this period bear unfortunate traces of this artistic and moral uncertainty. The Two Hussars (1856) has a quality of pretentiousness and elegance, a snobbish worldly flavour, which shocks one as coming from Tolstoy. Albert, written at Dijon in 1857, is weak and eccentric, with no trace of the writer’s habitual depth or precision. The Diary of a Sportsman (1856), a more striking though hasty piece of work, seems to betray the disillusionment which Tolstoy inspired in himself. Prince Nekhludov, his Doppelganger, his double, kills himself in a gaming-house.
“He had everything: wealth, a name, intellect, and high ambitions; he had committed no crime; but he had done still worse: he had killed his courage, his youth; he was lost, without even the excuse of a violent passion; merely from a lack of will.”
The approach of death itself does not alter him:
“The same strange inconsequence, the same hesitation, the same frivolity of thought…”
Death!… At this period it began to haunt his mind. Three Deaths (1858-59) already foreshadowed the gloomy analysis of The Death of Ivan Ilyitch; the solitude of the dying man, his hatred of the living, his desperate query “Why?” The triptych of the three deaths that of the wealthy woman, that of the old consumptive postilion, and that of the slaughtered dog—is not without majesty; the portraits are well drawn, the images are striking, although the whole work, which has been too highly praised, is somewhat loosely constructed, while the death of the dog lacks the poetic precision to be
