The greater number of stories and plays contained in these volumes date from the years following upon Tolstoy’s pedagogic activity.  Long intervals, however, elapsed in most cases between the original synopsis and the final touches.  Thus “Father Serge,” of which he sketched the outline to Mr. Chertkov in 1890, was so often put aside to make way for purely ethical writings that not till 1898 does the entry occur in his diary, “To-day, quite unexpectedly, I finished Serge.”  A year previously a dramatic incident had come to his knowledge, which he elaborated in the play entitled “The Man who was dead.”  It ran on the lines familiarised by Enoch Arden and similar stories, of a wife deserted by her husband and supported in his absence by a benefactor, whom she subsequently marries.  In this instance the supposed dead man was suddenly resuscitated as the result of his own admissions in his cups, the wife and her second husband being consequently arrested and condemned to a term of imprisonment.  Tolstoy seriously attacked the subject during the summer of 1900, and having brought it within a measurable distance of completion in a shorter time than was usual with him, submitted it to the judgment of a circle of friends.  The drama made a deep impression on the privileged few who read it, and some mention of it appeared in the newspapers.

Shortly afterwards a young man came to see Tolstoy in private.  He begged him to refrain from publishing “The Man who was dead,” as it was the history of his mother’s life, and would distress her gravely, besides possibly occasioning further police intervention.  Tolstoy promptly consented, and the play remained, as it now appears, in an unfinished condition.  He had already felt doubtful whether “it was a thing God would approve,” Art for Art’s sake having in his eyes no right to existence.  For this reason a didactic tendency is increasingly evident in these later stories.  “After the Ball” gives a painful picture of Russian military cruelty; “The Forged Coupon” traces the cancerous growth of evil, and demonstrates with dramatic force the cumulative misery resulting from one apparently trivial act of wrongdoing.

Of the three plays included in these volumes, “The Light that shines in Darkness” has a special claim to our attention as an example of autobiography in the guise of drama.  It is a specimen of Tolstoy’s gift of seeing himself as others saw him, and viewing a question in all its bearings.  It presents not actions but ideas, giving with entire impartiality the opinions of his home circle, of his friends, of the Church and of the State, in regard to his altruistic propaganda and to the anarchism of which he has been accused.  The scene of the renunciation of the estates of the hero may be taken as a literal version of what actually took place in regard to Tolstoy himself, while the dialogues by which the piece is carried forward are more like verbatim records than imaginary conversations.