Chapter M: S. Sukhotin was talking about Count Bludov. Tolstoi said

“His was a very interesting house where authors and the most interesting men of their time used to meet. I remember that I read there for the first time my _Two Hussars_. Bludov was once intimate with the Decembrists and sympathized in his soul with every progressive movement. And he kept on serving under Nicolas I.”

Mikhail Sergeevich Sukhotin asked whether Bludov was a Russian, and why was he a Count?

Tolstoi said:

“The Bludovs were a purely Russian family, to whom the title of Count was granted. I remember, when I gathered the peasants to read to them the Ukase of their liberation, at the bottom were the names of the signatories and it finished with the words: Countersigned by Count Bludov. An elderly peasant, Eremey, shook his head all the while and said: ‘That Blud, he must be a brainy fellow!’ Evidently he took it to mean that Bludov was at the head of the whole affair.”

The conversation was about medicine. Tolstoi said:

“Medicine cannot possibly be called an ‘experimental’ science, for in medicine experiment in the strict sense is impossible. With experiments in chemistry a repetition of the more or less same conditions is possible, and so there can be approximately an exact conclusion as to the results. But in medicine there is no exact experiment nor can there be, for it is never possible to repeat the conditions that existed previously; if only because the individuality of the patient changes, and nearly, if not quite, everything changes in sympathy with that.”

Tolstoi related this episode from his childhood:

“We had a distant relation--an old woman Yakovlev. She lived in her own house in the Staro-Konyushenna Street in Moscow. She was a great miser, and, when she went to the country in the summer, she sent her children ahead in the luggage van. Once, when I was quite a small child, old Yakovlev came to pay us a visit. She sat with the grown-up people, and my brother Nikolenka got a box, put dolls into it, and began dragging it across the rooms. When he dragged it into the room where old Yakovlev sat, she asked him: ‘Nicolas, what have you got there?’ and he replied, ‘It is old Yakovlev going into the country, and her children are being sent ahead in the luggage van.’” ...

During the two days (the 6th and 7th August) of my stay in Yasnaya, Tolstoi wrote a perfectly new and very powerful story called _Father and Daughter_,[5] which, he said, “will stay as it is for the time being.” Tolstoi himself seems to be very well pleased with the story, and he thinks he may not have to alter it.

Tolstoi recalled the folk-story of “Vanka Kliushnik,” who asked before his execution to be allowed to sing a song; and Tolstoi was in raptures over the beauty of it.

Tolstoi is much amused because he is riding a young horse and training it. He is a great connoisseur of horses; he loves them and is a perfect horseman. He trains his horse to various paces. He showed me and Ilya Vasilevich how the horse started to gallop with the right leg. At the beginning of the ride I asked Tolstoi how to train a horse to start with this or that leg. Tolstoi explained to me how it was done, and then observed:

“Once a horse leads off with a certain leg, it wants to start with the same leg next time. In a man’s life, too, custom plays an enormous part. Once a certain habit is formed, a man unconsciously tries to act in accordance with it. It is very seldom that people act in accordance with reason, and only very remarkable people do so; usually people live and act by habit. How otherwise could it be possible that moral truths, announced so long ago by the great thinkers and admitted by most people, so rarely guide their actions? Very few people overcome the habits of animal life and oppose them by the convictions of reason.”

When later we drove past a beautiful wood Tolstoi said:

“Once upon a time this forest belonged to Dolin-Ivansky. He was about to sell it and I wanted to buy it, but for some reason I bargained, although the price was reasonable. We did not settle the business. When I came home and thought it over, I saw that the price was reasonable and the forest good, and I sent the steward to say that I was ready to buy it. But when the steward arrived, the forest was already sold. For a long time afterwards I could not remember without annoyance that I had let that forest slip through my hands.”

Then we drove by the forest called “Limonov Woods.” It is a young forest planted by Tolstoi. He had not been there for a long time and was surprised to see how everything had flourished and grown up.

Tolstoi said:

“Yes, it is a queer sense, that of ownership: here, too, one finds the same habit. When one analyses it in one’s own mind, the feeling disappears; but instinctively one always sees in oneself a particular interest in what was or is one’s property, although one considers ownership harmful and unnecessary.”

Speaking later of the present political events Tolstoi said:

“The same is true also with regard to patriotism: unconsciously one’s sympathies are on the side of Russia and her fortunes, and one catches oneself at it. But it is clear that with these internal and foreign troubles one fine day all of a sudden Russia may fall to pieces. As the saying goes: _sic transit gloria mundi_. Now it is an enormous and powerful state, and suddenly everything may go to pieces!”

Tolstoi drew my attention to the fact that the road was beautifully lit up by the rays of the sun coming through the branches of the trees. He recalled that Turgenev in _Virgin Soil_ has described how Sipyagin met Mariana and Nezhdanov lit up by such rays. He asked me if I remembered the passage. I did not remember it and said:

“How do you remember it, Tolstoi?”

Tolstoi laughed and said:

“But you remember in your music, and so we writers remember things in our art.”

Tolstoi said about _Virgin Soil_ that he did not share the general indifference towards that novel and considered it very successful. Among other things, he thought the new type of Sipyagin successful and observed at the right time.

On this occasion Tolstoi said:

“But for the most part I object to the trick of guessing at modern types and phenomena. The other day the painter K. was here. I told him a great deal about his work which must be unpleasant to him. He is always occupied with these modern themes. I said to him that one ought never to paint what is talked about in the newspapers. Besides, he simply can’t make a picture intelligible, clear. In his works you can’t make out what he wants to represent. How inferior he is to Orlov[6] in this respect!”