The Power of Darkness, Tolstoy's first and greatest play,
was not written until he was fifty-eight years of age, and
it was not allowed to be performed in Russia till some
years later. Both there and elsewhere abroad it was
highly successful on the stage, as was also the comedy,
Fruits of Culture, which he wrote three years later, to be
performed by his own family and their friends.
The only other play published during his lifetime,
The First Distiller, is a very slight piece of no particular
dramatic importance. It was written in the cause
of temperance.
Besides these, he left three other plays finished, or
nearly finished, when he died.
The Live Corpse (which in English has also been called
The Man who was Dead) is the one best adapted for the
stage. The Cause of it All is, like The First Distiller, a short
and unimportant piece dealing with the effects of drink.
The most interesting, not dramatically but psychologically,
of the three is The Light Shines in Darkness, which
was left in an unfinished state. In it Tolstoy presents
his own case, and deals with the contradiction that existed
and has so often been commented on, between practice
and theory in his own life and teaching.
For the purpose of the play he greatly simplified his
own highly complex personality, and, though many of the
details and characters are drawn from life with extraordinary
exactitude, the picture presented is not one which
all the people concerned are disposed to regard as quite
fair to themselves.
The play presents the terrible clash which resulted
from the calls Tolstoy made on himself and on others to
abandon all customary ways of life and to start afresh in
a new direction. In his own case he was never allowed
to test the effects of a life of extreme poverty and
manual labour, such as he advocated; nor did those of his
followers who adopted such a life achieve much success
therein. Tolstoy's artistic sincerity is indeed shown by the
fact that, despite his spiritual fervour and his profound conviction
that he had really found the road to salvation for
mankind, he has not, in this play, minimised the failure
of his efforts to carry convictions to those about him, or
to achieve any other success than that of obtaining an
inward assurance that he was fulfilling the will of God.
This assurance would, no doubt, have been more fully indicated
in the last act, had he lived to complete it.
Tolstoy was well aware of the advantages a play
possesses over a novel as a means of propaganda, and but
for the existence of the Censorship he would have written
more for the stage. When asked, in 1892, whether he
would write any more plays, he replied: “I would
do so with great pleasure, and I even feel a special
need to express myself in that way; but I feel certain
the Censor would not pass my plays. You would not
believe how, from the very commencement of my activity,
that horrible Censor question has tormented me! I
wanted to write what I felt; but at the same time I felt
that what I wrote would not be permitted; and involuntarily
I abandoned the work. I abandoned, and went on
abandoning, and meanwhile the years passed away.”
······
There is one other matter of some importance on
which I must here say a word.
No accepted standard of transliteration for Russian
names into English has hitherto existed. Each writer has
been a law unto himself. Now, at last, the Liverpool
School of Russian Studies has prepared and privately circulated
a scheme, which deserves to be, and is likely to be,
generally adopted. It differs in some particulars from the
plan I have followed heretofore; but the advantage to
Anglo-Russian literature of the general adoption of a
uniform and authoritative rule will be so great that I
hasten to put myself in accord with the Liverpool scheme,
without even waiting for it to be publicly promulgated.
The result of so doing however is that in the three
earlier plays now reprinted from stereotype plates the
transliteration does not quite coincide with the plan
adopted in the three freshly translated plays. For this
discrepancy I must ask the readers' kind indulgence.
AYLMER MAUDE.
Printed in Great Britain by
T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the University Press, Edinburgh
