Chapter V: G. Kristi who walked with us asked Tolstoi

“If such an old woman talked about religion, must one destroy her illusions and tell her honestly what one thinks?”

Tolstoi replied to him:

“The question does not exist to me. If I talk about religious questions, I always express my thoughts, if I believe the truth of what I say; and if my words are not understood, it is none of my business, but I can say only what I think.”

Last year two young men came to Tolstoi, and now they have been again. They are very nice and in search of a better life. They turned out to be ballet dancers from the Moscow Grand Theatre. The necessity of maintaining their family prevents them from changing their profession. Tolstoi praised them highly. Then with a smile he said:

“If I had children now, I should send them to the ballet. At any rate it is better than the university. Their feet alone might be spoilt in the ballet, but at the university it is their heads.”

Tolstoi compared marriage to a little boat in which two people sail over a stormy ocean.

“Each must sit tight and not make sharp movements or the boat will upset.”

Speaking of the present schemes for a constitution in Russia Tolstoi said:

“The misfortune is in that the Radicals and their set will only try to say something very clever, to play the part of Russian Bebels, and the party game will constitute the whole of the activity of the representatives of the people.”

Of the war Tolstoi said:

“The comforting side of the Russian failure in the war consists in this, that, however much people distort the genuine Christian teaching, yet its meaning has already permeated the consciousness of the people so deeply that war cannot become to them, as to the Japanese, a sacred cause by sacrificing his life to which a man becomes a hero and does a great deed. The view of war, as an evil, permeates the consciousness of the people, deeper and deeper.”

Tolstoi said about the Japanese:

“The Japanese are perfectly incomprehensible and unknown to me. I see their wonderful capacity for adapting and even for carrying further the superficial side of European culture, chiefly in its worse aspects, but the soul of the Japanese is absolutely dark to me. Japan, by the way, proved that the whole of the boasted European civilization of a thousand years could be taken over and even surpassed in a few decades.”

The conversation was about crowd psychology.

Tolstoi said:

“It is an interesting and still little explored problem. It is a hypnotism which has a terrible power over men. There is one moment when it is still possible to resist it. I am now no longer infected by others’ yawning, because I always remember it. When you see a crowd running, you have to remember that you do not know why they run, and to look back; and immediately you have dissociated yourself from the crowd, you are at once saved from the danger of succumbing to the hypnotism.”

We played chess on the terrace, and in the hall Sophie Nicolaevna sang Schubert’s “Wanderer.”

Tolstoi said:

“Ah that Schubert! he did a lot of harm!”

I asked how?

“Because he had in a high degree the power of making music correspond to the poetry of the text. This rare power of his has brought to birth a great deal of music which pretends to correspond to poetry, and that is a revolting kind of art.”

They sang Glinka. Tolstoi said:

“Now, sinful man....” The interesting state of the game prevented him from finishing his sentence.

Later he said:

“I feel that Glinka was coarse, a sensual man. One always feels the man himself in his music. The young Mozart--bright and direct; the simple Haydn; the stern, conceited Beethoven--are all heard in their music.”

Tolstoi is writing an article which is called “The Beginning of the End.”

There was a newspaper correspondent to whom Tolstoi expressed a few of the ideas which made the basis of his article.

“The present movement in Russia is a world movement, the importance of which is still little understood. This movement, like the French Revolution formerly, will perhaps give, by means of its ideas, an impetus for hundreds of years to come. The Russian people has in the highest degree the capacity for organization and self-government. They gave up their power to the Government and waited, as they formerly did for the liberation of the serfs, for the liberation of the land. They have not been given the land, and they themselves will carry out that great reform. Our revolutionaries are perfectly ignorant of the people and do not understand this movement. They might help it, but they only hamper it. In the Russian people, it seems to me, and I think I am not biased, there is more of the Christian spirit than in other peoples. Probably the reason is that the Russian people got to know the New Testament about five centuries before the people of Europe, who until the Reformation hardly knew it.”

Tolstoi criticized the complexity and artificiality of modern art in general, and of music in particular. He said:

“Certainly, if I love art, I can’t love _no_ art, but I must love that which exists. Still I have always before me the ideal of the highest art: to be clear, simple, and accessible to all.”

I was saying how long and systematically one must teach piano-playing in order to be able to play well. Tolstoi found that “system” dangerous.

He said:

“In doing this one may lose the direct fresh feeling with which you regard a new work of art. I know it from my own experience--when one begins to write something, one works with excitement and interest, and the work goes well; but then the same old thing begins to tire one and it becomes boring. Of course, there is the love of one’s work, and the love is stronger than the boredom, and by love the boredom is overcome, but still boredom there is.”

I spoke about the complexity of certain of Chopin’s works, whom Tolstoi loves very much.

“Well, he too makes mistakes,” Tolstoi replied smilingly. “Once I stayed with the Olsufevs in the country, and, referring to the weather and the gathering in of the harvest, I said to the old butler there--he was a sceptic and pessimist--that God knows what He does, to which he replied: ‘He too makes mistakes!’”

Of creative activity Tolstoi said:

“The worst thing of all is to begin a work with the details; then one gets muddled and loses the power of seeing the whole. One has to behave like Pokhitonov who has spectacles with double glasses divided in two (looking at the distance and at his work), to look now through these and now through those and to put on now the bright and now the dark glasses.”

_July 28th._ Biryukov showed Marie Nikolaevna (Tolstoi’s sister) some old letters written by her brother Nikolay in French. Tolstoi recalled then that from childhood he was so much used to writing French that he kept the habit until he was quite grown up. When he lived in Paris with Turgenev, he once sat down to write a letter to his brother. Turgenev came up and, seeing that he was writing in French, was surprised and asked Tolstoi why he did it. Tolstoi said that until that moment it seemed to him that it was impossible to do otherwise, so used was he to writing letters in French.

On account of Biryukov’s visit (he is writing Tolstoi’s biography) and the arrival of his sister Marie Nikolaevna, Tolstoi again turned to memories of the past. He said:

“It is surprising how all the past becomes _me_. It is in me, like something folded. But it is difficult to be perfectly sincere. Sometimes I remember the bad only, another time the opposite. Lately I have remembered only the bad acts and events. It is difficult in this to keep the balance, so as not to exaggerate one way or another.”

Tolstoi said:

“It is impossible to know anything about God; He is a necessary hypothesis or, more truly speaking, the only possible condition of a right moral life. As an astronomer must base his observations upon the earth as a motionless centre, so also man cannot live rightly and morally without the idea of God. Christ always speaks of God as of a father, that is, as if He were the condition of our existence.”

_August 2nd._ Tolstoi and Marie Nikolaevna were recalling a certain Voeikov. He was once a hussar, and then became a monk. When Tolstoi was young, Voeikov was continually at Yasnaya, permanently drunk, ragged, in monk’s clothing, and telling lies unmercifully.

Tolstoi remembered a story that Voeikov told:

“‘We were once in a box: Mikhail Illarionovich (Kutuzov), Alexander Pavlovich (Alexander I.), myself, and some one else. Sontag sang. She came out to the front of the stage. Her bosom--oh! (he makes a gesture with his hand showing the size of her bust). Alexander Pavlovich said to me: “Voeikov, what is it?” And I said to him: “An organism, Your Majesty!”’

“And once, after all his mad ways and lies, he suddenly came up to me in the garden and said: ‘I am tired of life, Levochka!’”

Marie Nikolaevna asked Tolstoi why he had never described Voeikov. Tolstoi said:

“There are some events and people in life, as there are scenes in nature, which cannot be described: they are too exceptional and seem to be impossible. Voeikov was like that. Dickens described such types.”

_August 3rd._ The conversation turned on Lobachevsky[13] and on his theory that space is of many dimensions. Tolstoi remembers Lobachevsky, who was Professor and Principal of the Kazan University when Tolstoi was an undergraduate there. Then the company began to recall various mathematicians, amongst whom there are often queer fellows to be met. Tolstoi mentioned Prince S. U. Urusov, the Sevastopol hero, who was a mathematician and a splendid chess player.

Tolstoi said of him:

“He used to get up at three o’clock in the morning, light his samovar, which was prepared for him the night before by his orderly, and begin his calculations. Urusov was trying to find a way of solving the different forms of equations. Later he went quite mad. Nothing came of his calculations. When, in the belief that he had arrived at a positive result, he decided to read a paper to the Mathematical Society, there was so awkward a silence after his paper was read that all felt ashamed.” ...

Tolstoi went on to say:

“I was always surprised that mathematicians who are so exact in their own science are so vague and inexact when they try to philosophize.”

Tolstoi also mentioned Professors Nekrasov and B., whom he knew personally. Tolstoi recollected how one evening he visited B.:

“His wife was an unpleasant woman. That evening she was decolletée, and, as is always the case on such occasions, one feels something superfluous, unnecessary--one doesn’t know where to look. Looking at her I remembered Turgenev’s story,--how in Paris he always bought himself a loaf in the morning, and the baker’s girl would hand it over to him with her bare arm, which was more like a leg than an arm.”

_August 20th._ A certain gentleman from Petersburg (I don’t remember his name) now and then sends books to Tolstoi. Recently he sent him the _Sovremennik_ for 1852 in which Tolstoi’s _Childhood_ was published. Tolstoi read the books with great interest and said that the _Sovremennik_ was at that time a very interesting review. Marie Nikolaevna, who was on a visit to Yasnaya, described how she read _Childhood_ for the first time. She lived then with her husband in the country, in the Chernsky district of the Tula province, and Turgenev used to come to visit them fairly often. Her brother Sergey Nikolaevich also lived there. During one visit Turgenev read them the MS. of his _Rudin_. Next time he brought a number of the _Sovremennik_ and said to them:

“There is a wonderful new writer; a remarkable work by him is published here, _Childhood_”; and he began to read it aloud.

From the very first words Marie Nikolaevna and Sergey Nikolaevna were amazed:

“But he is describing us! Who is he?”

“At first we did not think of Levochka,” Marie Nikolaevna went on. “He was in debt and had been sent to the Caucasus. We were rather inclined to think that our brother Nikolay had written _Childhood_.”

It is said that Turgenev in his _Faust_ described Marie Nikolaevna.

The conversation turned on Dostoevsky’s hatred of Turgenev. Tolstoi greatly blamed the libel on Turgenev in _The Possessed_. This hatred always surprised Tolstoi, and so did that between Goncharov and Turgenev.

Tolstoi went on to say:

“Now books are written by people who have nothing to say. You read, but you do not see the writer. They always try to give ‘the last word.’ They reject the real writers and say that they have become obsolete. It is an absurd notion--to become obsolete. Modern books are read just because one can get to know ‘the last word’ from them; and this is easier than to read and know the real writers. These purveyors of ‘the last word’ do enormous harm, they make people unused to thinking independently.”

Some one mentioned Kant, and Tolstoi said:

“What is particularly valuable in Kant is that he always thought for himself. In reading him you deal all the time with _his_ thoughts, and this is extraordinarily valuable.”

About reading modern literature Tolstoi said:

“I am much more ready to read the memoirs of some old General in the _Russkaia Starina_; he romances a little, like Zavalishin, about his merits and successes, but this can be excused, and there is always something of interest in it.”

Tolstoi said further:

“Brain work often tires the head, and when tired, you can’t work as fruitfully as with a fresh head. Generally speaking, in brain work the moment is very important. There are moments when your thoughts come out as if moulded in bronze; at other moments nothing happens.”

_December 31st._ Tolstoi said:

“I am always interested to see what can become obsolete in literature. I am curious to know what in modern literature will seem old-fashioned, as, for instance, Karamzin’s ‘Oh soever!’ etc., seems to us now. Within my memory it has become impossible to write a long poem in verse. It seems to me that in time works of art will cease to be invented. It will be a shame to invent a story about a fictitious Ivan Ivanovich or Marie Petrovna. Writers, if such there be, will not invent, but will only describe the significant or interesting things which they have happened to observe in life.”

FOOTNOTES:

[12] A. M. Dobrolyubov (1876), religious seeker. His adherents formed a “Dobrolyubovian sect” on the basis of Christian anarchy. D. began his literary activity as a poet of the decadent school.

[13] Nikolay Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1793-1856), the great Russian mathematician and geometrist (founder of the non-Euclidean geometry).

1906

_August 21st._ Speaking about art Tolstoi said:

“Great works of art are for all time. They exist. They must only be revealed, as Michael Angelo said.”

Tolstoi was reminded by this saying of Michael Angelo’s of a peasant who without any training cut wonderful figures in wood and said, when Tolstoi expressed surprise at the art with which he did it:

“It is inside there. I am only taking off what is not needed.”

Tolstoi said that Turgenev, in his ecstasy over Pushkin’s description of Lensky’s death in Onegin, said that the wonderful rhyme--_ranen, stranen_--seemed to be inevitable.

Then Tolstoi recollected certain of Tyutchev’s poems, whom he rates very highly.

I asked him if he knew Tyutchev.

Tolstoi said:

“When after the Sevastopol campaign I lived in Petersburg, Tyutchev, then a famous author, did me, a young writer, the honour to call on me. And then, I remember, how surprised I was that he, who had all his life mixed in court circles--he was a friend, in the purest sense, of the Empress Marie Alexandrovna--who spoke and wrote French more easily than Russian, picked out for special praise, when he expressed his admiration for my Sevastopol stories, a certain soldiers’ expression; and this sensitiveness to the Russian language surprised me in him extraordinarily.”

The conversation arose about writers’ fees.

Tolstoi turned to P. Biryukov and said:

“I understand fees in the case of a work like your biography (of Tolstoi), but fees to writers for their artistic work always seemed strange and wrong to me. The man wrote and enjoyed writing, and suddenly for that enjoyment he asks five hundred roubles per printed sheet!” ...

Tolstoi said:

“I became more and more convinced that a sensible man is to be known by his humility. Conceit is incompatible with understanding.”

Of conceit Tolstoi said a long time ago in my presence:

“Every man can be seen as a fraction, whose numerator is his actual qualities, and its denominator his opinion of himself. The greater the denominator the less is the absolute quantity of the fraction.”

1907

_September 7th._ Tolstoi went to-day to Mme. Zveginzev to ask the police inspector, who lives on her estate, to release from prison the house-painter, Ivan Grigorevich; and also to thank her for the peaches she had sent him.

Tolstoi said:

“There was her daughter, Princess Volkonsky, there. They all wanted to direct me on the path of truth. I tried to speak with all seriousness; but hardly anything could penetrate through their diamonds and luxury. They now employ the stove-maker who used to come to me to borrow books. And he has been telling them that I said that one should not believe in God, and various other bits of nonsense. I told them that there was nothing strange in my words being distorted. If even from Christ’s teaching people can deduce the rites of the Church, the blessing of war, etc., then it is no wonder that our words are always misrepresented and distorted.

“Then they asked me how I explained the fact that in my family no one followed my teaching. I told them that it probably happened because I lived like a Pharisee, and did not fulfil my own teaching. To this they made no reply.”

Tolstoi said that he saw to-day a review of a new book on Turgenev. The book is partly of a polemical kind. The author gives an account of Turgenev’s quarrels with all writers (Dostoevsky, Tolstoi, Hertzen, Fet, etc.), as if it were his object to vindicate Turgenev and to prove that on all occasions he was right.

Tolstoi said:

“Really, it is strange that he quarrelled with every one. He was a very nice, good man. Only he was very weak, and was conscious of his weakness. Once, I remember, Count Urusov was here, my good friend. There were two brothers, and for some reason people considered them stupid. Now knowing this, Turgenev began arguing with them arrogantly as though feeling his superiority, but Urusov quietly, easily, and confidently refuted his argument. And no wonder: Urusov had his own definite religious convictions, whatever they might be, and Turgenev had none.”

“I was fond of him,” Tolstoi said of Turgenev.

Sophie Andreevna said that Turgenev had loved Tolstoi very much.

“No, on the contrary,” Tolstoi replied. “He rather liked me as a writer, but, as man, I did not find in him real warmth and cordiality. Well, he liked no one in that way, except women with whom he happened to be in love. He had no friends.”

Tolstoi asked me about my work, whether I was composing music, and said how bad it was when people force work out of themselves, and how great artists lose by immediately starting a new work when they have finished the old one.

Tolstoi mentioned Pushkin and said:

“The best writers are always strict with themselves. I re-write until I feel that I am beginning to spoil. And then, of course, I leave it alone. And one begins to spoil because at first, when you enjoy your work, whilst it is _yours_, you apply all your spiritual force to it. Later when the fundamental original idea ceases more and more to be new, and becomes, as it were, someone else’s, it bores you. You begin to try to say something new and you spoil and distort the first idea.”

A telegram arrived from Leonid Andreev asking to be allowed to come.

Tolstoi said:

“How terribly undeserved fame, like that of Andreev, spoils a man!”

Then Tolstoi could not compose a telegram in reply.

“How shall I answer? ‘Come.’ ... But that is too short. ‘Shall be very glad to see you’--that is not altogether true. Well, Dushan Petrovich, write simply: ‘You are welcome.’”

Tolstoi said:

“I had a letter to-day from a man who congratulates me on my fifty-fifth anniversary, and writes that he so much loves my works that he is always reading and re-reading _War and Peace_, for instance, but he says: ‘However much I tried, I could not read a single one of your philosophical writings to the end.’ He tries to persuade me to give up that kind of writing.”

“Why should he have written all that?” Tolstoi said, laughing. “There was a man living and nobody knew he was a fool, and suddenly he got up and told me so!” ...

1908

_January 6th._ Yesterday, when many letters came, Tolstoi said:

“In old age one becomes indifferent to the fact that one will never see the results of one’s activity. But the results will be there. It is not modesty on my part, but I know there will be results.”

To-day, speaking of the revolutionaries, Tolstoi said:

“Their chief mistake is the superstition that one can arrange human life.”

_April 12th._ Tatyana Lvovna was saying that A. N. Volkov is writing a book on art. Tolstoi became interested. Volkov says in his book that art must follow Nature blindly in everything.

Tolstoi said:

“It is absolutely untrue. It is always like that. When people are discussing art, they either say, like the modern decadents, that everything is allowed, everything is possible, that there is complete freedom in art. Or they talk about the slavish imitation of Nature. Both views are false. Just as every man is perfectly individual and never occurs twice over, so also his thoughts, his feelings are always new; they are _his_ thoughts and feelings alone. At the basis of a true work of art there must lie some perfectly original idea or feeling, but it must be expressed with slavish adherence to the smallest details of life.”

_July 27th._ A fortnight ago Mme. E--v, the wife of a privy councillor, came here on a visit. Tolstoi played chess with me on the balcony and the lady talked at first to Sophie Andreevna, and then, I think, to Marie Nikolaevna, about the great service which landowners performed, and how the peasants are beasts, and how, but for the landed aristocracy and their culture, they would become absolute brutes.

Tolstoi kept silent, but at last could stand it no longer. He got up from his chair and said to her:

“You must forgive me, but what you are saying is terrible, one can’t listen to it with indifference. If one is speaking of beasts, then certainly it is not the peasants who are beasts, but all of us who rob them and live on them. And all the ‘work’ of the landowners is nothing but playing about for want of anything else to do!”

Tolstoi was in a state of agitation and could not get calm for a long time afterwards.

The same evening at tea, when Mme. E--v had gone, the talk was about executions. Sophie Andreevna tried to prove that any murder is as bad as an execution, and yet people don’t talk about them. Elisabetha Valerianovna replied that an execution is a murder which is considered to be just, and the horror of it lies in that.

Tolstoi said:

“If one were to ask who is worse, the wretched executioner, hired, intoxicated, spiritually destroyed, or those who hire him and those who pass sentence of death, the prosecutors, the judges, then it seems to me there can be no doubt.”

At tea Elisabetha Valerianovna asked her mother, Marie Nikolaevna, to have some milk, and she began to drink it.

Tolstoi said:

“How is it, Mashenka, that you drink it? For myself, if I am told to drink milk, I want sherry, and, when I’m told to drink sherry, I want milk.” ...

Marie Nikolaevna began recalling the past. When they lived in Moscow, soon after the death of their father in 1837-38, Tolstoi, who was then about eight or nine, jumped out of the first-floor window and was badly hurt.

Tolstoi said:

“I remember that quite well. I wanted to see what would happen, and I even remember that, as I jumped, I tried to jump upwards.”

_July 28th._ Yesterday my wife and I were at Yasnaya. Tolstoi’s leg is still painful. He lies in a chair with it stretched out. He suffers from inflammation and from embolism of the vein. They say he must lie like that for six weeks.

We arrived at Yasnaya about eight o’clock. Tolstoi sat in a chair in the dining-room. He played chess with S. Then he began to play chess with me. S. looked on at our game for a time, and then sitting near the round table he began to talk to Sophie Andreevna about the children’s anthology to be chosen from Tolstoi’s works, which he wishes to publish for his Jubilee (Tolstoi’s eighty years). The conversation was terrible. Sophie Andreevna said in the sharpest way that she was not going to be cheated out of her rights, that she would go to a lawyer and would write to the papers about it. S. behaved rather well, and asked her to point out what she would allow to be published; but she would not listen to reason. At last she said that it was the same as if he stole her silver spoons. It was intolerably humiliating and painful.

Sophie Andreevna made attempts to draw Tolstoi into the dispute. Poor Tolstoi! He suffered, frowned, shook his head in horror, but kept silent. The greatest deed in his life is his humility and patience with Sophie Andreevna. His behaviour is all the more difficult, because people criticize him for being humble and long-suffering in this way. How much easier it would be for him to leave this kind of life, which he not only does not want, but which is intolerable to him.

Then it became even worse. S. left the room for a time, and when he returned and sat down near us watching the chess, Sophie Andreevna did not see him and began talking about something and, as usual, complaining of the worries of managing the household, and said:

“When I get rid of the steward, of the thieving, of S., and ...” of something else, I don’t remember what.

Every one was overcome with shame. Tolstoi even uttered a groan. S. turned deadly white. Some one managed to whisper to Sophie Andreevna that he, S., was in the room. She was not in the least put out, and only began saying how much she regretted that she had not died under her operation.

Tolstoi glanced at S.; S. said:

“Did you want to say something, Leo Nikolaevich?”

Tolstoi was silent for a time and then said:

“You understood me.”

Then he added:

“Whom God loves, him He tries.”

It was intolerable. S. left the room quickly and went away without saying good-bye to any one.

There the matter rested. Mme. Zveginzev then arrived. Tolstoi talked about Chertkov’s father:[14]

“When he was about forty-five, gangrene attacked his toe. Then it went further, and his leg had to be amputated at the knee. He went to England. There they made him an artificial leg on which he walked fairly easily. Then the gangrene attacked the other leg. This, too, had to be amputated, but this time much above the knee. He sat in a chair and was carried about. He was very patient and did not groan, although he shuddered with pain all day long. In the evenings he would be given an injection of morphia; he would then revive, read the papers, and talk. He was a brilliant man, a wit, and a great success in society. He used to be taken in his chair to parties. There was even a cult for him; he used to visit the Empress. In society invitations were issued: ‘Venez; M. Chertkoff sera ce soir chez nous.’ He died early. He never drank and never could drink, for the wine went to his head. But once at dinner some one drank, and he took a little glass of vodka, and suddenly died then and there at the dinner party.”

Some one began to talk about bugs.

Tolstoi said:

“When he has bugs, Perna does not scratch, but lies quietly--he allows them to have their fill, like Buddha, who gave himself to be devoured by the tigress; and when the bugs have eaten enough, he sleeps peacefully. In olden days, under the serfdom, when the landed gentry lived very dirtily and bugs were everywhere, if a guest remained for the night, the butler used to be put into the bed first, so as to feed the bugs, and only after that was the bed made for the guest.”

Then I came up to Tolstoi and he talked to me. At first, with a smile, he winked at Mme. Zveginzev’s colossal hat.

I asked him if he was still working on the new “Circle of Reading.” Tolstoi said that he is already working at the twenty-first day. He makes the same number of days in all the twelve months. I told him that I had read the first day and that it seemed to me very good.

Tolstoi said:

“Yes, but it must all be gone over again. At the beginning of each day I put the ideas which can be understood by children and simple people. This is very difficult. I am doing it now, when I am an old man, but I ought to have begun my career as a writer by doing it. I ought to have written so that it could be understood by every one. This is true, too, of your art. And, generally speaking, of all the arts.”

I said to him that in music the most musical language happens to be beyond one’s reach, whether or not one belongs to intellectual circles, either because one is not trained or because one is unmusical by nature.

Tolstoi agreed with me partly, but said that this was the case in other arts as well:

“There are some ideas which can be understood by all and are necessary to all, but are expressed in the language of a small group of people. For instance, the poem ‘I remember the wonderful moment,’ or ‘When to the mortal the noisy day passes into silence’--do you remember them? A peasant couldn’t understand them.”

Tolstoi said:

“I was thinking a great deal about art to-day and I re-read my article, and I must confess I agreed with my ideas.”

Tolstoi is reading the English biography of Chopin (by Huneker). He does not like it. He said to me:

“I have not read books of that kind for a long time. The author does not reveal Chopin’s inner life, but displays his own erudition, his ability to write well and wittily. He is controversial and proves the faults of other biographers. But there is no Chopin here.... Yet there are many interesting facts in it. It is the life of a small circle of poets, writers, and musicians--what a perverted and terrible life! And George Sand, that disgusting woman!... I can’t understand her success.”

Marie Nikolaevna, who was listening, said:

“No! she has done good things. Take, for instance, her _Consuelo_.”

“No, that is not good. It is all false and bad and tedious; I could never read it.”

_July 30th._ There were staying at Yasnaya Marie Alexandrovna, I. Gorbunov, and E. I. Popov. Tolstoi was not well. His leg was still painful. We played chess. Then there was tea. Before the game of chess, when I had come into the drawing-room by myself, Tolstoi was telling Obolensky and the others, whom I mentioned, the plot of Anatole France’s novel, a very complicated novel. I believe it is called _Jocaste_. Tolstoi was telling the plot in detail and was surprised at its absurdity, but said it was written with A. France’s usual mastery.

As I came in, I had met two men downstairs who wished to see Tolstoi. As Tolstoi is ill, Gusev (the secretary) went downstairs. One of the men turned out to be a sectarian, “an immortalist,” and the other sent up by Gusev a strange note in which, referring to Boulanger’s promise to try to find a job for him, he said something foolish about his desire to be useful to Tolstoi. Altogether there was no sense, no purpose in it.

Tolstoi said:

“It is amazing, why can’t they understand? It seems to him that only he and myself exist, and yet there are hundreds of him, and only one of me. And what can I do for him?”

At tea Tolstoi talked about the ‘immortalist.’ Marie Nikolaevna asked what sect it was.

Tolstoi said to her:

“The ‘immortalists’ believe that if they go on believing they will never die. And when one of them dies they say: he did not really believe.... I quite understand it. With them immortality is identified with the body. At a low level of religious development that is understandable. The Church doctrine also thinks of resurrection as a resurrection in the flesh.”

Marie Nikolaevna began to say that she believed that there _would_ be something after death.

Tolstoi said:

“In the first place, as to our state after death, it is impossible to say that it _will_ be. Immortality neither will be, nor was, but _is_. It is outside the forms of time and space. People who keep on asking what is going to happen after death should be told: the very same thing that _was_ before birth. We do not know, neither can we or must we know what existence outside of the body, fusion with God, is like, and, when people begin telling me about it--even if some one from the other world were to come to tell me about it--I would not believe and I should say that I do not need it. That which we need, we always are aware of and know without doubting. One ought to live so that one’s life should help on the happiness of other people.”

Marie Nikolaevna said that although she neither believes in nor admits the existence of paradise and hell with real suffering, nevertheless there is hell for the soul in the constant suffering which comes from realization of evil done or of good undone.

“I can’t admit,” she added, “that one who lives badly and has done no good will achieve the same fusion with God as the man who has lived justly.”

Tolstoi was about to say something, but Marie Nikolaevna interrupted him.

Tolstoi said quietly and gently:

“I listened to you, Mashenka; now do you listen to me. Compared with the perfection of God, the difference which exists in life between the most righteous man and the most wicked is so insignificant that it is simply equal to nothing. And how am I to admit that God, the God whom I realize through love, can be revengeful and punish?”

“But suppose one lived wickedly all one’s life and died without repenting?” Marie Nikolaevna said.

“Ah, Mashenka,” Tolstoi said, “but what man wishes to be bad? The man whom we think bad we must love and pity for his sufferings. Nobody wants to live a bad life and to suffer. He must not be punished, he must be pitied, because he does not know the truth.”

Marie Nikolaevna still could not give up her point of view.

Tolstoi said to her:

“Very well, if what you believe in satisfies you; and this must never be condemned, only you must not prevent people from believing what their conscience prompts them to, and you must not try to make them believe differently, as all the Churches do, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Orthodox, the Buddhist, the Muhammadan.” ...

Towards the end of July, Klechkovsky came to Yasnaya and played.

Tolstoi lay on the sofa, and, after Klechkovsky had finished playing, we sat by Tolstoi. Klechkovsky began talking about himself, how dissatisfied he was with his life, how he would like to live on the land, to give up his music teaching and the Institute. But he can’t do it because his father would be much upset by such a sudden change in his life. He also said that he would like to go and live in a community.

Tolstoi replied to him:

“Why in a community? One ought not to separate oneself from other people. If there is anything good in a man, let that light be spread about him wherever he lives. What numbers of people settled in communities, yet nothing came of it! All their energies went at first into external arrangement of life, and when at length they settled down, there began to be quarrels and gossip, and it all fell to pieces.... You are grumbling at the Institute, yet there is the porter there whom you could treat kindly, like a human being, and then you would have done a good act. And the girls, your pupils? Can’t you make a great deal that is good out of those relations? One can always shut oneself off from people, but nothing good will come of it. I say this not because I want to justify my own life. I live in the wrong way and know it is the wrong way, but I have always wanted and tried to live better, only I could not.... I shall go to God in the consciousness that I did what I could to make my life better.

“One should never attempt to arrange life beforehand. At times I ask myself what I should do if I remained here alone? For instance, I should say to Ilya Vasilevich: ‘It would be nice if you did the rooms and tidied them to-day, and I will do them to-morrow.’ Then we should eat together. And so on with one thing after another, as things would arrange themselves. Only it has to be remembered that the ideal of the material life cannot be fully realized, any more than the ideal of the spiritual life. The whole point is in the constant effort to approach the ideal. If I gave up everything now and went away, Sophie Andreevna would hate me, and the evil of that would perhaps be worse. You have your father ... and so it is with every one.”

Tolstoi said before this:

“I said to Sophie Andreevna to-day, and I believe she was hurt by it: the first concern in life must be for the things of the soul, and, if household duties interfere with that, then damn household duties.”

Last night we sat on the balcony.

Tolstoi said that he had had a nice letter from a simple man who had read several of his books, and who asked, at the end of his letter, where there were people who live a Christian life, for he would leave everything and go and live with them. Tolstoi said that he replied to him much in the same way as he had done to Klechkovsky.

Tolstoi added:

“I think that even if one was a woman in a brothel, or a gaoler, one ought not suddenly to give up one’s work. Certainly any one who realizes the evil of such a life will not go on with it, but the important thing is not the external change.”

Tolstoi said he had received three letters: one from Mr. Grekov, who sent him three copies of his book, _The Message of Peace_, and wrote that his book was so remarkable that, if it were widely read, it would revolutionize human life; the second letter was from an intellectual who asked for a loan of 800 roubles; and the third from a simple illiterate peasant, a good serious letter. Tolstoi said that, besides letters asking for money, he also receives letters from authors sending him their books, and begging that Tolstoi will use his authority to make their books known.

“An odd idea,” Tolstoi said, “that I should try to spread opinions which I neither sympathize with nor share.”

_August 5th._ Marie Nikolaevna told how the steward Fokanich had once stolen 400 roubles from Tolstoi, and Tolstoi took it rather indifferently. Soon afterwards Sergey Nikolaevich, Tolstoi’s brother, was very much worried about his affairs, and when he was told that it was not worth while to be so worried, he said:

“It doesn’t matter to Levochka that Fokanich stole 400 roubles from him; he will write a story and get the money back; and he will describe Fokanich into the bargain; but where shall I get my money?”

Tolstoi replied to this:

“Mashenka, how can you remember all this? But I heard an expression to-day that keeps on coming back into my mind.”

And Tolstoi told how during lunch to-day an unusually importunate beggar arrived. He stood by the balcony and began saying how happy he was to see and salute Tolstoi, etc.... He was given something, but he was not satisfied, went to the kitchen, and began begging with extraordinary importunity. After lunch when Tolstoi was coming down from the balcony, Ilya Vasilevich, pointing to the beggar, said to Tolstoi:

“Yes, that fellow could beg the parson’s mare off him.”

_August 19th._ At tea the conversation turned upon modern literature. Tolstoi asked Buturlin to send him anything new he could find by Anatole France, whom Tolstoi values very highly. He spoke again.

Tolstoi said:

“I cannot remember getting a strong impression from a book for a long time. I do not think it is because I am old; it seems to me that modern literature, like the Roman literature in the past, is coming to an end. There is no one, neither in the West nor here.”

Buturlin asked Tolstoi if he remembered Oscar Wilde’s _De Profundis_.

Tolstoi had not read it, but said:

“I forget everything now, but I remember having tried to read Wilde, and it has left me with an impression that he was not worth reading.”

Speaking of modern Russian writers Tolstoi mentioned Kuprin.

“His scope is small; he knows the life of the soldiers, but still he has real artistic power. The others simply have nothing to say, and are on the look-out for new forms. But why look for new forms? If you have something to say, you should only ask for time in which to say what you want, but you won’t need to seek new forms.”

Apropos of Eltzbacher’s book on anarchy, which Tolstoi was re-reading, he said:

“Christian anarchy is a narrow definition of the Christian conception of the world, but anarchy follows certainly from Christianity in its application to social life.”

_September 3rd._ Tolstoi again spoke about the old German mystic, Angelus Silesius. Tolstoi asked some one to fetch his book (a large old volume) and read aloud several aphorisms, translating them as he read. When he came to the passage: “If God did not love Himself in us, we could neither love ourselves, nor God,” Tolstoi exclaimed:

“Ah, how well that’s said!”

Referring to some account in the papers of a conversation with him, Tolstoi said:

“If I were to live for another eighty years, and were never to cease talking, I could not manage to say all the sayings that are attributed to me.”

_September 6th._ Tolstoi said, with reference to the addresses and congratulations on his eightieth birthday (August 28th, 1908) which keep on coming:

“I believe I am right in saying that I have no vanity, but I can’t help being touched involuntarily. And yet, at my age, I live so far away from all this, it is all so unnecessary and so humiliating. Only one thing is necessary, the inner life of the spirit.”

On August 29th, when more than two thousand telegrams of congratulation arrived, Tolstoi said:

“I feel with joy that I have utterly lost the power of being interested in all this. In the past, I remember, I experienced a feeling of pride; I was glad at my success. But now--and I think it is not false modesty--it is a matter of absolute indifference to me. Perhaps it is because I have had too much success. It is like sweets: if you have too many, you feel surfeited. But one thing is pleasant: in nearly all the letters, congratulations, addresses, the same thing is repeated--it has simply become a truism--that I have destroyed religious delusions and opened the way for the search after truth. If it is true, it is just what I have wanted and tried to do all my life, and this is very dear to me.”

FOOTNOTE:

[14] Gregory Ivanovich Chertkov (1828-1884), Adjutant-General.

1909

_February 10th._ Once in the winter Sophie Andreevna in Tolstoi’s presence criticized V. G. Chertkov bitterly, which, as usual, pained him very much. This was in the morning. In the middle of the conversation Tolstoi got up and went into his room.

Some time later he came into the dining-room, stood at the door, and said in an agitated voice:

“There is an old nurse in our house. I scarcely know her, but I love her because she loves Sasha, and when there is nothing like that in a house, there is no real love.” ...

After saying this, Tolstoi turned and quietly went to his room.

To-night Tolstoi said:

“When one listens to music, it agitates, excites, elates, but one does not think. But when I play patience in my room, the finest thoughts come to me.”

During work, especially if he found some difficulty, Tolstoi used to play patience. This was his habit throughout his life. When he was writing Part III. of _Resurrection_, Tolstoi was undecided for a long time about the fate of Katyusha Maslov. Now he decided that Nekhlyudov should marry her, now that he should not. At last he decided to play a game of patience: if the patience came out, Nekhlyudov should marry her; if not, then he should not marry her. The patience did not come out. Once Tolstoi told me that he had found a passage in a book, which he was writing, very difficult. He hesitated for a long time what to do, but made up his mind and wrote it. Then he decided to test it by means of a game of patience; if the patience came out, that meant that what he had written was good; if it did not come out, then it was bad. The patience did not come out, and Tolstoi said to himself: “Never mind, it is good as it is!” and he left it as he had written it.

_May 24th._ Tolstoi was speaking about Dietrich’s German book on Goethe. The author sent him the book and asked him his opinion.

Tolstoi said:

“It is amazing! So far back as 1824 Goethe wrote that sincerity was become almost impossible in art, because of the multitude of newspapers, journals, and reviews. The artist reads them, involuntarily pays attention to them, and cannot be perfectly sincere. What would he say if he lived now!”

THE END

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