1900
Moscow, January 29th. Tolstoi had a conversation with V. E. Den when Chalyapin was here. Tolstoi is working now on the article on the labour question, “New Slavery,” and the conversation turned upon labour.
Tolstoi said: “We are going through a new stage in the evolution of slavery: the slavery of the working men suffering under the yoke of the well-to-do classes.
“Slavery will never cease at the bottom first, exclusively from the movement of the slaves themselves. We saw it in America, and here during the serfdom of the peasants. So must it happen now again. It is only when we realize that it is a shame to have slaves, that we shall cease to be slave-drivers, and shall voluntarily give up exploiting the working classes.
“Freedom cannot come from the slaves. Individual slaves who have rid themselves of the yoke of slavery become in the majority of cases particularly harsh oppressors and tyrants over their late brothers. Nor can it be otherwise. How can you expect from them—harassed and tortured—anything else? It is only when we voluntarily give up the shameful use of the labour of the slaves, our brothers, that slavery will come to an end.
“Science, in so far as it describes and clarifies the real state of things, does a useful and necessary work. But as soon as it starts laying down programmes for the future, it becomes useless. All these ideas about an eight-hour working day, etc., only increase and legalize the evil. Labour must be free, not slavish, and that is all.
“When a peasant gets up before sunrise and works all day long in the field, he is not a slave. He has intercourse with nature, he does a useful work. But when he stands by a piece of machinery in a Morosov’s factory all his life long, manufacturing textiles which he will never see, and neither himself nor any one of his people will ever use, then he is a slave and perishes in slavery.
“Railways, telephones, and the other accessories of the civilized world—all that is useful and good. But if one had to choose either the whole of this civilization, for which not hundreds of thousands of ruined lives are required, but only the certain destruction of one single existence, or, on the other hand, no civilization at all, then no thank you for this civilization with its railways and telephones, if a necessary condition of them is the destruction of human life.”
February 24th. On the 18th and 20th I was at the Tolstois’. On the 18th Tolstoi went to the “Pod Deviche” playhouse and afterwards to a dirty public-house, where there is an extraordinary amount of drunkenness and debauchery, to make observations.
Tolstoi said:
“Twenty years ago I saw at the ‘Pod Deviche,’ Churkin, a play composed by a drunken tramp, and this time I saw Stenka Rasin—and it is all the same thing. Murder and violence are represented as heroic and are acclaimed by the crowd. And it is remarkable that whilst every word in a book which may enlighten the minds of the people is carefully struck out by the censorship, such performances are readily allowed, under the police inspector’s censorship. During the last twenty years probably over a million people have seen these Churkins and Rasins.”
In telling this, Tolstoi recollected how he was once in a workhouse where the priest explained the Gospels:
“The passage was read where Christ says: ‘It is said: thou shalt not kill; but I say unto you, do not be angry without cause.’ The priest began to explain that one must not be angry without cause, but, if the authorities become angry, that is right and as it should be. ‘Do not kill’ also does not mean that one should never kill. In war or at an execution, killing is necessary and is not a sin. This is the only chance that an illiterate person has to understand the meaning of the Gospels, for in church all the chapters are either indistinctly read by the sexton, or shouted so loud that they are perfectly unintelligible—and this is the way in which the Gospels are explained to the people!”
A long talk about the Boers and the English took place.
Tolstoi said:
“I always consider that moral motives are effective and decisive historically. And now, when the universal dislike of the English is so clearly pronounced—I shall not live to see it, but it seems to me that the power of England will be much shaken. And I say this not out of an unconscious Russian patriotism. If Poland or Finland rose against Russia and success were on their side, my sympathy would be on their side as the oppressed.
“The Russian people, speaking impartially, is perhaps the most Christian of all in its moral character. It is partly to be explained by the fact that the Gospels have been read by the Russian people for nine hundred years; Catholics don’t know the Gospels even now, and other races came to know the Gospel only after the Reformation.
“I was struck when I saw in the streets of London a criminal escorted by the police, and the police had to protect him energetically from the crowd, which threatened to tear him to pieces. With us it is just the opposite: police have to drive away by force the people who try to give the criminal money and bread. With us, criminals and prisoners are ‘little unhappy ones.’ But now, unfortunately, there is a change for the worse, and our abominable Government tries with all its might and main to rouse hatred against the condemned. In Siberia, even prizes are given to any one who kills an escaped prisoner.”
April 29th. The conversation was on Shakespeare. Tolstoi is not very fond of him. Tolstoi said:
“Three times in my life I have read through Shakespeare and Goethe from end to end, and I could never make out in what their charm consisted.”
According to Tolstoi, Goethe is cold. Among his (Goethe’s) works he likes many of the lyrics and Hermann and Dorothea. He does not like Goethe’s dramatic works, and his novels he considers quite weak. Tolstoi did not speak about Faust.
Tolstoi is very fond of Schiller, and said: “He is a genuine man!” He loves almost all his works, particularly The Robbers and Don Carlos, also Mary Stuart, William Tell, and Wallenstein.
Then A. M. Sukhotin, a man over seventy, read aloud Turgenev’s Old Portraits superbly. Tolstoi did not remember the story, and was in great delight over it. He said:
“It is only after reading all these moderns that one really appreciates Turgenev.”
Tolstoi remembered Turgenev with great love. He said, in passing:
“When Turgenev died I wanted to read a paper about him. I wanted especially, in view of the misunderstandings that there had been between us, to remember and relate all the good that was so abundant in him, and to tell what I loved in him. The lecture was not given. Dolgorukov did not allow it.”
The conversation turned on Chekhov and Gorky. Tolstoi as usual praised Chekhov’s artistic gift very highly. The lack of a definite world conception grieves him in Chekhov; and in this respect Tolstoi prefers Gorky. Of Gorky Tolstoi said:
“You know what he is from his works. Gorky’s great and very serious essential defect is a poorly developed sense of proportion, and this is extremely important. I pointed out this defect to Gorky himself, and as an instance I drew his attention to his misuse of the method of animating inanimate things. Then Gorky said that in his opinion it was a good method, and gave an instance of it in his story Malva, where it says: ‘the sea laughed.’ I replied to him that, if on certain occasions the method might be very successful, nevertheless one ought not to abuse it.”
Yesterday Ushakov asked Tolstoi about Gromeka. Tolstoi and Tatyana Lvovna spoke a great deal about him.
Tolstoi said:
“He was a sympathetic, passionate, and gifted man. He shot himself when still a young man, it was said because he was mentally deranged.”
Tatyana Lvovna says, by the way, that Gromeka was her first admirer and proposed to her when she was sixteen.
Tolstoi values Gromeka’s criticism very much. He said:
“It was a pleasure to me that a man who sympathized with me could see even in War and Peace and in Anna Karenin a great deal of what I was afterwards to say and write.”
Tolstoi also said:
“When I wrote the story What Men Live by, Fet said, ‘Well, what do people live by? By money, of course.’”
I observed that Fet had probably said it in joke. Tolstoi replied:
“No, it was his conviction. And, as often happens, what people try very stubbornly to get, they do get. Fet all his life long wanted to become rich, and he became rich. His brothers and sisters, it seems, went out of their minds, and all their fortunes came to him.”
Fet wrote in Tatyana Lvovna’s album that the unhappiest day of his life was the one when he saw that he was going to be ruined.
I talked a good deal with Tolstoi to-day. Tolstoi said about current events:
“I am not so much horrified at these murders in the Transvaal, and now in China, as by the open declaration of immoral motives. They used at least to cloak themselves hypocritically in good motives, but now that this is no longer possible they express all their immoral and cruel intentions and claims openly.”
We spoke about the abolition of deportation. Tolstoi considers it worse than the other method. He said:
“Instead of making it possible for a man to order his life in a new place, he is put into prison. The Government has already voted six and a half millions for the enlargement of prisons. And this money will again be flayed off the peasants, for there is nowhere else to take it from.”
Of our courts of justice Tolstoi said:
“How absurd our courts are can be seen at each stage. For example, take the case of the Tula priest. How was it that the Tula court acquitted him, and then after the acquittal the Oriol court sentenced him to hard labour for twenty years? If such uncertainty is possible, what are those verdicts worth? Indeed, it depends on a thousand accidents: the temper of the jurymen, the behaviour of the prisoner at the bar—the prisoner bursts into tears, and the impression produced secures his acquittal. It is merely a game of heads and tails! It would be simpler and easier to say: Heads or tails, and to give sentence accordingly. It simply baffles me how decent people can be judges!”
Of the case of S. I. Mamontov, Tolstoi said:
“One is certainly very sorry for him: he is an old, unhappy man; but, on the other hand, you have to remember that the man has squandered twelve millions, or whatever it may be; he certainly spent between one and two hundred thousand roubles per annum, and is then acquitted, while another wretched man steals a trifle and is condemned for it. And in his case, too, money was spent on expensive lawyers. This reminds me of the anecdote I read in the papers. A cashier who embezzled twenty-five thousand roubles came to a lawyer to ask him to undertake his defence. The lawyer asked him: ‘Is there any more money left?’ The cashier said that there was another twenty-five thousand. Then the lawyer said: ‘Take the rest and give it to me, and then I will undertake your case.’
“And why should the jury be able to pardon? Only the plaintiff can pardon; but the jury whom he has not hurt have nothing to pardon him for.
“I once talked to N. V. Davidov, and said to him that all punishment may be dispensed with, yet an enquiry ought to be made; and when the crime is proved, they should go to the criminal and accuse him in the presence of all of his crime, and should bring forward the proof of his guilt. It is quite likely that the man will say: ‘Be damned to you, it is none of your business!’ But still I think that this method would more often give positive results than the existing system of punishment.”
Speaking of the Government, Tolstoi said:
“I wonder why they have not put me into prison yet? Particularly now, after my article on ‘Patriotism.’ Perhaps they have not read it yet? It ought to be sent to them.”
Tolstoi spoke again of his indifference to modern complicated music:
“I tried to accustom myself to modern dissonances, but these are all a perversion of taste. A modern composer takes a musical idea, now and then even a lovely one, and twists it round and round without end or measure, combines it with other themes, and, when at last he manages to express something simple, one is ready to heave a sigh of relief and say: Thank God!”
July 4th. Yesterday Tolstoi said to me:
“Buddha says that happiness consists in doing as much good as possible to others. However strange this may seem on the face of it, yet it is true without a doubt: happiness is only possible when the struggle for personal happiness is renounced.”
Then Tolstoi smiled and said:
“And yet you play the piano! But certainly that is better than many other things. At any rate you need not pass sentence on any one, or commit murder.”
Tolstoi said of newspapers:
“At present the newspaper infection has reached its ultimate limits. All the questions of the day are artificially puffed up by the newspapers. The worst danger is that the newspapers present everything ready made, without making people stop to think about anything. A liberal Kuzminsky, or even a Koni, takes his fresh newspaper with his morning coffee, reads it, goes to his court, where he meets others who have just read the very same newspaper, and the contagion is spread!”
Tolstoi went on to say:
“It has suddenly become perfectly clear to me that the evil lies in regulations, i.e. the chief thing is not that people do wrong, but that some force others to do a wrong which is considered to be right. Hitherto not a single one even of the most extreme socialist doctrines has dispensed with compulsion. But slavery will only cease when every one is free to choose his work and the time needed for it.
“People always put an end to things by asking: ‘Well; let us suppose that we have liberated the slave, what will follow next? How is it going to be done?’ I do not know how it is going to be done, but I do know that the existing order is the greatest evil, and therefore I must try to take as little part as possible in keeping it going. But what will come in place of that evil—I do not and must not know. For what reason did we, the well-to-do classes, take upon ourselves the rôle of the controllers of life? Let the freed slaves arrange things for themselves. I know only this, that it is bad to be a slave and worse still to own slaves, and therefore I must rid myself of the evil. That’s all.”
Tolstoi wanted to take for the motto of his new book, The Slavery of our Times, Marx’s saying that since the capitalists made themselves masters of the working classes the European governments lost all shame.
Tolstoi praised Elzbacher’s book on anarchy, in which the doctrines of seven anarchists are expounded: of Godwin, Proudhon, Max Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, B. P. Tucker, and Tolstoi himself.
Tolstoi said:
“I myself can remember at the beginning of the socialist movement in Russia that the word ‘socialist’ was only spoken in a whisper; but when Professor Ivanyukov in the first years of the eighties openly wrote his book on socialism, it was already a widely spread doctrine in Western Europe. It is in the same way that the public now regard anarchism, often crudely identifying this doctrine with the throwing of bombs.”
Of Elzbacher’s book Tolstoi said:
“At the end of the book is an alphabetical index of the words used by the seven anarchists. It appears that the word Zwang, compulsion, violence, is absent only in the exposition of my views.”
Sergeenko was telling Tolstoi about Volinsky’s book on Leonardo da Vinci, and said it was a fine book.
Tolstoi remarked:
“Yes, it seems to be one of those books which are good in that it is not necessary to read them.”
Tolstoi said yesterday about doctors and science generally:
“How trivial and unnecessary are all our sciences! It is true that exact sciences—mathematics and chemistry, although quite unimportant for the improvement of moral life, are at any rate exact and positive. But, although medical science has a great deal of knowledge, that amount is nothing in proportion to what is needed in order actually to know anything. And what is the good of it?”
I replied to Tolstoi that, although in theory it may be so, yet in practice, when some one is ill, one always wants to help them.
To this Tolstoi replied:
“It often happens that if some one is seriously ill, those around him, at the bottom of their hearts, want him to die, in order to be rid of him—he is in their way.”
Tolstoi said to Sophie Andreevna:
“It’s time for us to die,” and he quoted Pushkin’s lines:
“And then our heir in a lucky moment will crush us down with a heavy monument.”
July 5th. Tolstoi went for a walk to-day with myself and P. A. Sergeenko. We passed through the splendid young fir-tree forest on the left of the road to Kozlovka.
Tolstoi said:
“I am trying to like and appreciate the modern writers, but it is so difficult. Dostoevsky often wrote so badly, so weakly and incompetently, from the point of view of technique; but what a lot he always has to say! Taine said that for one page of Dostoevsky’s he would give all French novels.
“And technique has now reached a wonderful perfection. A Mme. Lukhmanov or Mme. D. writes quite wonderfully. What are Turgenev or myself compared with her! She could give us forty points’ start of her!”
Tolstoi has recently re-read all Chekhov’s short stories. To-day he said of Chekhov:
“His mastery is of the highest order. I have been re-reading his stories with the greatest pleasure. Some, as, for instance, ‘Children,’ ‘Sleepy,’ ‘In Court,’ are real masterpieces. I really read one story after another with great pleasure. And yet it is all a mosaic; there is no connecting inner link.
“The most important thing in a work of art is that it should have a kind of focus, i.e. there should be some place where all the rays meet or from which they issue. And this focus must not be able to be completely explained in words. This indeed is one of the significant facts about a true work of art—that its content in its entirety can be expressed only by itself.”
Tolstoi finds a great likeness between the talents of Chekhov and Maupassant. He prefers Maupassant for his greater joy in life. But, on the other hand, Chekhov’s gift is a purer gift then Maupassant’s.
Sergeenko, I don’t remember in what connection, recalled a poem by Lermontov.
Tolstoi said:
“He had indeed a permanent and powerful seeking after truth! Pushkin has not that moral significance, but the sense of beauty is developed in him more highly than in any one else. In Chekhov, and in modern writers generally, there is an extraordinary development of the technique of realism. In Chekhov everything is real to the verge of illusion. His stories give the impression of a stereoscope. He throws words about in apparent disorder, and, like an impressionist painter, he achieves wonderful results by his touches.”
Tolstoi likes M. Gorky very much as a man. He begins, however, to be disappointed with his work.
Tolstoi said of him:
“Gorky lacks a sense of proportion. He has a familiar style which is unpleasant.”
Tolstoi wrote a short preface to Von Polenz’s novel Der Büttnerbauer.
On that occasion he said:
“As I read the novel, I kept saying to myself: ‘Why did not you, you fool, write this novel?’—indeed, I know this world; and how very important it is to point out the poetry of peasant life! Men with their civilization will cut down this lime tree here, this forest; they will lay pavements and make houses with tall chimneys, and they will destroy the boundless beauty of natural life.”
On my asking him whether he had ever tried to write such a novel, Tolstoi said that he had done so several times long ago.
Tolstoi said of Grigorovich:
“He is now old-fashioned and seems feeble, but he is an important and remarkable writer, and God grant that Chekhov may be a tenth part as important as Grigorovich was. He belonged to the number of the best men who found an important movement. He has also many artistic merits. For instance, in the beginning of his Anton Goremika, when the old peasant comes home and gives his son or grandson a twig, it is a moving incident which depicts the old peasant as well as the simplicity and artlessness of his life.”
Of Turgenev, Tolstoi said:
“He was a typical representative of the men of the ’fifties—a radical in the best sense of the word. His struggle against serfdom is remarkable, and also his love for what he describes; for instance, the way he describes the old man in Old Portraits. And then there is his sensitiveness to the beauties of nature.”
Speaking of the province of criticism, Tolstoi said:
“The value of criticism consists in pointing out all the good that there is in this or that work of art, and in thus directing the opinion of the public, whose tastes are mostly crude and the majority of whom have no feeling for beauty. Just as it is difficult to be a really good critic, so it is easy for the most stupid and limited man to become a critic; and as good critics are needed, so bad critics are merely harmful. It is a particularly absurd and cheap habit of critics to express, in talking of other people’s work, all sorts of personal ideas which have nothing to do with the book they are criticizing. This is the most useless gossip.”
July 7th. Tolstoi said that all human vices can be reduced to three classes: (1) anger, malevolence; (2) vanity; and (3) lust—in the widest sense of the word. The last is the most powerful.
In the morning, at coffee, Tolstoi sighed and said:
“Yes, it is hard, it is hard.... It is hard because falsehood and arrogance prevail in the higher ranks of society, and because there is much darkness among the people. The other day two sectarians of the priestless sect came to me from Tula: one a young one, evidently of little understanding, and the other an old man, who, while we talked, kept putting on his spectacles. The old man turned out to be understanding, wise, and said many things to the point, as though he agreed with my religious views; and yet when I offered them tea they refused because they had not brought their tea things with them.”
On the occasion of the Boxer rising Tolstoi said:
“It is terrible that it should happen in such an awful way. But, although it is difficult to foresee, yet it is to be expected that after the war a greater understanding will take place between Europeans and the Chinese; and I think that the Chinese are bound to have a most beneficial influence on us, if only because of their extraordinary capacity for work and of their ability to grow more on a small plot of land and obtain better results than we do on a space a dozen times larger.”
Tolstoi compares the present state of Europe with the end of the Roman Empire. The Chinese, in his opinion, play the part of the “barbarians.”
Tolstoi said to-day:
“All our actions are divided into those which have a value, and those which have no value at all, in the face of death. If I were told that I had to die to-morrow, I should not go out for a ride on horseback; but if I were about to die this moment, and Levochka here” (Leo Lvovich’s son, who passed across the terrace at that moment with his nurse) “fell and burst into tears, I should run to him and pick him up. We are all in the position of passengers from a ship which has reached an island. We have gone on shore, we walk about and gather shells, but we must always remember that, when the whistle sounds, all the little shells will have to be thrown away and we must run to the boat.”
Sophie Andreevna, who was present during some of the talks, argued all the time, and answered Tolstoi in a very feminine way. When Sophie Andreevna on a walk said that a woman, while her husband writes novels and philosophical articles, has to bear, to give birth to, and to rear her children, and how difficult all this is, Tolstoi became indignant and exclaimed with a bitterness that was rare in him:
“What terrible things you are saying, Sonechka! A woman who is annoyed at having children and does not desire them is not a woman, but a whore!”
In the evening we sat on the balcony: Tolstoi, Sergeenko, and myself.
Tolstoi wondered at the illogicality of women, and turning to me said:
“Peter Alexeevich and myself have a right to speak about women, but you have none. One must have a wife and daughters to do this. Daughters are perhaps the more important of the two. Daughters are the only women who are not ‘women’ at all to a man, and who can be known fully from the beginning. With sisters such a relation is impossible, for one grows up side by side with them; a certain rivalry enters into the relation, and one cannot know one’s sister, entirely, as a whole.”
Sergeenko asked Tolstoi’s advice as to how to educate his son sexually.
Tolstoi said to him:
“These questions are so dangerous that it is better that parents should not speak of them at all to their children. It is only necessary to watch the influence of surroundings. At times a vicious boy, or one who is not vicious at all, but spoilt in this sense, can corrupt a whole circle of boys. It is best of all that a growing boy should be as much as possible among young girls. But there are among modern girls some that are worse than young men. If a feeling of romance is felt for any girl, this is the best protection against immorality....”
July 12th. Yesterday I returned home. On the day of my departure during our walk Sophie Andreevna was talking about the sale of the Samara estate, which she has completed for four hundred and fifty thousand roubles (Tolstoi originally bought the estate cheap), and by the sale of which Andrey, Michael, and Alexandra will get 150,000 roubles each. This money was the topic of conversation during the last few days, and how the sons meant to buy this or some other estate. At the end of the walk Tolstoi and myself found ourselves ahead of the others. Suddenly he gave a heavy sigh.
I asked him: “Why do you sigh, Leo Nikolaevich?”
“If you knew how painful it is to me to hear it all! I have it always on my conscience that I, with my wish to renounce property, once bought estates. It is funny to think that it seems now as if I had wished to make provision for my children, and in doing so I did them the greatest injury. Look at my Andryusha. He is completely incapable of doing anything, and lives on the people whom I once robbed and whom my children keep on robbing. How terrible it is to listen to all this talk now, to watch it all going on! It is so opposed to my ideas and desires and to everything I live by.... Oh! that they would spare me!...”
Tolstoi was silent for a time, and then said:
“Why did I suddenly begin complaining?”
At that moment Tatyana Lvovna came up, and our conversation turned on other subjects.
Tolstoi talked about poetry.
“When a poem deals with love, flowers, etc., it is a comparatively innocent occupation until the age of sixteen. But to express in verse an important and serious idea without distorting the idea is almost impossible. How very difficult it is to express one’s thoughts by words only, so that every one understands just what you want to express! How much more difficult, then, it is when the writer is bound by metre and rhyme! Only the very great poets have succeeded in doing it, and rarely too. Perfectly false ideas are often hidden behind verses.”
An undergraduate who had written an article upon Tolstoi in reply to Nordau’s criticism came, and turned out to be a foolish young man. Tolstoi had been unwell for the last few days and in a bad temper, so that he came to us quite upset and said:
“No, it is time, it is time for me to die! They stick to some single idea, which they arbitrarily choose from the rest, and go on and on repeating: Non-resistance! non-resistance! How am I to blame for it?”
Sophie Andreevna said to me:
“The private life of famous men is always distorted in their biographies. They are sure to make me out a Xantippe. You must take my side, Alexander Borisovich!” ...
During our walk Sophie Andreevna showed me the spot which is called “the apiary,” and said:
“There actually was an apiary here once. Leo N. was at one time mad about bees, and used to spend whole days in the apiary. We often drove here, taking a samovar and having tea here. Once Fet came here, and we went to join Leo N. at the apiary. It was a wonderful evening; we sat here for a long time; and there were many glow-worms in the grass. Leo N. said to me: ‘Now, Sonia, you always wanted emerald earrings; take two glow-worms for earrings.’ Thereupon Fet wrote a poem in which were these lines:
In my hand is thy hand—what a marvel!
On the ground are two glow-worms, two emeralds.”
At another point Sophie Andreevna showed me the field where Tolstoi and Turgenev once stood when shooting, and she was with them.
Sophie Andreevna said:
“It was the last time Turgenev stayed at Yasnaya, not long before his death. I asked him: ‘Ivan Sergeevich, why don’t you write now?’ He answered: ‘In order to write I had always to be a little in love. Now I am old, I can’t fall in love any more, and that is why I have stopped writing.’”
December 27th. Last night I was at the Tolstois’. There were Tolstoi, Ilya, and Andrey (Tolstoi’s sons). A message arrived that Tatyana Lvovna had given birth prematurely to a stillborn child; a day before, news reached Yasnaya Polyana that the son of Leo Lvovich, a boy of about two, was dead. Sophie Andreevna left for Yasnaya. There was an atmosphere of depression.
Tolstoi played chess with me. Later P. S. Usov came, who also played a game of chess with Tolstoi. We began to talk. Tolstoi became animated. The post arrived. There were three letters from Chertkov. In one of them there were many pages of closely written manuscript.
Tolstoi glanced at it and said:
“It is probably a woman’s writing. How nice it would be if one need not read it!”
The manuscript, however, turned out not to be from a woman, so that Tolstoi put it aside to read it.
Referring to his daughter’s misfortune, Tolstoi said:
“I am not sorry that my daughters have no children; I cannot be glad that I have grandchildren. I know that they will inevitably grow up to be idlers. My daughters are certainly anxious that this should not be so, but considering the surroundings in which they will have to be brought up, it is very difficult to avoid it. All my life long I have had these surroundings, and, however much I struggle, I can do nothing. Now, during the Christmas season I can’t bear to look at this mad extravagance; these visits. What a terrible absurdity it is!”
Usov was saying in what circumstances a doctor has the right to bring on birth artificially, thereby killing the baby.
Tolstoi replied:
“It is always immoral. For the most part, when there are various ways of relieving the patient, oxygen, etc., it is difficult to abstain from using them; but it would be better if they did not exist. We shall all die without fail, and the doctors’ activity is directed towards fighting death. But to die—in ten days or in ten years—is all the same. How terrible it is that it is always concealed from the patient that he is dying! We are none of us accustomed to look death in the face!”
Usov defended the activity of doctors, considering it a useful one.
Tolstoi said:
“It is for this reason that I consider the activity of doctors harmful: people are crowded in towns; they are infected with syphilis and consumption; they are kept in terrible conditions, and then millions are spent on the establishment of hospitals and clinics. But why not spend that energy, not in curing people, but in improving the conditions of their lives? While numbers of healthy, useful peasants are infected with all sorts of diseases, and are worn out by work beyond their strength, so that they die at thirty instead of seventy, some useless old woman who is quite incurable has spent upon her all the treatment that medicine can supply.
“All modern sciences do the very opposite of what they set out to do. Theology hides moral truths, jurisprudence obscures in every possible way the conception of justice, the natural sciences teach materialism, and history distorts the true life of the people. Darwin’s theory is in agreement with the crude fable of Moses. All discussions on Darwinism are polemics against Moses.
“Every young man growing up in Russia passes through a terrible contagion, a sort of moral syphilis; in the first place, the Orthodox Church, and then, when he frees himself from that, the doctrines of materialism. The best physiologists, like Krafft-Ebing or Claude Bernard, openly admit that, however carefully we investigate even a simple cell, there is always some x in its composition which we do not understand. Consequently the complex of organisms and the social conditions of life are an x raised to the x degree. And if we cannot investigate a cell completely, then how can we realize the laws which govern the life of human societies? Yet some blockhead like B. assures us that it is all very simple, and the science of history can deduce immutable laws by which human life is shaped.
“Look at all our historians: what dull, stupid men they are! For instance, Solovev. He was an incredibly dull man. And when some one gifted appears among them—a Granovsky, Kostomarov, Kudryavzev—and you ask, ‘What after all have they done?’ it turns out that they have done nothing of any importance or value. Take Kluchevsky, for instance: what has he done? He talks brilliantly, toys with the liberal point of view about Catherine the Great, and says that she was a whore—well, we knew that without him. Or take the man who dances the mazurka in the Moscovskya Vedomsti, Ilovaisky—he is an historian too!
“What should be taught at school? Long ago, when I was interested in education, I came to the conclusion that school teaching ought to consist of two branches only, of languages and mathematics. This is the only positive knowledge that one can give a pupil. There is no humbug about this. Either you know it or you don’t know it. Besides, from this fundamental knowledge all science can develop. From mathematics come astronomy, physics, natural sciences. From languages, history, geography, and so on. But with us, who is taught and what are they taught? To-day I walked in the street. Drunken men were going about, swearing obscenely, dragging women after them. Who has ever said a single word to these men about their moral needs? What did we teach them?
“The other evening I was coming home from the Turkish bath and walked near the theatres. Policemen on horseback were lounging about; coachmen with buttocks like this” (Tolstoi illustrated it with his hands) “and rows of buttons on their backs sit on the boxes. And in the illuminated theatres, crowded with people, a divine service is performed: a silly and distorted story Sadko (an opera) is acted, or ‘When we dead awaken’ is played. It’s sheer madness!”