Chapter L: N. looked at me and said

“Now our little cockerel is gone.” ...

I arrived at Yasnaya on July 6th after eleven o’clock at night.

I got up early in the morning and went to the river with L. N. to bathe. L. N. works every day from breakfast till lunch. He seemed to me to be in good spirits. In the morning at coffee he said:

“I feel as though I were nineteen or twenty.”

Yasnaya then used to be crowded and gay. Nearly all the children were at home. All the young people played tennis and enjoyed themselves. Occasionally L. N. would also play tennis. In the evening all used to go out for long walks in the woods. L. N. always loved to find short cuts, and would take us all into wonderful places in the forests. It must be admitted that the ‘short-cuts’ nearly always made the walks longer.

Once L. N. and myself were left far behind the others. L. N. said: “Let us catch them up!” And for half a mile or three-quarters I, twenty-one years old, and he, sixty-eight, ran neck and neck. On another occasion his physical vigour struck me even more. Mikhail Lvovich was doing a very difficult gymnastic exercise which he could not bring off. L. N. looked and looked, could not stand it any longer, and said: “Let me try,” and to the surprise of all present he at once did the exercise better than his son.

When I was leaving Yasnaya and my carriage was waiting for me, L. N. took my arm, led me aside, and said:

“I have been meaning all this time to tell you, and now as you are going I shall tell you: however great a gift for music you may have, and however much time and power you may spend on it, do remember that, above all, the most important of all is to be a man. It is always necessary to remember that art is not everything.... In your relations with people it is necessary to try to give them as much as possible and to take from them as little as possible. Forgive me for saying this, but I did not want to say good-bye to you without having told you what I think.”

Another of L. N.’s sayings at this time was: “The ego is the temporary thing that limits our immortal essence. Belief in personal immortality always seems to me a misunderstanding.”

“Materialism is the most mystical of all doctrines: it makes a belief in some mythical matter, which creates everything out of itself, the foundation of everything. It is sillier than a belief in the Trinity!”

1897

_Moscow, January 6th._ To-day I spent the evening at the Tolstois’. L. N. was talkative. The conversation was on various topics, beginning with the peasants and ending with the latest “decadent” movement in art.

L. N. read aloud certain passages of Maeterlinck’s new play _Aglavaine et Sélysette_. His attitude to it is one of complete indifference.