"There's a great deal, Liovushka, which you can't make out: you're not shrewd...."
There came in Andrey Lvovitch's wife, and the conversation was interrupted. As she and Suler went out, Leo Nicolayevitch said to me: "Leopold is the purest man I know. He is like that: if he did something bad, it would be out of pity for someone."
XXII
He talks most of God, of peasants, and of woman; of literature rarely and little, as 'though literature were something alien to him. Woman, in my opinion, he regards with implacable hostility and loves to punish her, unless she be a Kittie or Natasha Rostov, i.e., a creature not too narrow. It is the hostility of the male who has not succeeded in getting all the pleasure he could, or it is the hostility of spirit against "the degrading impulses of the flesh." But it is hostility, and cold, as in Anna Karenin. Of "the degrading impulses of the flesh" lie spoke well on Sunday in a conversation with Tchekhov and Yelpatievsky about Rousseau's Confession. Suler wrote down what he said, and later, while preparing coffee, burnt it in the spirit-lamp. Once before he burnt Leo Nicolayevitch's opinions on Ibsen, and he also lost the notes of the conversation in which Leo Nicolayevitch said very pagan things on the symbolism of the marriage ritual, agreeing to a certain extent with V. V. Rosanov.
XXIII
In the morning some "stundists" came to Tolstoi from Feodosia, and to-day all day long he spoke about peasants with rapture.
At lunch: "They came both so strong and fleshy; says one: 'Well, we've come uninvited,' and the other says: 'With God's help we shall leave unbeaten,'" and he broke out into child-like laughter, shaking all over.
After lunch, on the terrace:
"We shall soon cease completely to understand the language of the people. Now we say: 'The theory of progress,' 'the role of the individual in history,' 'the evolution of science and a peasant says: 'You can't hide an awl in a sack,' and all theories, histories, evolutions become pitiable and ridiculous, because they are incomprehensible and unnecessary to the people.' But the peasant is stronger than we; he is more tenacious of life, and there may happen to us what happened to the tribe of Atzurs, of whom it was reported to a scholar:
'All the Atzurs have died out, but there is a parrot here who knows a few words of their language.'"