“Often remarkable men suffer from the lack of that Chinese ‘respect.’
For instance, in Henry George’s _Progress and Poverty_ Marx’s name is
not mentioned at all; and in his recently published posthumous work
hardly eight lines refer to Marx, and those speak of the obscurity,
complexity, and emptiness of Marx’s works.
“Apropos of obscurity and complexity, they are nearly always a proof of
the absence of true meaning. But there is one great exception--Kant,
who wrote horribly, and yet he makes an epoch in the development of
mankind. In many respects he discovered perfectly new horizons.”
To-day after lunch L. N. went on horseback to Sokolniki and came back
late in the evening. Nevertheless, when Mme. M. A. Maklakov and myself
began to say good-bye, he said he would come with us. On the way Mme.
Maklakov kept saying all the time how much she would like to live in
the country. L. N. interrupted her:
“How it annoys me when people abuse the town with such exaggeration and
say: To the country, to the country! All depends on the person,--in
town, too, one can be with Nature. Don’t you remember,” L. N. asked
her, “we had an old gatekeeper, Vasili? He lived all his life in
town; in the summer he used to get up at 3 o’clock in the morning,
and enjoyed his intercourse with Nature in our garden much more than
country gentlemen do, who spend their evenings in the country playing
cards. Besides, compared with the enormously important question of how
to live one’s life in the best and most moral way, the question of town
or country has no value at all.”
Before this L. N. said with a smile:
“I once said, but you must not talk about it, and I tell it you in
secret: woman is generally so bad that the difference between a good
and a bad woman scarcely exists.”
_Yasnaya Polyana, July 31st._ I am working with N. N. Ge on the
proofs of _Resurrection_. The corrections are to be inserted in the
proof-sheets from L. N.’s draft copy, and two copies of the same are
made. The draft copy remains here, and the fair copies are sent, one to
Marx for the weekly _Niva_, and the other to Chertkov in England for
the English edition.
It is an interesting, but worrying and difficult work. Throughout,
instead of the one printed proof-sheet, one has to copy out afresh
three or four long pages. Often L. N.’s corrections are written so
closely that a magnifying glass has to be used to read them. Unless
one has seen L. N.’s incredible work, the numerous passages that are
rewritten, the additions and alterations, the same incident being
sometimes written dozens of times over, one can have not the remotest
idea of this labour.
_August 2nd._ I have been here from July 27th (in Yasnaya Polyana).
A queer young man, K., came to L. N., and, on my asking him what he was
doing, he said that “he was the free son of air.” K. told L. N. that he
wanted to settle down in the country among the people.