Editor’s Picks

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ஹரால்ட் ப்ளூமின் ‘Genius’ நூலை வாசித்துக்கொண்டிருந்தேன். இலக்கிய உலகின் நூறு மேதாவிகளைப் பற்றி விரிவாக எழுதப்பட்டிருக்கும் நூல். ஷேக்ஸ்பியர், தல்ஸ்தோய், மார்ஸல் ப்ரூஸ்ட், செகாவ், விக்டர் ஹ்யூகோ, வில்லியம் ஃபாக்னர், ஃப்ளானரி ஓ கானர், இடாலோ கால்வினோ என நான் விரும்பும் எழுத்தாளுமைகள் பலரும் இப்பட்டியலில் இடம்பெற்றிருப்பதைக் காண மகிழ்ச்சியாக இருந்தது. ஐசக் பாஷவிஸ் சிங்கரை சேர்க்காதது கூட பிரச்சனையில்லை. இத்தகைய மேதைகளுடன் சாதாரண எழுத்தாளரான காஃப்காவையும் இணைத்திருப்பதுதான் குழப்பமாகவும் அதிர்ச்சியளிக்கக் கூடியதாகவும் இருந்தது.

தல்ஸ்தோய் குறித்து ப்ளூம் எழுதியிருப்பதைத்தான் முதலில் வாசித்தேன். ஒரு ரஷிய ராபையிடம் (Rabbi) தல்ஸ்தோய் ஹீப்ரூ கற்றுக்கொண்டார் என்பதை அறிய ஆச்சரியமாக இருந்தது. அதன்பொருட்டு, சில மாதங்களுக்கு தேவாலயத்திலேயே தங்கியிருக்கிறார். பிறகு, கடவுளுக்கும் தல்ஸ்தோய்க்கும் ஒத்துவரவில்லை. ‘என்னய்யா ஆசாமி நீ?’ என்று தெய்வத்துடன் பிணக்குகொண்டு வீடு திரும்பியவர்தான். எதோ ஒரு மூலையில் அமர்ந்தபடி ஓர் உலகத்தைப் படைத்து அதில் அவரே அரசனாகவும் முடிசூட்டிக்கொண்டார். எல்லோரையும் குனிந்து நோக்கி வாழ்க்கை விசாரங்களை மேற்கொண்டார்.

‘தல்ஸ்தோய் சொர்க்கத்திற்குச் சென்றுவிட்டால் அங்கே கடவுளுக்கு வேலை பறிபோய்விடும்’ எனச் சொல்லும் மாக்சிம் கார்க்கி, ‘ஒரே குகையிலுள்ள இரண்டு கரடிகள்’ என்று கடவுளையும் தல்ஸ்தோயையும் வர்ணிக்கிறார். கதேயின் உலகத்தில் தன்னைத் தவிர வேறெதைப் பற்றியும் அவருக்கு அக்கறையில்லை. தல்ஸ்தோயின் உலகிலோ அவரைத் தவிர வேறெவருமே வேண்டியதில்லை. அவர் ஒருவரே ஒட்டுமொத்த உலகையும் நிர்மாணித்துவிடுவார்.

அவர் உருவாக்கி அளிப்பது வெறும் மெய்நிகர் உலகமல்ல. கற்பனையின் சாத்தியங்களை நம்பி புனையப்படும் பகற்கனவல்ல. மண்ணும் விண்ணும் பூரணமடைந்த ஓர் அற்புத சிருஷ்டி. நூற்றுக்கணக்கான மனங்களின் விருப்பக் கொப்பளிப்புகள். ஒவ்வொரு கணமும் உருமாறியபடியே விரையும் எண்ணங்களின் மோதல்கள். அவை அத்தனையையும் பின்தொடரும் மனத்தின் விசை எப்பேர்ப்பட்ட ஆற்றலுடையதாக இருந்திருக்க வேண்டும்? அவர் மானுடர்தானா?

தல்ஸ்தோயை வாசிக்கும்போது நம்முடைய பகுப்பாய்வு மனம் செயல்படுவதில்லை எனக் கருதும் ஹரால்டு ப்ளூம், அதற்குக் காரணமாக, பேரண்டங்களைப் படைக்கும் தல்ஸ்தோயின் ஒப்பற்ற தனித்துவத்தையே குறிப்பிடுகிறார். பேரளவில் (macroscopic) மட்டுமின்றி நுண்ணிய தளங்களிலும் (microscopic) அவரது உலகம் (Tolstoyian Cosmic) நகாசு வேலைப்பாடுகள் கொண்டதாகவே உள்ளது. போரும் வாழ்வும் நாவலையே எடுத்துக்கொள்வோம். பேரளவில் அது ரஷிய வரலாறையும் படையெடுப்புகளையும் தேசத்தின் உருமாற்றங்களையும் சொல்லிச் செல்கிறது. அதே சமயத்தில் அதுவொரு குடும்பக் கதையும்கூட. பியரின் தனிப்பட்ட வாழ்க்கைச் சிதைவும் மீட்பும் நடாஷாவுடனான காதலும் கதையின் போக்கில் முக்கியப் பங்கு வகிக்கிறது.

இலக்கியத்தைப் பொருத்தமட்டில் ஷேக்ஸ்பியருக்கு அடுத்து தல்ஸ்தோய்தான் (எனக்கு இக்கருத்தில் உடன்பாடில்லை) எனக் கூறும் ப்ளூம், இந்த உண்மையை தல்ஸ்தோயும் உள்ளூர உணர்ந்திருந்ததாலேயே அவர் ஷேக்ஸ்பியரை வெறுத்தார் என்கிறார். தான் எழுத வேண்டியதை தனக்கு முன்னமே சிறப்பாக எழுதிவிட்ட எவர்மீதும் எழுத்தாளர்களுக்கு மெல்லிய பொறாமை இருக்கும்தான். அதுமட்டுமில்லாமல், ஷேக்ஸ்பியர் படைத்த எத்தனையோ நல்ல கதாபாத்திரங்களும் புகழ்பெற்ற நாடகங்களும் இருக்க, உள்ளதிலேயே மாற்றுக்குறைவான ஃபால்ஸ்தாஃப் (Falstaff) பாத்திரம்தான் தனக்குப் பிடித்தமானது என்று தல்ஸ்தோய் எழுதியிருக்கிறார். இதுவோர் எகத்தாளக் கூற்று என்றே கருத வேண்டியிருக்கிறது.

மாக்சிம் கார்க்கியுடன் பூங்காவில் நடந்துகொண்டிருக்கும் போது பெயர் தெரியாத ஒரு பறவையின் சீட்டியொலியைக் கேட்கிறார் தல்ஸ்தோய். அதனுடன் இணைந்து அவரும் பாட முயல்கிறார். அந்த ராகத்துடன் தல்ஸ்தோயின் சீட்டியொலி ஒத்திசையும் தருணம் நெருங்கும்போதெல்லாம் அப்பறவை சட்டென சுருதியை மாற்றிப் பாடிவிடுகிறது. மீண்டும் மீண்டும் இவ்வாறே நிகழ்கிறது. ‘என்ன இது! என்ன இது!’ என தல்ஸ்தோய் வியந்து போகிறார். ‘இப்பறவைக்கு போட்டியும் பொறாமையும் உண்டு. அதற்குச் சமமாக நீங்கள் பாடுவதை அதனால் ஏற்றுக்கொள்ள முடியவில்லை. அதனிடம் நூறு மெட்டுகள் இருக்கக்கூடும்’ என்கிறார் கார்க்கி. ‘அப்படியானால் என்னிடம் இலட்சம் கதாபாத்திரங்கள் இருக்க வேண்டாமா?’ எனக் கேட்கிறார் தல்ஸ்தோய். ஷேக்ஸ்பியர் மீது தல்ஸ்தோய்க்கு பொறாமை இல்லாமலிருந்திருந்தால்தான் நான் ஆச்சரியப்படுவேன்.

அவரது மற்ற ஆக்கங்களைப் பற்றி முன்னமே விரிவாக எழுதியிருப்பதால், தல்ஸ்தோயின் மேதைமையை எடுத்துரைக்க, “The Kreutzer Sonata”-வை மட்டும் எடுத்துக்கொண்டிருப்பதாக கூறும் ப்ளூம், இந்தக் குறுநாவலைப் பற்றியும் விசேஷமாக எதையும் சொல்லவில்லை. கதையையே திருப்பி எழுதிவிட்டார். இந்நூலில் தல்ஸ்தோய்க்கு ஒதுக்கியிருப்பதே ஐந்து பக்கங்கள்தான். அதிலும் நிறைய மேற்கோள்கள். அநியாயம்!

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தமிழினியின் இருபத்து ஐந்தாவது மின்னிதழை சிறப்பிதழாக வெளியிடும் திட்டமிருந்தது. யாரைச் சிறப்பிப்பது என்பதில் மாற்றுக்கருத்தே எழவில்லை. இலத்தீன் அமெரிக்க எழுத்துகளும் வடமேற்கு ஆப்பிரிக்க எழுத்துகளும் கோலோச்சிக்கொண்டிருக்கும் தற்போதைய தமிழ்ச்சூழலில் ‘required reading’ குறித்த விழிப்புணர்வு குறைந்துவிட்டிருக்கிறது என்பதாலும் தஸ்தாயேவ்ஸ்கி அளவுக்குக்கூட தல்ஸ்தோய் மீது கவனம் குவியவில்லை என்பதாலும் அந்த இலக்கிய மாமேதைக்கு என்னால் இயன்ற காணிக்கையாக இவ்விதழ் வெளியாகிறது. இதழ் வெளியாகும் இன்றைய தினம் தல்ஸ்தோயின் நூற்றிப் பத்தாவது நினைவுநாளுடன் ஒத்திசைந்திருப்பது தற்செயலானதே.

மார்ஸல் ப்ரூஸ்ட் முதல் ரொபெர்ட்டோ பொலான்யோ வரை வாசித்தபிறகும் தல்ஸ்தோய் மீதான பிரமிப்பு மட்டுப்படவில்லை. சொல்லப்போனால், அதிகரித்திருக்கிறது. அவரை வாசிக்கிற பலருக்கும் அப்படித்தான் இருந்திருக்கும். அதற்கான காரணங்கள் என்ன என்பதை தமிழின் சமகால எழுத்தாளுமைகளின் பார்வையில் முன்வைக்கிறது இந்தச் சிறப்பிதழ். இதில் தல்ஸ்தோய் பற்றின விதந்தோதுதலும் இருக்கிறது, மெல்லிய விலகலும் இருக்கிறது. எதுவாயினும், வாசகர்களது மேலதிக கவனத்தை தல்ஸ்தோயை நோக்கி குவிப்பதே தமிழினியின் விருப்பம்.

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உலகெங்கிலும் உள்ள பல்வேறு விமர்சகர்களால் தல்ஸ்தோய் குறித்து எழுதப்பட்ட சில முக்கியமான குறிப்புகளைத் தொகுத்திருக்கிறேன். தல்ஸ்தோய் பற்றின ஒரு பருந்துப் பார்வையை இவை அளிக்கும்.

“There is something adolescent about the love for Dostoevsky – maturity demands Tolstoy.” – Jorge Louis Borges

“‘Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth’s exact whereabouts and essential properties. To Pushkin it was of marble under a noble sun; Dostoevsky, a much inferior artist, saw it as a thing of blood and tears and hysterical and topical politics and sweat; and Chekhov kept a quizzical eye upon it, while seemingly engrossed in the hazy scenery all around. Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched, and found the place where the cross had once stood, or found – the image of his own self.” – Vladimir Nabokov

“…that the author is a fixed point, and that the work of art—like a yoyo—will unroll itself from him to the length of its string and then coil itself back to him again. Tolstoy is not a fixed point; he is constantly on the move, carrying us with him. His delight in the object in itself… is like that of a man in a train who does not want to miss anything as he goes past, carried onward by forces greater than his own sense of words.” – Ivan Turgenev

“…French critics compared Tolstoy’s works, especially ‘Anna Karenina‘, unfavorably with Madame Bovary with its impeccable form, tailored style, and naturalistic detail. Their tendency was to express bewilderment over the vast mass of reality reflected in Tolstoy’s major novels and to regard them as peculiarly formless and artless – the chaotic outpourings of some super-reporter of experience. Nor did Matthew Arnold in England clarify the situation much by basing his preference of ‘Anna Karenina‘ over ‘Madame Bovary‘ partly on the conviction that Tolstoy’s novel was not really a work of art at all but a piece of life, and that what it lost in art it gained in reality. And Henry James’ near-sighted discovery of “large loose baggy monsters” in Tolstoy’s fiction, his lament over the absence of “a deep-breathing economy of an organic form,” and later E. M. Forster’s comment on ‘War and Peace‘ as an “untidy book” have contributed to this notion of formlessness and artlessness which has clung to so much Western criticism of Tolstoy. In its application to serious fiction, Arnold’s dichotomy of life and art is a spurious conception. Not “a piece of life” but life in all its manifestations crowds the huge canvas of Tolstoy’s masterpieces. Their patterns of human relationships are always carefully planned, and plot is a poetic form reflecting reality rather than a contrived frame on which to stretch events. If the transformation of reality into art has been effected with equal skill in, let us say, Stendhal’s ‘The Red and the Black‘ or Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary‘, in no novel has so much reality been transformed into art as in ‘War and Peace‘. – Ernest J.Simmons

“…The natural, simple, and true is always pitted against the artificial, elaborate, and false, the particular against abstractions and generalizations, knowledge gained from observation against assertions of borrowed faiths. Tolstoy’s magical simplicity is a product of these tensions, and all his work is a record of the questions he put to himself and of the answers he found in his search, and rejected or accepted. The greatest characters of his fiction exemplify this search, and their happiness depends on the measure of their solutions; their stories are bildungsromanen. This is true of Nicholas Irteneyev in Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, of Pierre and Andrew in War and Peace, of Levin in Anna Karenina, of Ivan Ilych, of Prince Kassatskiy in Father Sergius. Tolstoy wanted happiness, but only hard-won happiness, that emotional fulfillment and intellectual clarity which could come only as the prize of all consuming effort. He scorned lesser satisfactions.” – Helen Muchnic

“…Tolstoy does not write in black and white: All of his characters come in shades of gray, and all wind up fighting Tolstoy’s own inner duel, the duel between reason and emotion. Tolstoy was convinced that a natural existence is the best; thus, Pierre and Natasha survive because they are natural, while Andrey perishes because he is not. Kutuzov triumphs over Napoleon because he is more natural. Tolstoy exploits to the utmost his famous psychophysical technique of showing people through various gestures and traits. Numerous characters come equipped with single predominant features that forever identify them: the upper lip of Lise, the beautiful wife of Andrey, who dies in childbirth; the beautiful white shoulders of Helen; Pierre’s habit of looking out over his glasses; the thick, little white hands of Napoleon; the dimpled chin of the French prisoner; the pimple on the nose of the man who leads the merchant delegation that meets Napoleon as he invades Moscow; the round face and composure of Platon Karatayev, the peasant whom Pierre meets in prison, whose roundness is a symbol of his moral completeness and of his ability to accept the world as it is”. – Nasrullah Mambrol

“…Tolstoy believed that the literary patterns inherited from the Romantics did not get to the essence of meaning and were thus obsolete. His task: to destroy them. In his diary, he began a series of literary experiments: He made lists, he drew up columns, he numbered propositions in sequence. He was seeking a rational creative method—he wanted to construct narratives that were both factual, that is, true to experience, and aesthetically right.” – Long Fiction Analysis

“… Marcel Proust considered Tolstoy to be the almighty lord of his works, controlling all their actions and thoughts. If so it is a generous lord, who is great because he gives freedom to his heroes, and they, on entering our memory, become more alive than the living. […] Dostoevsky has clear goals and defined action. The curtain opens and we watch how a godless existence leads inexorably to sin and evil. Crime becomes punishment. By contrast, when Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina throws herself under a train, what is it? Her punishment? High tragedy? The fate of fallen women? A delirious stream of consciousness? There is no answer. For that, in Tolstoy’s logic, you go to the police, not to the writer. In Dostoevsky, life is subservient to thought. In Tolstoy, thought is in a constant spin, like the grenade that will explode and take the life of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky.” – Victor Erofeyev

“…The depiction of one of the main guardians of spirituality in Russian society as a soulless automaton fits with Tolstoy’s general treatment of Orthodoxy as a religion that has inverted Christ’s thought. In a scene that has become notorious for precipitating Tolstoy’s 1901 excommunication by the Holy Synod, the author depicts the Eucharist through a defamiliarized gaze. Tolstoy shows the priest blessing the bread and wine and then praying afterwards, because “he had eaten a small piece of God’s flesh and swallowed a sip of His blood” […] Tolstoy analyzes the various layers of the grotesque in Resurrection on both a social and an individual level, the protagonist and, indirectly, the narrative itself eventually retreat from this reality. At first, political prisoners guide Nekhliudov as he leaves society. As their fellow traveler to Siberia, he renounces the injustice of his past, thus abiding by Thoreau’s famous dictum that during times of injustice (such as during slavery in America) “the only proper place for the honest citizen […] [is] the prison” – Ani Kokobobo

“…Tolstoy gives us real, concretely observable details which also have great symbolic power; often, they achieve such power only as part of a network of similar details. Tolstoy works not through metaphorical deformations but through the placement of delicately perceived facts exactly where they will link up with the most crucial events and with the most powerful emotional associations. In Tolstoy, it is not the metaphor which encodes reality, but reality which comprehends the potentiality of metaphorical meaning that may be realized as a structural function of given context” – Gary Saul Morson

“…One reason for Tolstoy’s enduring relevance, surely, is our escalating susceptibility to “the onset of moral nausea”. Tolstoy’s term for our outrage when the moral law within us is violated, yet we continue to “go along”. Going along feels awful. But it is not only cowardice that paralyses us in the face of Tolstoyan questions. The questions themselves are impossible. Is violence evil but inevitable? Evil and eradicable? Evil and necessary? As critics suggest, what caused Tolstoy the most anguish was the boundless potential for pity and love he sensed among individuals, and the disappearance of that potential once people begin to identify with ideas, collective entities, material goods and official structures. Tolstoy’s thought is astonishing for the ferocity of its anger against organized groups and inherited legacies, combined with the naïve purity of its individualism. Yet many of us find it difficult to share his non-negotiable insistence that the inner moral law is identical for all people.” – Caryl Emerson

“…At a time when political “strong men” in several countries are seen as larger-than-life heroes (or villains), and are extolled (or denounced) for having single-handedly brought about sweeping change in their countries, Tolstoy’s ideas about historical determinism — that all events can be traced back to previously existing causes and have little do with individual free will, including that of Heroes — are especially relevant. At the same time, Tolstoy’s understanding of free will is not monochromatic. He does recognize that free will is an operational force, although only on the individual level, whereas the larger events that shape individual destinies are driven by pre-existing conditions. This is a debate that he has with himself, in the second Epilogue of War and Peace — it is also a debate that adds to the relevance of his work to our times, when social media algorithms reinforce confirmation bias, encouraging individuals to cling to previously held beliefs, and discouraging most things that pose a moral or intellectual challenge.” – Pooja Pillai

“…Reading the aged Tolstoy stirs the heart. He will not yield to time, sloth, or nature. He clings to the waist of the life force. Deep into old age, he battles with the world, more often with himself, returning in his diaries, fictions, and tracts to the unanswerable questions that torment him. Blessed old magician, he is free of literary posture and the sins of eloquence. […] Nothing in the late Tolstoy reaches the “epic” largess of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but several of the late writings are of a very high order. There is now less interest in the witnessing of life for its own pleasurable sake, less likelihood of aesthetic surprise revealed through a character in spontaneous behavior. And while the passion for enclosing an entire way of life that informs much nineteenth-century fiction—a passion that the earlier Tolstoy shared with Dickens and Balzac—is not wholly suppressed, it is subordinated to a narrative pointing up the relation between depicted event and thematic line.” – Irwing Howe

“…Confession comes to life again if we read it alongside The Death of Ivan Ilyich rather than alongside the religious essays with which it is usually grouped. The similarities and overlaps between the two instantly catch the eye: from the discussion of the inevitability of death to the nature of human self-deception and the admiration (romantic or not) of the honorable approach to life and mortality shown by Russian peasants (in contrast to the people, as Tolstoy puts it, “in our world”; that is, among the elite). In short, the pairing encourages us to see The Death of Ivan Ilyich as a fictional exploration of the theoretical problems of religion, morality, and mortality explored autobiographically in Confession. In other words, that question directly posed in Confession—“Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn’t be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?”—is answered by the novella. […] Critics have often taken Confession as a more or less transparent account of Tolstoy’s spiritual development from his youth, and especially of the religious “crisis” he went through after finishing Anna Karenina—a crisis marked first by his turn to the Orthodox church, then by his emphatic rejection of the dogma and lies of established religion. There are certainly many overlaps between Tolstoy’s claims in Confession and what we know of his life, and of his intellectual and religious dilemmas, from other accounts. His son Leo, for example, in his own memoir of Tolstoy’s life, The Truth About My Father (written, it is true, explicitly to defend Sonya from the attacks on her after the old man’s death), claims to recall the very moment when his father rejected the Orthodox rules on fasting: during what should have been a fast for a strict observer of such things, sitting at the dinner table with the rest of the family, who were enjoying a hearty meal, Tolstoy pushed away his “ascetic fare,” turned to one of the children, and demanded what they were eating. “Ilia, my boy,” he said, “pass me the cutlets!” His days of formal religious observance were over.” – Mary Beard

“…Tolstoy speaks of a “new history” that must take stock of this new reality. However, in Tolstoy’s view, history as practiced by modern historians has only replaced divine will with that of the man of genius, and divine telos with some abstract notion of the end of history, whether it be equality, the Enlightenment, the happiness of all, or the power of the nation. For Tolstoy, these substitutions are nothing more than atavistic regression, because they use the same structures of thought, only in a secularized form. What results is a reductive vision of history, inasmuch as the multiple causes of history’s unfolding are condensed to the will of a sole individual, just as history’s movement toward its end-point is confined to Europe’s destiny.” – Andreas Schonle

“…JM Coetzee calls Tolstoy the exemplary master of authority, by which he means, I think, that he makes us trust what he tells us. This is all the more surprising since Tolstoy seems to speak freely, in his fiction, with the sort of moralistic-prophetic voice – the voice of a teacher of right and wrong – that lesser writers are obliged to use sparingly, unless they want to sound pompous and didactic. While that is distinctive and remarkable, it’s not what makes Tolstoy a great writer. Nor is it his tight focus on the three essential themes in narrative art, namely love, death and money. What makes him stand out is his skill with the very cloth from which the narrative is cut – time. His fictional places are in time, not space. His descriptions of landscapes and interiors are never merely descriptions and never merely symbolic; they are waypoints in a journey, burdens to be got rid of, obstacles to be overcome, lessons to be taken. More startlingly, he has the ability to do something that sounds easy but is in fact very difficult, namely to write about a moment – a man at the point of proposing marriage, a woman about to kill herself, a dissolute youth arriving in a frontier village – without any apparent consciousness of all the moments that have led up to that moment, or of all the moments that are about to come.” – James Meek

“…If anyone is bored with Leo Tolstoy, I’m afraid that’s his problem. I don’t know the exact age at which one should start on War and Peace or Anna Karenina, though. In the 19th century, every serious grammar school student read War and Peace. It’s true that times have changed. But I still believe that without these two novels, you cannot claim to be educated – or at least an educated Russian. […] Tolstoy puts that down to a single obstacle – a lack of faith. A man who believes in God is a happy man. In this case, life is a short period between one eternity (before birth) and the next one (after death). Therefore, according to Tolstoy, death is merely an awakening to eternity.” – Pavel Basinsky

“…The Great October Socialist Revolution created a new interest in Russian life and culture in India. Tolstoy’s heritage was seen in the light of the revolutionary upheaval, and again attracted the Indian writers working for social progress and national dignity, protesting against colonial slavery and spiritual degradation. Premchand, for one, dreamed of national writers of Tolstoy’s stature, capable of inspiring the masses. If the working people of Russia were able to make their Revolution, he wrote in 1919, the Indian people, too, could throw off the yoke. “We must prepare the people for it, influence them in the way of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gorky.” In 1924 Premchand published a book in Hindi of Tolstoy’s stories in a series of propaganda against collaboration with the colonialists. “Tolstoy’s tales are very popular with the swaraj intellectuals, i. e., among its rather wide circles striving for political independence,” wrote A. P. Barannikov in his paper on Premchand in 1927. “So the Indian authorities look on the book as seditious. In Premchand’s drama The Struggle there is a scene in which the police search the house of a swaraj landowner and arrest him for possessing a copy of Tolstoy’s tales.” – Y.Chelsychev