“Because he had in a high degree the power of making music correspond
to the poetry of the text. This rare power of his has brought to birth
a great deal of music which pretends to correspond to poetry, and that
is a revolting kind of art.”
They sang Glinka. Tolstoi said:
“Now, sinful man....” The interesting state of the game prevented him
from finishing his sentence.
Later he said:
“I feel that Glinka was coarse, a sensual man. One always feels the man
himself in his music. The young Mozart--bright and direct; the simple
Haydn; the stern, conceited Beethoven--are all heard in their music.”
Tolstoi is writing an article which is called “The Beginning of the
End.”
There was a newspaper correspondent to whom Tolstoi expressed a few of
the ideas which made the basis of his article.
“The present movement in Russia is a world movement, the importance
of which is still little understood. This movement, like the French
Revolution formerly, will perhaps give, by means of its ideas, an
impetus for hundreds of years to come. The Russian people has in the
highest degree the capacity for organization and self-government. They
gave up their power to the Government and waited, as they formerly did
for the liberation of the serfs, for the liberation of the land. They
have not been given the land, and they themselves will carry out that
great reform. Our revolutionaries are perfectly ignorant of the people
and do not understand this movement. They might help it, but they only
hamper it. In the Russian people, it seems to me, and I think I am not
biased, there is more of the Christian spirit than in other peoples.
Probably the reason is that the Russian people got to know the New
Testament about five centuries before the people of Europe, who until
the Reformation hardly knew it.”
Tolstoi criticized the complexity and artificiality of modern art in
general, and of music in particular. He said:
“Certainly, if I love art, I can’t love _no_ art, but I must love that
which exists. Still I have always before me the ideal of the highest
art: to be clear, simple, and accessible to all.”
I was saying how long and systematically one must teach piano-playing
in order to be able to play well. Tolstoi found that “system” dangerous.
He said:
“In doing this one may lose the direct fresh feeling with which you
regard a new work of art. I know it from my own experience--when one
begins to write something, one works with excitement and interest, and
the work goes well; but then the same old thing begins to tire one and
it becomes boring. Of course, there is the love of one’s work, and the
love is stronger than the boredom, and by love the boredom is overcome,
but still boredom there is.”
I spoke about the complexity of certain of Chopin’s works, whom Tolstoi
loves very much.
“Well, he too makes mistakes,” Tolstoi replied smilingly. “Once I
stayed with the Olsufevs in the country, and, referring to the weather
and the gathering in of the harvest, I said to the old butler there--he
was a sceptic and pessimist--that God knows what He does, to which he
replied: ‘He too makes mistakes!’”
Of creative activity Tolstoi said:
“The worst thing of all is to begin a work with the details; then one
gets muddled and loses the power of seeing the whole. One has to behave
like Pokhitonov who has spectacles with double glasses divided in two
(looking at the distance and at his work), to look now through these
and now through those and to put on now the bright and now the dark
glasses.”
_July 28th._ Biryukov showed Marie Nikolaevna (Tolstoi’s sister) some
old letters written by her brother Nikolay in French. Tolstoi recalled
then that from childhood he was so much used to writing French that he
kept the habit until he was quite grown up. When he lived in Paris with
Turgenev, he once sat down to write a letter to his brother. Turgenev
came up and, seeing that he was writing in French, was surprised and
asked Tolstoi why he did it. Tolstoi said that until that moment it
seemed to him that it was impossible to do otherwise, so used was he to
writing letters in French.
On account of Biryukov’s visit (he is writing Tolstoi’s biography) and
the arrival of his sister Marie Nikolaevna, Tolstoi again turned to
memories of the past. He said:
“It is surprising how all the past becomes _me_. It is in me, like
something folded. But it is difficult to be perfectly sincere.
Sometimes I remember the bad only, another time the opposite. Lately I
have remembered only the bad acts and events. It is difficult in this
to keep the balance, so as not to exaggerate one way or another.”
Tolstoi said:
“It is impossible to know anything about God; He is a necessary
hypothesis or, more truly speaking, the only possible condition of a
right moral life. As an astronomer must base his observations upon
the earth as a motionless centre, so also man cannot live rightly and
morally without the idea of God. Christ always speaks of God as of a
father, that is, as if He were the condition of our existence.”
_August 2nd._ Tolstoi and Marie Nikolaevna were recalling a certain
Voeikov. He was once a hussar, and then became a monk. When Tolstoi was
young, Voeikov was continually at Yasnaya, permanently drunk, ragged,
in monk’s clothing, and telling lies unmercifully.
Tolstoi remembered a story that Voeikov told:
“‘We were once in a box: Mikhail Illarionovich (Kutuzov), Alexander
Pavlovich (Alexander I.), myself, and some one else. Sontag sang. She
came out to the front of the stage. Her bosom--oh! (he makes a gesture
with his hand showing the size of her bust). Alexander Pavlovich said
to me: “Voeikov, what is it?” And I said to him: “An organism, Your
Majesty!”’
“And once, after all his mad ways and lies, he suddenly came up to me
in the garden and said: ‘I am tired of life, Levochka!’”
Marie Nikolaevna asked Tolstoi why he had never described Voeikov.
Tolstoi said:
“There are some events and people in life, as there are scenes in
nature, which cannot be described: they are too exceptional and seem to
be impossible. Voeikov was like that. Dickens described such types.”
_August 3rd._ The conversation turned on Lobachevsky[13] and on his
theory that space is of many dimensions. Tolstoi remembers Lobachevsky,
who was Professor and Principal of the Kazan University when Tolstoi
was an undergraduate there. Then the company began to recall various
mathematicians, amongst whom there are often queer fellows to be met.
Tolstoi mentioned Prince S. U. Urusov, the Sevastopol hero, who was a
mathematician and a splendid chess player.
Tolstoi said of him:
“He used to get up at three o’clock in the morning, light his samovar,
which was prepared for him the night before by his orderly, and begin
his calculations. Urusov was trying to find a way of solving the
different forms of equations. Later he went quite mad. Nothing came of
his calculations. When, in the belief that he had arrived at a positive
result, he decided to read a paper to the Mathematical Society, there
was so awkward a silence after his paper was read that all felt
ashamed.” ...
Tolstoi went on to say:
“I was always surprised that mathematicians who are so exact in their
own science are so vague and inexact when they try to philosophize.”
Tolstoi also mentioned Professors Nekrasov and B., whom he knew
personally. Tolstoi recollected how one evening he visited B.:
“His wife was an unpleasant woman. That evening she was decolletée,
and, as is always the case on such occasions, one feels something
superfluous, unnecessary--one doesn’t know where to look. Looking at
her I remembered Turgenev’s story,--how in Paris he always bought
himself a loaf in the morning, and the baker’s girl would hand it over
to him with her bare arm, which was more like a leg than an arm.”
_August 20th._ A certain gentleman from Petersburg (I don’t remember
his name) now and then sends books to Tolstoi. Recently he sent
him the _Sovremennik_ for 1852 in which Tolstoi’s _Childhood_ was
published. Tolstoi read the books with great interest and said that
the _Sovremennik_ was at that time a very interesting review. Marie
Nikolaevna, who was on a visit to Yasnaya, described how she read
_Childhood_ for the first time. She lived then with her husband in
the country, in the Chernsky district of the Tula province, and
Turgenev used to come to visit them fairly often. Her brother Sergey
Nikolaevich also lived there. During one visit Turgenev read them the
MS. of his _Rudin_. Next time he brought a number of the _Sovremennik_
and said to them:
“There is a wonderful new writer; a remarkable work by him is published
here, _Childhood_”; and he began to read it aloud.
From the very first words Marie Nikolaevna and Sergey Nikolaevna were
amazed:
“But he is describing us! Who is he?”
“At first we did not think of Levochka,” Marie Nikolaevna went on. “He
was in debt and had been sent to the Caucasus. We were rather inclined
to think that our brother Nikolay had written _Childhood_.”
It is said that Turgenev in his _Faust_ described Marie Nikolaevna.
The conversation turned on Dostoevsky’s hatred of Turgenev. Tolstoi
greatly blamed the libel on Turgenev in _The Possessed_. This hatred
always surprised Tolstoi, and so did that between Goncharov and
Turgenev.
Tolstoi went on to say:
“Now books are written by people who have nothing to say. You read, but
you do not see the writer. They always try to give ‘the last word.’
They reject the real writers and say that they have become obsolete.
It is an absurd notion--to become obsolete. Modern books are read
just because one can get to know ‘the last word’ from them; and this
is easier than to read and know the real writers. These purveyors of
‘the last word’ do enormous harm, they make people unused to thinking
independently.”
Some one mentioned Kant, and Tolstoi said:
“What is particularly valuable in Kant is that he always thought for
himself. In reading him you deal all the time with _his_ thoughts, and
this is extraordinarily valuable.”
About reading modern literature Tolstoi said:
“I am much more ready to read the memoirs of some old General in the
_Russkaia Starina_; he romances a little, like Zavalishin, about his
merits and successes, but this can be excused, and there is always
something of interest in it.”
Tolstoi said further:
“Brain work often tires the head, and when tired, you can’t work as
fruitfully as with a fresh head. Generally speaking, in brain work the
moment is very important. There are moments when your thoughts come out
as if moulded in bronze; at other moments nothing happens.”
_December 31st._ Tolstoi said:
“I am always interested to see what can become obsolete in
literature. I am curious to know what in modern literature will seem
old-fashioned, as, for instance, Karamzin’s ‘Oh soever!’ etc., seems
to us now. Within my memory it has become impossible to write a long
poem in verse. It seems to me that in time works of art will cease to
be invented. It will be a shame to invent a story about a fictitious
Ivan Ivanovich or Marie Petrovna. Writers, if such there be, will not
invent, but will only describe the significant or interesting things
which they have happened to observe in life.”