Talks with Tolstoi

by Aleksandr Borisovich Golʹdenveĭzer

He said:

“In doing this one may lose the direct fresh feeling with which you regard a new work of art. I know it from my own experience—when one begins to write something, one works with excitement and interest, and the work goes well; but then the same old thing begins to tire one and it becomes boring. Of course, there is the love of one’s work, and the love is stronger than the boredom, and by love the boredom is overcome, but still boredom there is.”

I spoke about the complexity of certain of Chopin’s works, whom Tolstoi loves very much.

“Well, he too makes mistakes,” Tolstoi replied smilingly. “Once I stayed with the Olsufevs in the country, and, referring to the weather and the gathering in of the harvest, I said to the old butler there—he was a sceptic and pessimist—that God knows what He does, to which he replied: ‘He too makes mistakes!’”

Of creative activity Tolstoi said:

“The worst thing of all is to begin a work with the details; then one gets muddled and loses the power of seeing the whole. One has to behave like Pokhitonov who has spectacles with double glasses divided in two (looking at the distance and at his work), to look now through these and now through those and to put on now the bright and now the dark glasses.”

July 28th. Biryukov showed Marie Nikolaevna (Tolstoi’s sister) some old letters written by her brother Nikolay in French. Tolstoi recalled then that from childhood he was so much used to writing French that he kept the habit until he was quite grown up. When he lived in Paris with Turgenev, he once sat down to write a letter to his brother. Turgenev came up and, seeing that he was writing in French, was surprised and asked Tolstoi why he did it. Tolstoi said that until that moment it seemed to him that it was impossible to do otherwise, so used was he to writing letters in French.

On account of Biryukov’s visit (he is writing Tolstoi’s biography) and the arrival of his sister Marie Nikolaevna, Tolstoi again turned to memories of the past. He said:

“It is surprising how all the past becomes me. It is in me, like something folded. But it is difficult to be perfectly sincere. Sometimes I remember the bad only, another time the opposite. Lately I have remembered only the bad acts and events. It is difficult in this to keep the balance, so as not to exaggerate one way or another.”