1906
August 21st. Speaking about art Tolstoi said:
“Great works of art are for all time. They exist. They must only be revealed, as Michael Angelo said.”
Tolstoi was reminded by this saying of Michael Angelo’s of a peasant who without any training cut wonderful figures in wood and said, when Tolstoi expressed surprise at the art with which he did it:
“It is inside there. I am only taking off what is not needed.”
Tolstoi said that Turgenev, in his ecstasy over Pushkin’s description of Lensky’s death in Onegin, said that the wonderful rhyme—ranen, stranen—seemed to be inevitable.
Then Tolstoi recollected certain of Tyutchev’s poems, whom he rates very highly.
I asked him if he knew Tyutchev.
Tolstoi said:
“When after the Sevastopol campaign I lived in Petersburg, Tyutchev, then a famous author, did me, a young writer, the honour to call on me. And then, I remember, how surprised I was that he, who had all his life mixed in court circles—he was a friend, in the purest sense, of the Empress Marie Alexandrovna—who spoke and wrote French more easily than Russian, picked out for special praise, when he expressed his admiration for my Sevastopol stories, a certain soldiers’ expression; and this sensitiveness to the Russian language surprised me in him extraordinarily.”
The conversation arose about writers’ fees.
Tolstoi turned to P. Biryukov and said:
“I understand fees in the case of a work like your biography (of Tolstoi), but fees to writers for their artistic work always seemed strange and wrong to me. The man wrote and enjoyed writing, and suddenly for that enjoyment he asks five hundred roubles per printed sheet!” ...
Tolstoi said:
“I became more and more convinced that a sensible man is to be known by his humility. Conceit is incompatible with understanding.”
Of conceit Tolstoi said a long time ago in my presence:
“Every man can be seen as a fraction, whose numerator is his actual qualities, and its denominator his opinion of himself. The greater the denominator the less is the absolute quantity of the fraction.”