1905
January 5th. During the Christmas holidays Misha Sukhotin read Professor Korkunov’s book on Russian State Law. Tolstoi took it and began to read it. He sat nearly the whole evening in his room, and came out in a state of agitation and disturbance saying: “It gave me palpitation of the heart to read that! In this, as in almost all legal books which deal with ‘rights’ of different kinds, it talks of anything and everything except the truth of the matter. It deals with the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of right—I never could make out what precisely those words and others of the same sort mean, nor could I ever get any one to explain them to me. But whenever the argument approaches the real question, the author immediately swerves aside and hides himself behind his objects and subjects.”
Further Tolstoi said:
“This is what surprises me; all my life I have striven for knowledge. I sought and still seek for it, and the so-called men of science say that I denounce science. All my life I have been occupied with religious questions, and outside of them I see no sense in human life; yet the so-called religious men consider me an atheist.” ...
About that time, in January, Tolstoi said that he should like to write a whole series of stories for his “Reading Circle” which he is now planning, and that he had already many subjects in mind.
“Only one minute of life remains, and there’s work for a hundred years,” he said.
When later in the evening I played Chopin’s prelude, Tolstoi said:
“Those are the kind of short stories one ought to write!”
There was then an interesting talk about Chekhov’s story, The Darling, with reference to Gorbunov’s letter dissuading him from publishing the story in the “Reading Circle.” Tolstoi on the contrary decided to include the story without fail, and expressed his very high opinion of it; and in a few days he wrote a preface to The Darling in which he expressed his feeling for it.
Of Gorbunov’s letter Tolstoi said:
“I feel a woman’s influence on him in this. The confused modern idea is that a woman’s capacity to give herself up with all her being to love is obsolete and done with; and yet this is the most precious and the best thing in her and her true vocation; and not political meetings, scientific courses, revolutions, etc.”
Of Beethoven’s music Tolstoi said that at times he felt a little bored by it, as he thought often happens with what has once struck one greatly. He felt the same, for instance, about Ge’s paintings.
June 16th. In February I made a note of Tolstoi’s words:
“Immortality, incomplete, of course, is certainly realized in our children. How strongly man desires immortality, is most clearly shown by his endeavour to leave some trace after his death. It might seem of no importance to a man what is said of him and whether he is remembered after he has gone; and yet what efforts he makes for it!”
Tolstoi said of the Molokans that he had no sympathy with their religious formalism. In this respect he draws a parallel between the Molokans and the English.
The son of Vicomte de Vogüé visited Tolstoi in the spring; Tolstoi said of him:
“He is a typical Frenchman in everything—from his trousers to his way of thought. His father translated Three Deaths and wrote to me about it long ago. It was on my conscience that I did not answer him, and was glad to have the opportunity of apologizing to his son.”
Tolstoi was surprised by young de Vogüé’s saying that his father worked at night and smoked a great deal during his work.
Tolstoi said:
“I imagine that a Frenchman must in the morning rub himself red with eau-de-Cologne, drink his coffee, and sit down quietly to work.
“I always write in the morning. I was pleased to hear lately that Rousseau too, after he got up in the morning, went for a short walk and sat down to work. In the morning one’s head is particularly fresh. The best thoughts most often come in the morning after waking, while still in bed or during the walk. Many writers work at night. Dostoevsky always wrote at night. In a writer there must always be two people—the writer and the critic. And, if one works at night, with a cigarette in one’s mouth, although the work of creation goes on briskly, the critic is for the most part in abeyance, and this is very dangerous.”
Tolstoi often says that he cannot find a suitable definition of music.
Once in the spring he said:
“Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.”
Once, a long time ago, Tolstoi said:
“Life is the present. All that a man has felt remains with him as a memory. We always live by memories. I often feel more strongly not what I have actually felt, but what I have written and felt in describing my characters. They too have become my memories, as if they had been actual experiences.”
The other day the talk was on the same lines.
Tolstoi said:
“A so-called misfortune happens; one does not usually feel it, just as one does not feel a wound at the moment it is inflicted; and it is only by degrees that the sorrow grows in strength, having become a memory, placed, that is, not outside me, but already within. Yet, after a long life, I notice that the bad and painful things have not become me; they have somehow passed by; but on the contrary, all the pleasant feelings, all the loving relations towards people—my childhood, all that has been good—rise with particular clearness in my memory.”
Tatyana Lvovna said:
“But how do you explain Pushkin’s poem; ‘Memory unfolding its long scroll,’ and further: ‘And reading my life with disgust, I tremble and curse’?”
Tolstoi replied:
“That is quite different. To be able to experience and feel all that is bad in one with such power—that is a precious and necessary quality. Happy and of great importance is the man who can go through it with the vigour of Pushkin.”
July 6th. We went for a walk to the sandpits. During the walk Gorbunov asked Tolstoi about Alexander Dobrolyubov’s[12] religious and philosophic book. Tolstoi said of the book:
“It is vague, false, and artificial.”
On that occasion the talk was about the literary profession.
Tolstoi said:
“It is surprising how in even a little piece of work one must think it over from all points of view before starting it. It does not matter whether you are making a shirt or a move in chess. And if you do not think it out, you at once spoil it all—you won’t make the shirt, you’ll lose the game. It is only in writing that one can do what one likes, and people never notice—indeed one can become a famous writer.”
Tolstoi went on to say:
“The whole business of the writer is to perfect himself. I have always tried and try now to make a question which interests me clear to the highest degree that I am capable of making it. The writer’s work consists in that. The most dangerous thing is to be a teacher. I do not think I have tried to be that. Yes, I have.... But always badly.”
I. Gorbunov was saying that the “Posrednik” had the Censor’s permission to publish an excellent little book, in which a visit to Sarov is described impartially.
Tolstoi said:
“I have no sympathy when such things are described in a joking or jeering way. There is a great deal of sincere, simple belief there which should be treated carefully. In some old credulous woman you feel, in spite of the absurd superstition, that the foundation of her faith is a real striving for the highest and for the truth. Her outlook on the world is much higher than that of a professor who has solved all questions long ago.”
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.”