1908
January 6th. Yesterday, when many letters came, Tolstoi said:
“In old age one becomes indifferent to the fact that one will never see the results of one’s activity. But the results will be there. It is not modesty on my part, but I know there will be results.”
To-day, speaking of the revolutionaries, Tolstoi said:
“Their chief mistake is the superstition that one can arrange human life.”
April 12th. Tatyana Lvovna was saying that A. N. Volkov is writing a book on art. Tolstoi became interested. Volkov says in his book that art must follow Nature blindly in everything.
Tolstoi said:
“It is absolutely untrue. It is always like that. When people are discussing art, they either say, like the modern decadents, that everything is allowed, everything is possible, that there is complete freedom in art. Or they talk about the slavish imitation of Nature. Both views are false. Just as every man is perfectly individual and never occurs twice over, so also his thoughts, his feelings are always new; they are his thoughts and feelings alone. At the basis of a true work of art there must lie some perfectly original idea or feeling, but it must be expressed with slavish adherence to the smallest details of life.”
July 27th. A fortnight ago Mme. E—v, the wife of a privy councillor, came here on a visit. Tolstoi played chess with me on the balcony and the lady talked at first to Sophie Andreevna, and then, I think, to Marie Nikolaevna, about the great service which landowners performed, and how the peasants are beasts, and how, but for the landed aristocracy and their culture, they would become absolute brutes.
Tolstoi kept silent, but at last could stand it no longer. He got up from his chair and said to her:
“You must forgive me, but what you are saying is terrible, one can’t listen to it with indifference. If one is speaking of beasts, then certainly it is not the peasants who are beasts, but all of us who rob them and live on them. And all the ‘work’ of the landowners is nothing but playing about for want of anything else to do!”
Tolstoi was in a state of agitation and could not get calm for a long time afterwards.
The same evening at tea, when Mme. E—v had gone, the talk was about executions. Sophie Andreevna tried to prove that any murder is as bad as an execution, and yet people don’t talk about them. Elisabetha Valerianovna replied that an execution is a murder which is considered to be just, and the horror of it lies in that.
Tolstoi said:
“If one were to ask who is worse, the wretched executioner, hired, intoxicated, spiritually destroyed, or those who hire him and those who pass sentence of death, the prosecutors, the judges, then it seems to me there can be no doubt.”
At tea Elisabetha Valerianovna asked her mother, Marie Nikolaevna, to have some milk, and she began to drink it.
Tolstoi said:
“How is it, Mashenka, that you drink it? For myself, if I am told to drink milk, I want sherry, and, when I’m told to drink sherry, I want milk.” ...
Marie Nikolaevna began recalling the past. When they lived in Moscow, soon after the death of their father in 1837-38, Tolstoi, who was then about eight or nine, jumped out of the first-floor window and was badly hurt.
Tolstoi said:
“I remember that quite well. I wanted to see what would happen, and I even remember that, as I jumped, I tried to jump upwards.”
July 28th. Yesterday my wife and I were at Yasnaya. Tolstoi’s leg is still painful. He lies in a chair with it stretched out. He suffers from inflammation and from embolism of the vein. They say he must lie like that for six weeks.
We arrived at Yasnaya about eight o’clock. Tolstoi sat in a chair in the dining-room. He played chess with S. Then he began to play chess with me. S. looked on at our game for a time, and then sitting near the round table he began to talk to Sophie Andreevna about the children’s anthology to be chosen from Tolstoi’s works, which he wishes to publish for his Jubilee (Tolstoi’s eighty years). The conversation was terrible. Sophie Andreevna said in the sharpest way that she was not going to be cheated out of her rights, that she would go to a lawyer and would write to the papers about it. S. behaved rather well, and asked her to point out what she would allow to be published; but she would not listen to reason. At last she said that it was the same as if he stole her silver spoons. It was intolerably humiliating and painful.
Sophie Andreevna made attempts to draw Tolstoi into the dispute. Poor Tolstoi! He suffered, frowned, shook his head in horror, but kept silent. The greatest deed in his life is his humility and patience with Sophie Andreevna. His behaviour is all the more difficult, because people criticize him for being humble and long-suffering in this way. How much easier it would be for him to leave this kind of life, which he not only does not want, but which is intolerable to him.
Then it became even worse. S. left the room for a time, and when he returned and sat down near us watching the chess, Sophie Andreevna did not see him and began talking about something and, as usual, complaining of the worries of managing the household, and said:
“When I get rid of the steward, of the thieving, of S., and ...” of something else, I don’t remember what.
Every one was overcome with shame. Tolstoi even uttered a groan. S. turned deadly white. Some one managed to whisper to Sophie Andreevna that he, S., was in the room. She was not in the least put out, and only began saying how much she regretted that she had not died under her operation.
Tolstoi glanced at S.; S. said:
“Did you want to say something, Leo Nikolaevich?”
Tolstoi was silent for a time and then said:
“You understood me.”
Then he added:
“Whom God loves, him He tries.”
It was intolerable. S. left the room quickly and went away without saying good-bye to any one.
There the matter rested. Mme. Zveginzev then arrived. Tolstoi talked about Chertkov’s father:[14]
“When he was about forty-five, gangrene attacked his toe. Then it went further, and his leg had to be amputated at the knee. He went to England. There they made him an artificial leg on which he walked fairly easily. Then the gangrene attacked the other leg. This, too, had to be amputated, but this time much above the knee. He sat in a chair and was carried about. He was very patient and did not groan, although he shuddered with pain all day long. In the evenings he would be given an injection of morphia; he would then revive, read the papers, and talk. He was a brilliant man, a wit, and a great success in society. He used to be taken in his chair to parties. There was even a cult for him; he used to visit the Empress. In society invitations were issued: ‘Venez; M. Chertkoff sera ce soir chez nous.’ He died early. He never drank and never could drink, for the wine went to his head. But once at dinner some one drank, and he took a little glass of vodka, and suddenly died then and there at the dinner party.”
Some one began to talk about bugs.
Tolstoi said:
“When he has bugs, Perna does not scratch, but lies quietly—he allows them to have their fill, like Buddha, who gave himself to be devoured by the tigress; and when the bugs have eaten enough, he sleeps peacefully. In olden days, under the serfdom, when the landed gentry lived very dirtily and bugs were everywhere, if a guest remained for the night, the butler used to be put into the bed first, so as to feed the bugs, and only after that was the bed made for the guest.”
Then I came up to Tolstoi and he talked to me. At first, with a smile, he winked at Mme. Zveginzev’s colossal hat.
I asked him if he was still working on the new “Circle of Reading.” Tolstoi said that he is already working at the twenty-first day. He makes the same number of days in all the twelve months. I told him that I had read the first day and that it seemed to me very good.
Tolstoi said:
“Yes, but it must all be gone over again. At the beginning of each day I put the ideas which can be understood by children and simple people. This is very difficult. I am doing it now, when I am an old man, but I ought to have begun my career as a writer by doing it. I ought to have written so that it could be understood by every one. This is true, too, of your art. And, generally speaking, of all the arts.”
I said to him that in music the most musical language happens to be beyond one’s reach, whether or not one belongs to intellectual circles, either because one is not trained or because one is unmusical by nature.
Tolstoi agreed with me partly, but said that this was the case in other arts as well:
“There are some ideas which can be understood by all and are necessary to all, but are expressed in the language of a small group of people. For instance, the poem ‘I remember the wonderful moment,’ or ‘When to the mortal the noisy day passes into silence’—do you remember them? A peasant couldn’t understand them.”
Tolstoi said:
“I was thinking a great deal about art to-day and I re-read my article, and I must confess I agreed with my ideas.”
Tolstoi is reading the English biography of Chopin (by Huneker). He does not like it. He said to me:
“I have not read books of that kind for a long time. The author does not reveal Chopin’s inner life, but displays his own erudition, his ability to write well and wittily. He is controversial and proves the faults of other biographers. But there is no Chopin here.... Yet there are many interesting facts in it. It is the life of a small circle of poets, writers, and musicians—what a perverted and terrible life! And George Sand, that disgusting woman!... I can’t understand her success.”
Marie Nikolaevna, who was listening, said:
“No! she has done good things. Take, for instance, her Consuelo.”
“No, that is not good. It is all false and bad and tedious; I could never read it.”
July 30th. There were staying at Yasnaya Marie Alexandrovna, I. Gorbunov, and E. I. Popov. Tolstoi was not well. His leg was still painful. We played chess. Then there was tea. Before the game of chess, when I had come into the drawing-room by myself, Tolstoi was telling Obolensky and the others, whom I mentioned, the plot of Anatole France’s novel, a very complicated novel. I believe it is called Jocaste. Tolstoi was telling the plot in detail and was surprised at its absurdity, but said it was written with A. France’s usual mastery.
As I came in, I had met two men downstairs who wished to see Tolstoi. As Tolstoi is ill, Gusev (the secretary) went downstairs. One of the men turned out to be a sectarian, “an immortalist,” and the other sent up by Gusev a strange note in which, referring to Boulanger’s promise to try to find a job for him, he said something foolish about his desire to be useful to Tolstoi. Altogether there was no sense, no purpose in it.
Tolstoi said:
“It is amazing, why can’t they understand? It seems to him that only he and myself exist, and yet there are hundreds of him, and only one of me. And what can I do for him?”
At tea Tolstoi talked about the ‘immortalist.’ Marie Nikolaevna asked what sect it was.
Tolstoi said to her:
“The ‘immortalists’ believe that if they go on believing they will never die. And when one of them dies they say: he did not really believe.... I quite understand it. With them immortality is identified with the body. At a low level of religious development that is understandable. The Church doctrine also thinks of resurrection as a resurrection in the flesh.”
Marie Nikolaevna began to say that she believed that there would be something after death.
Tolstoi said:
“In the first place, as to our state after death, it is impossible to say that it will be. Immortality neither will be, nor was, but is. It is outside the forms of time and space. People who keep on asking what is going to happen after death should be told: the very same thing that was before birth. We do not know, neither can we or must we know what existence outside of the body, fusion with God, is like, and, when people begin telling me about it—even if some one from the other world were to come to tell me about it—I would not believe and I should say that I do not need it. That which we need, we always are aware of and know without doubting. One ought to live so that one’s life should help on the happiness of other people.”
Marie Nikolaevna said that although she neither believes in nor admits the existence of paradise and hell with real suffering, nevertheless there is hell for the soul in the constant suffering which comes from realization of evil done or of good undone.
“I can’t admit,” she added, “that one who lives badly and has done no good will achieve the same fusion with God as the man who has lived justly.”
Tolstoi was about to say something, but Marie Nikolaevna interrupted him.
Tolstoi said quietly and gently:
“I listened to you, Mashenka; now do you listen to me. Compared with the perfection of God, the difference which exists in life between the most righteous man and the most wicked is so insignificant that it is simply equal to nothing. And how am I to admit that God, the God whom I realize through love, can be revengeful and punish?”
“But suppose one lived wickedly all one’s life and died without repenting?” Marie Nikolaevna said.
“Ah, Mashenka,” Tolstoi said, “but what man wishes to be bad? The man whom we think bad we must love and pity for his sufferings. Nobody wants to live a bad life and to suffer. He must not be punished, he must be pitied, because he does not know the truth.”
Marie Nikolaevna still could not give up her point of view.
Tolstoi said to her:
“Very well, if what you believe in satisfies you; and this must never be condemned, only you must not prevent people from believing what their conscience prompts them to, and you must not try to make them believe differently, as all the Churches do, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Orthodox, the Buddhist, the Muhammadan.”...
Towards the end of July, Klechkovsky came to Yasnaya and played.
Tolstoi lay on the sofa, and, after Klechkovsky had finished playing, we sat by Tolstoi. Klechkovsky began talking about himself, how dissatisfied he was with his life, how he would like to live on the land, to give up his music teaching and the Institute. But he can’t do it because his father would be much upset by such a sudden change in his life. He also said that he would like to go and live in a community.
Tolstoi replied to him:
“Why in a community? One ought not to separate oneself from other people. If there is anything good in a man, let that light be spread about him wherever he lives. What numbers of people settled in communities, yet nothing came of it! All their energies went at first into external arrangement of life, and when at length they settled down, there began to be quarrels and gossip, and it all fell to pieces.... You are grumbling at the Institute, yet there is the porter there whom you could treat kindly, like a human being, and then you would have done a good act. And the girls, your pupils? Can’t you make a great deal that is good out of those relations? One can always shut oneself off from people, but nothing good will come of it. I say this not because I want to justify my own life. I live in the wrong way and know it is the wrong way, but I have always wanted and tried to live better, only I could not.... I shall go to God in the consciousness that I did what I could to make my life better.
“One should never attempt to arrange life beforehand. At times I ask myself what I should do if I remained here alone? For instance, I should say to Ilya Vasilevich: ‘It would be nice if you did the rooms and tidied them to-day, and I will do them to-morrow.’ Then we should eat together. And so on with one thing after another, as things would arrange themselves. Only it has to be remembered that the ideal of the material life cannot be fully realized, any more than the ideal of the spiritual life. The whole point is in the constant effort to approach the ideal. If I gave up everything now and went away, Sophie Andreevna would hate me, and the evil of that would perhaps be worse. You have your father ... and so it is with every one.”
Tolstoi said before this:
“I said to Sophie Andreevna to-day, and I believe she was hurt by it: the first concern in life must be for the things of the soul, and, if household duties interfere with that, then damn household duties.”
Last night we sat on the balcony.
Tolstoi said that he had had a nice letter from a simple man who had read several of his books, and who asked, at the end of his letter, where there were people who live a Christian life, for he would leave everything and go and live with them. Tolstoi said that he replied to him much in the same way as he had done to Klechkovsky.
Tolstoi added:
“I think that even if one was a woman in a brothel, or a gaoler, one ought not suddenly to give up one’s work. Certainly any one who realizes the evil of such a life will not go on with it, but the important thing is not the external change.”
Tolstoi said he had received three letters: one from Mr. Grekov, who sent him three copies of his book, The Message of Peace, and wrote that his book was so remarkable that, if it were widely read, it would revolutionize human life; the second letter was from an intellectual who asked for a loan of 800 roubles; and the third from a simple illiterate peasant, a good serious letter. Tolstoi said that, besides letters asking for money, he also receives letters from authors sending him their books, and begging that Tolstoi will use his authority to make their books known.
“An odd idea,” Tolstoi said, “that I should try to spread opinions which I neither sympathize with nor share.”
August 5th. Marie Nikolaevna told how the steward Fokanich had once stolen 400 roubles from Tolstoi, and Tolstoi took it rather indifferently. Soon afterwards Sergey Nikolaevich, Tolstoi’s brother, was very much worried about his affairs, and when he was told that it was not worth while to be so worried, he said:
“It doesn’t matter to Levochka that Fokanich stole 400 roubles from him; he will write a story and get the money back; and he will describe Fokanich into the bargain; but where shall I get my money?”
Tolstoi replied to this:
“Mashenka, how can you remember all this? But I heard an expression to-day that keeps on coming back into my mind.”
And Tolstoi told how during lunch to-day an unusually importunate beggar arrived. He stood by the balcony and began saying how happy he was to see and salute Tolstoi, etc.... He was given something, but he was not satisfied, went to the kitchen, and began begging with extraordinary importunity. After lunch when Tolstoi was coming down from the balcony, Ilya Vasilevich, pointing to the beggar, said to Tolstoi:
“Yes, that fellow could beg the parson’s mare off him.”
August 19th. At tea the conversation turned upon modern literature. Tolstoi asked Buturlin to send him anything new he could find by Anatole France, whom Tolstoi values very highly. He spoke again.
Tolstoi said:
“I cannot remember getting a strong impression from a book for a long time. I do not think it is because I am old; it seems to me that modern literature, like the Roman literature in the past, is coming to an end. There is no one, neither in the West nor here.”
Buturlin asked Tolstoi if he remembered Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis.
Tolstoi had not read it, but said:
“I forget everything now, but I remember having tried to read Wilde, and it has left me with an impression that he was not worth reading.”
Speaking of modern Russian writers Tolstoi mentioned Kuprin.
“His scope is small; he knows the life of the soldiers, but still he has real artistic power. The others simply have nothing to say, and are on the look-out for new forms. But why look for new forms? If you have something to say, you should only ask for time in which to say what you want, but you won’t need to seek new forms.”
Apropos of Eltzbacher’s book on anarchy, which Tolstoi was re-reading, he said:
“Christian anarchy is a narrow definition of the Christian conception of the world, but anarchy follows certainly from Christianity in its application to social life.”
September 3rd. Tolstoi again spoke about the old German mystic, Angelus Silesius. Tolstoi asked some one to fetch his book (a large old volume) and read aloud several aphorisms, translating them as he read. When he came to the passage: “If God did not love Himself in us, we could neither love ourselves, nor God,” Tolstoi exclaimed:
“Ah, how well that’s said!”
Referring to some account in the papers of a conversation with him, Tolstoi said:
“If I were to live for another eighty years, and were never to cease talking, I could not manage to say all the sayings that are attributed to me.”
September 6th. Tolstoi said, with reference to the addresses and congratulations on his eightieth birthday (August 28th, 1908) which keep on coming:
“I believe I am right in saying that I have no vanity, but I can’t help being touched involuntarily. And yet, at my age, I live so far away from all this, it is all so unnecessary and so humiliating. Only one thing is necessary, the inner life of the spirit.”
On August 29th, when more than two thousand telegrams of congratulation arrived, Tolstoi said:
“I feel with joy that I have utterly lost the power of being interested in all this. In the past, I remember, I experienced a feeling of pride; I was glad at my success. But now—and I think it is not false modesty—it is a matter of absolute indifference to me. Perhaps it is because I have had too much success. It is like sweets: if you have too many, you feel surfeited. But one thing is pleasant: in nearly all the letters, congratulations, addresses, the same thing is repeated—it has simply become a truism—that I have destroyed religious delusions and opened the way for the search after truth. If it is true, it is just what I have wanted and tried to do all my life, and this is very dear to me.”