Leo Tolstoy's comment about Felicia Skene's novel

For the first time the article first considered LN Tolstoy's review of F. Skene's novel Hidden Depths. The creativity of this English writer is still not known to the Russian reader, and her works have not been translated into Russian. The features of LN Tolstoy's reception of this novel is defined by the specificity of the ethical-religious quest of L.N. Tolstoy in the crisis period. The Russian writer felt close to the ideas in Felicia Skene's novel on the need for prison reform, on women's inequality, injustice, social structure of society. Especially important for the writer was the thought about the relationship between faith and reason. Tolstoy's own attempt to resolve the basic contradictions of life and, most importantly, the contradiction between the finite human and the infinite being with the help of a rational approach have been unsuccessful. As a result of searches of the late 1870s - early 1880s Tolstoy turns to faith understood as the power of life. Tolstoy marked this topic as the main one in the novel by F. Skene and approved of its artistic solution. The article also names works in which L. Tolstoy addresses the problem of the relation between faith and reason: Anna Karenina, Confession, The Coffee-House of Surat.

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