1905
January 5th. During the Christmas holidays Misha Sukhotin read Professor Korkunov’s book on Russian State Law. Tolstoi took it and began to read it. He sat nearly the whole evening in his room, and came out in a state of agitation and disturbance saying: “It gave me palpitation of the heart to read that! In this, as in almost all legal books which deal with ‘rights’ of different kinds, it talks of anything and everything except the truth of the matter. It deals with the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of right—I never could make out what precisely those words and others of the same sort mean, nor could I ever get any one to explain them to me. But whenever the argument approaches the real question, the author immediately swerves aside and hides himself behind his objects and subjects.”
Further Tolstoi said:
“This is what surprises me; all my life I have striven for knowledge. I sought and still seek for it, and the so-called men of science say that I denounce science. All my life I have been occupied with religious questions, and outside of them I see no sense in human life; yet the so-called religious men consider me an atheist.” ...
About that time, in January, Tolstoi said that he should like to write a whole series of stories for his “Reading Circle” which he is now planning, and that he had already many subjects in mind.
“Only one minute of life remains, and there’s work for a hundred years,” he said.
When later in the evening I played Chopin’s prelude, Tolstoi said:
“Those are the kind of short stories one ought to write!”
There was then an interesting talk about Chekhov’s story, The Darling, with reference to Gorbunov’s letter dissuading him from publishing the story in the “Reading Circle.” Tolstoi on the contrary decided to include the story without fail, and expressed his very high opinion of it; and in a few days he wrote a preface to The Darling in which he expressed his feeling for it.