It seemed sometimes as though this old sorcerer were playing with Death, coquetting with her, trying somehow to deceive her, saying: "I am not afraid of thee, I love thee, I long for thee."
And at the same time peering at Death with his keen little eyes: "What art thou like? What follows thee hereafter? Wilt thou destroy me altogether, or will something in me go on living?"
A strange impression used to be produced by his words: "I am happy, I am awfully happy, I am too happy." And then immediately afterwards: "To suffer." To suffer—that, too, was true in him; I don't doubt for a second that he, only half convalescent, would have been really glad to be put into prison, to be banished—in a word, to embrace a martyr's crown. Would not martyrdom probably in some measure justify death, make her more understandable, acceptable from the external, from the formal point of view? But he was never happy, never and nowhere; I am certain of that: neither "in the books of wisdom," nor "on the back of a horse," nor "in the arms of a woman" did he experience the full delights of "earthly paradise." He is too rational for that and knows life and people too well. Here are some more of his words:
"The Kaliph Abdurahman had during his life fourteen happy days, but I am sure I have not had so many. And this is because I have never lived—I cannot live—for myself, for my own self; I live for show, for people."
When we left, Anton Tchekhov said to me: "I don't believe that he was not happy." But I believe it. He was not. Though it is not true that he lived for show. Yes, what he himself did not need, he gave to people as though they were beggars; he liked to compel them, to compel them to read, walk, be vegetarians, love the peasants, and believe in the infallibility of the rational-religious reflections of Leo Tolstoi. People must be given something which will either satisfy or amuse them, and then let them be off. Let them leave a man in peace, to his habitual, tormenting, and sometimes cosy loneliness in face of the bottomless pit of the problem of "the essential."
All Russian preachers, with the exception of Avvakum and, perhaps, Tikhon Zadonsky, are cold men, for they did not possess an active and living faith. When I was writing Luka in The Lower Depths, I wanted to describe an old man like that: he is interested in "every solution," but not in people; coming inevitably in contact with them, he consoles them, but only in order that they may leave him in peace. And all the philosophy, all the preaching of such men, is alms bestowed by them with a veiled aversion, and there sounds behind their preaching words which are beggarly and melancholy: "Get out! Love God or your neighbour, but get out! Curse God, love the stranger, but leave me alone! Leave me alone, for I am a man and I am doomed to death."
Alas, so it is and so it will be. It could not and cannot be otherwise, for men have become worn out, exhausted, terribly separated, and they are all chained to a loneliness which dries up the soul. If Leo Nicolayevitch had had a reconciliation with the Church, it would not have at all surprised me. The thing would have had a logic of its own; all men are equally insignificant, even Archbishops. In fact, it would not have been a reconciliation, strictly speaking; for him personally the act would have been only logical: "I forgive those who hate me." It would have been a Christian act, and behind it there would have hidden a quick, ironical, little smile, which would be understood as the way in which a wise man retaliates on the fools.
What I write is not what I want to say; I cannot express it properly. There is a dog howling in my soul and I have a foreboding of some misfortune. Yes, newspapers have just arrived and it is already clear: you at home are beginning to "create a legend": idlers and good-for-nothings have gone on living and have now produced a saint. Only think how pernicious it is for the country just at this moment, when the heads of disillusioned men are bowed down, the souls of the majority empty, and the souls of the best full of sorrow. Lacerated and starving, they long for a legend. They long so much for alleviation of pain, for the soothing of torment. And they will create just what he desires, but what is not wanted—the life of a holy man and saint; but surely he is great and holy because he is a man, a madly and tormentingly beautiful man; a man of the whole of mankind. I am somehow contradicting myself in this, but it does not matter. He is a man seeking God, not for himself, but for men, so that God may leave him, the man, alone in the peace of the desert chosen by him. He gave us the Gospels in order that we might forget the contradictions in Christ; he simplified Christ's image, smoothing away the militant elements and bringing into the foreground the humble "will of Him that sent Him." No doubt Tolstoi's Gospel is the more easily accepted because it is "soothing to the malady" of the Russian people. He had to give them something, for they complain and trouble the earth with their groaning and distract him from "the essential." But War and Peace and all the other things of the same kind will not soothe the sorrow and despair of the grey Russian land. Of War and Peace he himself said: "Without false modesty, it is like the Iliad." M. Y. Tchaikovsky heard from his lips exactly the same appreciation of Childhood, Youth.
Journalists have just arrived from Naples; one even hurried from Rome. They ask me to say what I think of Tolstoi's "flight"—"flight" is the word they use. I would not talk to them. You, of course, understand that inwardly I am terribly disturbed; I do not want to see Tolstoi a saint; let him remain a sinner close to the heart of the all-sinful world, even close to the heart of each one of us. Poushkin and he—there is nothing more sublime or dearer to us.
Leo Tolstoi is dead.