He loved Tchekhov, and, when he looked at him, his eyes were tender and seemed almost to stroke Anton Pavlovitch's face. Once, when Anton Pavlovitch was walking on the lawn with Alexandra Lvovna, Tolstoi, who at the time was still ill and was sitting in a chair on the terrace, seemed to stretch towards them, saying in a whisper: "Ah, what a beautiful, magnificent man: modest and quiet like a girl! And he walks like a girl. He's simply wonderful."
One evening, in the twilight, half closing his eyes and moving his brows, he read a variant of the scene in Father Sergius, where the woman goes to seduce the hermit: he read it through to the end, and then, raising his head and shutting his eyes, he said distinctly: "The old man wrote it well, well."
It came out with such amazing simplicity, his pleasure in its beauty was so sincere, that I shall never forget the delight which it gave me at the time, a delight which I could not—did not know how to express, but which I could only suppress by a tremendous effort. My heart stopped beating for a moment, and then everything around me seemed to become fresh and revivified.
One must have heard him speak in order to understand the extraordinary, indefinable beauty of his speech; it was, in a sense, incorrect, abounding in repetitions of the same word, saturated with village simplicity. The effect of his words did not come only from the intonation and the expression of his face, but from the play and light in his eyes, the most eloquent eyes I have ever seen. In his two eyes Leo Nicolayevitch possessed a thousand eyes.
Once Suler, Sergey Lvovitch, Tchekhov, and someone else, were sitting in the park and talking about women; he listened in silence for a long time, and then suddenly said:
"And I will tell the truth about women, when I have one foot in the grave—I shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me, and say, 'Do what you like now.'" The look he gave us was so wild, so terrifying that we all fell silent for a while.
He had in him, I think, the inquisitive, mischievous wildness of a Vaska Buslayev, and also something of the stubbornness of soul of the Protopop Avvakum, while above or at his side lay hidden the scepticism of a Tchaadayev. The Avvakumian element harried and tormented with its preachings the artist in him; the Novgorod wildness upset Shakespeare and Dante, while the Tchaadayevian element scoffed at his soul's amusements and, by the way, at its agonies. And the old Russian man in him dealt a blow at science and the State, the Russian driven to the passivity of anarchism by the barrenness of all his efforts to build up a more human life.
Strange! This Buslayev characteristic in Tolstoi was perceived through some mysterious intuition by Olaf Gulbranson, the caricaturist of Simplicissimus: look closely at his drawing and you will see how startlingly he has got the likeness of the real Tolstoi, what intellectual daring there is in that face with its veiled and hidden eyes, for which nothing is sacred and which believe "neither in a sneeze, nor a dream, nor the cawing of a bird."
The old magician stands before me, alien to all, a solitary traveller through all the deserts of thought in search of an all-embracing truth which he has not found—I look at him and, although I feel sorrow for the loss, I feel pride at having seen the man, and that pride alleviates my pain and grief.
It was curious to see Leo Nicolayevitch among "Tolstoyans"; there stands a noble belfry and its bell sounds untiringly over the whole world, while round about run tiny, timorous dogs whining at the bell and distrustfully looking askance at one another as though to say, "Who howled best?" I always thought that these people infected the Yassnaya Polyana house, as well as the great house of Countess Panin, with a spirit of hypocrisy, cowardice, mercenary and self-seeking pettiness and legacy-hunting. The "Tolstoyans" have something in common with those friars who wander in all the dark corners of Russia, carrying with them dogs' bones and passing them off as relics, selling "Egyptian darkness" and the "little tears of Our Lady." One of these apostles, I remember, at Yassnaya Polyana refused to eat eggs so as not to wrong the hens, but at Tula railway-station he greedily devoured meat, saying: "The old fellow does exaggerate."