"I do not like people when they are drunk, but I know some who become
interesting when they are tipsy, who acquire what is not natural to
them in their sober state--wit, beauty of thought, alertness, and
richness of language. In such cases I am ready to bless wine."
Suler tells how he was once walking with Leo Nicolayevitch in Tverskaya
Street when Tolstoi noticed in the distance two soldiers of the Guards.
The metal of their accoutrements shone in the sun; their spurs
jingled; they kept step like one man; their faces, too, shone with the
self-assurance of strength and youth.
Tolstoi began to grumble at them: "What pompous stupidity! Like animals
trained by the whip...."
But when the guardsmen came abreast with him, he stopped, followed them
caressingly with his eyes, and said enthusiastically: "How handsome!
Old Romans, eh, Liovushka? Their strength and beauty! O Lord! How
charming it is when man is handsome, how very charming!"
_A LETTER_
I have just posted a letter to you--telegrams have arrived telling of
"Tolstoi's flight," and now once more one with you in thought I write
again.
Probably all I want to say about the news will seem to you confused,
perhaps even harsh and ill-tempered, but you will forgive me--I am
feeling as though I had been gripped by the throat and was being
strangled.
I had many long conversations with him; when he was living at Gaspra
in the Crimea, I often went to him and he liked coming to me; I have
studied his books lovingly; it seems to me that I have the right to
say what I think of him, even if it be bold and differ widely from the
general opinion. I know as well as others that no man is more worthy
than he of the name of genius; more complicated, contradictory, and
great in everything--yes, yes, in everything. Great--in some curious
sense wide, indefinable by words--there is something in him which made
me desire to cry aloud to everyone: "Look what a wonderful man is
living on the earth." For he is, so to say, universally and above all a
man, a man of mankind.
But what always repelled me in him was that stubborn despotic
inclination to turn the life of Count Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi into
"the saintly life of our blessed father, boyard Leo." As you know,
he has for long intended to suffer; he expressed his regret to E.
Soloviov, to Suler, that he had not succeeded, but he wanted to
suffer simply, not out of a natural desire to test the resistance of
his will, but with the obvious and, I repeat, the despotic intention
of increasing the influence of his religious ideas, the weight of
his teaching, in order to make his preaching irresistible, to make
it holy in the eyes of man through his suffering, to force them to
accept it; you understand, to force them. For he realizes that that
preaching is not sufficiently convincing; in his diary you will, some
day, read good instances of scepticism applied by him to his own
preaching and personality. He knows that "martyrs and sufferers, with
rare exceptions, are despots and tyrants"--he knows everything! And yet
he says to himself, "Were I to suffer for my ideas they would have a
greater influence." This in him always repelled me, for I cannot help
feeling that it is an attempt to use violence to me--a desire to get
hold of my conscience, to dazzle it with the glory of righteous blood,
to put on my neck the yoke of a dogma.
He always greatly exalted immortality on the other side of life, but
he preferred it on this side. A writer, national in the truest and
most complete sense, he embodied in his great soul all the defects
of his nation, all the mutilations caused us by the ordeals of our
history; his misty preaching of "non-activity," of "non-resistance to
evil"--the doctrine of passivism--this is all the unhealthy ferment
of the old Russian blood, envenomed by Mongolian fatalism and almost
chemically hostile to the West with its untiring creative labour,
with its active and indomitable resistance to the evil of life.
What is called Tolstoi's "anarchism," essentially and fundamentally,
expresses our Slav anti-stateism, which, again, is really a national
characteristic and desire, ingrained in our flesh from old times,
to scatter nomadically. Up to now we have indulged that desire
passionately, as you and everyone else know. We Russians know it,
too, but we break away, always along the line of least resistance; we
see that this is pernicious, but still we crawl further and further
away from one another--and these mournful cockroach journeyings are
called "the history of Russia," of a State which has been established
almost incidentally, mechanically, to the surprise of the majority of
its honest-minded citizens, by the forces of the Variags, Tartars,
Baltic Germans, and petty constables. To their surprise, because all
the time "scattering," and only when we reached places beyond which
we could find nothing worse--for we could go no further--well, then
we stopped and settled down. This is the lot, the destiny to which we
are doomed--to settle in the snows and marshes by the side of the wild
Erza, Tchood, Merey, Vess, and Muroma. Yet men arose who realized that
light must come to us not from the East but from the West; and now he,
the crown of our ancient history, wishes, consciously or unconsciously,
to stretch himself like a vast mountain across our nation's path to
Europe, to the active life which sternly demands of man the supreme
effort of his spiritual forces. His attitude towards science is, too,
certainly national: one sees magnificently reflected in him the old
Russian village scepticism which comes from ignorance. Everything is
national in him, and all his preaching is a reaction from the past, an
atavism which we had already begun to shake off and overcome.
Think of his letter "The Intelligenzia, the State, the People," written
in 1905--what a pernicious, malignant thing it is! You can hear in it
the sectarian's "I told you so." At the time I wrote an answer to him,
based on his own words to me that he had long since forfeited the right
to speak of and on behalf of the Russian people, for I am a witness of
his lack of desire to listen to and understand the people who came to
talk to him soul to soul. My letter was bitter, and in the end I did
not send it to him.
Well, now he is probably making his last assault in order to give to
his ideas the highest possible significance. Like Vassily Buslayev, he
usually loved these assaults, but always so that he might assert his
holiness and obtain a halo. That is dictatorial, although his teaching
is justified by the ancient history of Russia and by his own sufferings
of genius. Holiness is attained by flirting with sin, by subduing the
will to live. People do desire to live, but he tries to persuade them:
"That's all nonsense, our earthly life." It is very easy to persuade a
Russian of this; he is a lazy creature who loves beyond anything else
to find an excuse for his own inactivity. On the whole, of course, a
Russian is not a Platon Karatayev, nor an Akim, nor a Bezonkhy, nor
a Neklyudov; all these men were created by history and nature, not
exactly on Tolstoi's pattern, he only improved on them in order more
thoroughly to support his teaching. But, undeniably, Russia as a whole
is--Tiulin above and Oblomov below. For the Tiulin above look at the
year 1905, and for the Oblomov below look at Count A. N. Tolstoi, I.
Bunin, look at everything round about you. Beasts and swindlers--we
can leave them out of consideration, though our beast is exceedingly
national--what a filthy coward he is for all his cruelty. Swindlers, of
course, are international.
In Leo Nicolayevitch there is much which at times roused in me a
feeling very like hatred, and this hatred fell upon my soul with
crushing weight. His disproportionately overgrown individuality is
a monstrous phenomenon, almost ugly, and there is in him something
of Sviatogor, the bogatir, whom the earth can't hold. Yes, he _is_
great. I am deeply convinced that, beyond all that he speaks of, there
is much which he is silent about, even in his diary--he is silent,
and, probably, will never tell it to anyone. That "something" only
occasionally and in hints slipped through into his conversation, and
hints of it are also to be found in the two note-books of his diary
which he gave me and L. A. Sulerzhizky to read; it seems to me a kind
of "negation of all affirmations," the deepest and most evil nihilism
which has sprung from the soil of an infinite and unrelieved despair,
from a loneliness which, probably, no one but he has experienced with
such terrifying clearness. I often thought him to be a man who in the
depths of his soul is stubbornly indifferent to people: he is so much
above and beyond them that they seem to him like midges and their
activities ridiculous and miserable. He has gone too far away from them
into some desert, and there solitary, with the highest effort of all
the force of his spirit, he closely examines into "the most essential,"
into death.
All his life he feared and hated death, all his life there throbbed in
his soul the "Arsamaxian terror" --must he die? The whole world, all
the earth looks toward him; from China, India, America, from everywhere
living, throbbing threads stretch out to him; his soul is for all and
for ever. Why should not Nature make an exception to her law, give to
one man physical immortality--why not? He is certainly too rational
and sensible to believe in miracles, but, on the other hand, he is a
bogatir, an explorer, and, like a young recruit, wild and headstrong
from fear and despair in face of the unknown barrack. I remember in
Gaspra he read Leo Shestov's book _Good and Evil in the Teaching of
Nietzsche and Tolstoi_, and, when Anton Tchekhov remarked that he did
not like the book, Tolstoi said: "I thought it amusing. It's written
swaggeringly, but it's all right and interesting. I'm sure I like
cynics when they are sincere. Now he says: 'Truth is not wanted'; quite
true, what should he want truth for? For he will die all the same."
And, evidently seeing that his words had not been understood, he added
with a quick smile:--
"If a man has learned to think, no matter what he may think about;, he
is always thinking of his own death. All philosophers were like that.
And what truths can there be, if there is death?"
He went on to say that truth is the same for all --love of God; but
on this subject he spoke coldly and wearily. After lunch on the
terrace, he took up the book again, and, finding the passage, "Tolstoi,
Dostoevsky, Nietzsche could not live without an answer to their
questions, and for them any answer was better than none," he laughed
and said:
"What a daring coiffeur; he says straight that I deceived myself,
and that means that I deceived others too. That is the obvious
conclusion...."
"Why coiffeur?" asked Suler.
"Well," he answered thoughtfully, "it just came into my mind--he is
fashionable, chic, and I remembered the coiffeur from Moscow at a
wedding of his peasant uncle in the village. He has the finest manners
and he dances fashionably, and so he despises everyone."
I repeat this conversation, I think, almost literally; it is most
memorable for me, and I even wrote it down, as I did many other things
which struck me. Sulerzhizky and I wrote down many things which
Tolstoi said, but Suler lost his notes when he came to me at Arsamas:
he was habitually careless, and although he loved Leo Nicolayevitch
like a woman, he behaved towards him rather strangely, almost like
a superior. I have also mislaid my notes somewhere, and cannot find
them; someone in Russia must have got them. I watched Tolstoi very
attentively, because I was looking for--I am still looking for, and
will until my death--a man with an active and a living faith. And
also because once Anton Tchekhov, speaking of our lack of culture,
complained:
"Goethe's words were all recorded, but Tolstoi's thoughts are being
lost in the air. That, my dear fellow, is intolerably Russian.
After his death they will bestir themselves, will begin to write
reminiscences, and will lie."
But to return to Shestov. "'It is impossible,' he says, 'to live
looking at horrible ghosts,' but how does _he_ know whether it's
horrible or not? If he knew, if he saw ghosts, he would not write this
nonsense, but would do something serious, what Buddha did all his life."
Someone remarked that Shestov was a Jew.
"Hardly," said Leo Nicolayevitch doubtfully.
"No, he is not like a Jew; there are no disbelieving Jews, you can't
name one.... no."
It seemed sometimes as though this old sorcerer were playing with
Death, coquetting with her, trying somehow to deceive her, saying: "I
am not afraid of thee, I love thee, I long for thee."
And at the same time peering at Death with his keen little eyes: "What
art thou like? What follows thee hereafter? Wilt thou destroy me
altogether, or will something in me go on living?"
A strange impression used to be produced by his words: "I am happy, I
am awfully happy, I am too happy." And then immediately afterwards:
"To suffer." To suffer--that, too, was true in him; I don't doubt for
a second that he, only half convalescent, would have been really glad
to be put into prison, to be banished--in a word, to embrace a martyr's
crown. Would not martyrdom probably in some measure justify death,
make her more understandable, acceptable from the external, from the
formal point of view? But he was never happy, never and nowhere; I am
certain of that: neither "in the books of wisdom," nor "on the back
of a horse," nor "in the arms of a woman" did he experience the full
delights of "earthly paradise." He is too rational for that and knows
life and people too well. Here are some more of his words:
"The Kaliph Abdurahman had during his life fourteen happy days, but
I am sure I have not had so many. And this is because I have never
lived--I cannot live--for myself, for my own self; I live for show, for
people."
When we left, Anton Tchekhov said to me: "I don't believe that he was
not happy." But I believe it. He was not. Though it is not true that he
lived for show. Yes, what he himself did not need, he gave to people
as though they were beggars; he liked to compel them, to compel them
to read, walk, be vegetarians, love the peasants, and believe in the
infallibility of the rational-religious reflections of Leo Tolstoi.
People must be given something which will either satisfy or amuse
them, and then let them be off. Let them leave a man in peace, to his
habitual, tormenting, and sometimes cosy loneliness in face of the
bottomless pit of the problem of "the essential."
All Russian preachers, with the exception of Avvakum and, perhaps,
Tikhon Zadonsky, are cold men, for they did not possess an active and
living faith. When I was writing Luka in _The Lower Depths_, I wanted
to describe an old man like that: he is interested in "every solution,"
but not in people; coming inevitably in contact with them, he consoles
them, but only in order that they may leave him in peace. And all
the philosophy, all the preaching of such men, is alms bestowed by
them with a veiled aversion, and there sounds behind their preaching
words which are beggarly and melancholy: "Get out! Love God or your
neighbour, but get out! Curse God, love the stranger, but leave me
alone! Leave me alone, for I am a man and I am doomed to death."
Alas, so it is and so it will be. It could not and cannot be otherwise,
for men have become worn out, exhausted, terribly separated, and
they are all chained to a loneliness which dries up the soul. If Leo
Nicolayevitch had had a reconciliation with the Church, it would not
have at all surprised me. The thing would have had a logic of its own;
all men are equally insignificant, even Archbishops. In fact, it would
not have been a reconciliation, strictly speaking; for him personally
the act would have been only logical: "I forgive those who hate me." It
would have been a Christian act, and behind it there would have hidden
a quick, ironical, little smile, which would be understood as the way
in which a wise man retaliates on the fools.
What I write is not what I want to say; I cannot express it properly.
There is a dog howling in my soul and I have a foreboding of some
misfortune. Yes, newspapers have just arrived and it is already
clear: you at home are beginning to "create a legend": idlers and
good-for-nothings have gone on living and have now produced a saint.
Only think how pernicious it is for the country just at this moment,
when the heads of disillusioned men are bowed down, the souls of the
majority empty, and the souls of the best full of sorrow. Lacerated and
starving, they long for a legend. They long so much for alleviation
of pain, for the soothing of torment. And they will create just what
he desires, but what is not wanted--the life of a holy man and saint;
but surely he is great and holy because he is a man, a madly and
tormentingly beautiful man; a man of the whole of mankind. I am somehow
contradicting myself in this, but it does not matter. He is a man
seeking God, not for himself, but for men, so that God may leave him,
the man, alone in the peace of the desert chosen by him. He gave us the
Gospels in order that we might forget the contradictions in Christ; he
simplified Christ's image, smoothing away the militant elements and
bringing into the foreground the humble "will of Him that sent Him."
No doubt Tolstoi's Gospel is the more easily accepted because it is
"soothing to the malady" of the Russian people. He had to give them
something, for they complain and trouble the earth with their groaning
and distract him from "the essential." But _War and Peace_ and all the
other things of the same kind will not soothe the sorrow and despair
of the grey Russian land. Of _War and Peace_ he himself said: "Without
false modesty, it is like the Iliad." M. Y. Tchaikovsky heard from his
lips exactly the same appreciation of _Childhood_, _Youth._
Journalists have just arrived from Naples; one even hurried from Rome.
They ask me to say what I think of Tolstoi's "flight"--"flight" is the
word they use. I would not talk to them. You, of course, understand
that inwardly I am terribly disturbed; I do not want to see Tolstoi a
saint; let him remain a sinner close to the heart of the all-sinful
world, even close to the heart of each one of us. Poushkin and
he--there is nothing more sublime or dearer to us.
Leo Tolstoi is dead.
A telegram came containing the commonest of words--is dead.
It struck me to the heart; I cried with pain and anger, and now, half
crazy, I imagine him as I know and saw him--I am tormented by a desire
to speak with him. I imagine him in his coffin--he lies like a smooth
stone at the bottom of a stream, and in his grey beard, I am sure, is
quietly hidden that aloof, mysterious, little smile. And at last his
hands are folded peacefully--they have finished their hard task.
I remember his keen eyes--they saw everything through and through--and
the movements of his fingers, as though they were perpetually modelling
something out of the air, his talk, his jokes, his favourite peasant
words, his elusive voice. And I see what a vast amount of life was
embodied in the man, how inhumanly clever he was, how terrifying.
I once saw him as, perhaps, no one has ever seen him. I was walking
over to him at Gaspra along the coast, and behind Yussupov's estate,
on the shore among the stones I saw his smallish, angular figure in a
grey, crumpled, ragged suit and crumpled hat. He was sitting with his
head on his hands, the wind blowing the silvery hairs of his beard
through his fingers: he was looking into the distance out to sea, and
the little greenish waves rolled up obediently to his feet and fondled
them as though they were telling something about themselves to the old
magician. It was a day of sun and cloud, and the shadows of the clouds
glided over the stones, and with the stones the old man grew now bright
and now dark. The boulders were large, riven by cracks, and covered
with smelling sea-weed: there had been a high tide. He, too, seemed to
me like an old stone come to life, who knows all the beginnings and
the ends of things, who considers when and what will be the end of
the stones, the grasses of the earth, of the waters of the sea, and of
the whole universe from the pebble to the sun. And the sea is part of
his soul, and everything around him comes from him, out of him. In the
musing motionlessness of the old man I felt something fateful, magical,
something which went down into the darkness beneath him and stretched
up, like a searchlight, into the blue emptiness above the earth -as
though it were he, his concentrated will, which was drawing the waves
to him and repelling them, which was ruling the movements of cloud and
shadow, which was stirring the stones to life. Suddenly, in a moment
of madness, I felt it is possible, he will get up, wave his hand, and
the sea will become solid and glassy, the stones will begin to move and
cry out, everything around him will come to life, acquire a voice, and
speak in their different voices of themselves, of him, against him. I
cannot express in words what I felt rather than thought at that moment;
in my soul there was joy and fear, and then everything blended in one
happy thought: "I am not an orphan on the earth so long as this man
lives on it."
Then I walked on tip-toe away in order that the pebbles might not
scrunch under my feet, not wishing to distract his thoughts. And now
I feel I am an orphan, I cry as I write--never before have I cried so
unconsolably and in such bitter despair. I do not know whether I loved
him; but does it matter, love of him or hatred? He always roused in
me sensations and agitations which were enormous, fantastic; even the
unpleasant and hostile feelings which he aroused were of a kind not to
oppress, but rather to explode the soul: they made it more sensitive
and capacious. He was grand when, with his boots scraping over the
ground, as though he were imperiously smoothing its unevenness, he
suddenly appeared from somewhere, from behind a door or out of some
corner, and came towards you with the short, light, quick step of a
man accustomed to walk a great deal on the earth. With his thumbs in
his belt he would stop for a second, looking round quickly with a
comprehensive glance, a glance which at once took in anything new and
instantly absorbed the meaning of everything.
"How do you do?"
I always translated these words into: "How do you do? There's pleasure
for me, and for you there's not much sense in it--but still, how do you
do?"
He would come out looking rather small, and immediately everyone
round him would become smaller than he. A peasant's beard, rough but
extraordinary hands, simple clothes, all this external, comfortable
democratism deceived many people, and I often saw how Russians who
judge people by their clothes--an old slavish habit--began to pour out
a stream of their odious "frankness," which is more properly called
"the familiarity of the pig-sty."
"Ah, you are one of us! That's what you are. At last, by God's grace,
I am face to face with the greatest son of our native land. Hail for
ever. I bow low to you."
That is a sample of Muscovite Russian, simple and hearty, and here is
another, but "free-thinkerish":
"Leo Nicolayevitch, though I disagree with your religious-philosophical
views, I deeply respect in your person the greatest of artists."
And suddenly, under his peasant's beard, under his democratic crumpled
blouse, there would rise the old Russian _bariny_ the grand aristocrat:
then the noses of the simple-hearted visitor, educated and all the
rest, instantly became blue with intolerable cold. It was pleasant to
see this creature of the purest blood, to watch the noble grace of
his gestures, the proud reserve of his speech, to hear the exquisite
pointedness of his murderous words. He showed just as much of the
_barin_ as was needed for these serfs, and when they called out the
_barin_ in Tolstoi it appeared naturally and easily and crushed them so
that they shrivelled up and whined.
One day I was returning from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow with one of
these "simple-hearted" Russians, a Moscow man, and for a long time
he could not recover his breath, but kept on smiling woefully and
repeating in astonishment: "Well, well, that was a cold bath. He's
severe ... pooh!"
And in the middle of it all he exclaimed, apparently with regret:
"And I thought he was really an anarchist. Everyone keeps on saying:
Anarchist, anarchist,' and I believe it...."
The man was a large, rich manufacturer, with a great belly, and a face
the colour of raw meat--why did he want Tolstoi to be an anarchist? One
of the "profound mysteries" of the Russian soul!
When Leo Nicolayevitch wished to please, he could do so more easily
than a clever and beautiful woman. Imagine a company of people of
all kinds sitting in his room: the Grand Duke Nicolay Mikhailovitch,
the house-painter Ilya, a social-democrat from Yalta, the stundist
Patzuk, a musician, a German, the manager of the estates of Countess
Kleinmichel, the poet Bulgakov, and all look at him with the same
enamoured eyes. He explains to them the teaching of Lao-Tse, and he
seems to me an extraordinary man-orchestra, possessing the faculty of
playing several instruments at the same time, a brass trumpet, a drum,
harmonium, and flute. I used to look at him just as the others did. And
now I long to see him once more--and I shall never see him again.
Journalists have come asserting that a telegram has been received
in Rome "denying the rumour of Tolstoi's death." They bustled and
chattered, redundantly expressing their sympathy with Russia. The
Russian newspapers leave no room for doubt.
To lie to him, even out of pity, was impossible; even when he was
seriously ill, one could not pity him. It would be banal to pity a man
like him. They ought to be taken care of, cherished, not loaded with
the wordy dust of worn-out, soulless words.
He used to ask: "You don't like me?" and one had to answer: "No, I
don't."
"You don't love me?"--"No, to-day I don't love you."
In his questions he was merciless, in his answers reserved, as becomes
a wise man.
He used to speak with amazing beauty of the past, and particularly of
Turgeniev; of Fet always with a good-natured smile and always something
amusing, of Nekrassov coldly and sceptically; but of all writers
exactly as if they were his children and he, the father, knew all their
faults, and--there you are!
He would point out their faults before their merits, and every time he
blamed someone it seemed to me that he was giving alms to his listeners
because of their poverty; to listen to him then made one feel awkward,
one's eyes fell before his sharp little smile and--nothing remained in
one's memory.
Once he argued fiercely that G. Y. Uspensky wrote in the Tula language,
and had no talent at all. And later I heard him say to Anton Pavlovitch
Tchekhov: "He (Uspensky) is a writer! In the power of his sincerity he
recalls Dostoevsky, only Dostoevsky went in for politics and coquetted,
while Uspensky is more simple and sincere. If he had believed in God,
he would have been a sectarian."
"But you said he was a Tula writer and had no talent."
He drew his shaggy brows down over his eyes and said: "He wrote badly.
What kind of language does he use? There are more punctuation marks
than words. Talent is love. One who loves is talented. Look at lovers,
they are all talented."
Of Dostoevsky he spoke reluctantly, constrainedly, evading or
repressing something: "He ought to have made himself acquainted with
the teaching of Confucius or the Buddhists; that would have calmed
him down. That is the chief thing which everyone should know. He was
a man of rebellious flesh; when angry, bumps would suddenly rise on
his bald head; and his ears would move. He felt a great deal, but he
thought poorly; it is from the Fourierists, from Butashevitch and the
others, that he learnt to think. And afterwards all his life long he
hated them. There was something Jewish in his blood. He was suspicious
without reason, ambitious, heavy and unfortunate. It is curious that he
is so much read. I can't understand why. It is all painful and useless,
because all those Idiots, Adolescents, Raskolnikovs, and the rest of
them, they are not real; it is all much simpler, more understandable.
It's a pity people don't read Lieskov, he's a real writer--have you
read him?"
"Yes, I like him very much, especially his language."
"He knew the language marvellously, even the tricks. Strange that you
should like him; somehow you are not Russian, your thoughts are not
Russian -is it all right, you're not hurt at my saying that r I am an
old man, and, perhaps, I can no longer understand modern literature,
but it seems to me that it is all not Russian. They begin to write a
curious kind of verse; I don't know what these poems are or what they
mean. One has to learn to write poetry from Poushkin, Tiutchev, Fet.
Now you"--he turned to Tchekhov--"you are Russian. Yes, very, very
Russian."
And smiling affectionately, he put his hand on Tchekhov's shoulder;
and the latter became uncomfortable and began in a low voice to mutter
something about his bungalow and the Tartars.
He loved Tchekhov, and, when he looked at him, his eyes were tender
and seemed almost to stroke Anton Pavlovitch's face. Once, when Anton
Pavlovitch was walking on the lawn with Alexandra Lvovna, Tolstoi, who
at the time was still ill and was sitting in a chair on the terrace,
seemed to stretch towards them, saying in a whisper: "Ah, what a
beautiful, magnificent man: modest and quiet like a girl! And he walks
like a girl. He's simply wonderful."
One evening, in the twilight, half closing his eyes and moving his
brows, he read a variant of the scene in _Father Sergius_, where the
woman goes to seduce the hermit: he read it through to the end, and
then, raising his head and shutting his eyes, he said distinctly: "The
old man wrote it well, well."
It came out with such amazing simplicity, his pleasure in its beauty
was so sincere, that I shall never forget the delight which it gave me
at the time, a delight which I could not--did not know how to express,
but which I could only suppress by a tremendous effort. My heart
stopped beating for a moment, and then everything around me seemed to
become fresh and revivified.
One must have heard him speak in order to understand the extraordinary,
indefinable beauty of his speech; it was, in a sense, incorrect,
abounding in repetitions of the same word, saturated with village
simplicity. The effect of his words did not come only from the
intonation and the expression of his face, but from the play and light
in his eyes, the most eloquent eyes I have ever seen. In his two eyes
Leo Nicolayevitch possessed a thousand eyes.
Once Suler, Sergey Lvovitch, Tchekhov, and someone else, were sitting
in the park and talking about women; he listened in silence for a long
time, and then suddenly said:
"And I will tell the truth about women, when I have one foot in the
grave--I shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me, and
say, 'Do what you like now.'" The look he gave us was so wild, so
terrifying that we all fell silent for a while.
He had in him, I think, the inquisitive, mischievous wildness of a
Vaska Buslayev, and also something of the stubbornness of soul of the
Protopop Avvakum, while above or at his side lay hidden the scepticism
of a Tchaadayev. The Avvakumian element harried and tormented with its
preachings the artist in him; the Novgorod wildness upset Shakespeare
and Dante, while the Tchaadayevian element scoffed at his soul's
amusements and, by the way, at its agonies. And the old Russian man in
him dealt a blow at science and the State, the Russian driven to the
passivity of anarchism by the barrenness of all his efforts to build up
a more human life.
Strange! This Buslayev characteristic in Tolstoi was perceived through
some mysterious intuition by Olaf Gulbranson, the caricaturist
of Simplicissimus: look closely at his drawing and you will see
how startlingly he has got the likeness of the real Tolstoi, what
intellectual daring there is in that face with its veiled and hidden
eyes, for which nothing is sacred and which believe "neither in a
sneeze, nor a dream, nor the cawing of a bird."
The old magician stands before me, alien to all, a solitary traveller
through all the deserts of thought in search of an all-embracing truth
which he has not found--I look at him and, although I feel sorrow
for the loss, I feel pride at having seen the man, and that pride
alleviates my pain and grief.
It was curious to see Leo Nicolayevitch among "Tolstoyans"; there
stands a noble belfry and its bell sounds untiringly over the whole
world, while round about run tiny, timorous dogs whining at the bell
and distrustfully looking askance at one another as though to say, "Who
howled best?" I always thought that these people infected the Yassnaya
Polyana house, as well as the great house of Countess Panin, with a
spirit of hypocrisy, cowardice, mercenary and self-seeking pettiness
and legacy-hunting. The "Tolstoyans" have something in common with
those friars who wander in all the dark corners of Russia, carrying
with them dogs' bones and passing them off as relics, selling "Egyptian
darkness" and the "little tears of Our Lady." One of these apostles, I
remember, at Yassnaya Polyana refused to eat eggs so as not to wrong
the hens, but at Tula railway-station he greedily devoured meat,
saying: "The old fellow does exaggerate."
Nearly all of them like to moan and kiss one another; they all have
boneless perspiring hands and lying eyes. At the same time they are
practical fellows and manage their earthly affairs cleverly.
Leo Nicolayevitch, of course, well understood the value of the
"Tolstoyans," and so did Sulerzhizky, whom Tolstoi loved tenderly and
whom he always spoke of with a kind of youthful ardour and fervour.
Once one of those "Tolstoyans" at Yassnaya Polyana explained eloquently
how happy his life had become and how pure his soul after he accepted
Tolstoy's teaching. Leo Nicolayevitch leant over and said to me in
a low voice: "He's lying all the time, the rogue, but he does it to
please me...."
Many tried to please him, but I did not observe that they did it
well or with any skill. He rarely spoke to me on his usual subjects
of universal forgiveness, loving one's neighbour, the Gospels, and
Buddhism, evidently because he realized at once that all that would not
"go down" with me. I greatly appreciated this.
When he liked he could be extraordinarily charming, sensitive, and
tactful; his talk was fascinatingly simple and elegant, but sometimes
it was painfully unpleasant to listen to him. I always disliked what
he said about women--it was unspeakably "vulgar," and there was in
his words something artificial, insincere, and at the same time very
personal. It seemed as if he had once been hurt, and could neither
forget nor forgive. The evening when I first got to know him, he
took me into his study--it was at Khamovniki in Moscow--and, making
me sit opposite to him, began to talk about _Varienka Oliessova_ and
of _Twenty-Six and One_. I was overwhelmed by his tone and lost my
head, he spoke so plainly and brutally, arguing that in a healthy
girl chastity is not natural. "If a girl who has turned fifteen is
healthy, she desires to be touched and embraced. Her mind is still
afraid of the unknown and of what she does not understand -that is what
they call chastity and purity. But her flesh is already aware that
the incomprehensible is right, lawful, and, in spite of the mind, it
demands fulfilment of the law. Now you describe Varienka Oliessova as
healthy, but her feelings are anaemic--that is not true to life."
Then he began to speak about the girl in _Twenty-six and One_, using a
stream of indecent words with a simplicity which seemed to me cynical
and even offended me. Later I came to see that he used unmentionable
words only because he found them more precise and pointed, but at the
time it was unpleasant to me to listen to him. I made no reply, and
suddenly he became attentive and kindly and began asking me about my
life, what I was studying, and what I read.
"I am told that you are very well read; is that true? Is Korolenko a
musician?"
"I believe not; but I'm not sure."
"You don't know? Do you like his stories?"
"I do very much."
"It is the contrast. He is lyrical and you haven't got that. Have you
read Weltmann?"
"Yes."
"Isn't he a good writer, clever, exact, and with no exaggeration? He
is sometimes better than Gogol. He knew Balzac. And Gogol imitated
Marlinsky."
When I said that Gogol was probably influenced by Hoffmann, Stern,
and perhaps Dickens, he glanced at me and asked: "Have you read that
somewhere? No? It isn't true. Gogol hardly knew Dickens. But you must
clearly have read a great deal: now look here, it's dangerous. Kolzov
ruined himself by it."
When he accompanied me to the door, he embraced and kissed me and said:
"You are a real mouzhik. You will find it difficult to live among
writers, but never mind, don't be afraid, always say what you feel even
if it be rude--it doesn't matter. Sensible people will understand."
I had two impressions from this first meeting: I was glad and proud
to have seen Tolstoi, but his conversation reminded me a little of
an examination, and in a sense I did not see in him the author of
_Cossacks, Kholstomier, War and Peace_, but a _barin_ who, making
allowances for me, considered it necessary to speak to me in the common
language, the language of the street and market-place. That upset my
idea of him, an idea which was deeply rooted and had become dear to me.
It was at Yassnaya Polyana that I saw him again. It was an overcast,
autumn day with a drizzle of rain, and he put on a heavy overcoat
and high leather boots and took me for a walk in the birch wood. He
jumped the ditches and pools like a boy, shook the rain-drops off
the branches, and gave me a superb account of how Fet had explained
Schopenhauer to him in this wood. He stroked the damp, satin trunks of
the birches lovingly with his hand and said: "Lately I read a poem--
The mushrooms are gone, but in the hollows
Is the heavy smell of mushroom dampness....