32 SOCIAL SCIENTIST and affirm that in every case the writer's reactionary views can coexist with the positive value of his work ? Is such a position valid today when the truthful portrayal of social reality calls for a more and more conscious identification with the interests of working masses engaged in the stupendous struggle to change the course of human history? Will not the acceptance of such a position imply that the writers's outlook, in the last analysis, is irrelevant in evaluation the literary excellence of his work ? Before attempting to answer this question, let us consider a parallel assessment of Tolstoy by Lenin and Plekhanov. Lenin's evaluation of the genius of Tolstoy, especially when considered along with Plekhanov's intemperate denigration of the great novelist, confirms the need to search for the total reality reflected in a writer's work in the context of determining the degree of the relevance of his word-outlook to its literary excellence. Plekhanov makes a distinction between Tolstoy the thinker with whom he is "uneasy" and the artist with whom he "feels fine". He directed his powerful critical shafts against Tolstoy's sanctimonius psuedo-moral system centred on the Christian religious ideal of "non-resistance to evil." Both in his essay Art and Social Life and in his articles on Tolstoy, Plekhanov makes the vulgar sociological error of confusing the class origin of the artist with value of his work. West European capitalism began to decline in the second half of the nineteenth century ; Plekhanov concludes that, therefore, the painting and literature of the period must necessarily be decadent. The Russian literature of the same period was produced and consumed by a decaying nobility; it is, therefore, arraigned as degenerate. Tolstoy was an aristocrat "to his finger-tips;" therefore, it is simply ridiculous to speak of his living contact with reality.8 It is true that Plekhanov dealt crippling blows to the attempts of the reactionary and liberal theorists to make Tolstoy a new Christ, a new angel of an "undogmatic," "humanised" Christianity. But he failed to provide a concrete analysis of Tolstoy's world-outlook emerging from the total picture represented in his works. This Lenin did. Lenin saw Tolstoy as the mirror of the democratic revolution in Russia, a revolution the novelist failed to understand. While Plekhanov wrote that Tolstoy distanced himself from the times, Lenin showed how he was intensely and passionately preoccupied with contemporary problems. Though the solutions offered by Tolstoy were Utopian to the extreme, he did not ignore that "accursed questions" which were tormenting generations of Russian radical intelligentsia in the period of preparation of the democratic revolution. Tolstoy "embodied in amazing bold relief the specific historical features of the entire first Revolution, its strength and its weakness."9 While Plekhanov saw only the aristocrat in Tolstoy, Lenin pointed out how the great writer transcended the circumstances of his birth and upbringing and identified himself with the peasant masses. "Tolstoy is great as the spokesman of ideas and sentiments that emerged among the