As Mme. Kolokoltsev was insane, the conversation turned on insanity. I said, as I had done previously, that the spiritual life of the so-called insane remains unchanged. All that happens is that a mad person cannot make his personality felt. Tolstoi agreed with me.
Next day he said to me:
“Yesterday’s conversation on insanity was of great interest to me. I have been thinking a great deal about it. There are two consciousnesses in us: one—the animal; the other—the spiritual. The spiritual is not always shown in us, but it is this that makes our true spiritual life, which is not subject to time. I do not know how it is with you who are comparatively young, but with me there are times in my long life which are clearly preserved in my memory, and other times which have completely disappeared, they no longer exist. The moments which remain are most frequently the moments when the spirit in me awoke. It often happens at a time when one has done something wrong, and suddenly one wakes up, realizes that it is bad, and feels the spirit in one with special force. Spiritual life is a recollection. A recollection is not the past, it is always the present. It is our spirit, which shows itself more or less clearly, that contains the progress of man’s temporary existence. There can be no progress for the spirit, for it is not in time. What the life in time is for, we do not know; it is only a transitory phenomenon. Speaking metaphorically, I see this manifestation of the spirit in us as the breathing of God.
“There is a beautiful story about the unreality of time in The Arabian Nights. Some one was put into a bath; he dipped his head in the water and saw a long history with most complicated adventures; and then when he raised his head from the water, it turned out that he had only dipped his head in once!”
Tolstoi was talking about Fedorov and Peterson, particularly about Fedorov:
“They belonged to the sect which believes in the resurrection of the dead here on earth. Their idea is that people must try to resurrect all those who have died in the past. They believe that by hard work for centuries mankind will achieve it. For this purpose one must study all things of antiquity and restore them. Fedorov was librarian to the Rumyantsev Museum and was a passionate collector of all old things: portraits, objects, etc. Mankind must cease to multiply and everything will be resurrected. That is their ideal. It turns out that Vladimir Solovev and Dostoevsky to some extent—there is a letter to this effect—believed in this idea.
“Fedorov, I think, is still alive. He must be over eighty. All his life he has lived as an ascetic. When I once visited him in the spring and saw his thin overcoat, I asked him: ‘Do you wear a thin overcoat already?’ and he replied: ‘Christ said, if you have two cloaks, give them to him who has none, and I have two overcoats.’ And after that he always wore only a thin coat. He received a very small salary, ate very, very little, slept almost on the bare boards, helped the poor, and denied himself everything. He wrote a great deal, but his works remain in manuscript: his disciples have no money to publish them, and no publisher can be found to publish them.”
There was a plague of poisonous flies at Yasnaya Polyana this summer which made one’s face swell when they bit one.
Tolstoi said:
“Once, when I was younger, I wanted to write a story about a young man who stayed in the summer at a friend’s house where there was a young girl. The very first day they fell in love and raved about each other. At night, when he was asleep, a fly bit his lip, and half his face swelled up. His lip and cheek were swollen, and his face looked idiotic. When the girl saw him in the morning their love at once came to an end. There were no more illusions: she noticed a number of faults in him which she had not noticed at all the day before.”