Dear Friend Ilya:
There is always somebody or something that prevents me from answering
your two letters, which are important and dear to me, especially the
last. First it was Baturlin, then bad health, insomnia, then the arrival
of D----, the friend of H---- that I wrote you about. He is sitting at
tea talking to the ladies, neither understanding the other; so I left
them, and want to write what little I can of all that I think about you.
Even supposing that S---- A---- demands too much of you, [19] there is
no harm in waiting; especially from the point of view of fortifying your
opinions, your faith. That is the one important thing. If you don't, it
is a fearful disaster to put off from one shore and not reach the other.
The one shore is an honest and good life, for your own delight and the
profit of others. But there is a bad life, too--a life so sugared, so
common to all, that if you follow it, you do not notice that it is a bad
life, and suffer only in your conscience, if you have one; but if you
leave it, and do not reach the real shore, you will be made miserable
by solitude and by the reproach of having deserted your fellows, and you
will be ashamed. In short, I want to say that it is out of the question
to want to be rather good; it is out of the question to jump into the
water unless you know how to swim. One must be truthful and wish to be
good with all one's might, too. Do you feel this in you? The drift of
what I say is that we all know what PRINCESS MARYA ALEXEVNA [20] verdict
about your marriage would be: that if young people marry without a
sufficient fortune, it means children, poverty, getting tired of each
other in a year or two; in ten years, quarrels, want--hell. And in
all this PRINCESS MARYA ALEXEVNA is perfectly right and plays the true
prophet, unless these young people who are getting married have another
purpose, their one and only one, unknown to PRINCESS MARYA ALEXEVNA, and
that not a brainish purpose, not one recognized by the intellect, but
one that gives life its color and the attainment of which is more moving
than any other. If you have this, good; marry at once, and give the lie
to PRINCESS MARYA ALEXEVNA. If not, it is a hundred to one that your
marriage will lead to nothing but misery. I am speaking to you from the
bottom of my heart. Receive my words into the bottom of yours, and weigh
them well. Besides love for you as a son, I have love for you also as a
man standing at the cross-ways. I kiss you and Lyolya and Noletchka and
Seryozha, if he is back. We are all alive and well.
The following letter belongs to the same period:
Your letter to Tanya has arrived, my dear friend Ilya, and I see
that you are still advancing toward that purpose which you set up for
yourself; and I want to write to you and to her--for no doubt you tell
her everything--what I think about it. Well, I think about it a great
deal, with joy and with fear mixed. This is what I think. If one marries
in order to enjoy oneself more, no good will ever come of it. To set up
as one's main object, ousting everything else, marriage, union with the
being you love, is a great mistake. And an obvious one, if you think
about it. Object, marriage. Well, you marry; and what then? If you had
no other object in life before your marriage, it will be twice as hard
to find one.
As a rule, people who are getting married completely forget this.
So many joyful events await them in the future, in wedlock and the
arrival of children, that those events seem to constitute life itself.
But this is indeed a dangerous illusion.
If parents merely live from day to day, begetting children, and have no
purpose in life, they are only putting off the question of the purpose
of life and that punishment which is allotted to people who live without
knowing why; they are only putting it off and not escaping it, because
they will have to bring up their children and guide their steps, but
they will have nothing to guide them by. And then the parents lose their
human qualities and the happiness which depends on the possession of
them, and turn into mere breeding cattle.
That is why I say that people who are proposing to marry because their
life SEEMS to them to be full must more than ever set themselves to
think and make clear to their own minds for the sake of what each of
them lives.
And in order to make this clear, you must consider the circumstances
in which you live, your past. Reckon up what you consider important and
what unimportant in life. Find out what you believe in; that is, what
you look on as eternal and immutable truth, and what you will take for
your guide in life. And not only find out, but make clear to your own
mind, and try to practise or to learn to practise in your daily life;
because until you practise what you believe you cannot tell whether you
believe it or not.
I know your faith, and that faith, or those sides of it which can be
expressed in deeds, you must now more than ever make clear to your own
mind, by putting them into practice.
Your faith is that your welfare consists in loving people and being
loved by them. For the attainment of this end I know of three lines of
action in which I perpetually exercise myself, in which one can never
exercise oneself enough and which are specially necessary to you now.
First, in order to be able to love people and to be loved by them, one
must accustom oneself to expect as little as possible from them, and
that is very hard work; for if I expect much, and am often disappointed,
I am inclined rather to reproach them than to love them.
Second, in order to love people not in words, but in deed, one must
train oneself to do what benefits them. That needs still harder
work, especially at your age, when it is one's natural business to be
studying.
Third, in order to love people and to b. l. b. t., [21] one must train
oneself to gentleness, humility, the art of bearing with disagreeable
people and things, the art of behaving to them so as not to offend any
one, of being able to choose the least offense. And this is the hardest
work of all--work that never ceases from the time you wake till the time
you go to sleep, and the most joyful work of all, because day after day
you rejoice in your growing success in it, and receive a further reward,
unperceived at first, but very joyful after, in being loved by others.
So I advise you, Friend Ilya, and both of you, to live and to think as
sincerely as you can, because it is the only way you can discover if
you are really going along the same road, and whether it is wise to
join hands or not; and at the same time, if you are sincere, you must be
making your future ready.
Your purpose in life must not be the joy of wedlock, but, by your life
to bring more love and truth into the world. The object of marriage is
to help one another in the attainment of that purpose.
The vilest and most selfish life is the life of the people who have
joined together only in order to enjoy life; and the highest vocation
in the world is that of those who live in order to serve God by bringing
good into the world, and who have joined together for that very purpose.
Don't mistake half-measures for the real thing. Why should a man not
choose the highest? Only when you have chosen the highest, you must set
your whole heart on it, and not just a little. Just a little leads to
nothing. There, I am tired of writing, and still have much left that I
wanted to say. I kiss you.