1901
Moscow, February 1st. Tolstoi began about a couple of months ago to learn Dutch, and now he reads quite easily, at the age of seventy-three!
He has an original way of learning languages: he gets the New Testament in the language he wants to know, and whilst reading it through he learns the language.
Tolstoi said to me recently about modern art:
“The sense of shame is lost. I cannot call it anything else—the sense of æsthetic shame. I wonder if you know the feeling? I feel it most strongly when I read something that is artistically false, and I can call it nothing else but shame.”
With regard to his play, The Corpse, Tolstoi said to me:
“The son of the wife of the man I described came to me, and then the man himself. The son on behalf of his mother asked me not to publish the play,[1] because it would be very painful to her, and also because she was afraid of the consequences. I of course promised.
“Their visit was very interesting and useful to me. Once more, as so many times before, I was convinced how much feebler and more unreal are the psychological motives which one invents oneself in order to explain actions. The actions of one’s imaginary characters are then the motives which guided those people in real life. After talking to these people I cooled to my work.”
On another occasion, in the dining-room downstairs, animated conversation was going on among the younger people. Tolstoi, who was resting in the next room in the dark, afterwards came into the dining-room and said to me:
“I lay there and listened to your talk. It interested me from two points of view: it was interesting simply to hear young people talking, and then it was also interesting from the dramatic point of view. I listened and said to myself: This is how one ought to write for the stage. It is not one speaking and the others listening. It is never like that. It is necessary that all should speak, and the art of the writer consists in making what he wants run through it like a beautiful thread.”