Suddenly a hare got up under our feet. Leo Nicolayevitch started up
excited, his face lit up, and he whooped like a real old sportsman.
Then, looking at me with a curious little smile, he broke into a
sensible, human laugh. He was wonderfully charming at that moment.
Another time he was looking at a hawk in the park: it was hovering over
the cattle-shed, making wide circles suspended in the air, moving its
wings very slightly as if undecided whether or not the moment to strike
had come. Leo Nicolayevitch stood up shading his eyes with his hand and
murmured with excitement: "The rogue is going for our chickens. Now,
now ... it's coming ... O, he's afraid. The groom is there, isn't he?
I'll call the groom...."
And he shouted to the groom. When he shouted, the hawk was scared,
swept upwards, swung away, and disappeared. Leo Nicolayevitch sighed,
apparently reproaching himself, and said: "I should not have shouted;
he would have struck all the same...."
Once in telling him about Tiflis, I mentioned the name of V. V.
Flerovsky-Bervi. "Did you know him?" Leo Nicolayevitch asked with
interest: "Tell me, what is he like?"
I told him about Flerovsky: tall, long-bearded, thin, with very large
eyes; how he used to wear a long, sail-cloth blouse, and how, armed
with a bundle of rice, cooked in red wine, tied in his belt, and an
enormous linen umbrella, he wandered with me on the mountain paths
of Trans-Caucasia; how once on a narrow path we met a buffalo and
prudently retreated, threatening the brute with the open umbrella, and,
every time we stepped back, in danger of falling over the precipice.
Suddenly I noticed that there were tears in Tolstoi's eyes, and this
confused me and I stopped.
"Never mind," he said, "go on, go on. It's pleasure at hearing about a
good man. I imagined him just like that, unique. Of all the radicals he
is the most mature and clever; in his _Alphabet_ he proves conclusively
that all our civilization is barbarian, that culture is the work of the
peaceful and weak, not the strong, nations, and that the struggle for
existence is a lying invention by which it is sought to justify evil.
You, of course, don't agree with this? But Daudet agrees, you know, you
remember his Paul Astier?"
"But how would you reconcile Flerovsky's theory, say, with the part
played by the Normans in the history of Europe?"
"The Normans? That's another thing."
If he did not want to answer, he would always say "That's another
thing."
It always seemed to me--and I do not think I was mistaken--that Leo
Nicolayevitch was not very fond of talking about literature, but was
vitally interested in the personality of an author. The questions: "Do
you know him? What is he like? Where was he born?" I often heard in his
mouth. And nearly all his opinions would throw some curious light upon
a man.
Of V.K. he said thoughtfully: "He is not a Great Russian, and so he
must see our life better and more truly than we do." Of Anton Tchekhov,
whom he loved dearly: "His medicine gets in his way; if he were not
a doctor, he would be a still better writer." Of one of the younger
writers: "He pretends to be an Englishman, and in that character a
Moscow man has the least success." To me he once said: "You are an
inventor: all these Kuvaldas of yours are inventions." When I answered
that Kuvalda had been drawn from life, he said: "Tell me, where did you
see him?"
He laughed heartily at the scene in the court of the Kazan magistrate,
Konovalov, where I had first seen the man whom I described under the
name of Kuvalda. "Blue blood," he said, wiping the tears from his eyes,
"that's it--blue blood. But how splendid, how amusing. You tell it
better than you write it. Yes, you are an inventor, a romantic, you
must confess."
I said that probably all writers are to some extent inventors,
describing people as they would like to see them in life; I also said
that I liked active people who desire to resist the evil of life by
every means, even violence.
"And violence is the chief evil," he exclaimed, taking me by the arm.
"How will you get out of that contradiction, inventor? Now your _My
Travelling Companion_ isn't invented--it's good just because it isn't
invented. But when you think, you beget knights, all Amadises and
Siegfrieds."
I remarked that as long as we live in the narrow sphere of our
anthropomorphous and unavoidable "travelling companions," we build
everything on quicksands and in a hostile medium.
He smiled and nudged me slightly with his elbow: "From that very, very
dangerous conclusions can be drawn. You are a questionable Socialist.
You are a romantic, and romantics must be monarchists--they always have
been."
"And Hugo?"
"Hugo? That's another thing. I don't like him, a noisy man."
He often asked me what I was reading, and always reproached me if I had
chosen, in his opinion, a bad book.
"Gibbon is worse than Kostomarov; one ought to read Mommsen, he's very
tedious, but it's all so solid."
When he heard that the first book I ever read was _The Brothers
Semganno_, he even got angry:
"Now, you see--a stupid novel. That's what has spoilt you. The French
have three writers, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert; and, well, perhaps
Maupassant, though Tchekhov is better than he. The Goncourts are mere
clowns, they only pretended to be serious. They had studied life from
books written by inventors like themselves, and they thought it a
serious business; but it was of no use to a soul."
I disagreed with this opinion, and it irritated Leo Nicolayevitch a
little; he could barely stand contradiction, and sometimes his opinions
were strange and capricious.
"There is no such thing as degeneration," he said once. "The Italian
Lombroso invented it, and after him comes the Jew Nordau, screaming
like a parrot. Italy is the land of charlatans and adventurers: only
Arentinos, Casanovas, Cagliostros, and the like are born there."
"And Garibaldi?"
"That's politics; that's another thing."
To a whole series of facts, taken from the life of the merchant-class
families in Russia, he answered: "But it's untrue; it's only written in
clever books."
I told him the actual history of three generations of a merchant family
which I had known, a history in which the law of degeneration had acted
with particular mercilessness. Then he began excitedly tugging at my
arm and encouraging me to write about it: "Now that's true. I know it;
there are two families like that in Tula. It ought to be written. A
long novel, written concisely, do you see? You must do it." His eyes
flashed.
"But then there will be knights, Leo Nicolayevitch."
"Don't. This is really serious. The one who is going to be a monk and
pray for the whole family --it's wonderful. That's real: you sin and
I will go and expiate your sin by prayer. And the other, the weary
one, the money-loving founder of the family--that's true too. And he's
a drunken, profligate beast, and loves everyone, and suddenly commits
murder--ah, it's good. It should be written, among thieves and beggars
you must not look for heroes, you really mustn't. Heroes--that's a lie
and invention; there are simply people, people, and nothing else."
He often pointed out exaggerations in my stories, but once, speaking of
_Dead Souls_, he said, smiling good-naturedly:
"We are all of us terrible inventors. I myself, when I write, suddenly
feel pity for some character, and then I give him some good quality or
take a good quality away from someone else, so that in comparison with
the others he may not appear too black." And then in the stern tones of
an inexorable judge: "That's why I say that art is a lie, an arbitrary
sham, harmful for people. One writes not what real life is, but simply
what one thinks of life oneself. What good is that to anyone, how I see
that tower or sea or Tartar--what interest or use is there in it?"
[At times his thoughts and feelings seemed to me capriciously, even
deliberately, perverse, but what particularly struck and upset men
was just the stern directness of his thought, like Job, the fearless
questioner of the cruel God. He said:
"I was walking one day on the road to Kiev, about the end of May; the
earth was a paradise; everything rejoiced; the birds sang; the bees
hummed; the sunshine and everything seemed so happy, humane, splendid.
I was moved to tears; I felt myself a bee to whom are given the best
flowers, and I felt God close to my soul. And suddenly I saw by the
roadside a man and woman, pilgrims; they were lying together, both
grey, dirty, and old --they writhed like worms, made noises, murmured,
and the sun pitilessly lighted up their naked blue legs and wizened
bodies. It struck such a blow to my soul. Lord, thou creator of beauty,
how art thou not ashamed? I felt utterly wretched----
"Yes, you see what things happen. Nature--the devout considered her the
work of the devil--cruelly and mockingly torments man; she takes away
the power and leaves the desire. All men with a living soul experience
that. Only man is made to experience the whole shame and horror of that
torment, given to him in his flesh. We carry it in ourselves as an
inevitable punishment--a punishment for what sin?"
While he said this the look in his eyes changed strangely, now
childishly plaintive, now hard and stern and bright. His lips trembled,
his moustache bristled. When he had finished, he took a handkerchief
from the pocket of his blouse and wiped his face hard, though it was
dry. Then he smoothed his beard with the knotted fingers of his strong
peasant's hand, and repeated gently: "Yes, for what sin?"]
Once I was walking with him on the lower road from Dyulbev to Ai-Todor
On; he was walking with the light step of a young man, when he said to
me more nervously than was usual with him: "The flesh should be the
obedient dog of the spirit, running to do its bidding; but we--how do
we live? The flesh rages and riots, and the spirit follows it helpless
and miserable."
He rubbed his chest hard over the heart, raised his eyebrows, and then,
remembering something, went on: "One autumn in Moscow in an alley near
the Sukhariov Gate I once saw a drunken woman lying in the gutter. A
stream of filthy water flowed from the yard of a house right under
her neck and back. She lay in that cold liquid, muttering, shivering,
wriggling her body in the wet, but she could not get up."
He shuddered, half closed his eyes, shook his head, and went on gently:
"Let's sit down here.... It's the most horrible and disgusting thing, a
drunken woman. I wanted to help her get up, but I couldn't; I felt such
a loathing; she was so slippery and slimy--I felt that if I'd touched
her, I could not have washed my hand clean for a month --horrible. And
on the curb sat a bright, grey-eyed boy, the tears running down his
cheeks: he was sobbing and repeating wearily and helplessly: 'Mu-um ...
mu-um-my ... do get up.' She would move her arms, grunt, lift her head,
and again--bang went her neck into the filth."
He was silent, and then looking round, he repeated almost in a
whisper: "Yes, yes, horrible. You've seen many drunken women? Many--my
God! You, you must not write about that, you mustn't."
"Why?"
He looked straight into my eyes and smiling repeated: "Why?" Then
thoughtfully and slowly he said: "I don't know. It just slipped out ...
it's a shame to write about filth. But yet why not write about it? Yes,
it's necessary to write all about everything, everything."
Tears came into his eyes. He wiped them away, and, smiling, he looked
at his handkerchief, while the tears again ran down his wrinkles. "I
am crying," he said. "I am an old man. It cuts me to the heart when I
remember something horrible."
And very gently touching me with his elbow, he said: "You, too--you
will have lived your life, and everything will remain exactly as it
was, and then you, too, will cry worse than I, more streamingly,'
as the peasant women say. And everything must be written about,
everything; otherwise that bright little boy might be hurt, he might
reproach us--'it's untrue, it's not the whole truth,' he will say. He's
strict for the truth."
Suddenly he gave himself a shake and said in a kind voice: "Now, tell
me a story; you tell them well. Something about a child, about your
childhood. It's not easy to believe that you were once a child. You are
a strange creature, exactly as if you were born grown-up. In your ideas
there is a good deal of the child-like and the immature, but you know
more than enough of life--and one cannot ask for more. Well, tell me a
story....'
He lay down comfortably upon the bare roots of a pine tree and watched
the ants moving busily among the grey spines.
In the South, which, with its self-asserting luxuriance and flaunting,
unbridled vegetation, seems so strangely incongruous to a man from the
North, he, Leo Tolstoi--even his name speaks of his inner power--seemed
a small man, but knitted and knotted out of very strong roots deep in
the earth --in the flaunting scenery of the Crimea, I say, he was at
once both out of place and in his place. He seemed a very ancient man,
master of all his surroundings--a master-builder who, after centuries
of absence, has arrived in the mansion built by him. He has forgotten a
great deal which it contains; much is new to him; everything is as it
should be, and yet not entirely so, and he has at once to find out what
is amiss and why it is amiss.
He walked the roads and paths with a businesslike, quick step of the
skilled explorer of the earth, and with sharp eyes, from which neither
a single pebble nor a single thought could hide itself, he looked,
measured, tested, compared. And he scattered about him the living seeds
of indomitable thoughts. He said to Suler once: "You, Liovushka, read
nothing which is not good out of self-conceit, while Gorky reads a lot
which is not good, because he distrusts himself. I write much which is
not good, because of an old man's ambition, a desire that all should
think as I do. Of course, I think it is good, and Gorky thinks it is
not good, and you think nothing at all; you simply blink and watch what
you may clutch. One day you will clutch something which does not belong
to you--it has happened to you before. You will put your claws into
it, hold on for a bit, and when it begins to get loose, you won't try
to stop it. Tchekhov has a superb story, _The Darling_--you are rather
like her."
"In what?" asked Suler, laughing.
"You can love well, but to choose--no, you can't, and you will waste
yourself on trifles."
"Is everyone like that?"
"Everyone?" Leo Nicolayevitch repeated.
"No, not everyone."
And suddenly he asked me, exactly as if he were dealing me a blow: "Why
don't you believe in God?"
"I have no faith, Leo Nicolayevitch."
"It is not true. By nature you are a believer, and you cannot get on
without God. You will realize it one day. Your disbelief comes from
obstinacy, because you have been hurt: the world is not what you would
like it to be. There are also some people who do not believe out of
shyness; it happens with young people; they adore some woman, but don't
want to show it from fear that she won't understand, and also from lack
of courage. Faith, like love, requires courage and daring. One has to
say to oneself 'I believe,' and everything will come right, everything
will appear as you want it, it will explain itself to you and attract
you. Now, you love much, and faith is only a greater love: you must
love still more, and then your love will turn to faith. When one loves
a woman, she is, unfailingly, the best woman on earth, and each loves
the best woman, and that is faith. A nonbeliever cannot love: to-day he
falls in love with one woman, and next year with another. The souls of
such men are tramps living barren lives--that is not good. But you were
born a believer, and it is no use thwarting yourself. Well, you may say
beauty? And what is beauty? The highest and most perfect is God."
He hardly ever spoke to me on this subject, and its seriousness and the
suddenness of it rather overwhelmed me. I was silent.
He was sitting on the couch with his legs drawn up under him, and
breaking into a triumphant little smile and shaking his finger at me,
he said: "You won't get out of this by silence, no."
And I, who do not believe in God, looked at him for some reason very
cautiously and a little timidly, I looked and thought: "The man is
godlike."