He went on to say that truth is the same for all —love of God; but on this subject he spoke coldly and wearily. After lunch on the terrace, he took up the book again, and, finding the passage, "Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche could not live without an answer to their questions, and for them any answer was better than none," he laughed and said:
"What a daring coiffeur; he says straight that I deceived myself, and that means that I deceived others too. That is the obvious conclusion...."
"Why coiffeur?" asked Suler.
"Well," he answered thoughtfully, "it just came into my mind—he is fashionable, chic, and I remembered the coiffeur from Moscow at a wedding of his peasant uncle in the village. He has the finest manners and he dances fashionably, and so he despises everyone."
I repeat this conversation, I think, almost literally; it is most memorable for me, and I even wrote it down, as I did many other things which struck me. Sulerzhizky and I wrote down many things which Tolstoi said, but Suler lost his notes when he came to me at Arsamas: he was habitually careless, and although he loved Leo Nicolayevitch like a woman, he behaved towards him rather strangely, almost like a superior. I have also mislaid my notes somewhere, and cannot find them; someone in Russia must have got them. I watched Tolstoi very attentively, because I was looking for—I am still looking for, and will until my death—a man with an active and a living faith. And also because once Anton Tchekhov, speaking of our lack of culture, complained:
"Goethe's words were all recorded, but Tolstoi's thoughts are being lost in the air. That, my dear fellow, is intolerably Russian. After his death they will bestir themselves, will begin to write reminiscences, and will lie."
But to return to Shestov. "'It is impossible,' he says, 'to live looking at horrible ghosts,' but how does he know whether it's horrible or not? If he knew, if he saw ghosts, he would not write this nonsense, but would do something serious, what Buddha did all his life."
Someone remarked that Shestov was a Jew.
"Hardly," said Leo Nicolayevitch doubtfully.
"No, he is not like a Jew; there are no disbelieving Jews, you can't name one.... no."