518 SLAVIC LITERATURE 



the peasant to the front in literature, for during the fifties and early 

 sixties, and even later, the peasant is the chief subject of the novels 

 and even of the poems of the time. Turgeniev's Sketches of a Hunts- 

 man are an example of this class of literature, but it is Grigorovich 

 who with his sketches of peasant life earned for himself the title of 

 the Russian Beecher Stowe, which at once bears witness to the 

 American influence upon the Russian literature of the time. 



Since then the best American authors have been translated into 

 Russian, and Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, and others are known 

 to even- literary man. But not one Russian author, indeed no author 

 of any foreign country, has come so entirely under the influence of 

 American thought as Tolstoy. From his earliest writings until the 

 present he has reproduced the advanced ideas of the United States 

 to his Russian people, and, on account of his great popularity, to the 

 world at large. Tolstoy has been directly and consciously influenced 

 by a great array of American writers, and of these he distinctly 

 mentions Garrison, Parker, Emerson, Ballou, Channing, Whittier, 

 Lowell, Walt Whitman, Henry George, and Alice Stockham. With 

 most of these, however, he became acquainted at a comparatively 

 late date, after his religious ideas of his so-called second period, 

 since 1880, had been formulated by him. But there is sufficient 

 evidence on hand to show that even at a much earlier period he 

 stood, if not under the direct, certainly under the unconscious, 

 influence of individual Americans and American thought. One 

 such influence dates back to the beginning of peasant literature, 

 and Tolstoy's love for the peasant, as shown in his earliest works, 

 was in line with the tendency of the time. It cannot be ascertained 

 at present whether Tolstoy had read any American authors before 

 1868. For that year we have the explicit statement of Eugen Schuyler 

 in his reminiscences, that Tolstoy received through him a number 

 of American school-books, if nothing else. Schuyler, with his usual 

 perspicacity and interest in Russian matters, went in that year to 

 Yasnaya Polyana. to meet Tolstoy, whose reputation was not fully 

 established at that time even in Russia. Tolstoy had just begun his 

 pedagogical career, and Schuyler procured for him a number of 

 American books, and in the pedagogical articles written by him in 

 the next few years, and in his readers, we find unmistakable influ- 

 ences of American methods. So, too, all his articles on progress and 

 culture, in which he assumes a negative attitude, smack of similar 

 productions in certain periodicals in the United States. The farther 

 he proceeded in his religious and sociological writings, the greater 

 became his indebtedness. If in the Krcutzer Sonata we only surmise 

 some American influence, we are certain of it in the epilogue to the 

 same, where it becomes evident that the medical writings of Alice 

 Stockham and others of that character were well known to him. 



