LYOFF NIKOLAIEVICH TOLSTOI was born August 28th, 1828 (O. S.) in the province of Tula, Russia. He belonged to the hereditary nobility of Russia and received the education generally given the young nobles of the wealthy provincial families. After leaving the University of Kazan, he entered the Russian army and commanded a battery during the Crimean War, taking part in the storming of Sebastopol. The scenes of carnage and destruction he witnessed during this period of his life affected him deeply and resulted in a strong revulsion against the social, political, and ethical theories of Upper-Class Russia. He finally retired to his estate, renounced his class privileges and began to support himself by manual labor, working at the bench as a shoemaker and using the spade as an agricultural laborer among the peasantry whose dress he had adopted. His real mission, however, was that of a prophet of progress, expressing himself by the modern methods of the essay and the popular novel. With an almost incredible courage, he struck at the foundations of Russian despotism. His protests against the knouting of peasants had more power in them than a pitched battle won by an insurrectionary army, and they so compelled the opinion of the bureaucratic nobility which really governs Russia that Tolstoi was not molested. His views on orthodox Russian religion were equally radical. He proposed for Russia and the world at large what Swift, with great gravity, suggested as certain to be destructive of all social and religious order in England—the actual practice of the Christianity of the Gospels as a rule of life in business, politics, and church management. Having adopted this view, Tolstoi expressed it in a series of celebrated novels and essays, notably in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” “My Religion,” “What Is Art?” and “Resurrection” books which had great influence in England and America where radical habits of thought were promoted by them. Tolstoi’s greatest fault as a novelist is the reflex of his greatest merit. His earnestness makes him so intense that his work gives the reader no relief. The same characteristic appears in his essays also. He is a great man, the greatest Russian of the nineteenth century, and it is doubtful if the Russia of the twentieth will produce any one to equal him. But a great man is not necessarily a great artist, nor is it always necessary that he should be. Horace and Virgil at the court of Augustus; Addison and Steele in the age of Queen Anne are great artists. A smith at his anvil, forging sword blades, from white-hot iron, does not lack art, nor does Tolstoi lack it. But it is the art which compels the unwilling—not the divine and immortal art which controls those who do not know they are being controlled until under its influence they grow as a plant grows in the sunshine.