1903
March 21st. Last week I went for a day to Yasnaya Polyana. I found Tolstoi well and cheerful.
Tolstoi is always much interested in the question of man’s spiritual state during sleep.
He told me this time:
“In a dream one cries, or is happy or excited, and, when one wakes up and remembers the dream, one does not understand what made one cry or be happy or excited. I explain it to myself in this way: Apart from the happiness, excitement, or bitterness which are caused by definite events, there are also states of happiness, excitement, ecstasy, and grief. In such states an insignificant event is often sufficient to throw us into ecstasy, excitement, etc. In a dream, when one’s consciousness does not act so consistently and logically, this state is expressed by the corresponding sensation which has often no external cause. For instance, in a dream one often feels utterly ashamed, and when one wakes up and sees that one’s trousers are quietly hanging over a chair, one feels an extraordinary joy. That is why I so much love ‘Popov’s Dream.’[2] It gives a wonderful account of that sensation of shame in a dream, and, besides, all the characters are magnificently described. In spite of its comic nature, it is a real work of art.”
June 1st. I returned from Yasnaya Polyana, where I spent a day. Tolstoi is planning a work of a philosophical nature, which he is greatly excited about at present. Speaking of it, Tolstoi said to me:
“Everything in the world is alive. Everything that seems to us dead seems so only because it is either too large or, on the contrary, too small. We do not see microbes, and heavenly bodies seem dead to us, for the same reason that we seem dead to an ant. The earth is undoubtedly alive, and a stone on the earth is the same as a nail on a finger. The materialists make matter the basis of life. All these theories of the origin of species, of protoplasm, of atoms, are all of value in so far as they help us to know the laws governing the visible world. But it must not be forgotten that all these, including ether, are working hypotheses, and nothing else. Astronomers in their calculations assume that the earth is a motionless body, and only afterwards correct the mistake. Materialists too make false premises, but they do not observe the fact that this is so, but let them pass as basic truths.
“True life exists where the living being is conscious of itself as an indivisible ‘I,’ in whom all impressions, feelings, etc., become one. So long as the ‘I’ struggles, as nearly the whole animal world does, merely to crush the other creatures known to him, in order to attain his own temporary advantage, true spiritual life which is without time and space remains unexpressed and imprisoned. True spiritual life is liberated when a man neither rejoices in his own happiness, nor suffers from his own suffering, but suffers and rejoices with the worries and pleasures of others and is fused with them into a common life.
“Of the life to come, although of course the words ‘to come’ are inappropriate here, of life beyond our physical being, it is impossible to have knowledge. We can imagine two forms only: either a new form of the individual life, or a fusion of personal life in the life of the whole. The former seems to us more comprehensible and more likely, since we only know our individual life and we can more easily accept the idea of the same life in a different form.”
July 14th. In the beginning of July my wife and I spent two days in Yasnaya Polyana.
On the occasion of Mme. Kolokoltsev’s[3] suicide Tolstoi said to me: “I can’t understand why people look upon suicide as a crime. It seems to me to be man’s right. It gives a man the chance of dying when he no longer wishes to live. The Stoics thought like that.”
As Mme. Kolokoltsev was insane, the conversation turned on insanity. I said, as I had done previously, that the spiritual life of the so-called insane remains unchanged. All that happens is that a mad person cannot make his personality felt. Tolstoi agreed with me.
Next day he said to me:
“Yesterday’s conversation on insanity was of great interest to me. I have been thinking a great deal about it. There are two consciousnesses in us: one—the animal; the other—the spiritual. The spiritual is not always shown in us, but it is this that makes our true spiritual life, which is not subject to time. I do not know how it is with you who are comparatively young, but with me there are times in my long life which are clearly preserved in my memory, and other times which have completely disappeared, they no longer exist. The moments which remain are most frequently the moments when the spirit in me awoke. It often happens at a time when one has done something wrong, and suddenly one wakes up, realizes that it is bad, and feels the spirit in one with special force. Spiritual life is a recollection. A recollection is not the past, it is always the present. It is our spirit, which shows itself more or less clearly, that contains the progress of man’s temporary existence. There can be no progress for the spirit, for it is not in time. What the life in time is for, we do not know; it is only a transitory phenomenon. Speaking metaphorically, I see this manifestation of the spirit in us as the breathing of God.
“There is a beautiful story about the unreality of time in The Arabian Nights. Some one was put into a bath; he dipped his head in the water and saw a long history with most complicated adventures; and then when he raised his head from the water, it turned out that he had only dipped his head in once!”
Tolstoi was talking about Fedorov and Peterson, particularly about Fedorov:
“They belonged to the sect which believes in the resurrection of the dead here on earth. Their idea is that people must try to resurrect all those who have died in the past. They believe that by hard work for centuries mankind will achieve it. For this purpose one must study all things of antiquity and restore them. Fedorov was librarian to the Rumyantsev Museum and was a passionate collector of all old things: portraits, objects, etc. Mankind must cease to multiply and everything will be resurrected. That is their ideal. It turns out that Vladimir Solovev and Dostoevsky to some extent—there is a letter to this effect—believed in this idea.
“Fedorov, I think, is still alive. He must be over eighty. All his life he has lived as an ascetic. When I once visited him in the spring and saw his thin overcoat, I asked him: ‘Do you wear a thin overcoat already?’ and he replied: ‘Christ said, if you have two cloaks, give them to him who has none, and I have two overcoats.’ And after that he always wore only a thin coat. He received a very small salary, ate very, very little, slept almost on the bare boards, helped the poor, and denied himself everything. He wrote a great deal, but his works remain in manuscript: his disciples have no money to publish them, and no publisher can be found to publish them.”
There was a plague of poisonous flies at Yasnaya Polyana this summer which made one’s face swell when they bit one.
Tolstoi said:
“Once, when I was younger, I wanted to write a story about a young man who stayed in the summer at a friend’s house where there was a young girl. The very first day they fell in love and raved about each other. At night, when he was asleep, a fly bit his lip, and half his face swelled up. His lip and cheek were swollen, and his face looked idiotic. When the girl saw him in the morning their love at once came to an end. There were no more illusions: she noticed a number of faults in him which she had not noticed at all the day before.”
The conversation was about Father Gregory Petrov.[4]
Tolstoi said of him:
“As was the case with Ambrosii of the Optino Monastery, he is becoming the slave of his popularity. Generally speaking, fame, popularity, is a dangerous thing. It is also harmful because it prevents one from looking upon people simply, in a Christian way. Now, for instance, I find Gorky very pleasant as a man, and yet I can’t behave to him with perfect sincerity. His popularity prevents me from doing so. It is as if he were not in his right place. To him, too, his popularity is dangerous. His long novels are worse than his short stories, his plays are worse than his novels, and his addresses to the public are simply revolting.
“Yet as some one said: if my work is abused by every one, it means that there is something in it. If all praise it, it means that it is bad; but if some praise it very much, and others dislike it very much, then it is first-rate. According to this theory Gorky’s works are first-rate. Well, it may be so.” ...
A blind man came to Tolstoi, and Tolstoi was very much interested in him. The blind man was trying to get into a school for the blind, so as to complete his education, and Tolstoi wanted to help him. The blind man intended to give an account of his life. After lunch we were going for a walk. Tolstoi was talking to the blind man. Then he took him to the kitchen to give him some food, and said good-bye to him.
The blind man said to him:
“I should like to go on talking to you.”
Tolstoi replied:
“Later, perhaps, I will talk to you again.”
We went for a walk. But before reaching the gate Tolstoi said that he had changed his mind and would return home.
Sophie Andreevna observed:
“He probably regrets having left the blind man.”
And it was true. We walked for a long time, and when we got back Tolstoi was still sitting with the blind man.
Tolstoi said to me later:
“The blind man told me many legends. One of them I never heard before:
“‘Once upon a time Christ and Peter the Apostle walked in the country and saw an old peasant making a fence out of reeds. Christ asked him: “Why, father, are you making such a weak fence of reeds?” and the peasant replied: “I am old, it will last my lifetime.” After that God saw to it that people should not know their age.’ He also told me another legend, which I had heard before but in a different version:
“‘A just old man once lived in the woods. And people came to him and said: “Why do you never go to church?” The old man listened to them and went with them. But while they took a boat to cross the river, the old man walked upon the water. They arrived and went into the church, but inside the church the devils stretched a skin on the floor and wrote down the names of the sinners on it. The old man looked and looked at this, then called the devils bad names, and they wrote his name down. On returning home he was unable to walk upon the water, but had to take the boat.’”
Tolstoi said:
“It is time for me to die, and I have a whole mass of subjects, and even a new one to-day. I have a whole long list of them.” ...
Tolstoi is going to expound in an artistic form Buddha’s teaching, “Ta Twam Asi,” the meaning of which is that in every man and his actions one can always recognize oneself.
Tolstoi recalled the following:
“When I was taken for the first time to a box in the Grand Theatre as a young child I saw nothing: I did not know that it was necessary to look at the stage sideways, and I looked straight in front of me at the opposite boxes.”
August 12th. I spent the 7th and 8th in Yasnaya Polyana.
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!”
I. V. Denisenko read aloud the chapters about Nicolas from Hadji-Murat.
Tolstoi sat in his room, but he wanted to come where we were all sitting.
He came in several times and said:
“It is not interesting; let it be!”
At last he even said with irritation:
“It is rubbish!”
Then M. S. Sukhotin asked him:
“Why did you write it, then, Leo Nickolaevich?”
Tolstoi replied:
“But it is not finished yet. You came into my kitchen, and no wonder it stinks with the smell of cooking.”
Tolstoi explained why he had made up his mind never to write to the papers to deny what was said about him.
“When I stayed with Turgenev in Petersburg, Mefodii Katkov[7] arrived from Moscow, and, on behalf of his brother, asked Turgenev and myself to let him have something for his Russkii Vestnik. I promised nothing, but Turgenev with his characteristic kindness said, rather vaguely, that he might perhaps let him have something.
“Soon after this a group of writers in Petersburg, Nekrasov, Turgenev, myself, Panaev, Druzhinin, Grigorovich, formed ourselves into a group and decided to publish only in the Sovremennik. When Katkov heard this, he accused Turgenev in print of breaking his promise. Then I wrote a letter to Katkov, and asked him to publish it, in which I, as a witness, refuted Katkov’s statement and proved that Turgenev had not promised Katkov anything.
“At first Katkov did not publish the letter; afterwards he published it, but in such a mutilated form that it quite changed its character. After that I made a vow to myself that I would never make any reply to attacks in the Press.”
The talk turned on our Government.
Tolstoi said:
“Do you know, Peter Alexeevich, I want to found a society whose members would bind themselves not to abuse the Government.”
Sergeenko and others replied that, although it was true that people made too much of that subject, still, when the Government prevented people from living freely or breathing freely, it was difficult not to criticize it.
To this Tolstoi said:
“It is only necessary to remember that the Government, however strong and cruel it may be, can never prevent the real, spiritual life of man, which alone is of importance. And why wonder that the Government is cruel and wicked? So it must be. Mosquitoes bite, worms devour leaves, pigs grout in manure—all this suits them and it is not worth while to be indignant about it. I remember many years ago—my sons are now tall, bearded men, but they were then children—I once came into the dining-room downstairs in the Khamovniki house and saw that a ray of the sun fell across the whole room through the windows and made a bright spot on the sideboard which stood by the wall opposite the window. The ventilator was not tight shut and was moved by the wind, and as it moved the bright spot slid over the sideboard. I went in, showed the children the bright spot, and cried out: ‘Catch it!’ They all threw themselves on to the bright spot to catch it, but it raced, and it was difficult to catch it. But if one of the children succeeded in putting his hand on it, the bright spot showed on the top of his hand. That is like the spiritual nature of man: however you hide it, however much you try to suppress it or extinguish it, it will always remain the same and unchanged.”
About writing Tolstoi said:
“If you ask some one: ‘Can you play the violin?’ and he says: ‘I don’t know, I have not tried, perhaps I can,’ you laugh at him. Whereas about writing, people always say: ‘I don’t know, I have not tried,’ as though one had only to try and one would become a writer.”
Tolstoi said about Jews:
“There are three kinds of Jews. Some are believers, religious, respecting their religion and strictly following its teaching. Others are cosmopolitan, standing on the highest step of consciousness; and finally a third kind, the middle kind, almost the biggest class, at any rate of educated Jews, are even ashamed of being Jews or hide the fact, and at the same time they are hostile to other races; but it is as if they hid their hostility behind the skirts of their overcoats. As my sympathies are with the first two classes, so the third is unsympathetic to me.”
The conversation was about religion. Tolstoi said:
“Rousseau expressed a perfectly true idea that the Jewish religion admitted one revelation—the past; the Christian religion two—the past and present; and the Muhammadan three—the past, the present, and the future. Historically it is undoubtedly a progressive movement. Christianity is higher than Judaism, which is no longer alive. It is all in the past; and Muhammadanism is higher than Christianity: it has not the superstitions, the idolatry. To me personally Christianity, to be sure, is above all religions, but I speak about Christianity, not as the highest religious moral teaching, but as a historical fact. And as there is ever much in common between the opposite poles, so there is here; both Judaism and Muhammadanism keep strictly to monotheism, and there is no intoxication in either; but in the historical Christianity of the churches there is polytheism, as well as all kinds of ignorance and cruelty. Everything is justified and even encouraged.”