whose invisible summit is lost in the mists. Tolstoy is seventy years old. He contemplates the world, his life, his past mistakes, his faith, his righteous anger.
He sees them from a height. We find the same ideals as in his previous books; the same warring upon hypocrisy; but the spirit of the artist, as in War and Peace, soars above his subject. To the sombre irony, the mental tumult of the Kreutzen Sonata and The Death of Ivan Ilyitch he adds a religious serenity, a detachment from the world, which is faithfully reflected in himself. One is reminded, at times, of a Christian Goethe.
All the literary characteristics which we have noted in the works of his later period are to be found here, and of these especially the concentration of the narrative, which is even more striking in a long novel than in a short story. There is a wonderful unity about the book; in which respect it differs widely from War and Peace and Anna Karenin. There are hardly any digressions of an episodic nature. A single train of action, tenaciously
why, but the tears fill his eyes; it seems to him that he has become the man he is seeking to save—Nikita—and that his life is no longer in himself, but in Nikita. “Nikita is alive; then I am still alive, myself.” He has almost forgotten who he, Vassili, was. He thinks: “Vassili did not know what had to be done. But I, I know!” He hears the voice of Him whom he was awaiting (here his dream recalls one of the Popular Tales), of Him who, a little while ago, had commanded him to lie upon Nikita. He cries, quite happy: “Lord, I am coming!” and he feels that he is free; that nothing is keeping him back any longer. He is dead.
