WALKS AND TALKS WITH TOLSTOI-MARCH, 1894 75 



piratical; and that in my opinion lie would do a much 

 better thing by taking the full value of his copyrights and 

 bestowing the proceeds upon the peasantry starving about 

 him. To which he answered that it was a question of duty. 

 To this I agreed, but remarked that beneath this lay the 

 question what this duty really was. It was a pleasure to 

 learn from another source that the countess took a differ 

 ent view of it, and that she had in some way secured the 

 proceeds of his copyrights for their very large and in 

 teresting family. Light was thus thrown on Tolstoi s re 

 mark, made afterward, that women are not so self-sacrifi 

 cing as men; that a man would sometimes sacrifice his 

 family for an idea, but that a woman would not. 



He then went on to express an interest in the Shakers, 

 and especially in Frederick Evans. He had evidently 

 formed an idea of them very unlike the reality ; in fact, 

 the Shaker his imagination had developed was as differ 

 ent from a Lebanon Shaker as an eagle from a duck, and 

 his notion of their influence on American society was 

 comical. 



He spoke at some length regarding religion in Russia, 

 evidently believing that its present dominant form is soon 

 to pass away. I asked him how then he could account for 

 the fact that while in other countries women are greatly 

 in the majority at church services, in every Russian church 

 the majority are men ; and that during the thirty-five years 

 since my last visit to Moscow this tendency had apparent 

 ly increased. He answered, &quot;All this is on the surface; 

 there is much deeper thought below, and the great want 

 of Russia is liberty to utter it.&quot; He then gave some ex 

 amples to show this, among them the case of a gentleman 

 and lady in St. Petersburg, whose children had been taken 

 from them and given to Princess - , their grandmother, 

 because the latter is of the Orthodox Church and the 

 former are not. I answered that I had seen the children ; 

 that their grandmother had told me that their mother 

 was a screaming atheist with nihilistic tendencies, who 

 had left her husband and was bringing up the children in 



