A LETTER
I HAVE just posted a letter to you—telegrams have arrived telling of "Tolstoi's flight," and now once more one with you in thought I write again.
Probably all I want to say about the news will seem to you confused, perhaps even harsh and ill-tempered, but you will forgive me—I am feeling as though I had been gripped by the throat and was being strangled.
I had many long conversations with him; when he was living at Gaspra in the Crimea, I often went to him and he liked coming to me; I have studied his books lovingly; it seems to me that I have the right to say what I think of him, even if it be bold and differ widely from the general opinion. I know as well as others that no man is more worthy than he of the name of genius; more complicated, contradictory, and great in everything—yes, yes, in everything. Great—in some curious sense wide, indefinable by words—there is something in him which made me desire to cry aloud to everyone: "Look what a wonderful man is living on the earth." For he is, so to say, universally and above all a man, a man of mankind.
But what always repelled me in him was that stubborn despotic inclination to turn the life of Count Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi into "the saintly life of our blessed father, boyard Leo." As you know, he has for long intended to suffer; he expressed his regret to E. Soloviov, to Suler, that he had not suc-
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