The Forged Coupon eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 211 pages of information about The Forged Coupon.

The Forged Coupon eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 211 pages of information about The Forged Coupon.
like a loaf.’  And, sure enough, he had no sooner lain down than he slept like a lump of lead, and in the morning on waking he was bright and lively, and ready for any work.  He could do anything, just not very well nor very ill; he cooked, sewed, planed wood, cobbled his boots, and was always occupied with some job or other, only allowing himself to chat and sing at night.  He sang, not like a singer who knows he has listeners, but as the birds sing to God, the Father of all, feeling it as necessary as walking or stretching himself.  His singing was tender, sweet, plaintive, almost feminine, in keeping with his serious countenance.  When, after some weeks of captivity his beard had grown again, he seemed to have got rid of all that was not his true self, the borrowed face which his soldiering life had given him, and to have become, as before, a peasant and a man of the people.  In the eyes of the other prisoners Plato was just a common soldier, whom they chaffed at times and sent on all manner of errands; but to Pierre he remained ever after the personification of simplicity and truth, such as he had divined him to be since the first night spent by his side.”

This clearly is a study from life, a leaf from Tolstoy’s “Crimean Journal.”  It harmonises with the point of view revealed in the “Letters from Sebastopol” (especially in the second and third series), and shows, like them, the change effected by the realities of war in the intolerant young aristocrat, who previously excluded all but the comme-il-faut from his consideration.  With widened outlook and new ideals he returned to St. Petersburg at the close of the Crimean campaign, to be welcomed by the elite of letters and courted by society.  A few years before he would have been delighted with such a reception.  Now it jarred on his awakened sense of the tragedy of existence.  He found himself entirely out of sympathy with the group of literary men who gathered round him, with Turgenev at their head.  In Tolstoy’s eyes they were false, paltry, and immoral, and he was at no pains to disguise his opinions.  Dissension, leading to violent scenes, soon broke out between Turgenev and Tolstoy; and the latter, completely disillusioned both in regard to his great contemporary and to the literary world of St. Petersburg, shook off the dust of the capital, and, after resigning his commission in the army, went abroad on a tour through Germany, Switzerland, and France.

In France his growing aversion from capital punishment became intensified by his witnessing a public execution, and the painful thoughts aroused by the scene of the guillotine haunted his sensitive spirit for long.  He left France for Switzerland, and there, among beautiful natural surroundings, and in the society of friends, he enjoyed a respite from mental strain.

“A fresh, sweet-scented flower seemed to have blossomed in my spirit; to the weariness and indifference to all things which before possessed me had succeeded, without apparent transition, a thirst for love, a confident hope, an inexplicable joy to feel myself alive.”

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Project Gutenberg
The Forged Coupon from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.