already mentioned, and he said to me: "Tolstoy is a human being, and everything human is of concern to him. Every man has his idiosyncrasies; Tolstoy has shown his in his attitude towards Shakespeare. The reverential carefulness with which Tolstoy arrived at his negative attitude towards Shakespeare is far more interesting than the denial itself."
Let us turn again to Tolstoy's own words. "My disagreement with the accepted opinion about Shakespeare," wrote Tolstoy at the beginning of his analysis, "is the outgrowth not of a casual mood, nor of a light-minded attitude towards the subject; it is the result of repeated attempts, made in the course of many years, to reconcile my outlook with the traditional opinions about Shakespeare held by all the educated people of the Christian world. I remember the amazement I experienced on first reading Shakespeare. I expected great aesthetic pleasure, but after reading consecutively those of his dramas which are reputed to be his best, viz., King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, what I felt was not pleasure, but repugnance, boredom, perplexity."
After describing this perplexity at some length and emphasizing Shakespeare's great reputation in the entire civilized world, Tolstoy continues: "For a long time I distrusted myself, and, during fifty years, I read Shakespeare several times, to verify my state of mind. Every time my feelings were the same: boredom, repugnance, perplexity. Before writing this, I, a man of seventy-five years, read Shakespeare once more in order to be certain; the same feelings came to me with even greater force."
How eloquent are these endless verifications! For fifty years Tolstoy was checking up his impressions, and only near the eve of his death did he finally decide to utter his judgment against Shakespeare. His death itself is truly Shakespearean in its tragical grandeur. Is not this the most striking refutation of his judgment about the great Poet?
The third part of the study on "Aspect of Russian Literature" by Louis S. Friedland, will appear in the May number of the Russian Review.—Ed.
