“You ask me a question which I now for twenty years have been trying to solve.
“It always seems to us—when the simple truth is that we ought to lead a Christian life, and when it is disclosed to us how terribly far from that life is the life we lead—it always seems to us that we for the moment find ourselves in an exceptionally disadvantageous condition for beginning that new life, which opens itself to us: To one, it is a mother, to another a wife, to a third, children, to a fourth, business; this one bought a bull, or the other has a wedding which interferes from his going to the feast. And we usually say to ourselves, ‘Oh, if it were not so,’—looking at it as on an accidental hindrance and not as on the unavoidable conditions of Christian life, as on the law of gravitation in problems of activity.
“Beauty which discloses to us the kingdom of God blinds us so, that we immediately want to enter it and we forget that this is not the programme of life, but the ideal; and that the programme of life consists in struggle and in effort to attain the kingdom of God, to approach it.
“And when you understand this, then the attitude towards activity is changed....”
[261.] The village of Dolgoe, province of Tula, district of Krapevensk, nineteen versts from Yasnaya Polyana. The Yasnaya Polyana house in which Tolstoi was born stands there. In the fifties this house was sold to a neighbouring landlord, Gorobov, who took it from Yasnaya Polyana to Dolgoe, where it remained until 1913, when it was destroyed.
[262.] Nicholai Ilich Storozhenko (1836–1906), professor in the Moscow University, author of numerous books and articles on Russian history and general literature.
[263.] Tolstoi probably asked N. A. Kasatkin for examples of true art in painting.
[264.] N’s stories seemed to be about some of the Chertkovs’ difficult experiences in England.
[265.] Prince S. N. Troubetskoi (1862–1905), professor of philosophy in the Moscow University, took an active part in the magazine, Problems of Philosophy and Psychology, and became after N. Y. Grot’s death, the editor of it. Tolstoi, as was said above, gave his work, What Is Art? to this magazine.