earth? Whv live? Whv die? His wife entreats him to have extreme unc-
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tion. He submits. Then he is seized with terror. He screams. He grows calm again. lie begins to listen attentively. "Where is death? What death? He was not afraid any more, because there was no death any more. Instead of death, there was only light."
Beyond any doubt, this double story of the decomposing body and awakening soul is one of the most powerful works in the literature of the world. The author employ's the same precision in his clinical analysis of the disease (cancer of the abdominal region) as in his description of the successive stages passed through by the dying man's soul. A dying man who is in no way exceptional, or even likable, and yet we identify with him because through him we imagine what our own death will be. We think of ourselves while Ivan Ilich moans in pain in his bed; we pass our own lives in review as he draws up the balance sheet for his. At the end of his torment, two things dominate: the terror of what is coming and the emptiness of what has been. No philosophical dissertation can ever equal in depth this simple "documentary"—unemotional, sharp, cruel, devoid of all artistic effect—of a sickroom. The most fervent challenger of modern society, the world of officialdom and middle-class marriage is not the author of What Then Must We Do? but the author of The Death of Ivan Ilich.
The first persons to read it were overwhelmed by its cynicism and grandeur. Stasov wrote to Tolstoy: "No nation anywhere in the world has a work as great as this. Everything is little and petty in comparison with these seventy pages."28 On August 12, 1886, Tchaikovsky wrote in his diary, "I read The Death of Ivan Ilich. More than ever, I am convinced that the greatest author-painter who ever lived is Leo Tolstoy. He alone can keep the Russians from bowing their heads in shame when all the great things that have come out of Europe are lined up in front of them. But patriotism has 110 part in my belief in Tolstoy's immense, almost divine importance."
Tolstoy's toughness, in this story which he wrote for the cultivated classes, is equaled only by his gentleness in the simple tales he was writing during the same period for the common people to illustrate his catechism: love of God, love of one's neighbor, charity, poverty. Some of these "moralities," such as What Men Live By and Three Old Men, have a biblical purity of inspiration. Written in the words of everyday life, they can be understood by children. And yet grownups find in them, if not a specific lesson, at least an impression of freshness, a taste of spring—which may be more important.
If Tolstoy idealizes the common people in these delightful tableaux, he unveils all their hideous reality in The Power of Darkness. Why this shift from moderation to violence, admiration to execration? The reason is that although he honors the superior "wisdom" of the muzhiks and exhorts all intellectuals to follow in their footsteps, he is sometimes overcome with aristocratic revulsion at the physical and moral filth in which these primitive beings live. True, the capitalist civilization is the only thing that keeps them in their bestial condition. But in their present state, most of them cannot serve as examples to the bourgeois. In The Power of Darkness the author unconsciously contradicts What
Then Must We Do? But who cares? One ambiguity more or less was not going to make any difference to Tolstoy!
The subject of The Power of Darkness was furnished by an actual occurrence, on January 18, 1880, in a village in the government of Tula: after murdering a child born to him and his daughter-in-law, Koloskov, a muzhik, was stricken with remorse and publicly confessed his guilt.
Out of this unremarkable material Tolstoy wove a work of black, brutal
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despair. All the characters are heavily underscored and lean on their shadows. Nikita the farmhand, handsome and weak; Anisya—hot- blooded, completely dominated by wild sensuality; old Matryona, who encourages her son Nikita to commit adultery; Akim, Nikita's father, a muzhik with a stutter who aspires to saintliness. 'llie sin of the flesh begets crime. Anisya poisons her husband in order to be free to love Nikita. But Nikita, not content with sharing Anisya's bed, also seduces her sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Akulina. A child is born. Going berserk, Nikita crushcs the tiny bastard between two boards, while Matryona and Anisya look on. But he does not have their strength of character. He appeals to them: "I can't go on! Where can I hide?" He thinks he hears the child whimpering. To atone for his crime, he waits for Akulina's wedding-day and then, kneeling down in the middle of the crowd, tells the whole story, urged on by Akim, his stammering father, who sighs, "God! Ah! There, God! . . /'
To add credulity to this tragedy of the downtrodden, Tolstoy pored over his pocket notebooks, veritable dictionaries of the peasant language, and sprinkled his dialogue full of the popular expressions, the old, flavorful, crude proverbs that were his delight. He admitted that he enjoyed himself enormously writing these speeches; they virtually wrote themselves. The charm of the words made him forget the horror of the situation.
The emotion his play aroused in everyone who read it encouraged him to try to have it produced by one of the major companies. He began to negotiate with the actress Savina. On January 27, 1887 Stakho- vich, the man who had read the play to the muzhiks before, read it at a party in the home of the court minister Vorontsov-Dashkov, in the presence of Alexander III, the empress and the grand dukes and duchesses. His second audience grasped the torments of the peasant soul more clearly than the first had. The tsar found Tolstoy's play an admirable work of art and said that in order to ensure its success it should be acted by a joint company from both the Moscow and St. Petersburg imperial theaters. He even promised to attend the opening night. But on February 18 Pobvedonostsev, minister to the Holy Synod, wrote to Alexander III to say that he was so upset after reading The