1907
September 7th. Tolstoi went to-day to Mme. Zveginzev to ask the police inspector, who lives on her estate, to release from prison the house-painter, Ivan Grigorevich; and also to thank her for the peaches she had sent him.
Tolstoi said:
“There was her daughter, Princess Volkonsky, there. They all wanted to direct me on the path of truth. I tried to speak with all seriousness; but hardly anything could penetrate through their diamonds and luxury. They now employ the stove-maker who used to come to me to borrow books. And he has been telling them that I said that one should not believe in God, and various other bits of nonsense. I told them that there was nothing strange in my words being distorted. If even from Christ’s teaching people can deduce the rites of the Church, the blessing of war, etc., then it is no wonder that our words are always misrepresented and distorted.
“Then they asked me how I explained the fact that in my family no one followed my teaching. I told them that it probably happened because I lived like a Pharisee, and did not fulfil my own teaching. To this they made no reply.”
Tolstoi said that he saw to-day a review of a new book on Turgenev. The book is partly of a polemical kind. The author gives an account of Turgenev’s quarrels with all writers (Dostoevsky, Tolstoi, Hertzen, Fet, etc.), as if it were his object to vindicate Turgenev and to prove that on all occasions he was right.
Tolstoi said:
“Really, it is strange that he quarrelled with every one. He was a very nice, good man. Only he was very weak, and was conscious of his weakness. Once, I remember, Count Urusov was here, my good friend. There were two brothers, and for some reason people considered them stupid. Now knowing this, Turgenev began arguing with them arrogantly as though feeling his superiority, but Urusov quietly, easily, and confidently refuted his argument. And no wonder: Urusov had his own definite religious convictions, whatever they might be, and Turgenev had none.”
“I was fond of him,” Tolstoi said of Turgenev.
Sophie Andreevna said that Turgenev had loved Tolstoi very much.
“No, on the contrary,” Tolstoi replied. “He rather liked me as a writer, but, as man, I did not find in him real warmth and cordiality. Well, he liked no one in that way, except women with whom he happened to be in love. He had no friends.”
Tolstoi asked me about my work, whether I was composing music, and said how bad it was when people force work out of themselves, and how great artists lose by immediately starting a new work when they have finished the old one.
Tolstoi mentioned Pushkin and said:
“The best writers are always strict with themselves. I re-write until I feel that I am beginning to spoil. And then, of course, I leave it alone. And one begins to spoil because at first, when you enjoy your work, whilst it is yours, you apply all your spiritual force to it. Later when the fundamental original idea ceases more and more to be new, and becomes, as it were, someone else’s, it bores you. You begin to try to say something new and you spoil and distort the first idea.”
A telegram arrived from Leonid Andreev asking to be allowed to come.
Tolstoi said:
“How terribly undeserved fame, like that of Andreev, spoils a man!”
Then Tolstoi could not compose a telegram in reply.
“How shall I answer? ‘Come.’ ... But that is too short. ‘Shall be very glad to see you’—that is not altogether true. Well, Dushan Petrovich, write simply: ‘You are welcome.’”
Tolstoi said:
“I had a letter to-day from a man who congratulates me on my fifty-fifth anniversary, and writes that he so much loves my works that he is always reading and re-reading War and Peace, for instance, but he says: ‘However much I tried, I could not read a single one of your philosophical writings to the end.’ He tries to persuade me to give up that kind of writing.”
“Why should he have written all that?” Tolstoi said, laughing. “There was a man living and nobody knew he was a fool, and suddenly he got up and told me so!” ...