the Pentagon the best defense against the Soviet Union is to give them a lot of ground. By giving them some kind of a ringed defense border it just strengthens their position. The Battle of Leningrad, case in point, and as we’ll see the Battle of Sebastopol in the Crimean War, an even more ecstatic case in point. And Tolstoy was there.

He wrote Childhood, 1854. He had been in the Caucasian Mountains for about three years at that time. The material that he gained there would come out in such works as The Raid, or The Cossacks, Hajji Murad late in his life. These pictures of free individuals – the men and the women were equal. Both sexes could ride or shoot or have whatever kind of living situation they wanted. After marriage the women generally ran the families and the men generally ran the bringing in of– of goods to the household. But before marriage men and women were equal, equal stature. There was no double standard in the Caucasian Mountains.

The Cossacks, in fact, taught Tolstoy the genuineness in simplicity. That culpability accrues for man in complexity. So that if one simply sets oneself to hone down the complexities, one will come closer and closer to an openness of character. This would be one of the touchstones for– for Tolstoy. He in fact wrote his first work, Childhood in Tiflis. And then where to get it published? Well, he chose a periodical called, in translation, The Contemporary. The editor at this time was the poet Nekrasov. It had been founded by Pushkin in Saint Petersburg some ten or so years before and published Childhood with just the initials L-N-T. Nekrasov wrote to Tolstoy and said it’s not our practice to pay new writers for their first work. And Tolstoy noted in his diary “lots of praise and no check.” Nekrasov, a couple of weeks later, wrote to Tolstoy and said, “you know I have read your story again and it really is well written.”

In fact, when Childhood came out it caused a minor sensation. Russian literature was just getting off the ground. Pushkin who had been the first really great native writer had shown the world that Russians could be European. Turgenev who was about ten years older than Tolstoy was the first international Russian writer and he was just getting started. In fact it was Turgenev who picked up a copy of The Contemporary. Turgenev lived halfway between Gorky and Kazan just south of the– in Spasskoye, just south of the Volga River. He began raving about this new young writer and he was at Tolstoy’s sister’s house with her husband and he was reading passages out loud. And that’s when Mary knew that there was somebody in her family because these were stories that she knew.

The second story that he wrote was called The Raid and for this he was paid. Then he began sending more and more stories. And it seems, I don’t– I don’t have a complete listing available just right off the cuff – but he began to write, probably every three or four months, a story so that by 1853/1854 Tolstoy was launching himself on a literary career. It never occurred to him. He was in fact very comfortable in the army, but he wished to be withdrawn from the Crimea. The reason is is that he had fallen in love with a Cossack girl and she had sized him up in relation to Cossack values and he would not go horse trading for her. He was not really the kind of daring devil that she really wanted, so she was somewhat indifferent to him.

Tolstoy had made several friends among the Cossack men. There was one individual who taught him a lot about Cossack values. I believe his name was Sado who had taught Tolstoy that when you make an exchange and become friends you are friends for life and friends will offer their life for you. It’s just simply that. A life has no value other than just to be offered for a friend. This was a religious insight for Tolstoy later on. That one would offer one’s life for another became the central value which is achieved by simplicity of design and openness of purpose; that without simplicity of design or openness of purpose one could not understand the beauty and the joy of sacrificing oneself for another. That this quality of sacrificial love was in fact the poignant fundamental value in Christianity which was obscured and covered up by the organization of Christianity into the various churches. It was the one value that they could not admit, or they would have to sacrifice themselves for the congregation.

Tolstoy, after The Raid was published – his second story – wrote in quick succession Memoirs of a Billiard Marker and then he received a long expected order for him to take an officer’s exam, which he of course passed – it was just a formality – and so Tolstoy became a young aristocrat, junior officer. He left the Caucasian Mountains, went back into central Russia, back to Moscow. And just about this time as he was going back he participated in one of the worst snowstorms of the century. And out of this he wrote a very interesting short story called The Snowstorm. Rather like Joseph Conrad’s work Typhoon, which creates the natural conditions wherein man, regardless of his ingenuity and courage, is outdistanced by nature’s power and learns that there are only limitations to his mobility and purpose because nature can outdo him in its capacity to envelop him.

So if you get a chance, The Snowstorm is very very interesting. Tolstoy later on in his life dismissed it as a minor work but it’s actually quite interesting. About this time the Crimean War came to a head. The English, the Turks, the French – everybody wanted to get into the act. Tolstoy is a young aristocratic now officer an aide de camp for a general. Went down to the Crimea. He went to Bucharest, initially; took stock of the situation; volunteered for the intense fighting in the Crimea; was sent to Sebastopol.

Now Sebastopol at this time was beginning to be surrounded by a superior force probably on the order of twenty to one with sophisticated artillery and guns. And in fact the Russian general in charge of the defense of Sebastopol had withdrawn his army and given the city up. But there were a number of Russian sailors in town and there were still some troops left and some ingenious engineer who talked the population into resisting. And so they began building a series of trenches, interlocking labyrinthine trenches, surrounding Sebastopol on the south side. Sebastopol is cut in half by an estuary that comes in from the Sea of Azov the Black Sea, that area. And North Sebastopol, at that time, had just one large fort, fortress, and the city was south of this estuary, probably a hundred yards across, something like that – two hundred yards maybe.

The south ramparts of Sebastopol then were honeycombed by this ingenious engineer and the population of Sebastopol – which wasn’t that large – but they had set up enough ramparts and had positioned somehow enough cannon and so forth to repulse the attack and make it almost impossible for them to be conquered. So they sent a message to the Tsar. And the Tsar at this time, Nicholas the Second, who was a real tyrant, was filled with consternation that the general should have withdrawn, so he ordered reinforcements to go to Sebastopol. And Tolstoy was one of those young officers who went there.

Tolstoy recounts in three parts of a great short novel called Sebastopol the defense of that city, the heroism of the average Russian person in contradistinction to the rather dissipated immorality or amorality of the officers and General Staff. The first two parts, the first part was called, “Sebastopol in December,” the second, “Sebastopol in May,” and the third, later on, was “Sebastopol in August.” It’s an enormously moving work. It’s a portrayal of war and battle from the inside. It’s one of the really great accounts. If in fact had War and Peace never been written we would still think of Tolstoy as a master of describing the battle, the– the sense of dazed nothingness that takes possession of the average soldier, the wandering quality.

Tolstoy in his diary at this time recounts how of all the world’s recent literature you can tell he said that everyone is a desktop general and have never been in wars, have never been in battles except for Stendhal. Stendhal’s description of the Napoleonic battles in the Charterhouse of Parma he said stand out and show that Stendhal in fact knew war firsthand. Later on, when Tolstoy would translate Homer for himself – he was– he was astounded at the Iliad when he read the Iliad in– in Greek, he said at last one can see the bright sparkling clear water passing through the natural teeth of man of Homer as compared to the tepid bruise that translators have offered us. That somehow Homer also in the Iliad understood the psychology of battle, the kind of confusion and intensity, the pathos and the transcendence, that occurs on the battlefield in every Soldier.

Sebastopol was read by the emperor and the Emperor’s mother. In fact Nicholas the Second, the Tsar Nicholas the Second, had just died and the new Tsar Alexander the Second sent word to the front: protect this man; his life is valuable. Alexander the Second’s mother, the dowager, wept tears for days reading “Sebastopol in December” and “Sebastopol in May.”

We have to understand and remember also at this time that Russian literature always has been censored. The Russian people have never been free to express their fullness to each other. They have always been bright birds with clipped wings and the censor constantly would snip out and cross out sections so that when Tolstoy would see his works in print he would rage that these were not his works. But even with that kind of censorship, Tolstoy’s early works already declaimed him as one of the really great writers.

Turgenev who was probably on a par with Dostoevsky – and we could have just as well taken Turgenev as Dostoevsky in this series – said writers like he and Dostoevsky were just transition writers; just interesting because of the conditions in the culture at the time, but that Tolstoy belonged to eternity, that he was one of the really great ones. This, all this, while he was still just writing his– his short stories. The short stories generally are thirty, forty, fifty pages so they’re substantial.

In the description of Sebastopol, Tolstoy recounts the way in which human life is subjected to the most incredible disorientation and how in reaction to imminent death, the human personality finally tiring of cringing, turns to embrace that abrasiveness itself with joy. And that in the midst of battle the different sounds of shells as they go by, he says, some hum like bees some just shrill whistles. Some are sudden flutters in the air. But that every time you realize that you are still alive, that it has missed you, there is an elation that comes; and then there is the dread that the next one is coming and then the elation that it’s missed you. And this yo-yo constant cacophony of motion, of depression and elation, produces a mystical tone. And that a battlefield becomes almost like a temple of divinity because the ordinary human capacities are stymied and man exists increasingly increasingly in a battle in one of these suspended penumbras of never never land, within which if he has the insight he sees the secrets of life and death because they are given and open to him immediately in that context. Almost like the image of the gods coming in the midst of battle to carry the valorous off to Valhalla. That’s a mythic presentation of this characteristic that psychologically occurs. So that in the midst of suffering, man and his sudden despair, sudden elation, coming off and on in rapid fire, almost like priming the pump of detachment from all, has a capacity to see through the window of life and death to its ultimate mystery. He will of course later on in War and peace raise this to the epic fine art that almost no one will ever again be able to to write in prose on that scale and that depth. We simply don’t have the– the reality to deal with. Push button wars are tragic because they no longer contain any of this mystical human element at all. They are in fact just nightmares nothing more.

After the Crimea, Tolstoy came back to Petersburg, and found himself very much in demand. By this time he had published a number of stories and had quite a few more on the way. And he was taken in as one of the new young giants of literature. In fact, a photograph was taken, one of the early photographs and it showed the six new masters, young masters, of modern literature,/ Russian literature. And there was Turgenev and Nekrasov, and Tolstoy was there among them dressed in his military uniform. Looking with his greyish piercing eyes rather proud of himself. The vanity bothered him later in life that he had desired so much to be a part of life to have the glory to and then to have achieved it and wanting to savour it and finding that you cannot savour glory. It is not palpable for man. It is misleading to desire it because it is not a quality that one can have.

There is an immediate nostalgia for the legitimacy of one without this tone. And so triumph became a drug for Tolstoy. He wanted more and more fame. And then when he would have it the disappointments grew. And then he thought one more time. Maybe I’ll do it right the next time. And all of this was building and it would be building constantly for the next ten or fifteen years. And in this cycle of expectation and then letdown, Tolstoy would experience in slow motion in the literary realm what he had experienced existentially in quick rapid succession on the battlefield. That all of this is an illusion. None of it is to be trusted. None of it is to be entered into with any kind of confidence, the expectation, or the realization itself that life simply is not anything one can have as a possession.

But in order to broaden himself at this time he realized that he had not really been out of the Russian orbit very much. He’d been to Bucharest, it was true. He’d been to Tiflis. So he decided to go abroad to Paris and Switzerland – he went to Lucerne, he went to Stuttgart and Berlin. All this time he seemed to search himself to try and find some way that he could bring himself into sync with his own feeling tones. He would always be making lists of what he needed to do or making resolutions to try and be a better person. And his confidant often during this time was his stepmother. Actually Tatyana Alexandrovna was not his stepmother. She never married his father. She refused to marry him. She said I will be the mother for the children but I want to remain pure, intact. And she was sort of the guardian angel for Leo Tolstoy. He constantly wrote to her, wrote to her in French, always wrote to her in French. And occasionally when he wished to make a simple point he would put a Russian in. But generally he wrote to Auntie Titania in– in French. And he told her at this time that he felt himself. Confident that he was going to probably be a major writer that he had many stories in himself.

And then the news of the death of one of his brothers; the first brother of his to die and this letter translated to Auntie Tatiana the black seal and the letter will have told you all. What I have been expecting from hour to hour for two weeks occurred at nine o’clock this evening. Only since yesterday did he let me help him undress. And today for the first time he definitely took to his bed and asked for a nurse. He was conscious all the time and a quarter of an hour before he died he drank some milk and told me he was comfortable. Even today he still joked and showed interest in my educational projects. Only a few minutes before he died he whispered several times, “My God, my God.” So his oldest brother, the model for his life Nicolas – Nikolyna as he called him passed on. Tolstoy began to feel at this time the urge for two simultaneous developments the urge Urged for legitimacy in literature and the urge to find legitimacy in education.

Both these directions he would develop almost to the level to where they are left today by his death. We’ve made almost no advances in either in literature. Combining with his education he made a discovery in Marseille. He was in– in France, in Marseille, and he went to the French schools. And he found all the little French children just being drilled. He said they all raised their hands at a command and they crossed their hands at a command. They go around in circles at a command. They sit at a command and then they are forced to study and then they’re forced to take exams on what they’ve studied, and yet he said, one finds that one’s expectation that French people would be dull robots is simply not true. So the mystery of how– how do they become humane? How do they become those lovely cultivated French people which we know? It’s obviously not from school, it's not from their education. So he began to open his eyes, notice the situation, and then he discovered that it was in the cafes, in the bars, in the open spaces, that the French people educated each other. By reading things out loud, by putting on little skits and productions, by talking openly. And he said he made a great discovery. He discovered that every adult in Marseille had read Alexandre Dumas.

And he realized the power of great literature to penetrate and educate and humanize a population. And when he read Dumas he said it’s just fabulous. And so he began to read other writers like Dumas. He loved Dickens. He thought Dickens was very forthright. He loved Fenimore Cooper. He often said that he felt that something like The Three Musketeers was much more valuable to civilization than King Lear. Lear is something for the sophisticated to enjoy; The Three Musketeers teaches you the labyrinthian complexities of life on a very popular level. And everyone loves d’Artagnan. You’d have to be a very, very sorrowful person not to love d’Artagnan.

So that Tolstoy’s education and literary concerns began to interpenetrate, began to overlap. But he was still blind to the fact that they in fact form a unity. He would realize that later on. But at this point – in the late 1850s, early 1860s – Tolstoy was beginning to think of himself as beyond the age where one could have a family. Russians love large families; he had come from a large family. And he fell in love at this time with Sophie Behrs who was the younger of two daughters. And in fact for a long time the Behrs family thought he was going to marry Lisa who was the older daughter. And there was a big to-do when he announced that it was the younger daughter actually that he enjoyed. And at the time that he married Sophie Behrs, in 1862, Tolstoy also began to bring to a culmination his artistic literary ambitions. And I say ambitions. He began to moot to himself War and Peace. As he developed war and peace in his mind in his spirit one writes this in one’s whole being. The fanning out of the complexities began to absorb him and the happiness of his new marriage and the capacity of his young manhood – he was in his late thirties – made War and Peace one of these great flowerings of a human being. And one of the reasons that War and Peace is so monumental is that it unfolds human personality to its fullest extent.

Later on, the psychological penetration of Anna Karenina will exceed any one character in War and Peace in psychological depth and will be more refined in terms of artistic literature. But War and Peace is the great classic example of the slow, patient, gradual unfolding of a human personality to a universal vision; the unfolding of the human self. Pierre unfolds himself until at its farthest stretch where all the petals are open he fades into the cosmos because he realizes that that is the only place he could be. So that War and Peace is this great tapestry of self-realization on an enormous level. Tolstoy was paid seventy-five pounds for every sixteen page sheet of War and Peace. He became the highest paid writer in the world. This was four or five times more than the premium fee that had ever been paid to any other writer. And all through the early 1860s while the US Civil War was going on. Ironically enough War and Peace came out in installments in The Russian Messenger and it was finished early in 1866 just after the American Civil War was finished.

So almost as an ironic prelude to the great 20th century debacle, the Cold War, the Soviet Union in a fictive unfolding in the United States in a bloody practical unfolding came to terms with the specter of war and of the unfolding of personality. And in a way there is a great mystical world connection between Pierre’s realizations and Lincoln’s aspirations. At some time when we have covered all the basic work and we have time to have lectures for sure daring and pleasure we’ll talk about these kinds of things.

The development at this time of Tolstoy was monumental. When War and Peace came out, it astounded by its quality and scope, every writer in the world. It was quickly seized upon as the great novel it was pointed to from the moment that the installments came out that this was one of the– one of the great works. And we have a picture. I’m sorry I don’t have a slide facility yet, but Tolstoy at the time he was married and writing War and Peace. The– the intensity, the honesty, the marshaling of this bull-like energy that’s incredible mind facility to one great long almost three, four years long project. And then slowly bringing it to culmination. The realization that penetration of how human capacity can extend itself out to do this, to make this happen, to shape this. And as he did this of course Tolstoy realized more and more in himself that he was unsettling some profound level of himself by this achievement. He was wise enough in life. He was poignant enough in intelligence to realize that when you have made a large culmination like this you’ve not only culminated the past but you have opened a new threshold on a new kind of a future. And what War and Peace had culminated was a sense of personality and its ultimate stability according to history according to literature. And as soon as he tied that bow he began to get rumblings in himself that all was not right with himself in a very profound, religious level

It would be another decade before it would come to the fore but there were already rumblings. Tolstoy in his diary ten years before his collapse. He wrote of it at the time he said it feels as if the floor of the world has fallen out from under me and I have no place to stand in my anxiety. I seek only to kill myself and need to hide the guns every day. But War and Peace also made possible, Tolstoy realizing that he had done the male personality. And so he turned next to the female personality. And as War and Peace shows the great exfoliation of the masculine view of the world through War and Peace to Transcendence and Fullness, Anna Karenina shows the feminine poignancy of understanding not only the world but man also. And with Anna Karenina which was completed in 1877, Tolstoy came closer and closer to the crisis. He was never completely well. He was often sick during his life. There would be little excerpts but he felt somehow that he could always bring himself back into order as he was writing Anna Karenina. And I wish to emphasize that the education and literature went together at this time still going together. He was writing an ABC book. It’s awfully hard to find Tolstoy’s ABC book translated into English. I used to have a copy but it was – pardon me – confiscated by my ex-wife with a number of books that were taken and I haven’t been able to find a copy since then. But what Tolstoy wanted to do was to boil down educational processes via storytelling to its core. And so he wrote poignant little simple stories to illustrate qualities of temperament, insights of being for children. And his ABC book was written at the same time as Anna Karenina.

There is a story in there for instance of learning to ride a horse and all that that entails. About dogs – Tolstoy loved dogs. You know he had– when he went to the Caucasus’s his bulldog, I forget the– Bulka, that was the name of it. Bulka was tied up inside the house, threw himself against a plate glass window and ran fourteen miles following Tolstoy. Until finally Tolstoy realized that the– the dog was putting out a superhuman effort out of love and took the animal with him. The animal later died of wolf bites in a– in a fight with wolves in the Caucasus Mountains.

Anyway he wrote combinations of what we would identify off the cuff as Aesop’s Fables. In fact some of the ABC book was translated into a little Signet Classic years ago called Tolstoy’s Fables. And I do have that. I should have brought that tonight. At any rate the ABC book is a very very fine work. It was of course criticized by just about everybody. The Interior Minister wanted to have it confiscated and wrote to the Tsar and said this is– this is terrible. It’s undermining the educational system. But the Minister of Education decided that the ABC book was all right, it should be published. Tolstoy also put out an educational newspaper. It’s a very rare item. You almost– I’ve never seen a copy. There were 12 issues put out and it’s called Yasnaya Polyana. And these 12 issues carried experiments in education. Tolstoy thought of education that it should be a continual you experiment? There should be no set curriculum. There should be no set organization. It should always be an experiment and there should be no examinations whatsoever.

The ABC book came out, I think– it says here the first edition was three thousand copies and he subsidized it so it was very cheap. But all of his activities at integration had produced for Tolstoy a chronicle psychological vacuum on a very poignant level. One cannot reach so far with the left hand that the right hand must also reach out to balance. And he had through War and Peace, through Anna Karenina, through the ABC book, through all of his ingenious and excellent short stories and short novels and set himself up for a fall. When it came Tolstoy was reduced to continuing the only expressive realm that still made sense to him. He wrote out exactly what was happening to him. That is to say he had a collapse but didn’t collapse like an ordinary person. It wasn’t an ordinary nervous breakdown. It wasn’t an ordinary bout of neurotic incapacity. Tolstoy, like Strindberg later on, chronicled the thing day after day week after week month after month so that we can follow in Tolstoy’s confession a masterful human mind following its– the disintegration of its character.

He writes – this is in translation from Confession – “That was what happened to me. I understood that it was no casual indisposition but something very important and that if these questions constantly repeated themselves it would be necessary to answer them and I tried to do so. The question seemed such stupid simple childish questions but as soon as I touched them and tried to solve them I at once became convinced one that they are not childish and stupid but the most important and the deepest of life’s questions. And two that try as I would I could not solve them. He said I felt that what I had been standing on had broken down and that I had left nothing under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed and I had nothing left to live on. My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, I could eat, I could drink and sleep, and I could not help doing these things. But there was no life for there was no wishes the fulfilment of which I could consider reasonable. There was no longer any reasonableness. Had a faerie come and offered to fulfill my desires I should not have known what to ask for. In moments of intoxication I felt something which I cannot call a wish but a habit left by former wishes in silver moments; I knew this to be a delusion. And there is really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth for I guessed in what– in what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. I had as it were, lived– lived and walked– and walked till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing ahead of me. It was impossible to stop. It was impossible to go back and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death, complete annihilation.”

He said, “The thought of self-destruction now came to me as naturally as thoughts of how to improve my life had come formerly. And it was so seductive that I had to be wily with myself lest I should carry it out too hastily.”

He used to not only hide the guns, but he would hide the components (the shot, and the shell, and and the powder) in different areas so that it would take him a long time to put it together. In his library – he had his dressing room converted to a library – there was a bar joining two large bookcases. And every time he would see that bar he would think of hanging himself. So he would steal himself to walk from one portion of the room to another under that bar because the overwhelming compulsion was to go and get some rope and hang himself. He lived like this for a long time. And of course it’s like a dog having fleas. It’s so chronic, it’s so poignant, that everything that one can think of and do is directed to that. And the scratching at it, the itching at it, the gnawing at it with the mind just inflames the whole issue so that he became a mess.

And what was worse was that on the outside the world was praising him as the world’s greatest novelist. His wife, who really loved him, was giving birth to children. He had 10 or 11 children by her. The household was flourishing. Externally everything was there. Everything was all right with the world. Internally there was nothing. And the contrast between these two capacities is what was eating Tolstoy up, eating him alive.

He said, “My mental condition presented itself to me in this way. My life is a stupid and spiteful joke someone has played on me though I did not acknowledge a someone who created me. Yet that form of representation that someone had played an evil and stupid joke on me by placing me in the world. This was the form of expression that suggested itself most naturally to me. Involuntarily it appeared appeared to me that there somewhere is someone who amuses himself by watching how I live for thirty or forty years learning, developing, maturing in body and mind and how having now, with matured mental powers, reached the summit of life from which it all lies before me. I stand on the summit and that’s the problem. I stand on the summit like an arch fool seeing clearly that there is nothing in life and that there has been and will be nothing.”

And he is amused. Tolstoy’s confession goes on in this vein for a couple hundred pages scathing self-criticism. And yet he lived, he existed, he went on. At this time in order to grab hold of himself as someone will in this condition. Tolstoy began to try to literally immerse himself back into a ritual existence. There are times when one desires nothing more than to take refuge inside a shaman’s hut and let the drums play – that kind of a mentality, feeling tone. And at this time Tolstoy would go out and he would plow the land all day. Put on the [inaudible] outfit– outfit, and the kind of a slouched hat. And hook up the team and just plow all day. Just to have some contact with something. And then dread going back into the house. And then once being there dread going out. And so this– as Kierkegaard would so aptly call it, “the sickness unto death,” began to consume Tolstoy.

By 1879 when a Confession was published, the cat was out of the bag, but the odd thing is that Tolstoy was considered by the external world as an even greater man. He not only was a great artist but he was a great moral leader, a great religious personage, a holy man. But it didn’t help Tolstoy’s problem at all. It just exacerbated it. Everything he did turned to success. Everything he wrote turned to triumph. And what he was doing was opening himself up to show that there was no satisfaction, no reality anywhere there. So Tolstoy made a vow to himself never again to write literature, that it had become something reprehensible to him, that the only thing he would write from then on would be moral stories and it would be for the didactic purpose of conveying the ethics. And only later on when he had thought it through did the concern with art come back. And when it did the old Tolstoy could still turn out stories that are just incredible.

Thomas Mann said, “Tolstoy is one of those lions that makes writers like me just mice who play around his paws.”

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the Kreutzer Sonata, Hadji Murad, even the great novel Resurrection, that would come out in 1900 – Tolstoy would be 73 years old – all told the master still competent and capable of his powers. But almost all of Tolstoy’s writings after this were religious in nature and bear– bore such titles. What is to be done? What is religion? What then must we do? Life. Titles like this.

I’m running out of time. I only have gotten halfway through his life, but let me just curtail it in this way.

Tolstoy became concerned with social issues to the point that he became the great voice of the Russian people. He wrote a public letter to the Tsar when they were taking a census in Moscow, in 1881 I believe it was. And he said, whenever we have a census we always exclude the hovels of the tens of thousands of impoverished people; that the census takers, the young aristocrats, the young college students, should be forced to go into the slums of Moscow and not only count their heads. How many are there? But to note down the basic characteristics and necessities in other words to take an inventory of human misery. Tolstoy himself went to the slums of Moscow during the census and week after week month after month it became apparent the travesty of modern civilization even a hundred years ago was grinding the human race into trash.

Tolstoy began writing books that were so critical of society and civilization and religion that he was often held up to public ridicule and at the same time public triumph all at the same time. He became the most famous man in the world. He in fact began to level poignant criticisms at the whole history of Christianity. He wrote a number of books, the most poignant of which is called The Kingdom of God is Within You. It came out in 1893, in which Tolstoy outlines that the law of love as taught by Jesus is exactly what is obscured by the church. This led of course eventually to his excommunication and he writes not only as a masterful individual who can understand this, or who has seen this, but he writes with the attitude that if there is a politics that he could encourage it would be Christian anarchism. And in fact a great famine occurred, another great famine in his lifetime, the second, in 1891/1892. And Tolstoy organized the food relief for the starving millions in the Russian countryside and in the cities Moscow Leningrad and spent almost all of his great fortune at this time to make this apparent.

I wish we had time to go into this. It would take a whole lecture to outline the– the participation that Tolstoy had in the Great Famine of the early 1890s. The machines have given up and I suppose our time is given up.

He died in late 1910. I don’t wish to go into the circumstances too much except just to give you this poignant visage. His loving wife, over the years, over the strained forty years of strain, had become very fragile psychologically. And the old Tolstoy, over eighty, awoke one evening, one night and found his wife going through his drawers in his private study looking for his will and he had left all of his works, literary works, to his daughter not to his wife. So he got up after she left and put on his clothing and left his house, left Yasnaya Polyana, left his family and went on on the road like a holy fool himself to go and find some holy place in Russia to be for his last few weeks.

He was met by his favorite daughter Tatiana at a railway station. He fell ill. It was thought for several days that he was going to expire. They gave at that time injections of camphor which sort of stimulated the cardiovascular system. It was brought back around for a little bit but finally in November of 1910 expired.

With the death of Tolstoy a whole age came to a close. If there was a transition if the baton was passed on the only person that received that baton was M. K. Gandhi. And I’ve given that 13 part series on Gandhi which takes the story from here. We’ll probably at some time have to do another lecture or two on Tolstoy to see the second half of his life, all the major works that he wrote. They’re usually not regarded as worth reading by this petty society which we have today. The pinball mentality is not one that could regard books like What is Art with any equanimity? But they are extraordinary. They are works that are equally important with the great literature that he produced in the first half of his life. Because the mature Tolstoy was not unraveling, he was quite in possession of himself right up to the end of his life. I suggest probably for your own edification to try and find The Kingdom of God is Within You. And when you begin reading it you’ll see what I mean. The poignancy of the man’s mind qualifies him as the culmination of the whole 19th century and really the master’s spirit of that time.

Well we have to stop here simply because of circumstance.