. All the Russias: travels and studies in contemporary European Russia, Finland, Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. asks youropinion almost with deference, he considers your answer withrespect. Your personality is evidently a thing he regards assacred. You struggle in vain to reverse the relationship, butwithout much success, for his soul dwells apart and you can-not get on the same plane with him—there is so little commonground between you. To questions about matters of currentinterest, he often replies as a mathematician might reply to aquestion about the rotation of crops, and to my o
. All the Russias: travels and studies in contemporary European Russia, Finland, Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. asks youropinion almost with deference, he considers your answer withrespect. Your personality is evidently a thing he regards assacred. You struggle in vain to reverse the relationship, butwithout much success, for his soul dwells apart and you can-not get on the same plane with him—there is so little commonground between you. To questions about matters of currentinterest, he often replies as a mathematician might reply to aquestion about the rotation of crops, and to my own common-place questions, prompted by every-day life and mundane affairs, 4there come from the burning bush of his pure soul answers asincomprehensible as the commandments must have seemed toMoses. Are you in sympathy, I asked, with M. de Wittespolicy of fostering by all means the industrial development ofRussia, as against her agricultural development? I do notsee, was the Delphic reply, that it makes an engine w^ork anybetter or worse if you paint it red or blue or green. It took me, LEO, THE SON OF NICHOLAS 53. Count Tolstoy at Home. benighted recipient of an inspired message, several days to gvdown to the bed-rock meaning of this ethical conundrum. did, I saw that, like all Tolstoys utterances, it led straight backto the single primal principle which for him sums up Christs 54 ALL THE RUSSIAS teaching, and offers the one and only cure for the ills of I ran him to earth, so to speak, over the Dreyfus case, atthat moment being reheard at Rennes. And to my unspeakableastonishment I found him a believer in the secret dossier/ adefender of the General Staff, accepting the guilt of Dreyfus asan easier alternative than the conspiracy of his fellow-ofificersagainst him. The people are hypnotised, he said; theyknow nothing and they all shout the same thing. After all, whyshould I concern myself with Dreyfus—are there no innocentmen in the prison of Tula? * In
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