across that he wanted to run away. He knew poverty in the country, but he had never seen anything like the poverty he came across in the town. Writing about it, he says:
I could not look at our own or anybody else's drawing-room,
or a clean, well-spread dining-table, or a carriage
with well-fed coachman and horses, or shops or theaters
without a feeling of profound irritation.
It was because he had seen the other side of the
picture. And unfortunately there always is another
side to the picture.
He saw this side by side with the wretched lodging-houses he had been visiting, filled with cold, hungry, dreadful people, and one he felt was the result of the other.
His son says the look of suffering on his father's face at that time he shall never forget.
He was simply overcome with pity and with shame and indignation that our civilization can permit such things. So he went back to Yasnaya alone, and feeling ill with despair; he took things to heart in an extraordinary way. But gradually the peace and loneliness of the country comforted him, and he set to work on a book about his experiences with the poor in Moscow, and called it "What Then Must We Do?" He simply wrote down what he had seen and heard, and asked what we were to do to destroy what is in truth slavery—starving people struggling to live and
