“If such an old woman talked about religion, must one destroy her
illusions and tell her honestly what one thinks?”
Tolstoi replied to him:
“The question does not exist to me. If I talk about religious
questions, I always express my thoughts, if I believe the truth of what
I say; and if my words are not understood, it is none of my business,
but I can say only what I think.”
Last year two young men came to Tolstoi, and now they have been again.
They are very nice and in search of a better life. They turned out
to be ballet dancers from the Moscow Grand Theatre. The necessity of
maintaining their family prevents them from changing their profession.
Tolstoi praised them highly. Then with a smile he said:
“If I had children now, I should send them to the ballet. At any rate
it is better than the university. Their feet alone might be spoilt in
the ballet, but at the university it is their heads.”
Tolstoi compared marriage to a little boat in which two people sail
over a stormy ocean.
“Each must sit tight and not make sharp movements or the boat will
upset.”
Speaking of the present schemes for a constitution in Russia Tolstoi
said:
“The misfortune is in that the Radicals and their set will only try
to say something very clever, to play the part of Russian Bebels,
and the party game will constitute the whole of the activity of the
representatives of the people.”
Of the war Tolstoi said:
“The comforting side of the Russian failure in the war consists in
this, that, however much people distort the genuine Christian teaching,
yet its meaning has already permeated the consciousness of the people
so deeply that war cannot become to them, as to the Japanese, a sacred
cause by sacrificing his life to which a man becomes a hero and does a
great deed. The view of war, as an evil, permeates the consciousness of
the people, deeper and deeper.”
Tolstoi said about the Japanese:
“The Japanese are perfectly incomprehensible and unknown to me. I see
their wonderful capacity for adapting and even for carrying further the
superficial side of European culture, chiefly in its worse aspects,
but the soul of the Japanese is absolutely dark to me. Japan, by
the way, proved that the whole of the boasted European civilization
of a thousand years could be taken over and even surpassed in a few
decades.”
The conversation was about crowd psychology.
Tolstoi said:
“It is an interesting and still little explored problem. It is a
hypnotism which has a terrible power over men. There is one moment
when it is still possible to resist it. I am now no longer infected by
others’ yawning, because I always remember it. When you see a crowd
running, you have to remember that you do not know why they run, and
to look back; and immediately you have dissociated yourself from the
crowd, you are at once saved from the danger of succumbing to the
hypnotism.”
We played chess on the terrace, and in the hall Sophie Nicolaevna sang
Schubert’s “Wanderer.”
Tolstoi said:
“Ah that Schubert! he did a lot of harm!”