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.