1904
At Christmas Alexandra Lvovna made a Christmas tree in the lodge to entertain the village children. I do not know who made the choice, but, as there was not enough room, all the children were not admitted. Tolstoi, myself, and some one else, I don’t remember who, came in rather later when the entertainment was at its height. At the door of the lodge stood the children who could not be admitted. When they saw us, the mothers of the children began asking Tolstoi to take their children with him. Tolstoi took two or three inside with him. It was bright and hot. Inside the burning candles flamed. It smelt of burnt branches. We soon came out.
Tolstoi said with a sigh:
“How wrong it is! Some are inside and the others are not allowed in. When our children were small, Sophie Andreevna always had a Christmas tree, and the village children came to it. Once they gave us the scarlet fever, and after that they were no longer admitted, except a few who were carefully chosen. I remember once there was a Christmas tree upstairs. I was lying downstairs on the sofa (where the library now is), and I was terribly ashamed to think of the children crowding outside and not being let in. I remember I could not endure it, came out, and gave them three roubles, and of course made things still worse—they began to dispute and quarrel over the division of it, and it was revolting, shameful, and painful!”
June 5th. Yasnaya Polyana.
On the day of our arrival, May 27th, Tolstoi talked at dinner about the Decembrists whom he knew after their return from banishment (he is again studying that period).
He spoke of Prince Volkonsky:[8]
“His appearance with his long grey hair was altogether like that of an Old Testament prophet. What a pity I spoke so little to him then, when I need him so much now! He was a wonderful old man, the flower of the Petersburg aristocracy both by birth and by his position at Court. And then in Siberia, after he had already served hard labour, and his wife had something like a salon, he worked with the peasants; all sorts of tools for peasants’ work were in his room.”
Tolstoi does not believe the story about the affair between Poggio and Princess Volkonsky.
He said:
“I do not want to believe it: such scandals are so often invented and people’s memory spoilt. Moreover, Poggio loved Volkonsky so much that when later (Volkonsky’s wife being already dead) he felt the approach of death himself, he came to Volkonsky to die there.”
Tolstoi went on to say:
“I made Volkonsky’s acquaintance in Florence at Dolgorukov’s, Koko Dolgorukov, the doctor. At that time it was rare for an aristocrat to become a doctor. It was when Nicolas I. limited the number of university students to three hundred, and Dolgorukov could not be admitted to any other faculty. He was a wonderfully capable man: he wrote poems, was a superb musician, painted pictures. He was married to (?). When I visited them for the first time in Florence, this was the scene I found: his wife and the well-known Marquis de Rogan were playing an extraordinary game: they made a mark on the wall and tried, by lifting their feet, to touch the mark; each tried to lift his or her leg higher and higher.
“There was also present the very gifted painter Nikitin. He drew wonderfully in pencil. I remember he had an album and drew Volkonsky’s portrait in it. He also drew mine. I wonder where the album is. If some collector were to get hold of it now!”
Then at dinner Tolstoi told us two anecdotes from his life. The first was how he ate some earth-worms (Tolstoi told it because Alexandra Lvovna and Ilya Lvovich’s children were going fishing). Tolstoi said he was carrying the worms in one hand, and a loaf of black bread in the other. He had finished eating the bread, and, thinking of something else, put the worms in his mouth and began chewing them, and for some time could not think what mess he had put in his mouth.
Tolstoi said:
“I remember the taste of them as if I were eating them now.”
My wife asked him if it was very unpleasant.
“The taste of earth; but I don’t advise you to taste it.”
Some one sneezed and Tolstoi told another story.
“I used to sneeze very loudly; once at night I woke and felt I was going to sneeze immediately, and as Sophie Andreevna was going to have a baby, I was afraid to frighten her by sneezing. Half asleep I cried out: ‘Sonia, I am going to sneeze!’ Sophie Andreevna of course woke up and was frightened, and I instantly fell asleep without having sneezed.”
Tolstoi also talked about Belogolovy’s Reminiscences.[9] He seemed to Tolstoi a narrow-minded man. Speaking of the terrible impression made by his description of the diseases and deaths of Nekrasov, Turgenev, and Saltikov, Tolstoi said:
“How they dreaded death! And then there were those horrible disgusting details of their illnesses, particularly Nekrasov’s.”
Last winter my wife and I stayed at Yasnaya Polyana, and, when we had to leave, Tolstoi was sitting in his room with P. A. Boulanger. We came into the room to say good-bye, and probably they were talking of Boulanger’s family affairs.
We entered just as Tolstoi was saying:
“ ... if people only said more often: ‘Do you remember?’ People should make it a rule that if one person says or does something wrong in the heat of a quarrel, or when one is angry, the other should say: ‘Do you remember?’”
Tolstoi noticed my wife and me and said:
“Now, you young people, you ought to make that your rule! No one can be such a friend as one’s wife, a real friend. In marriage it is either paradise, or simple hell; there is no ‘purgatory.’”
Boulanger said that generally it was a case of purgatory.
Tolstoi thought for a time and then said with a sigh:
“Yes, perhaps, unfortunately.” ...
That same evening, looking at Andrey Lvovich’s little girl, Sonechka, playing on the floor, Tolstoi said:
“Faust speaks of the rare moment of which one can say: ‘Verweile doch, du bist so schön!’ Now there it is, that moment!” (Tolstoi pointed to the little girl.) “There is a perfectly happy, pure, and innocent moment.”
June 20th. Some time ago, in May, Tolstoi said:
“Religions are usually based on one of these three principles: on sentiment, reason, or illusion. Stoicism is an example of the religion of reason; Mormonism of illusion; Muhammadanism of sentiment. I have lately received many letters from Muhammadans. I had a letter from Cairo from a representative of the Baptist sect, it is an example of the religion of sentiment. I also had a letter from India, written by a wonderful and very religious man. He writes that true Muhammadanism is a perfectly different thing from what people usually think it to be. Indeed, I know some very religious Moslems. And how movingly simple and lofty is their worship!”
To-day at sunset we walked in the garden. We talked of Gorky and his feeble “Man.” Tolstoi was saying that to-day on his walk he met on the road (he likes to go out on to the road, and sit down on a little stone, a milestone, and to observe or to speak to the passers-by) a man who turned out to be a rather well-educated working-man.
Tolstoi said:
“His outlook on the world agrees perfectly with Gorky’s so-called Nietzscheism and the cult of the personality. It is evidently the spirit of the time. Nietzsche did not say anything new—his is now a very popular world-conception.”
Then Tolstoi said:
“When I was a Justice of the Peace, there lived in Krapivna a merchant called Gurev, who used to say about young people of education: ‘Well, I look at your students—they are all scholars, they know everything, only they have no invention.’ Turgenev, I remember, liked this expression very much.”
Recently a party of gypsies camped on the road near Yasnaya Polyana. Gypsies often roam about Yasnaya Polyana. The party usually stay for two or three days, and in the evenings the Yasnaya Polyana household comes out to hear the gypsy songs and enjoy their dances.
Tolstoi, looking at the gypsies, became a changed man, and involuntarily began to dance to their tunes, and to cry out again and again approvingly.
“What a wonderful people!”
The old gypsies all know Tolstoi and always enter into conversation with him. Tolstoi from his youngest days loved and knew the gypsies and their peculiar life.
When we left the house, it was drizzling. Soon the rain got worse, and we returned.
Andrey Lvovich said:
“Now we have come to the house, the rain will stop.”
And, indeed, on our way home the rain stopped, and we went back to the gypsies.
Tolstoi said:
“Yes, it is always like that: as soon as you turn to go home the rain stops. Something like this happens in Moscow too. When you have to find some one in a large building and ring for the porter, he is never there. But no sooner do you go into the yard to make water than the porter is sure to catch you. So I advise you that if you have to find some one, don’t ring for the porter, but do the second thing first.”
When Andrey Lvovich was made an aide-de-camp, Tolstoi said to him:
“My only comfort is that you are sure not to kill a single Japanese. An aide-de-camp is always exposed to great danger, but seldom takes part in the fighting. I spent a great deal of time on the fourth bastion at Sevastopol when I was in the army on the Danube. I was aide-de-camp, and I believe I had not to fire even once. I remember once on the Danube, near Silistria, we were on our side of the river, but there was also a battery on the other side, and I was sent across with some order. The commander of the battery, Schube, on seeing me, thought: ‘Well, there’s that little Count, I’ll give him a lesson!’ And he took me across the whole line under fire, and with deadly slowness on purpose. I passed that test well outwardly, but my feelings were not pleasant. I also remember how one of the highest officers—Kotsebu—visited the bastion in Sevastopol, and some one, I think it was Novosilzev, wanted to put him to the test, and began saying perpetually: ‘Look, Your Excellency, just there at their line,’ forcing him to put his head out from behind the fortifications. He put his head out once or twice, and then, realizing what was up, he, as the superior officer, began in his turn to order the other man to look at the firing, and, after teasing him for some time, he said: ‘Next time I advise you not to doubt the courage of your superiors.’”
Tolstoi recalled Lichtenberg’s[10] aphorism to the effect that mankind will finally perish when not a single savage is left.
Tolstoi added:
“I first turned to the Japanese, but they have already successfully adopted all the bad sides of our culture. The Kaffirs are the only hope remaining.”
Tolstoi said:
“I do not remember during any previous war such depression and anxiety as are now in Russia. I think it is a good sign, a proof that a realization of the evil and uselessness and absurdity of war is permeating deeper and deeper the social consciousness; so that perhaps the time is coming when wars will be impossible—nobody will want to go to war. Now Lisanka, who always sees the good in things, was telling me about a peasant—a porter, I think—who was called up and, before going to the front, took off his cross. That is a truly Christian spirit! Although he is not able to resist the general will and has to yield to it, yet he clearly realizes that it is not God’s doing.”
Tolstoi described with horror how a priest marched with his cross in his hand in front of the soldiers.
June 26th. Last week I reached Yasnaya in the evening. The Sukhotins were there. During tea Misha Sukhotin began to tell Tolstoi that on completing his studies at the School of Jurisprudence he would like to go to Paris to continue his studies; and he began to argue with Tolstoi. I did not hear the beginning of the argument. I came in when Tolstoi was saying:
“ ... Every man is a perfectly individual being, who has never existed before and will never happen again. It is just the individuality, the singularity of him, which is valuable; but school tries to efface all this and to make man after its own pattern. The pupils of the Tula secondary school came to me lately and asked what they should do. I said to them: above all, try to forget everything you have been taught.”
Tolstoi thinks the Russian University in Paris perfectly useless and good-for-nothing. He said:
“The best educational institution that I know is the Kensington Museum in London. There is a large public library where many people work, and they have professors of various special subjects. Every one who works, if he has a question to ask, gives notice of it, and, when several such questions have accumulated, the professor issues a notice to say that he will lecture on such and such subjects, and those who wish may come and hear him. Such an arrangement is most in keeping with the true object of teaching—to answer the questions which arise in the minds of the students. But in every other institution, lectures which are of no use to the student are read by professors who are for the most part entirely without gift. None of these lecturers would dare to publish their lectures. Goethe said:
“‘When I speak it turns out better than when I think; I write better than I speak; and what I publish is better than what I write.’ He meant by this that what a man publishes is usually the cream of his thought, the thing he most believes in. Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won’t come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn. One ought not to talk about oneself, but I must say this: when I was at the University in Kazan I did practically nothing the first year. The second year I began to work. There was a Professor Mayer who took an interest in me and gave me, as a subject, to compare the code of Catherine the Great with Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois. And, I remember, I became infatuated with the work. I went into the country and began to read Montesquieu; this reading opened up endless horizons; I began reading Rousseau, and left the University for the simple reason that I wanted to work; for at the University I should have to occupy myself with subjects that did not interest me and were of no use to me.”
Sergey Lvovich asked Tolstoi why he did not go in for his examinations at Petersburg University.
Tolstoi said:
“I began to work hard, passed two examinations, was awarded two marks of distinction, but then it was spring; it drew me to the country; well, I gave it up and went away.” ... Speaking of the good effects upon men of having received no education, Tolstoi said:
“I know two musicians who never went to school, and yet they are very well-educated men, who, whatever subject you talk about, know it thoroughly,—G. and Sergey Ivanovich Taneev.”
I played. Then Tolstoi said:
“Anton Rubinstein told me that, if he is moved himself by what he is playing, he ceases to move his audience. This shows that the creation of a work of art is only possible when the emotion has settled in the artist’s mind.”
I do not remember how the conversation now got upon writing, but Tolstoi said:
“Usually when I begin a new book I am very pleased with it myself and work with great interest. But as the book work goes on, I become more and more bored, and often in rewriting it I omit things, substitute others, not because the new idea is better, but because I get tired of the old. Often I strike out what is vivid and replace it by something dull.”
The conversation turned upon Hertzen. Tolstoi read aloud extracts from his book (a collection of articles published in the Kolokol). Tolstoi is extremely fond of Hertzen and values him very highly. He spoke of Hertzen’s unhappy private life and of the suffering he went through when the representatives (particularly the younger representatives) of the party with whom he had worked throughout his life deserted him and ceased to understand him.
Tolstoi saw Hertzen in London, when Hertzen lived with Mme. Tuchkov-Ogarev.
Biryukov asked Tolstoi (for the biography of Tolstoi which he is writing) about his conversation with Hertzen which Mme. Ogarev refers to in her Reminiscences.
Tolstoi said that he remembered a great many of their talks, but not that particular one. And he added:
“Perhaps she merely invented the conversation, as the authors of memoirs and reminiscences so often do.”
On the whole, Tolstoi has not a high opinion of Mme. Ogarev, although he says he knows her but little.
He said:
“I received a letter from her in which she, as though to justify herself, gives an account of the affair with the peasants which had lately taken place on her estate. There were some fields there which the peasants had had the use of from time immemorial. The fields belonged legally to the landowner. A bailiff was engaged, a Pole called Stanislavski, and he drove the peasants’ cattle from the fields on to the estate. The peasants collected with thick sticks in their hands to free their cattle, determined not to give up the use of the fields. They arrived at the Manor and began by demanding their cattle. Finally, Stanislavski fired, and killed or wounded, I do not remember which, some one in the crowd. The crowd became furious and threw themselves on Stanislavski, who tried to save himself by flight, but he was overtaken on a moor and was murdered in a most brutal way. As a result of the affair, a military court was held and two or three peasants were hanged.”
Tolstoi had known of this before he got her letter, and was horrified at the incredible verdict.
Afterwards Tolstoi said:
“Lately I got a letter from a lady asking me why, strictly speaking, it is a crime to kill. Anyhow man must die sooner or later—is it not all the same? I replied that since every man represents a unique type, which never occurs again, we have and can have no absolute knowledge of why he is needed for the life of all. In life everything is very carefully arranged, and we do not know the reason why just this individual should be alive, and it is for this reason that the destruction of this unique creature appears so terrible.”
Of being afraid in battle, Tolstoi said:
“It is impossible not to be afraid. Everyone is afraid, but tries to conceal it. When wounded have to be carried off the battlefield, so many men volunteer for the work that the officers have to use great force to keep the soldiers back, since every one wants, even for a time, to get out of fire.”
Of himself Tolstoi said that he was never so much afraid as upon the night before the attack on Silistria, which after all did not take place.
Then Tolstoi said:
“The Japanese are less afraid, for they evidently value life much less than Europeans do. The absence of the fear of death goes to extreme lengths with some people. For instance, if a Chukcha wants to spite his enemy, he comes to his hut and kills himself near it, knowing that his enemy will then have much trouble with legal proceedings.”
July 8th. Tolstoi said with regard to his article about war, “Bethink Yourselves”:
“It is painful to feel that my words go unheeded. If one is dealing with the so-called men of science who regard war, apart from its moral significance, as one of the stages in the evolution of human relations, then, at any rate, one knows where one is. But what is one to do and how is one to speak to people who evidently cannot understand my point of view? Whatever I say glides off them. They are, as it were, greased with a sort of oil, so that everything runs off them, like water, without wetting them.”
After this Tolstoi said that, when he wrote to Nicolas II. (from the Crimea, in the winter of 1901-1902), he was told that Nicolas II. “read his letter with pleasure.” He also recollected Hertzen’s letters to Alexander II.
Tolstoi wrote to Nicolas II. about the land question.
With reference to the attitude in Government circles to that question Tolstoi said:
“I can’t possibly put myself at their point of view. I remember when I was young and an officer I was never bothered by these questions; somehow they did not arise in me. But I cannot imagine that I should pass by such a problem, if I happened to come across it. I remember two such cases in my life. One, when Vasili Ivanovich Alexeev,[11] when I was at the height of my career as a landlord, expressed to me for the first time the idea that the ownership of land is evil. I remember how much I was struck by the idea, and how at once perfectly new horizons opened before me. So it also happened when some one, I don’t remember who it was, I think a Frenchman, told me that prostitution was an abnormal thing, and not only useless, but really harmful to mankind. Schopenhauer, for instance, says that it is only owing to prostitution that family relations are still preserved in the community. I had not previously thought about it, but, on hearing the Frenchman speak, I at once felt the truth of what he said and could no longer go back. I can imagine that one’s thoughts may not tend in a certain direction; one may be ignorant of some point of view. But I cannot understand that incapacity and unwillingness to learn.”
July 9th. Speaking of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms Tolstoi said:
“Aphorisms are perhaps the best way of expounding philosophical judgments. For instance, Schopenhauer’s aphorisms (Parerga and Paralipomena) express his conception of the world much more clearly than The World as Will and Imagination. A philosopher, in explaining a whole complicated system, sometimes involuntarily ceases to be honest. He becomes the slave of his system, for the symmetry of which he is often prepared to sacrifice the truth.”
Speaking of Lichtenberg’s beautiful German style, Tolstoi said:
“Every literary language reaches its highest point and then begins to decline. In the German language that time was at the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century; it was the same with the French language. Now both in Germany and France the language has become utterly spoilt. In Russia we are now finding ourselves on the border-line. The Russian language has quite lately reached its apex and now it begins to decay.”
Tolstoi praised Chekhov’s language very highly for its simplicity, compactness, and expressiveness. Gorky’s language he disapproves of, thinking it artificial and rhetorical.
When Nicolas II. appeared in many places to bless the troops going to the Japanese war with icons, Tolstoi said:
“If A, the ruler of a huge country, takes a board, B, in his hand and kisses it in the presence of crowds of many thousands of kneeling troops and then waves the board over the heads of those who stand in front of him, and does this all over the country, what except trash can come from such a country? This has never happened before. In your own room you may do whatever you like. One man likes to wash himself with wine or eau-de-Cologne, another kisses icons if he likes, but such idolatry on a large scale in the face of all and such deception of the crowd are simply incredible!” ...
During the war Tolstoi always said that in spite of his attitude to war and to patriotism generally, he felt in the depth of his soul an instinctive sorrow at Russian defeats.
I heard him say this in the presence of G., B., and some others. All of them energetically denied in themselves any such instinctive “patriotic bias.” It seems to me that they were simply afraid of admitting it even to themselves.
October 22nd. Mechnikov sent Tolstoi his book (Studies on the Nature of Man) in French. Tolstoi read it through.
To-day he said to me:
“I got much interesting information out of the book, for Mechnikov is undoubtedly a great scientist. But the self-satisfied narrowness with which he is convinced that he has solved almost all problems that agitate man is surprising in him. He is so sure that man’s happiness consists in a state of animal contentment that he calls old age an evil (because of its limited capacity of physical enjoyment), and does not even understand that there are men who think and feel precisely the opposite. But I value my old age and would not exchange it for any earthly blessings.”
The conversation turned on the tendency of women to crowd to universities.
Tolstoi said smilingly:
“If I were a Minister of Education, I should issue a Ukase by which all women were obliged to enter universities and would be deprived of the right to marry and have children. For the infringement of this law the guilty would be liable to a heavy fine. Then all of them would be sure to marry!”
Tolstoi spoke on August 28th with exasperation about writing as a profession. I have rarely seen him so agitated:
He said:
“One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one’s flesh in the ink-pot each time one dips one’s pen.”