The Man Who Was Dead and the Cause of It All

Description

Of the three plays left by Tolstoy for publication after his death, one is a short two-act Temperance play called in English The Cause of it All (the Russian title is a colloquialism difficult to render, but "From it all evil flows" is as near as one can get to it). It does not claim to be a piece of much importance, but if ever it is staged, it should act easily and well. Another of these posthumous plays is The Man Who Was Dead (The Live Corpse), a powerful piece, in which Tolstoy introduces one of those gipsy choirs which had such an influence on him (and still more on his brother Sergius) when he was a young man of twenty to twenty-three, before he went to the Caucasus and entered the army. The last of Tolstoy's plays, The Light That Shines in Darkness, was left unfinished.