English · Chapter 8
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
"God Sees the Truth, but Waits" is a short story by Leo Tolstoy (1828 to 1910), the Russian novelist and moral thinker best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina. It was first published in 1872 among the simple reading pieces Tolstoy prepared for peasant children, and it later became one of his most admired parables. The title is a Russian proverb, and the plot reads like a modern Book of Job set among merchants and convicts. Written in plain, unadorned prose, the story dramatizes Tolstoy's Christian convictions about patience under injustice, the limits of human courts, and forgiveness as the only real release from suffering.
Ivan Dmitrich Aksionov is a young merchant of Vladimir who owns two shops and a house. One summer he prepares to travel to the fair at Nizhny. His wife begs him to stay, because she has dreamt that he returned with his hair turned grey. Aksionov laughs off the omen, promises to bring presents, and drives away.
On the road he meets a merchant he knows. They share an inn and sleep in adjoining rooms. Aksionov rises before dawn, pays his bill and leaves. About twenty-five miles on, a police officer and two soldiers overtake him and announce that the merchant has been found with his throat cut. A blood-stained knife is pulled out of Aksionov's bag. He turns pale and trembles, insisting the knife is not his, but his fear looks like guilt and he is bound and taken away.
He is charged with murder and with stealing twenty thousand roubles. His wife visits him in prison with their children, faints at the sight of him in chains, and tells him that her petition to the Czar has been refused. Then she asks whether it was not he who did it. That even his wife can doubt him crushes Aksionov. He decides that only God knows the truth and gives up petitions for prayer. He is flogged with the knout and sent to the mines of Siberia.