To-day probably October 23. Y. P.
All these days I have been out of tune with my work. Wrote a letter yesterday to the commander of the disciplinary battalion in Irkutsk about Olkhovik.[134]
It is evening now, I am sitting down to write because I feel the special importance and seriousness of the hours of life which are left to me. And I do not know what I have to do, but I feel that there has ripened in me an expression of God’s will which asks to be let out.
Have re-read Hadji Murad—it isn’t what I want to say. As to Resurrection I can’t even get hold of it. The drama interests me.
A splendid article by Carpenter on science.[135] All of us walk near the truth and uncover it from various sides.
October 26. Y. P.
I am still just as indisposed and don’t feel like writing. My head aches. Serezha came yesterday.[136] Wrote a letter to Sonya and to Andrusha.
But it seems to me that during this time of doubt, I arrived at two very important conclusions:
1) That, which I also thought before and wrote down; that art is an invention, is a temptation for amusement with dolls, with pictures, with songs, with play, with stories—and nothing more. But to place art as they do (and they do the same with science), on the same level with the good is a horrible sacrilège. The proof that it is not so, is that about truth also (the right) I can say that truth is a good (as God said, great good, teib, i.e., good), and about beauty one can say that it is good; but it is impossible to say about good that it is beautiful (at times it is homely), or that it is true (it is always true).
There is only one good; good and bad; but truth and beauty are good qualities of certain objects.