Tolstoi said:
“It is impossible to know anything about God; He is a necessary hypothesis or, more truly speaking, the only possible condition of a right moral life. As an astronomer must base his observations upon the earth as a motionless centre, so also man cannot live rightly and morally without the idea of God. Christ always speaks of God as of a father, that is, as if He were the condition of our existence.”
August 2nd. Tolstoi and Marie Nikolaevna were recalling a certain Voeikov. He was once a hussar, and then became a monk. When Tolstoi was young, Voeikov was continually at Yasnaya, permanently drunk, ragged, in monk’s clothing, and telling lies unmercifully.
Tolstoi remembered a story that Voeikov told:
“‘We were once in a box: Mikhail Illarionovich (Kutuzov), Alexander Pavlovich (Alexander I.), myself, and some one else. Sontag sang. She came out to the front of the stage. Her bosom—oh! (he makes a gesture with his hand showing the size of her bust). Alexander Pavlovich said to me: “Voeikov, what is it?” And I said to him: “An organism, Your Majesty!”’
“And once, after all his mad ways and lies, he suddenly came up to me in the garden and said: ‘I am tired of life, Levochka!’”
Marie Nikolaevna asked Tolstoi why he had never described Voeikov. Tolstoi said:
“There are some events and people in life, as there are scenes in nature, which cannot be described: they are too exceptional and seem to be impossible. Voeikov was like that. Dickens described such types.”
August 3rd. The conversation turned on Lobachevsky[13] and on his theory that space is of many dimensions. Tolstoi remembers Lobachevsky, who was Professor and Principal of the Kazan University when Tolstoi was an undergraduate there. Then the company began to recall various mathematicians, amongst whom there are often queer fellows to be met. Tolstoi mentioned Prince S. U. Urusov, the Sevastopol hero, who was a mathematician and a splendid chess player.
Tolstoi said of him: