“There is also the superstition of the possibility of a ‘school’ in art. Hence all institutes and academies. The abnormal form which art takes now, however, is not the root of the evil, but one of its symptoms. When the religious conception of life changes, then art, too, will find its true methods.”
L. N. returned to the Chinese virtue of ‘respect,’ and said:
“Often remarkable men suffer from the lack of that Chinese ‘respect.’ For instance, in Henry George’s Progress and Poverty Marx’s name is not mentioned at all; and in his recently published posthumous work hardly eight lines refer to Marx, and those speak of the obscurity, complexity, and emptiness of Marx’s works.
“Apropos of obscurity and complexity, they are nearly always a proof of the absence of true meaning. But there is one great exception—Kant, who wrote horribly, and yet he makes an epoch in the development of mankind. In many respects he discovered perfectly new horizons.”
To-day after lunch L. N. went on horseback to Sokolniki and came back late in the evening. Nevertheless, when Mme. M. A. Maklakov and myself began to say good-bye, he said he would come with us. On the way Mme. Maklakov kept saying all the time how much she would like to live in the country. L. N. interrupted her:
“How it annoys me when people abuse the town with such exaggeration and say: To the country, to the country! All depends on the person,—in town, too, one can be with Nature. Don’t you remember,” L. N. asked her, “we had an old gatekeeper, Vasili? He lived all his life in town; in the summer he used to get up at 3 o’clock in the morning, and enjoyed his intercourse with Nature in our garden much more than country gentlemen do, who spend their evenings in the country playing cards. Besides, compared with the enormously important question of how to live one’s life in the best and most moral way, the question of town or country has no value at all.”
Before this L. N. said with a smile:
“I once said, but you must not talk about it, and I tell it you in secret: woman is generally so bad that the difference between a good and a bad woman scarcely exists.”
Yasnaya Polyana, July 31st. I am working with N. N. Ge on the proofs of Resurrection. The corrections are to be inserted in the proof-sheets from L. N.’s draft copy, and two copies of the same are made. The draft copy remains here, and the fair copies are sent, one to Marx for the weekly Niva, and the other to Chertkov in England for the English edition.
It is an interesting, but worrying and difficult work. Throughout, instead of the one printed proof-sheet, one has to copy out afresh three or four long pages. Often L. N.’s corrections are written so closely that a magnifying glass has to be used to read them. Unless one has seen L. N.’s incredible work, the numerous passages that are rewritten, the additions and alterations, the same incident being sometimes written dozens of times over, one can have not the remotest idea of this labour.