SUKHOTINA TOLSTOY: I have been long looking forward to an opportunity of meeting you. If my father had been alive, he would have been delighted to hear of your non-violent battle for freedom.
GANDHIJI: I am sure. And are you the daughter who wrote that famous letter of your father to me?
That was another daughter, a fact which led to inquiry about Tolstoy's children.
S. T. Six of us are still living. The two daughters accept my father's principles, but the four sons do not. You know my father allowed every one of us the fullest liberty of thought and action and, whilst these brothers of mine revered my father, they were not prepared to accept his principles.
I was a friend of Romain Rolland.
G. Why was? Are you not a friend now?
S. T. No, I used to be a great friend of his until two years ago. He wrote to me fairly frequently and I also used to write to him.
G. But now?
S. T. But now I find that he is in sympathy with Bolshevism and Bolshevik methods. I do not quarrel with their goal, but their doctrine that the end justifies the means seems to me to be frightful. How can Romain Rolland, a believer in non-violence, have any sympathy with them?
G. Supposing what you say is true, is it not all the more necessary that you should write to him and tell him what you feel about his views? Don't you as a friend of two years ago owe it to him to write freely and fully? After all, he is the one true and honest man in Europe after Tolstoy. Like your father he is old, worn-out, and unhappy over the tendencies of the present age and he has your father's childlike simplicity of never taking correction amiss, no matter whether it came from a wise man or a fool.
S. T. I know that he is all that. In the War he was the only man who stood out bravely against it and he has the same bravery even now. I also know that he has written the best book on my father that has ever been written. But somehow I have hesitated, I actually wrote a letter, but never posted it. If you like, I shall post it now.
