INTRODUCTION After making a production of Redemption, the chief feeling of the producer is one of deep regret that Tolstoi did not make more use of the theatre as a medium. His was the rare gift of vitalization: the ability to breathe life into word-people which survives in them so long as there is any one left to turn up the pages they have made their abode. In the world of writing, many terms that should be illuminative have become meaningless. So often has the barren been called "pregnant," the chill of death "the breath of life," the atrophied "pulsating," that when we really come upon a work with beating heart we find it difficult to give it place that has not already been stuffed to suffocation with misplaced dummies. We seat it at table with staring wax figures and bid it to join the feast. There is no exclusion act in art, no passport bureau, not even hygienic segregation. In writing the briefest introduction to Tolstoi's work, I am appointed by the publisher, a sort of reception committee of one to escort the work to some fitting place where it may enjoy the surroundings and deference it deserves. The place to which I escort it is built of words, but what words have been left me by the long procession of previous committees? Where they have been truthfully used they have been glorified, and offer all the rarer material for my structure, but how often have they been subjected to base use. Perhaps some day we will learn the proper respect of such simple words as love and truth and life, and then when we meet them in books we shall know how to greet them. The study of Redemption is so simple that it needs no illumination from me. The characters may walk in strange lands without introduction. They are part of us. Fédya is in all of us. His one cry "There has always been so much lacking between what I felt and what I could do" instantly makes him brother to all mankind. His simultaneous physical degeneration and spiritual regeneration is the glory that all people have invested in death. Tolstoi's cry against convention that disregards spiritual struggle, and system that ignores human growth, will find answering cries in many breasts in many lands.......
About the Author: Tolstoy name Frenchified Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, born 9 September (28 August) 1828 in Yasnaya Polyana and died on November 20 (November 7) 1910 Astapovo, Russia is a famous writer especially for his novels and short stories that portray the life of the Russian people at the time of the tsars, but also for his essays, in which he took a position with respect to civil and ecclesiastical powers and wanted to highlight The great stakes of civilization. War and Peace (1869), Tolstoy took ten years to write and that is one of his great novels, stands the historical and realistic picture of all social classes at the time of the invasion of Russia by troops Napoleon in 1812, in a vast fresco of the complexities of social life and the subtleties of human psychology, from which emanates a profound and original reflection on history and violence in human life. Tolstoy is a writer whose talent was quickly recognized, which is known for autobiographical stories of his childhood and youth, and his life as a soldier in Sevastopol (Crimea). He became very famous, as he ardently desired, with the novel Anna Karenina in 1877. But he was not happy, anguished and nihilistic. At the end of a research as fervent as that of celebrity, conducted in a rational way to answer his existential and philosophical questions, he enthusiasm for the doctrine of Christ. From then on and to the end of his life, he expresses his ideal of truth, good, justice and peace, still sometimes in fictions and short stories, but especially in essays. Advocating for manual work, life in contact with nature, the rejection of materialism, self-denial and detachment from family and society, confident that the mere communication of the truth of a person to another eventually would disappear All the superstitions, cruelties and contradictions of life. On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution and against the threat of the Great War, the only reasonable life is that stated by the doctrine of Christ, not patriotism, national churches, socialism or revolution.