Tolstoi said:
“When after the Sevastopol campaign I lived in Petersburg, Tyutchev,
then a famous author, did me, a young writer, the honour to call on
me. And then, I remember, how surprised I was that he, who had all his
life mixed in court circles--he was a friend, in the purest sense, of
the Empress Marie Alexandrovna--who spoke and wrote French more easily
than Russian, picked out for special praise, when he expressed his
admiration for my Sevastopol stories, a certain soldiers’ expression;
and this sensitiveness to the Russian language surprised me in him
extraordinarily.”
The conversation arose about writers’ fees.
Tolstoi turned to P. Biryukov and said:
“I understand fees in the case of a work like your biography (of
Tolstoi), but fees to writers for their artistic work always seemed
strange and wrong to me. The man wrote and enjoyed writing, and
suddenly for that enjoyment he asks five hundred roubles per printed
sheet!” ...
Tolstoi said:
“I became more and more convinced that a sensible man is to be known by
his humility. Conceit is incompatible with understanding.”
Of conceit Tolstoi said a long time ago in my presence:
“Every man can be seen as a fraction, whose numerator is his actual
qualities, and its denominator his opinion of himself. The greater the
denominator the less is the absolute quantity of the fraction.”
1907
_September 7th._ Tolstoi went to-day to Mme. Zveginzev to ask the
police inspector, who lives on her estate, to release from prison the
house-painter, Ivan Grigorevich; and also to thank her for the peaches
she had sent him.
Tolstoi said:
“There was her daughter, Princess Volkonsky, there. They all wanted to
direct me on the path of truth. I tried to speak with all seriousness;
but hardly anything could penetrate through their diamonds and luxury.
They now employ the stove-maker who used to come to me to borrow
books. And he has been telling them that I said that one should not
believe in God, and various other bits of nonsense. I told them that
there was nothing strange in my words being distorted. If even from
Christ’s teaching people can deduce the rites of the Church, the
blessing of war, etc., then it is no wonder that our words are always
misrepresented and distorted.
“Then they asked me how I explained the fact that in my family no one
followed my teaching. I told them that it probably happened because I
lived like a Pharisee, and did not fulfil my own teaching. To this they
made no reply.”
Tolstoi said that he saw to-day a review of a new book on Turgenev.
The book is partly of a polemical kind. The author gives an account of
Turgenev’s quarrels with all writers (Dostoevsky, Tolstoi, Hertzen,
Fet, etc.), as if it were his object to vindicate Turgenev and to prove
that on all occasions he was right.
Tolstoi said:
“Really, it is strange that he quarrelled with every one. He was a
very nice, good man. Only he was very weak, and was conscious of his
weakness. Once, I remember, Count Urusov was here, my good friend.
There were two brothers, and for some reason people considered them
stupid. Now knowing this, Turgenev began arguing with them arrogantly
as though feeling his superiority, but Urusov quietly, easily, and
confidently refuted his argument. And no wonder: Urusov had his own
definite religious convictions, whatever they might be, and Turgenev
had none.”
“I was fond of him,” Tolstoi said of Turgenev.
Sophie Andreevna said that Turgenev had loved Tolstoi very much.
“No, on the contrary,” Tolstoi replied. “He rather liked me as a
writer, but, as man, I did not find in him real warmth and cordiality.
Well, he liked no one in that way, except women with whom he happened
to be in love. He had no friends.”
Tolstoi asked me about my work, whether I was composing music, and said
how bad it was when people force work out of themselves, and how great
artists lose by immediately starting a new work when they have finished
the old one.
Tolstoi mentioned Pushkin and said:
“The best writers are always strict with themselves. I re-write until
I feel that I am beginning to spoil. And then, of course, I leave it
alone. And one begins to spoil because at first, when you enjoy your
work, whilst it is _yours_, you apply all your spiritual force to it.
Later when the fundamental original idea ceases more and more to be
new, and becomes, as it were, someone else’s, it bores you. You begin
to try to say something new and you spoil and distort the first idea.”
A telegram arrived from Leonid Andreev asking to be allowed to come.
Tolstoi said:
“How terribly undeserved fame, like that of Andreev, spoils a man!”
Then Tolstoi could not compose a telegram in reply.
“How shall I answer? ‘Come.’ ... But that is too short. ‘Shall be very
glad to see you’--that is not altogether true. Well, Dushan Petrovich,
write simply: ‘You are welcome.’”
Tolstoi said:
“I had a letter to-day from a man who congratulates me on my
fifty-fifth anniversary, and writes that he so much loves my works that
he is always reading and re-reading _War and Peace_, for instance, but
he says: ‘However much I tried, I could not read a single one of your
philosophical writings to the end.’ He tries to persuade me to give up
that kind of writing.”
“Why should he have written all that?” Tolstoi said, laughing. “There
was a man living and nobody knew he was a fool, and suddenly he got up
and told me so!” ...
1908
_January 6th._ Yesterday, when many letters came, Tolstoi said:
“In old age one becomes indifferent to the fact that one will never see
the results of one’s activity. But the results will be there. It is not
modesty on my part, but I know there will be results.”
To-day, speaking of the revolutionaries, Tolstoi said:
“Their chief mistake is the superstition that one can arrange human
life.”
_April 12th._ Tatyana Lvovna was saying that A. N. Volkov is writing a
book on art. Tolstoi became interested. Volkov says in his book that
art must follow Nature blindly in everything.
Tolstoi said:
“It is absolutely untrue. It is always like that. When people are
discussing art, they either say, like the modern decadents, that
everything is allowed, everything is possible, that there is complete
freedom in art. Or they talk about the slavish imitation of Nature.
Both views are false. Just as every man is perfectly individual and
never occurs twice over, so also his thoughts, his feelings are always
new; they are _his_ thoughts and feelings alone. At the basis of a true
work of art there must lie some perfectly original idea or feeling, but
it must be expressed with slavish adherence to the smallest details of
life.”
_July 27th._ A fortnight ago Mme. E--v, the wife of a privy councillor,
came here on a visit. Tolstoi played chess with me on the balcony and
the lady talked at first to Sophie Andreevna, and then, I think, to
Marie Nikolaevna, about the great service which landowners performed,
and how the peasants are beasts, and how, but for the landed
aristocracy and their culture, they would become absolute brutes.
Tolstoi kept silent, but at last could stand it no longer. He got up
from his chair and said to her:
“You must forgive me, but what you are saying is terrible, one can’t
listen to it with indifference. If one is speaking of beasts, then
certainly it is not the peasants who are beasts, but all of us who rob
them and live on them. And all the ‘work’ of the landowners is nothing
but playing about for want of anything else to do!”
Tolstoi was in a state of agitation and could not get calm for a long
time afterwards.
The same evening at tea, when Mme. E--v had gone, the talk was about
executions. Sophie Andreevna tried to prove that any murder is as bad
as an execution, and yet people don’t talk about them. Elisabetha
Valerianovna replied that an execution is a murder which is considered
to be just, and the horror of it lies in that.
Tolstoi said:
“If one were to ask who is worse, the wretched executioner, hired,
intoxicated, spiritually destroyed, or those who hire him and those who
pass sentence of death, the prosecutors, the judges, then it seems to
me there can be no doubt.”
At tea Elisabetha Valerianovna asked her mother, Marie Nikolaevna, to
have some milk, and she began to drink it.
Tolstoi said:
“How is it, Mashenka, that you drink it? For myself, if I am told to
drink milk, I want sherry, and, when I’m told to drink sherry, I want
milk.” ...
Marie Nikolaevna began recalling the past. When they lived in Moscow,
soon after the death of their father in 1837-38, Tolstoi, who was then
about eight or nine, jumped out of the first-floor window and was badly
hurt.
Tolstoi said:
“I remember that quite well. I wanted to see what would happen, and I
even remember that, as I jumped, I tried to jump upwards.”
_July 28th._ Yesterday my wife and I were at Yasnaya. Tolstoi’s leg is
still painful. He lies in a chair with it stretched out. He suffers
from inflammation and from embolism of the vein. They say he must lie
like that for six weeks.
We arrived at Yasnaya about eight o’clock. Tolstoi sat in a chair in
the dining-room. He played chess with S. Then he began to play chess
with me. S. looked on at our game for a time, and then sitting near the
round table he began to talk to Sophie Andreevna about the children’s
anthology to be chosen from Tolstoi’s works, which he wishes to
publish for his Jubilee (Tolstoi’s eighty years). The conversation was
terrible. Sophie Andreevna said in the sharpest way that she was not
going to be cheated out of her rights, that she would go to a lawyer
and would write to the papers about it. S. behaved rather well, and
asked her to point out what she would allow to be published; but she
would not listen to reason. At last she said that it was the same as if
he stole her silver spoons. It was intolerably humiliating and painful.
Sophie Andreevna made attempts to draw Tolstoi into the dispute. Poor
Tolstoi! He suffered, frowned, shook his head in horror, but kept
silent. The greatest deed in his life is his humility and patience with
Sophie Andreevna. His behaviour is all the more difficult, because
people criticize him for being humble and long-suffering in this way.
How much easier it would be for him to leave this kind of life, which
he not only does not want, but which is intolerable to him.
Then it became even worse. S. left the room for a time, and when he
returned and sat down near us watching the chess, Sophie Andreevna
did not see him and began talking about something and, as usual,
complaining of the worries of managing the household, and said:
“When I get rid of the steward, of the thieving, of S., and ...” of
something else, I don’t remember what.
Every one was overcome with shame. Tolstoi even uttered a groan. S.
turned deadly white. Some one managed to whisper to Sophie Andreevna
that he, S., was in the room. She was not in the least put out, and
only began saying how much she regretted that she had not died under
her operation.
Tolstoi glanced at S.; S. said:
“Did you want to say something, Leo Nikolaevich?”
Tolstoi was silent for a time and then said:
“You understood me.”
Then he added:
“Whom God loves, him He tries.”
It was intolerable. S. left the room quickly and went away without
saying good-bye to any one.
There the matter rested. Mme. Zveginzev then arrived. Tolstoi talked
about Chertkov’s father:[14]
“When he was about forty-five, gangrene attacked his toe. Then it
went further, and his leg had to be amputated at the knee. He went
to England. There they made him an artificial leg on which he walked
fairly easily. Then the gangrene attacked the other leg. This, too, had
to be amputated, but this time much above the knee. He sat in a chair
and was carried about. He was very patient and did not groan, although
he shuddered with pain all day long. In the evenings he would be given
an injection of morphia; he would then revive, read the papers, and
talk. He was a brilliant man, a wit, and a great success in society.
He used to be taken in his chair to parties. There was even a cult for
him; he used to visit the Empress. In society invitations were issued:
‘Venez; M. Chertkoff sera ce soir chez nous.’ He died early. He never
drank and never could drink, for the wine went to his head. But once
at dinner some one drank, and he took a little glass of vodka, and
suddenly died then and there at the dinner party.”
Some one began to talk about bugs.
Tolstoi said:
“When he has bugs, Perna does not scratch, but lies quietly--he
allows them to have their fill, like Buddha, who gave himself to be
devoured by the tigress; and when the bugs have eaten enough, he sleeps
peacefully. In olden days, under the serfdom, when the landed gentry
lived very dirtily and bugs were everywhere, if a guest remained for
the night, the butler used to be put into the bed first, so as to feed
the bugs, and only after that was the bed made for the guest.”
Then I came up to Tolstoi and he talked to me. At first, with a smile,
he winked at Mme. Zveginzev’s colossal hat.
I asked him if he was still working on the new “Circle of Reading.”
Tolstoi said that he is already working at the twenty-first day. He
makes the same number of days in all the twelve months. I told him that
I had read the first day and that it seemed to me very good.
Tolstoi said:
“Yes, but it must all be gone over again. At the beginning of each day
I put the ideas which can be understood by children and simple people.
This is very difficult. I am doing it now, when I am an old man, but I
ought to have begun my career as a writer by doing it. I ought to have
written so that it could be understood by every one. This is true, too,
of your art. And, generally speaking, of all the arts.”
I said to him that in music the most musical language happens to be
beyond one’s reach, whether or not one belongs to intellectual circles,
either because one is not trained or because one is unmusical by nature.
Tolstoi agreed with me partly, but said that this was the case in other
arts as well:
“There are some ideas which can be understood by all and are necessary
to all, but are expressed in the language of a small group of people.
For instance, the poem ‘I remember the wonderful moment,’ or ‘When to
the mortal the noisy day passes into silence’--do you remember them? A
peasant couldn’t understand them.”
Tolstoi said:
“I was thinking a great deal about art to-day and I re-read my article,
and I must confess I agreed with my ideas.”
Tolstoi is reading the English biography of Chopin (by Huneker). He
does not like it. He said to me:
“I have not read books of that kind for a long time. The author does
not reveal Chopin’s inner life, but displays his own erudition, his
ability to write well and wittily. He is controversial and proves the
faults of other biographers. But there is no Chopin here.... Yet there
are many interesting facts in it. It is the life of a small circle of
poets, writers, and musicians--what a perverted and terrible life! And
George Sand, that disgusting woman!... I can’t understand her success.”
Marie Nikolaevna, who was listening, said:
“No! she has done good things. Take, for instance, her _Consuelo_.”
“No, that is not good. It is all false and bad and tedious; I could
never read it.”
_July 30th._ There were staying at Yasnaya Marie Alexandrovna, I.
Gorbunov, and E. I. Popov. Tolstoi was not well. His leg was still
painful. We played chess. Then there was tea. Before the game of
chess, when I had come into the drawing-room by myself, Tolstoi was
telling Obolensky and the others, whom I mentioned, the plot of Anatole
France’s novel, a very complicated novel. I believe it is called
_Jocaste_. Tolstoi was telling the plot in detail and was surprised at
its absurdity, but said it was written with A. France’s usual mastery.
As I came in, I had met two men downstairs who wished to see Tolstoi.
As Tolstoi is ill, Gusev (the secretary) went downstairs. One of the
men turned out to be a sectarian, “an immortalist,” and the other
sent up by Gusev a strange note in which, referring to Boulanger’s
promise to try to find a job for him, he said something foolish about
his desire to be useful to Tolstoi. Altogether there was no sense, no
purpose in it.
Tolstoi said:
“It is amazing, why can’t they understand? It seems to him that only he
and myself exist, and yet there are hundreds of him, and only one of
me. And what can I do for him?”
At tea Tolstoi talked about the ‘immortalist.’ Marie Nikolaevna asked
what sect it was.
Tolstoi said to her:
“The ‘immortalists’ believe that if they go on believing they will
never die. And when one of them dies they say: he did not really
believe.... I quite understand it. With them immortality is identified
with the body. At a low level of religious development that is
understandable. The Church doctrine also thinks of resurrection as a
resurrection in the flesh.”
Marie Nikolaevna began to say that she believed that there _would_ be
something after death.
Tolstoi said:
“In the first place, as to our state after death, it is impossible to
say that it _will_ be. Immortality neither will be, nor was, but _is_.
It is outside the forms of time and space. People who keep on asking
what is going to happen after death should be told: the very same thing
that _was_ before birth. We do not know, neither can we or must we know
what existence outside of the body, fusion with God, is like, and, when
people begin telling me about it--even if some one from the other world
were to come to tell me about it--I would not believe and I should say
that I do not need it. That which we need, we always are aware of and
know without doubting. One ought to live so that one’s life should help
on the happiness of other people.”
Marie Nikolaevna said that although she neither believes in nor admits
the existence of paradise and hell with real suffering, nevertheless
there is hell for the soul in the constant suffering which comes from
realization of evil done or of good undone.
“I can’t admit,” she added, “that one who lives badly and has done no
good will achieve the same fusion with God as the man who has lived
justly.”
Tolstoi was about to say something, but Marie Nikolaevna interrupted
him.
Tolstoi said quietly and gently:
“I listened to you, Mashenka; now do you listen to me. Compared with
the perfection of God, the difference which exists in life between the
most righteous man and the most wicked is so insignificant that it is
simply equal to nothing. And how am I to admit that God, the God whom I
realize through love, can be revengeful and punish?”
“But suppose one lived wickedly all one’s life and died without
repenting?” Marie Nikolaevna said.
“Ah, Mashenka,” Tolstoi said, “but what man wishes to be bad? The man
whom we think bad we must love and pity for his sufferings. Nobody
wants to live a bad life and to suffer. He must not be punished, he
must be pitied, because he does not know the truth.”
Marie Nikolaevna still could not give up her point of view.
Tolstoi said to her:
“Very well, if what you believe in satisfies you; and this must
never be condemned, only you must not prevent people from believing
what their conscience prompts them to, and you must not try to make
them believe differently, as all the Churches do, the Catholic, the
Protestant, the Orthodox, the Buddhist, the Muhammadan.” ...
Towards the end of July, Klechkovsky came to Yasnaya and played.
Tolstoi lay on the sofa, and, after Klechkovsky had finished playing,
we sat by Tolstoi. Klechkovsky began talking about himself, how
dissatisfied he was with his life, how he would like to live on the
land, to give up his music teaching and the Institute. But he can’t do
it because his father would be much upset by such a sudden change in
his life. He also said that he would like to go and live in a community.
Tolstoi replied to him:
“Why in a community? One ought not to separate oneself from other
people. If there is anything good in a man, let that light be spread
about him wherever he lives. What numbers of people settled in
communities, yet nothing came of it! All their energies went at first
into external arrangement of life, and when at length they settled
down, there began to be quarrels and gossip, and it all fell to
pieces.... You are grumbling at the Institute, yet there is the porter
there whom you could treat kindly, like a human being, and then you
would have done a good act. And the girls, your pupils? Can’t you make
a great deal that is good out of those relations? One can always shut
oneself off from people, but nothing good will come of it. I say this
not because I want to justify my own life. I live in the wrong way and
know it is the wrong way, but I have always wanted and tried to live
better, only I could not.... I shall go to God in the consciousness
that I did what I could to make my life better.
“One should never attempt to arrange life beforehand. At times I ask
myself what I should do if I remained here alone? For instance, I
should say to Ilya Vasilevich: ‘It would be nice if you did the rooms
and tidied them to-day, and I will do them to-morrow.’ Then we should
eat together. And so on with one thing after another, as things would
arrange themselves. Only it has to be remembered that the ideal of the
material life cannot be fully realized, any more than the ideal of the
spiritual life. The whole point is in the constant effort to approach
the ideal. If I gave up everything now and went away, Sophie Andreevna
would hate me, and the evil of that would perhaps be worse. You have
your father ... and so it is with every one.”
Tolstoi said before this:
“I said to Sophie Andreevna to-day, and I believe she was hurt by it:
the first concern in life must be for the things of the soul, and, if
household duties interfere with that, then damn household duties.”
Last night we sat on the balcony.
Tolstoi said that he had had a nice letter from a simple man who had
read several of his books, and who asked, at the end of his letter,
where there were people who live a Christian life, for he would leave
everything and go and live with them. Tolstoi said that he replied to
him much in the same way as he had done to Klechkovsky.
Tolstoi added:
“I think that even if one was a woman in a brothel, or a gaoler,
one ought not suddenly to give up one’s work. Certainly any one who
realizes the evil of such a life will not go on with it, but the
important thing is not the external change.”
Tolstoi said he had received three letters: one from Mr. Grekov, who
sent him three copies of his book, _The Message of Peace_, and wrote
that his book was so remarkable that, if it were widely read, it would
revolutionize human life; the second letter was from an intellectual
who asked for a loan of 800 roubles; and the third from a simple
illiterate peasant, a good serious letter. Tolstoi said that, besides
letters asking for money, he also receives letters from authors sending
him their books, and begging that Tolstoi will use his authority to
make their books known.
“An odd idea,” Tolstoi said, “that I should try to spread opinions
which I neither sympathize with nor share.”
_August 5th._ Marie Nikolaevna told how the steward Fokanich had
once stolen 400 roubles from Tolstoi, and Tolstoi took it rather
indifferently. Soon afterwards Sergey Nikolaevich, Tolstoi’s brother,
was very much worried about his affairs, and when he was told that it
was not worth while to be so worried, he said:
“It doesn’t matter to Levochka that Fokanich stole 400 roubles from
him; he will write a story and get the money back; and he will describe
Fokanich into the bargain; but where shall I get my money?”
Tolstoi replied to this:
“Mashenka, how can you remember all this? But I heard an expression
to-day that keeps on coming back into my mind.”
And Tolstoi told how during lunch to-day an unusually importunate
beggar arrived. He stood by the balcony and began saying how happy he
was to see and salute Tolstoi, etc.... He was given something, but
he was not satisfied, went to the kitchen, and began begging with
extraordinary importunity. After lunch when Tolstoi was coming down
from the balcony, Ilya Vasilevich, pointing to the beggar, said to
Tolstoi:
“Yes, that fellow could beg the parson’s mare off him.”
_August 19th._ At tea the conversation turned upon modern literature.
Tolstoi asked Buturlin to send him anything new he could find by
Anatole France, whom Tolstoi values very highly. He spoke again.
Tolstoi said:
“I cannot remember getting a strong impression from a book for a long
time. I do not think it is because I am old; it seems to me that modern
literature, like the Roman literature in the past, is coming to an end.
There is no one, neither in the West nor here.”
Buturlin asked Tolstoi if he remembered Oscar Wilde’s _De Profundis_.
Tolstoi had not read it, but said:
“I forget everything now, but I remember having tried to read Wilde,
and it has left me with an impression that he was not worth reading.”
Speaking of modern Russian writers Tolstoi mentioned Kuprin.
“His scope is small; he knows the life of the soldiers, but still he
has real artistic power. The others simply have nothing to say, and are
on the look-out for new forms. But why look for new forms? If you have
something to say, you should only ask for time in which to say what you
want, but you won’t need to seek new forms.”
Apropos of Eltzbacher’s book on anarchy, which Tolstoi was re-reading,
he said:
“Christian anarchy is a narrow definition of the Christian conception
of the world, but anarchy follows certainly from Christianity in its
application to social life.”
_September 3rd._ Tolstoi again spoke about the old German mystic,
Angelus Silesius. Tolstoi asked some one to fetch his book (a large old
volume) and read aloud several aphorisms, translating them as he read.
When he came to the passage: “If God did not love Himself in us, we
could neither love ourselves, nor God,” Tolstoi exclaimed:
“Ah, how well that’s said!”
Referring to some account in the papers of a conversation with him,
Tolstoi said:
“If I were to live for another eighty years, and were never to cease
talking, I could not manage to say all the sayings that are attributed
to me.”
_September 6th._ Tolstoi said, with reference to the addresses and
congratulations on his eightieth birthday (August 28th, 1908) which
keep on coming:
“I believe I am right in saying that I have no vanity, but I can’t help
being touched involuntarily. And yet, at my age, I live so far away
from all this, it is all so unnecessary and so humiliating. Only one
thing is necessary, the inner life of the spirit.”
On August 29th, when more than two thousand telegrams of congratulation
arrived, Tolstoi said:
“I feel with joy that I have utterly lost the power of being interested
in all this. In the past, I remember, I experienced a feeling of
pride; I was glad at my success. But now--and I think it is not false
modesty--it is a matter of absolute indifference to me. Perhaps it is
because I have had too much success. It is like sweets: if you have too
many, you feel surfeited. But one thing is pleasant: in nearly all the
letters, congratulations, addresses, the same thing is repeated--it has
simply become a truism--that I have destroyed religious delusions and
opened the way for the search after truth. If it is true, it is just
what I have wanted and tried to do all my life, and this is very dear
to me.”