Tolstoi values Gromeka’s criticism very much. He said:
“It was a pleasure to me that a man who sympathized with me could see even in War and Peace and in Anna Karenin a great deal of what I was afterwards to say and write.”
Tolstoi also said:
“When I wrote the story What Men Live by, Fet said, ‘Well, what do people live by? By money, of course.’”
I observed that Fet had probably said it in joke. Tolstoi replied:
“No, it was his conviction. And, as often happens, what people try very stubbornly to get, they do get. Fet all his life long wanted to become rich, and he became rich. His brothers and sisters, it seems, went out of their minds, and all their fortunes came to him.”
Fet wrote in Tatyana Lvovna’s album that the unhappiest day of his life was the one when he saw that he was going to be ruined.
I talked a good deal with Tolstoi to-day. Tolstoi said about current events:
“I am not so much horrified at these murders in the Transvaal, and now in China, as by the open declaration of immoral motives. They used at least to cloak themselves hypocritically in good motives, but now that this is no longer possible they express all their immoral and cruel intentions and claims openly.”
We spoke about the abolition of deportation. Tolstoi considers it worse than the other method. He said: