COUNTESS SOPHIE TOLSTOL* THOSE who are interested in the intricacies
of the human heart will find in this brief fragment of autobiography by Countess Tolstoi considerable matter for reflection. We do not here get a picture of Tolstoi like the amazing study by Maxim Gorky, which was given to us in England by the Hogarth Press some two years ago—a portrait touched here and there with the genius and the venom of a Swift. Indeed, when we take up the book with Maxim Gorky's fragments still in our minds it is disap- pointing. The autobiography is, nevertheless, a curious book. Countess Tolstoi bore thirteen children to the author of the Kreutzer Sonata I ten of these children she nursed herself. She began life, it would seem, a cleverish girl, and remained always her husband's admirer and collaborator, but her arduous maternal and domestic career left her little time for literary self-expression; and if she ever possessed that art—an art which is perhaps commoner in Russia than here—she had lost it before she took up her pen in 1913 at Yasnaya Polyana. How- ever, ahe is happy in her translators : they have helped her by adding copious notes and quotations from Tolstoi's own diary covering the period of time of which she writes. Yet, in some ways, the very artlessness of the narrative helps us to fleeting impressions of the depths of the seething cauldron of the Tolstoi household.
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