Opening of the book
Preface
“I am writing to you specially to say how glad I have been to be your contemporary, and to express my last and sincere request. My friend, return to literary activity! That gift came to you from whence comes all the rest. … Great writer of our Russian land, listen to my wish!”
So wrote Turgenev on his deathbed to Tolstoy, when the latter, absorbed in religious struggles and studies, had for five years produced no work of art save one short story.
Nor was it long before the wish was realised, for three years later
Tolstoy was writing The Death of Iván Ilyitch, and that tremendous drama, The Power of Darkness; and these were followed by a number of short stories, some plays, a long novel (Resurrection) and the works now posthumously published. Among these latter a foremost place belongs to Hadji Murád, in which Tolstoy again tells of that
Caucasian life which supplied him with the matter for some of his earliest tales as well as for his great story The Cossacks, which Turgenev declared to be “the best story that has been written in our
(Russian) language.”
The Caucasus indeed offered a rich variety of material on which
Tolstoy drew at every stage of his literary career. It was there that, at the age of twenty-three, he first saw war as a volunteer; there he served for two years as a cadet; and there finally he became an officer, before leaving to serve in the Crimean war —which in its turn gave him material for his sketches of Sevastopol.
In his letters from the Caucasus he often complained of the dullness and emptiness of his life there; yet it certainly attracted him for a while, and was not devoid of stirring and curious incidents.
The most extraordinary of these relates to a gambling debt he incurred and was unable to pay. Having given notes-of-hand, he was in despair when the date of payment approached without his having been able to procure the money needed, and he prayed earnestly to
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