“No, on the contrary,” Tolstoi replied. “He rather liked me as a writer, but, as man, I did not find in him real warmth and cordiality. Well, he liked no one in that way, except women with whom he happened to be in love. He had no friends.”
Tolstoi asked me about my work, whether I was composing music, and said how bad it was when people force work out of themselves, and how great artists lose by immediately starting a new work when they have finished the old one.
Tolstoi mentioned Pushkin and said:
“The best writers are always strict with themselves. I re-write until I feel that I am beginning to spoil. And then, of course, I leave it alone. And one begins to spoil because at first, when you enjoy your work, whilst it is yours, you apply all your spiritual force to it. Later when the fundamental original idea ceases more and more to be new, and becomes, as it were, someone else’s, it bores you. You begin to try to say something new and you spoil and distort the first idea.”
A telegram arrived from Leonid Andreev asking to be allowed to come.
Tolstoi said:
“How terribly undeserved fame, like that of Andreev, spoils a man!”
Then Tolstoi could not compose a telegram in reply.
“How shall I answer? ‘Come.’ ... But that is too short. ‘Shall be very glad to see you’—that is not altogether true. Well, Dushan Petrovich, write simply: ‘You are welcome.’”