 Namaskar. Good afternoon to some, good morning to some others, since we are from different time zones and we are glad to find such a huge gathering of audience, learner delegates from the academia, dignitaries, distinguished guests from across the different states of the country and abroad. I am Chainika Sannapati and I feel privileged to welcome you all on behalf of Krishnakanta Hondikoi State Department University to the Krishnakanta Hondikoi Memorial Lecture 2020. Today is 28 July, the birth anniversary of Professor Krishnakanta Hondikoi and our university celebrates this day with Krishnakanta Hondikoi Memorial Lecture. This year due to COVID-19 pandemic, we are celebrating this special occasion in our digital platform. It is indeed a matter of great pride and privilege to have here with us Professor Saragay Dimitrievich Sarebriyani from Russian State University, who will be delivering the Memorial Lecture and Professor Ranjit Kumar Devagu Swami, former Trimonto Hongkodeb Chair, Tejko University, who will share the function. We'll start our program just after the rendition of the university anthem. Vice Chancellor, Professor Kondo Poddasa, to kindly deliver the welcome address. Sir, please, over to you. Respected Saragay Dimitrievich Sarebriyani, the Speaker of today's Memorial Lecture. Respected Professor Ranjit Kumar Devagu Swami, the Chair for today's function. This year, the lecture will be delivered online by Eminent Indrologist, Professor Saragay Dimitrievich Sarebriyani from the Russian State University for Humanities, Moscow, Russia. Thank you very much. Thank you. I take the privilege to introduce today's speaker for the Memorial Lecture, Professor Saragay Dimitrievich Sarebriyani. Professor Sarebriyani is currently the Director, E. M. Meletinsky, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, and an alumnus of Institute of Oriental Languages, Moscow State University, where he learned Hindi, Sanskrit, Bengali, and Urdu languages and literatures. He also studied at Varanasiya Sanskrit University, Varanasi, Banarasun, Hind University, and Deccan College, Pune. A PhD on the works of 15th century Indian author, Vidyapati. Professor Sarebriyani has done important researches in the Gorky Institute of World Literature, Moscow, and Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Kolkata. He has also been a visiting professor of comparative literature in Urbana campaign, Illyannus USA, and Professor Sarebriyani takes a special interest in the history of Indian literature and culture, history of philosophy, comparative cultural and literary studies, and Russian indology in the global context. He has to his credit a large number of books and research papers on the different aspects of history, culture, and Sanskrit studies. Professor Sarebriyani has also translated several works from Bengali, Hindi, and Sanskrit to Russian, besides writing a long commentary on Virendra Kumar Bharacharya's Magnum Opus written joint in its the Russian language. I welcome you, sir. Shall I begin? Yeah, yeah. Yes, sir. Okay, so this thing respected Srimati Ahola Gogoi, respected chairman, Professor Anjit Kumar Dev Goswami, Vice Chancellor and Professor Kandarpadas, dear guests and colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. It is for the first time in my life that I am going, giving a talk across such a distance and across so many borders, natural and national, that is political. I hope you hear me well, well enough, and will keep hearing me well enough. The invitation to deliver the Krishna Kanta Hondikoi Memorial Lecture has been both a great honor and, of course, a challenge, as well as a great pleasure for me. It is with great pleasure that I recall my visit to Assam in October 2012, almost eight years ago. I had been invited to a conference in Shipsagar, but first I came to Kauahati and stayed for some days there. Then we drove with Professor Kandarpadas and two more Indian scholars all the way along the Brahmaputra valley up to Shipsagar. I was fascinated with the landscapes of rural Assam and the towns that we passed, Tezpur, in the first place. By the end of our trip, we passed Jorhat, the native town of Krishna Kanta Hondikoi. After the conference in Shipsagar, we drove to Debrugarh to take a flight back to Delhi. So in 2012, I had very memorable personal impressions of Assam. It was then in Guwahati that Professor Kandarpadas introduced me to the personality of Krishna Kanta Hondikoi. Before that, I had met the name in books and remember wondering why an Indian should have such a strangely sounding name. Professor Kandarpadas explained to me that the name was of a home origin and took me to the library of Guwahati University, the spacious hall where the books of Krishna Kanta Hondikoi were kept. We came up to a big bookcase full of books in Russian. There was not enough time to get well acquainted with the books. But I noticed that at least some of them had been published in Berlin by Russian emigre publishers. I asked Professor Kandarpadas if there was a list of the books in that bookcase. The answer was no. I realized then that Krishna Kanta Hondikoi was an outstanding personality and that Russian Indologists should take special interest in him and his legacy. But in the following years, because of other concerns, I could not attend to this task. The invitation to deliver this lecture has given me an opportunity to learn more about Krishna Kanta Hondikoi, about his life and his work. Among other things, I have been able to read some chapters of his biography written by his daughter, Srimati Ahola Gogoi. And they're very informative forward to the book by the chair, Professor Ranjit Kumar Dev Goswami. I read, of course, the English translation. I have learned that there are at least two other books, but they were not available to me. In fact, the book of Srimati Gogoi has wetted my appetite to know more about Krishna Hondikoi. I hope to learn more in the future. But from what I have managed to read, I have got an impression that a full-fledged intellectual biography of Krishna Kanta Hondikoi, a biography which would also describe the historical and cultural background of this extraordinary personality, such a biography is still to be written and published. The first chapter of Srimati Gogoi's book is titled The Story of Origins. Among other things, we find there a striking story about the origin of the very surname Hondikoi. According to a legend, once upon a time, a Nahom king marching through a thick forest was stopped by a fast-flowing river. So, one of the king's companions felt a huge tree to bridge the river. Since then, the king called this person Hondikoi, which in their homeland, which meant bridge maker, he who builds bridges. That inventive person is said to be an ancestor of Krishna Kanta Hondikoi. This story, I would say, sounds symbolic. Krishna Kanta Hondikoi, too, may be justly called a bridge maker, a builder of bridges in several senses. First, we may say that he continued his family tradition of building bridges between various historical periods in the history of Assam. His ancestors were high-ranking people, we may say aristocrats, in their home kingdom. Later, they must have well adjusted themselves to the British rule, so that Krishna Kanta's father, Radha Kanta Hondikoi, was a rich tea-planter and got the title Rai Bahadur. Krishna Kanta Hondikoi has taken full advantage of the social and financial status in British India to get the high-quality education along European lines. As Professor Dev Goswami has put it, Krishna Kanta has been a product of the golden age of Kolkata University. Later, in the 1920s, he continued his education in Oxford, Paris and Berlin. In independent India, he went on with his scholarly research work and also became the first vice-chancellor of Gauhati University, the first university in Northeast India. In the world of scholarly work as such, Krishna Kanta Hondikoi may be called a builder of bridges between the traditional Sanskrit learning in Assam and Indian general, on the one hand, and modern European scholarship on the other. At this point, I may express my Krishna Kanta Hondikoi will prove to be a builder of bridges between Indian general and Assam in particular, on the one hand, and Russia, Russian culture, on the other. American colleagues have told me that in any lecture, even a very serious one, there must be some moments of fun, otherwise listeners will get tired and will not listen to you. So I venture to offer you an elfish suggestion. Krishna Kanta Hondikoi, by the end of his life, chose to study and translate the poem under the title Seto Bandha, Building a Bridge. Because among other reasons, he probably felt some affinity between the title and the subject matter of the poem and his surname. Actually, Hondikoi may be translated into Sanskrit as Seto Bandhin, or perhaps Seto Bandhaka. From the book of Srimati Gogoi, I have learned that Hondikoi bought some 2,000 books on European literature while in Berlin. Later, he managed to bring those books to his home in Assam. Reading this, I immediately recalled the bookcase with Russian books at Gauhat University Library. Berlin in the 1920s was an important center of Russian emigration and of Russian emigre book publishing. A question may and should be posed, why and how Hondikoi came to be interested in Russia in the Russian language and in Russian books. He could hardly study Russian in India before going to Europe in 1920. As far as I know, there was no such thing as Russian studies in India in those years. It looks like he developed interest in things Russian while living in Berlin in 1925-1926. We get some interesting hints and disrespect from Srimati Gogoi's book. Describing Hondikoi's life in Berlin, Srimati Gogoi mentions several expatriate Indians whom her father met there. Thus, and I quote, he made friends with an old Muhammad Barkatula who was the son of a royal employee of the king of Bhopal in India. Krishnakanta was very close to Barkatula and they had walks together in the evening, unquote. This Muhammad Barkatula must have been indeed an interesting person to mix with and to talk to. He was born in 1854 in Bhopal and died in 1927 in San Francisco. Wikipedia defines him as an Indian revolutionary with sympathy for the pan-Islamic movement. In 1915, during First World War, Barkatula became the prime minister of the so-called provisional government of India at Kabul in Afghanistan. In the spring of 1919, with the delegation of this provisional government, Barkatula came to Moscow and had a talk with Lenin and probably with Trotsky, the two leaders of the Bolsheviks. Barkatula tried to invite them to export their revolution to India via Afghanistan. But fortunately, both for India and for Russia, this revolutionary project never came true. Barkatula lived in the former Russian Empire until 1922, traveling to the regions inhabited by Muslims. I wonder if we can learn more what he told Handikai about Russia during their walks together in Berlin in 1925-26. Incidentally, Bhopal University, established in 1970, was re-christianed in 1988 as Barkatula University or in Hindi Barkatula Visvoidyali. Another expatriate Indian whom Handikai met in Berlin was Birindranath Chattopadhyay, a brother of Sarojini Naidu, the poet. In 1914, he went to Berlin and in 1927, together with some other Indian communists, also mishappened to be there at that time. Again, it would be interesting to learn more, if it is possible, about the context between the Bengali communists and their Samese scholar. Early in Paris, Handikai had met another Bengali, another Indian Muslim by the name Hassan Shahid Suhrawardi, who belonged to a well-known Bengali family. His uncle, Sir Abdullah Almamun Suhrawardi, an Islamic scholar and educationist, corresponded with Toy in 1907-09. His younger brother, Hussein Shahid Suhrawardi, a politician, was for about a year in the late 1950s, the fifth Prime Minister of Pakistan. Estu Hassan Shahid Suhrawardi himself, he studied at the University of Calcutta and Oxford University, and then in 1914 went to Moscow to study the Russian language. He left Russia after the events of 1917, but came back in 1926 to work for some years with the Moscow Art Theatre. He said to have spoken Russian fluently. Again, it would be interesting to know more about the context between this extraordinary person and Krishna Kanta Handikai. In any case, these three expatriate Indians, Muhammad Barkatula, Beryendranath Chattapadai, and Hassan Shahid Suhrawardi in Berlin and in Paris, could tell Handikai a lot about Russia and awaken his interest in Russian culture and the Russian language. In the 1920s, Berlin was an important center of Russian immigration, as I have already said. I do not know to what extent people in India are aware of the scale and nature of that immigration. We call it now the immigration of the first wave, to distinguish it from the immigration of the second wave, which took place during and immediately after the Second World War and the immigration of the third wave, which happened in the 1970s and 1980s. After the revolution of 1917 and the succeeding civil war, for various reasons many people left the former Russian Empire. Till now exact figures are not known, but the figure about two million seems to be a fair estimation. Now those people were well educated, engineers, scientists, scholars, writers, poets, lawyers, painters, actors, composers, singers, and last but least military officers. In the 1920s Berlin was full of such Russians. They established their own publishing houses and open bookshops. Handikai might have bought his Russian books in such Russian bookshops, where he must have met Russians and must have heard the Russian language spoken around. In 1926 in Paris he attended the performance of Anton Tchaikov's Cherry Orchard, staged by Russian actors in the Russian language. We may presume that he understood the Russian language spoken on the stage there. Is it not probable that during his two years staying in Berlin, Krishna Kanda could get some Russian acquaintances? Let me once again offer to you a risky hypothesis. Vladimir Nabokov, a young Russian immigrant who later in the 1950s became famous as an American writer, the author of Lalita and other novels. From 1922 up to 1937 lived in Berlin. Born in St. Petersburg in April of 1899, Vladimir Nabokov was only nine months younger than Krishna Kanda Handikai. In 1925-26 in Berlin, they were both in their mid-20s. They could easily meet each other there in Berlin in those years. Moreover, it was then and there that Nabokov wrote his first novel in Russian under the title Mashinka in English translation Mary. The novel was published in 1926 in Berlin. It told the story about Russian emigres there in Berlin. Krishna Kanda might have bought the book or even might have got it as a present from the author. It may well be kept in the book case in Guwahati University Library. Be it as it may, the description and study of the Russian books in that bookcase may be the first joint undertaking of scholars from Russia, Moscow and Assam, probably Guwahati. In Russia, we have got quite a tradition of describing the books, the libraries left after the passing away of eminent person. In this context, I may mention the detailed description in several volumes of the books kept in Yastnaya Polyana, Lev Tolstoy, hereditary state near the town of Tula, to the south of Moscow. Incidentally, there are some books there which Tolstoy got from his Indian correspondence. For instance, there is the book The Sains of Muhammad, compiled by Abdullah Al-Mamun Zuhrawadi, and published in London in 1905. A book about Gandhi by Joseph John Duke, published in London in 1908, and others. Many books in Yastnaya Polyana have got dedicated inscriptions of the authors to Lev Tolstoy. In many books there are various notes in the margins, but by Lev Tolstoy and the members of his family. Similar inscriptions and notes may be found in Hondikoi's Russian books, so we may learn whom he met in Berlin and perhaps elsewhere in Europe, and what he thought about the books he bought and read. In Moscow, there is so-called Alexander Solzhenitsyn House of Russian Diaspora, founded by Alexander Solzhenitsyn himself in 1995, after he came back to Russia after the 20 years of forced exile. This house is both a museum, a library, a research center, and a publishing house. Whose objective is to study all the waves of Russian immigration, their lives, and their achievements, their contribution to Russian culture, and to what may be called world culture. Distinguished scholars work at the research center there, and I'm happy to be acquainted with some of them, so we may invite them to take part in studying Hondikoi's Russian books. It would mean that those books get the best possible expertise. Some of those books may prove to be quite rare and precious, not easily available in today's Russia. Looking forward to this as a means Russian cooperation in research work, I may also suggest that to begin with, we may translate and get published in Moscow the essay of Hondikoi about Jakov's cherry orchard that he saw staged in Paris in 1926 by Russian actors. At our university, there is a department of theater and cinema studies. I have consulted colleagues from this department and have been told that scholars in Russia would very much appreciate the publication of such an essay in Russian. That way, we would add one more story to the general history of inter-Russian cultural relations. Actually, this general history has not yet been adequately investigated and described, but there are some episodes that are often, and I dare say ritually, evoked when the relations between India and Russia are spoken about on official occasions. One of such episodes is the visit to India in the 15th century of a Russian merchant from the city of Tver, by name Afanasin Nikityev. That visit is usually evoked to emphasize the allegedly ages-long tradition of inter-Russian context. But if we look into the matter more closely, we see that the voyage of Afanasin Nikitin to India and back home looks rather like a symbol of the failure to establish any meaningful context between Russia and India in the 15th century and in several succeeding centuries. All that we know about Afanasin Nikitin is the meager information that he gives about himself in his notes, a kind of diary which he brought from India. 19th century editors supplied the title to those notes, a voyage across three seas. Afanasin Nikitin was no doubt an extraordinary person, brave and enterprising and quite educated. His notes are unique among many other pre-modern Russian writings. For many centuries, he remained the only Russian to visit India and to leave notes about the visit. The notes are unique in their multilinguality. The bulk of the text is in a rather archaic Russian or church Slavonic, but there are sizable fragments in Turkic, Farsi, and even Arabic. This multilinguality creates problems for modern translators. From his notes, we learn that Afanasin Nikitin in the 1470s, rather by chance, got to India via Iran and stayed for about three years in the Bahmani Sultanate. He was a merchant and hoped to find in India some merchandise to be sold at home. In this, he was completely disappointed. He found nothing that he could take and sell in Russia. Some modern commentators suggest that he might have taken from India some precious stones, but on his way home in the Ottoman Empire, Afanasin was utterly robbed and sailed over the Black Sea only with his notes. He did not reach even his native principality of Tver and died near the city of Smolensk, which then belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His notes were passed to Moscow and included in local anal chronicles, but evidently did not attract much attention for several centuries. They were discovered at the beginning of the 19th century by the famous historian and writer Nikolai Karamzin, but again, did not attract much public attention all through the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. It is only since the late 1940s, with the development of relations between the USSR and independent India, that Afanasin Nikitin gradually became a famous and symbolic figure. In 1955, in the city of Tver, a monument to Afanasin Nikitin was erected with the financial help from India. But Afanasin's notes, this voyage over three seas, have been not so far for various reasons, probably studied and even adequately translated into modern Russia. There is no adequate translation into English either. Another episode of cultural relations between Russia and India, which is often and ritually evoked, is of course the correspondence between Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Lev Tolstoy. The traveling of Afanasin Nikitin is used as a symbol of the alleged historical depth of the Russian relations. The correspondence between Gandhiji and Tolstoy is often presented as a symbol of the alleged spiritual depth of those relations. But again, if we look into the matter more closely, we will see that the story about Gandhiji and Tolstoy reveals something almost opposite. The considerable differences between the cultural worlds to which Gandhiji and Tolstoy belonged, the low level of mutual understanding between the two great persons, and ideas say the absence of lasting historical consequences of this correspondence, at least for Russia. In other words, the significance of that correspondence as such should not be overestimated. During the last decades of his life, Tolstoy received a lot of letters from a lot of countries. The largest number of letters came from the USA. In 2004, in Moscow, a book of almost 1000 pages titled Tolstoy and the USA correspondence was published. Here is this. In this book, almost 70 American correspondence of Tolstoy are represented. All in all, we are told, Tolstoy got from the USA more than 1800 letters and sent back about 300 letters. Between 1896 and 1910, Tolstoy corresponded also with more than 20 Indians, some of them well known, like Sir Abdullah Almamun Sukhrawarli or Mohandas Karamchangandi, some quite obscure ones. In terms of time, Gandhi was the last in the list. A colleague of mine in Moscow, Dr. Tatyana Zagorodnikova, published in 2013 a book of almost 300 pages titled Tolstoy and India correspondence. The book contains more than 100 letters from India or Indians to Tolstoy and Tolstoy's replies, including the correspondence with Gandhi. Those more than 100 letters deserve a special detailed study, which has not yet been undertaken. The usual pattern of Tolstoy's correspondence with Indians was like this. An Indian would write a letter to Tolstoy, asking some questions or making some requests. Tolstoy would send a reply. The Indian would write again, but after two or three letters from the correspondent, Tolstoy would lose interest and stop the correspondence. Gandhi's case was exceptional. The correspondence stopped because Tolstoy died. Gandhi wrote his first letter to Tolstoy from London on the 1st of October 1909, about a year before Tolstoy's death. In this letter, Gandhi wrote about his campaign of passive resistance in South Africa and requested Tolstoy to confirm his authorship of a letter to a Hindu that had appeared in 1908. Gandhi wanted to reprint that letter and to translate it into Gujarati. Among other things, Gandhi asked Tolstoy from permission to delete from the letter the criticism of the idea of transmigration, which as Gandhi added, was a cherished belief with millions of India. Tolstoy replied quite quickly with a short letter. He confirmed his authorship of a letter to a Hindu, welcomed its translation in Gujarati and remarked, I quote, I would not like to exclude the word reincarnation because in my opinion, the belief in reincarnation can never be as firm as the belief in the immortality of soul and in the justice and love of God, but do as you like. On the 10th of November, still from London, Gandhi sent another letter to Tolstoy, together with the book about himself by Joseph John Duke. The book, as I have already said, is still there in the library of Fias Nepalianos. But this letter remained unanswered. Tolstoy fell ill, Gandhi's letter was misplaced and was found only in 1956. Later, Gandhi sent to Tolstoy a copy of his English translation of the English translation of his book, Hind Swaraj. But we do not know to what extent Tolstoy was able to read it. Unfortunately, the book itself has not been preserved in Fias Nepalianos. All in all, we have four letters from Gandhi ji to Tolstoy and three letters from Tolstoy to Gandhi ji. Tolstoy's last letter, written on the 7th of September, 1910, two and a half months before his death, is the longest. In that letter, Tolstoy expounded his ideas about non-violence and non-resistance to evil. The letter reads as a kind of summary of some chapters of his book, The Kingdom of God is within you. No doubt, the seven letters at Tolstoy and Gandhi ji wrote to each other, appreciate human documents, but they do not add much to our knowledge about these great persons. Nevertheless, the whole story of the relations between the Russian writer and the Indian politician has been and remains a very important historical phenomenon which has not yet been studied and appreciated properly. For Tolstoy, the acquaintance with Gandhi ji during the last year of his Tolstoy's life was hardly of much importance, though he might have been pleased to learn about one more partisan of non-violence in the far away South Africa. For Gandhi ji, his personal contact with Tolstoy in the very middle of his Gandhi's life was most probably more important, but this contact could hardly add much to Gandhi's ideas about non-violence and related subjects. Gandhi had already experienced a strong influence of Tolstoy's ideas much earlier through Tolstoy's writing. It is for us now in Russia and I suppose in India as well that intellectual relations between Gandhi ji and Tolstoy have acquired a significance which I would not there call great but which is I'm sure quite considerable. Studying those relations and thinking about them may help us better know and understand our present situation, our present predicaments. I'm not competent enough to talk about India in this respect, but I will try and tell you how things look from the Russian side. Sorry, yes. I may refer to my own personal experience. I will tell you how Gandhi ji has helped me better understand and appreciate Tolstoy, but first I must tell you how my generation of Soviet people had perceived Tolstoy and his writings. Fortunately, Tolstoy did not live long enough to see the Bolshevik take over in 1917-1918. Had he lived to see it, he would have criticized the new order as severely as he had criticized the old one. He would have been labeled a reactionary and would not have been admitted to the Soviet canon of Russian literature. Something like this happened to another famous 19th century Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In the 1920s and in the early 1930s, Dostoyevsky was more or less tolerated, but in the mid 1930s he was condemned as reactionary and practically excluded from the accepted literary canon. Among other things, it was recalled that Lenin had strongly disliked him. Dostoyevsky's works were not republished for more than 20 years and he was rehabilitated with other victims of Stalin's rule only during the so-called Khrushchev store in the late 1950s. Tolstoy's case was different. He was probably too great to be easily dismissed. So, in 1928, on Tolstoy's 100th anniversary, his former associate Vladimir Chertkov and his youngest daughter, Alexander Tolstaya, were allowed to start the publication of the so-called Jubilee Collected Works. The project has taken about 30 years to complete. All in all, 90 huge volumes have been published and the last ones saw the light of the day again only under Khrushchev. Tolstoy was admitted to the Soviet canon of Russian literature but very selectively. He had lived a long life, more than 80 years. By the age of 50 years, he became famous as the author of big novels. They were in peace and under Korean in the first place. But about the late 1870s, Tolstoy experienced a kind of intellectual, or you may say spiritual crisis. And after that, though continuing to write pieces of fiction, he wrote quite a number of discursive texts, which may be called religious and or philosophical. It is in this later phase of his life that Tolstoy preached the ideas of non-resistance to evil through violence, or for short non-violence. He also underwent a very radical religious evolution, starting with the criticism of the official Orthodox Christianity and coming by the end of his life to a negation of Christianity at all in favor of rather vague religious doctrines of his own. Tolstoy also became a very radical critic of the Russian imperial state system and in fact, of the very institution of the modern state. To use a later term, Tolstoy became a very radical dissident. He could afford being a dissident because he was quite rich and very famous. So, as I have said, unlike Dostoevsky, Tolstoy was accepted to the Soviet literary canon, but quite selectively. His great novels and other works of fiction were republished and praised taught at schools. But his religious and philosophical texts and their ideas were practically excluded from the public realm. This selectivity had been prescribed by Lenin, who, in 1908, had written several journalistic papers about Tolstoy. The most famous paper was titled Lev Tolstoy as a mirror of the Russian Revolution. It was under this label that Tolstoy later became acceptable for the Bolshevik establishment. But in fact, Tolstoy was not only a mirror, but also a severe critic in advance of the Russian Revolution. But of course, in this capacity, Tolstoy was not acceptable to Bolsheviks. In this paper, Lenin provided a very convenient formula. Tolstoy was a great writer, but a poor thinker. Lenin treated religious and philosophical ideas of Tolstoy, including non-violence, as petty followers of the great man. Lenin himself, following Karl Marx, considered violence a midwife of history. Lenin believed that the just social order might be established through violence. Now we in Russia have come to know all too well the falsity of this belief. Gandigy read Tolstoy's works quite selectively too. But his selection was, we may say, the opposite to the Soviet one. As far as I have been able to find out, Gandigy never read Tolstoy's great novels. They weren't peas, Anna Karenina, the Resurrection. The Tolstoy, which is best known to Russia, hardly existed for Gandigy at all. But he read and admired several works by Tolstoy, which are practically unknown to most Russians today. In the first place, the book titled The Kingdom of God is within you. In this, in his autobiography in the mid-20s, Gandigy wrote, Three Mordons have left a deep press in my life and kept evading me. Raichan Bhai by his living contact, Tolstoy by his book, The Kingdom of God is within you. And John Ruskin by his book, and to his last. Well, there are two more quotations about this, but I will skip to save the time. Tolstoy wrote, The Kingdom of God is within you at the beginning of the 1890s. As most of his other religious and philosophical writings, it could not be published in Russia and was first published in Russia, but in Germany. In Russia for many years, it circulated in homemade copies, what later in the Soviet time was called Samizdat, self-publishing. Printed editions appeared in Russia only after the revolution of 1905. After 1917, it was republished for the first time only in 1957. In the 28th volume of the Jubilee collected works, which was and is available only in big libraries. Now this edition is available in the internet as well. Last year, while working on a paper for a conference in Jasnaya Polyana, I found in big Moscow book shops two recent and rather imperfect editions of this book published after 2010. I must be ashamed to confess, but I read this book in full only last year. Of course I had read about it and some parts of it before, but somehow had never felt like reading it as a whole. Probably with my Soviet education Lenin's opinion that Tolstoy was a poor thinker had been impressed too deep in my mind. Now I agree with some Russian contemporaries of Tolstoy who considered this book just great. I would call it an original treatise on the philosophy of history. Here and now I cannot possibly analyze this big book as a whole, but let me emphasize that this book written more than 100 years ago is very topical now as well. Tolstoy passionately expresses his dissatisfaction with the state of the world of the human society in which he lived. At the beginning of the 1890s Tolstoy anticipated as it were the horrors of First World War and other wars of the 20th century. Tolstoy wrote with with awe that contemporary European civilization including the Russian Empire was based on violence and that it was imperative to change this violence based order of life and to go over to a new order of life based on non-violence. He was self-critical enough to confess that he did not know how exactly this radical change could be realized, but he acutely felt that such a change was a must. These ideas must have impressed Gandiji very much. Nowadays our world as a whole seems to live through a period of transition. Many people like Tolstoy more than 100 years ago feel that a new order of life is needed even though again like Tolstoy hardly anybody can offer a universally accepted way to such an order and a universally accepted image of such an order. In Russia we live through our own period of transition. The transition from our violent Soviet past to an unknown future and I think that in this period of transition we should take the deals of non-violence preached by Tolstoy and Gandhi much more seriously than we used to do it in the past. Thank you for listening to me. It was wonderful listening to you sir. Thank you so much for giving your valuable insights and enjoying the audience with your words of wisdom, knowledge and experience on the topic that you selected as a part of the Krishnakanta Hondikoi Memorial Lecture. Thank you so much.