Probably all I want to say about the news will seem to you confused, perhaps even harsh and ill-tempered, but you will forgive me—I am feeling as though I had been gripped by the throat and was being strangled.
I had many long conversations with him; when he was living at Gaspra in the Crimea, I often went to him and he liked coming to me; I have studied his books lovingly; it seems to me that I have the right to say what I think of him, even if it be bold and differ widely from the general opinion. I know as well as others that no man is more worthy than he of the name of genius; more complicated, contradictory, and great in everything—yes, yes, in everything. Great—in some curious sense wide, indefinable by words—there is something in him which made me desire to cry aloud to everyone: "Look what a wonderful man is living on the earth." For he is, so to say, universally and above all a man, a man of mankind.
But what always repelled me in him was that stubborn despotic inclination to turn the life of Count Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi into "the saintly life of our blessed father, boyard Leo." As you know, he has for long intended to suffer; he expressed his regret to E. Soloviov, to Suler, that he had not succeeded, but he wanted to suffer simply, not out of a natural desire to test the resistance of his will, but with the obvious and, I repeat, the despotic intention of increasing the influence of his religious ideas, the weight of his teaching, in order to make his preaching irresistible, to make it holy in the eyes of man through his suffering, to force them to accept it; you understand, to force them. For he realizes that that preaching is not sufficiently convincing; in his diary you will, some day, read good instances of scepticism applied by him to his own preaching and personality. He knows that "martyrs and sufferers, with rare exceptions, are despots and tyrants"—he knows everything! And yet he says to himself, "Were I to suffer for my ideas they would have a greater influence." This in him always repelled me, for I cannot help feeling that it is an attempt to use violence to me—a desire to get hold of my conscience, to dazzle it with the glory of righteous blood, to put on my neck the yoke of a dogma.
He always greatly exalted immortality on the other side of life, but he preferred it on this side. A writer, national in the truest and most complete sense, he embodied in his great soul all the defects of his nation, all the mutilations caused us by the ordeals of our history; his misty preaching of "non-activity," of "non-resistance to evil"—the doctrine of passivism—this is all the unhealthy ferment of the old Russian blood, envenomed by Mongolian fatalism and almost chemically hostile to the West with its untiring creative labour, with its active and indomitable resistance to the evil of life. What is called Tolstoi's "anarchism," essentially and fundamentally, expresses our Slav anti-stateism, which, again, is really a national characteristic and desire, ingrained in our flesh from old times, to scatter nomadically. Up to now we have indulged that desire passionately, as you and everyone else know. We Russians know it, too, but we break away, always along the line of least resistance; we see that this is pernicious, but still we crawl further and further away from one another—and these mournful cockroach journeyings are called "the history of Russia," of a State which has been established almost incidentally, mechanically, to the surprise of the majority of its honest-minded citizens, by the forces of the Variags, Tartars, Baltic Germans, and petty constables. To their surprise, because all the time "scattering," and only when we reached places beyond which we could find nothing worse—for we could go no further—well, then we stopped and settled down. This is the lot, the destiny to which we are doomed—to settle in the snows and marshes by the side of the wild Erza, Tchood, Merey, Vess, and Muroma. Yet men arose who realized that light must come to us not from the East but from the West; and now he, the crown of our ancient history, wishes, consciously or unconsciously, to stretch himself like a vast mountain across our nation's path to Europe, to the active life which sternly demands of man the supreme effort of his spiritual forces. His attitude towards science is, too, certainly national: one sees magnificently reflected in him the old Russian village scepticism which comes from ignorance. Everything is national in him, and all his preaching is a reaction from the past, an atavism which we had already begun to shake off and overcome.
Think of his letter "The Intelligenzia, the State, the People," written in 1905—what a pernicious, malignant thing it is! You can hear in it the sectarian's "I told you so." At the time I wrote an answer to him, based on his own words to me that he had long since forfeited the right to speak of and on behalf of the Russian people, for I am a witness of his lack of desire to listen to and understand the people who came to talk to him soul to soul. My letter was bitter, and in the end I did not send it to him.
Well, now he is probably making his last assault in order to give to his ideas the highest possible significance. Like Vassily Buslayev, he usually loved these assaults, but always so that he might assert his holiness and obtain a halo. That is dictatorial, although his teaching is justified by the ancient history of Russia and by his own sufferings of genius. Holiness is attained by flirting with sin, by subduing the will to live. People do desire to live, but he tries to persuade them: "That's all nonsense, our earthly life." It is very easy to persuade a Russian of this; he is a lazy creature who loves beyond anything else to find an excuse for his own inactivity. On the whole, of course, a Russian is not a Platon Karatayev, nor an Akim, nor a Bezonkhy, nor a Neklyudov; all these men were created by history and nature, not exactly on Tolstoi's pattern, he only improved on them in order more thoroughly to support his teaching. But, undeniably, Russia as a whole is—Tiulin above and Oblomov below. For the Tiulin above look at the year 1905, and for the Oblomov below look at Count A. N. Tolstoi, I. Bunin, look at everything round about you. Beasts and swindlers—we can leave them out of consideration, though our beast is exceedingly national—what a filthy coward he is for all his cruelty. Swindlers, of course, are international.
In Leo Nicolayevitch there is much which at times roused in me a feeling very like hatred, and this hatred fell upon my soul with crushing weight. His disproportionately overgrown individuality is a monstrous phenomenon, almost ugly, and there is in him something of Sviatogor, the bogatir, whom the earth can't hold. Yes, he is great. I am deeply convinced that, beyond all that he speaks of, there is much which he is silent about, even in his diary—he is silent, and, probably, will never tell it to anyone. That "something" only occasionally and in hints slipped through into his conversation, and hints of it are also to be found in the two note-books of his diary which he gave me and L. A. Sulerzhizky to read; it seems to me a kind of "negation of all affirmations," the deepest and most evil nihilism which has sprung from the soil of an infinite and unrelieved despair, from a loneliness which, probably, no one but he has experienced with such terrifying clearness. I often thought him to be a man who in the depths of his soul is stubbornly indifferent to people: he is so much above and beyond them that they seem to him like midges and their activities ridiculous and miserable. He has gone too far away from them into some desert, and there solitary, with the highest effort of all the force of his spirit, he closely examines into "the most essential," into death.
All his life he feared and hated death, all his life there throbbed in his soul the "Arsamaxian terror" —must he die? The whole world, all the earth looks toward him; from China, India, America, from everywhere living, throbbing threads stretch out to him; his soul is for all and for ever. Why should not Nature make an exception to her law, give to one man physical immortality—why not? He is certainly too rational and sensible to believe in miracles, but, on the other hand, he is a bogatir, an explorer, and, like a young recruit, wild and headstrong from fear and despair in face of the unknown barrack. I remember in Gaspra he read Leo Shestov's book Good and Evil in the Teaching of Nietzsche and Tolstoi, and, when Anton Tchekhov remarked that he did not like the book, Tolstoi said: "I thought it amusing. It's written swaggeringly, but it's all right and interesting. I'm sure I like cynics when they are sincere. Now he says: 'Truth is not wanted'; quite true, what should he want truth for? For he will die all the same."
And, evidently seeing that his words had not been understood, he added with a quick smile:—
"If a man has learned to think, no matter what he may think about;, he is always thinking of his own death. All philosophers were like that. And what truths can there be, if there is death?"