“It is time for me to die, and I have a whole mass of subjects, and even a new one to-day. I have a whole long list of them.” ...
Tolstoi is going to expound in an artistic form Buddha’s teaching, “Ta Twam Asi,” the meaning of which is that in every man and his actions one can always recognize oneself.
Tolstoi recalled the following:
“When I was taken for the first time to a box in the Grand Theatre as a young child I saw nothing: I did not know that it was necessary to look at the stage sideways, and I looked straight in front of me at the opposite boxes.”
August 12th. I spent the 7th and 8th in Yasnaya Polyana.
M. S. Sukhotin was talking about Count Bludov. Tolstoi said:
“His was a very interesting house where authors and the most interesting men of their time used to meet. I remember that I read there for the first time my Two Hussars. Bludov was once intimate with the Decembrists and sympathized in his soul with every progressive movement. And he kept on serving under Nicolas I.”
Mikhail Sergeevich Sukhotin asked whether Bludov was a Russian, and why was he a Count?
Tolstoi said:
“The Bludovs were a purely Russian family, to whom the title of Count was granted. I remember, when I gathered the peasants to read to them the Ukase of their liberation, at the bottom were the names of the signatories and it finished with the words: Countersigned by Count Bludov. An elderly peasant, Eremey, shook his head all the while and said: ‘That Blud, he must be a brainy fellow!’ Evidently he took it to mean that Bludov was at the head of the whole affair.”