In the same story the Cossack Loukáshka kills a Tartar 'brave' at night, and rises greatly in the popular esteem and in his own; and the hero thinks to himself:
'What nonsense and confusion! A man kills another and is as happy and satisfied as though he had done an excellent deed. Does nothing tell him there is here no cause for great rejoicing? That happiness consists not in killing others, but in sacrificing oneself?'
We have a yet safer record of Tolstoy's feelings in his Diary, in which about this time he noted down the following reflections concerning the chief faults he was conscious of in himself:
1. The passion of gaming is a covetous passion, gradually developing into a craving for strong excitement. Against this passion one can struggle.
2. Sensuality is a physical need, a demand of the body, excited by imagination. It increases with abstinence, and therefore the struggle against it is very difficult. The best way is by labour and occupation.
3. Vanity is the passion least harmful to others and most harmful to oneself.
In another passage, indicating quite a different phase of consciousness, he writes:
For some time past repentance for the loss of the best years of life has begun to torment me, and this since I commenced to feel that I could do something good.... There is something in me which compels me to believe that I was not born to be like everybody else.
In May we find him going on furlough to Pyatigórsk to drink the mineral water and to be treated for rheumatism. This is his description of Pyatigórsk, written nearly twenty years later in his Reading Book for Children:
Pyatigórsk (Five Hills) is so called because it stands on Mount Besh-tau. Besh means in Tartar 'five,' Tau means 'hill.' From this mountain flows a hot sulphur stream. The water is boiling, and over the places where it springs from the mountain there is always steam, as from a samovár.