“I hear there a presentiment, as it were, of the tragic dénouement, together with the excitement and even the romance of the duel.” ...
Then Tolstoi turned the conversation to the importance and province of form in art:
“I think that every great artist necessarily creates his own form also. If the content of works of art can be infinitely varied, so also can their form. Once Turgenev and I came back from the theatre in Paris and discussed this. He completely agreed with me. We recalled all that is best in Russian literature and it seemed that in these works the form was perfectly original. Omitting Pushkin, let us take Gogol’s Dead Souls. What is it? Neither a novel nor a story. It is a something perfectly original. Then there is the Memoirs of a Sportsman, the best book Turgenev ever wrote; then Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, and then, sinner that I am, my Childhood; Hertzen’s Past and Thoughts; Lermontov’s Hero of our Time....”
August 1st. Tolstoi talked with Marie Alexandrovna Schmidt in my presence about a certain Khokhlov who went mad.
Tolstoi told me his story briefly, and then said:
“What a riddle insanity is! What is he—alive or dead?”
I said that insanity is not a greater riddle than sanity. The mystery is how the personality which lives in me manifests itself through the brain. But if I admit that the first cause is not in my brain, but outside it, and the brain is only a means by which my personality is shown, then it is for me no fresh mystery that that personality of mine cannot be manifested when the machine of the brain is disordered.
Tolstoi said:
“Yes, it is all a mystery! Let us take a child. When it is born, has it conscious life? When does consciousness begin in a child? And what is it when it moves in its mother’s womb? To me life is a ceaseless liberation of the ‘I’ of the spirit. Recently N. N. came to me and asked me whether I believe in a future life? But to me there is a contradiction contained in the question. What does ‘future life’ mean? One may believe in life, but for eternal life our conception ‘future’ is quite inapplicable.
“But if we speak of life as we can realize it, as life after our present life, then it seems to me that it can be conceived only in two possible forms: either as a fusion with the eternal spiritual principle, with God, or as a continuation, in a different form, of the same process of liberation of the spiritual ‘I’ from what is called matter.