Part 2

“Woman, as a Christian, has a right to equality. Woman, as member of the modern and perfectly pagan family, must not struggle for an impossible equality. The modern family is like a tiny little boat sailing in a storm on the vast ocean. It can keep afloat if it is ruled by _one_ will. But when those in the boat begin struggling, the boat is upset, and the result is what we see now in most families. The man, however bad, is in the majority of cases the more sensible of the two. Woman is nearly always in opposition to any progress. When man wants to break with the old life and to go ahead, he nearly always meets with energetic resistance from the woman. The wife catches hold of his coat-tails and will not allow him. In woman a great evil is terribly highly developed--family egotism. It is a dreadful egotism, for it commits the greatest cruelties in the name of love; as if to say, let the whole world perish so that my Serge may be happy!...”

Then L. N. recalled scenes which he had observed in Moscow:

“There issues from Minangua’s a gentleman in a beaver coat, with a sad face, and after him his lady, and the porter carries boxes and helps the lady into the sledge.

“I love at times to stand near the colonnade by the great theatre and watch the ladies driving up to stop at Meriliz’s. I only know of two similar sights: (1) when peasant women go to Zaseka to pick up nuts the watchmen catch them, so that sometimes they give birth out of fright, and yet they go on doing it; and (2) so it is with ladies shopping at sales.

“And their coachmen wait in the bitter cold and talk among themselves: ‘My lady must have spent five thousand to-day!’

“I shall one day write about women. When I am quite old, and my digestion is completely out of order, and I am still looking out into the world through one eye, then I shall pop my head out and tell them: That’s what you are! and disappear completely, or they would peck me to death.” ...

Doctor E. N. Maliutin was in Yasnaya. L. N. said to him:

“I can’t understand the usual attitude that a doctor always serves a good cause. There is no profession that is good in itself. One may be a cobbler and be better and nicer than a doctor. Why is restoring some one to health good? At times it is quite the opposite. Man’s deeds are good, not in themselves, but because of the feelings which inspire him. That’s why I do not understand the desire of women to be doctors, trained nurses, midwives, as though by becoming a midwife everything is settled for the best.”

On some occasion L. N. said:

“When you are told about a complicated and difficult affair, for the most part about some one’s disgusting behaviour, reply to it: Did _you_ make the jam? or: Won’t you like to have tea?--and that’s all. Much harm comes from the so-called attempt to understand circumstances and relations.”

_October 1st._ I came to Yasnaya Polyana yesterday. It is very nice here now the weather is mild, almost bright, but rather cold. There are no strangers. I am copying _Resurrection_ again, on which L. N. is hard at work. Now I am doing the first chapters of Part III.

There is little joy in the Tolstois’ family life, and to an intimate friend this is extremely marked.

_Moscow, November 26th._ I am much distressed by L. N.’s serious illness, which at the bottom of my mind I consider hopeless. I called on Wednesday to inquire after his health, and the news was very unfavourable.

_December 7th._ When Tolstoi was ill (he is much better now) and I was for the first time in his room, he seemed glad to see me, which was a great delight to me. On his table was the volume of Tyutchev’s poems. In his hand he had an English book, _Empire and Freedom_ (I don’t remember by whom). As is always his way, Tolstoi at once spoke of what he was reading.

“Here is a remarkable book!” said Tolstoi. “He (the author) is American, therefore an Anglo-Saxon; nevertheless, he denies the so-called civilizing influence of the Anglo-Saxon race. I can’t understand how people can stick to such superstitions! I understand a Muhammad preaching his doctrine,--mediæval Christianity, the Crusades. Whatever the convictions of those people may have been, they did it in the belief that they knew the truth and were giving that knowledge to others. But now there is nothing! Everything is done for the sake of profit!”

Then Tolstoi began to talk about a French pamphlet on the workers’ co-operative societies which he had read.

“Why not introduce in the villages here such co-operative societies? That is a vital thing! You, instead of doing nothing,” he turned to Ilya Lvovich, who sat there, “ought to do it here in the village.

“Socialist ideas have become a truism. Who can now seriously dispute the idea that every one should have the right to enjoy the result of his labour?”

Then the conversation turned upon the _obschina_.

Tolstoi said:

“Everything is taken away from the peasants; they are overtaxed, oppressed in all ways. The only good thing left is the _obschina_. And then every one criticizes it and makes it responsible for all the miseries of the peasants, in their wish to take away from the peasants their last good thing. They make out that the mutual responsibility of the members is one of the evils of the _obschina_. But mutual responsibility is only one of the principles of the _obschina_ with regard to fiscal purposes. If I use a good thing for an evil end, that does not prove that the thing is in itself bad.”

Then the conversation turned upon Tyutchev. The other day Tolstoi saw in the _Novoe Vremya_ his poem “Twilight.” He therefore took down all Tyutchev’s poems and read them during his illness.

Tolstoi said to me:

“I am always saying that a work of art is either so good that there is no standard by which to define its qualities--that is real art,--or it is quite bad. Now, I am happy to have found a real work of art. I cannot read it without tears. I know it by heart. Listen, I’ll read it to you.”

Tolstoi began in a voice broken with tears:

“The dove-coloured shadows melted together....”

When I am on my death-bed I shall not forget the impression then produced on me by Tolstoi. He lay on his back, convulsively twisting the edge of his blanket with his fingers and trying in vain to restrain the tears that choked him. He broke down several times and began again. But at last, when he read the end of the stanza, “Everything is in me, and I in everything,” his voice gave way. The entrance of A. N. Dunaev stopped him. He grew calmer.

“What a pity that I spoilt the poem for you!” he said to me later.

Then I played the piano.

Tolstoi asked me not to play Chopin, saying: “I am afraid I might burst into tears.”

Tolstoi asked for something by Mozart or Haydn.

He asked: “Why do pianists never play Haydn? You ought to. How good it is--beside a modern complicated, artificial work--to play something of Mozart or Haydn!”

1900

_Moscow, January 29th._ Tolstoi had a conversation with V. E. Den when Chalyapin was here. Tolstoi is working now on the article on the labour question, “New Slavery,” and the conversation turned upon labour.

Tolstoi said: “We are going through a new stage in the evolution of slavery: the slavery of the working men suffering under the yoke of the well-to-do classes.

“Slavery will never cease at the bottom first, exclusively from the movement of the slaves themselves. We saw it in America, and here during the serfdom of the peasants. So must it happen now again. It is only when we realize that it is a shame to have slaves, that we shall cease to be slave-drivers, and shall voluntarily give up exploiting the working classes.

“Freedom cannot come from the slaves. Individual slaves who have rid themselves of the yoke of slavery become in the majority of cases particularly harsh oppressors and tyrants over their late brothers. Nor can it be otherwise. How can you expect from them--harassed and tortured--anything else? It is only when we voluntarily give up the shameful use of the labour of the slaves, our brothers, that slavery will come to an end.

“Science, in so far as it describes and clarifies the real state of things, does a useful and necessary work. But as soon as it starts laying down programmes for the future, it becomes useless. All these ideas about an eight-hour working day, etc., only increase and legalize the evil. Labour must be free, not slavish, and that is all.

“When a peasant gets up before sunrise and works all day long in the field, he is not a slave. He has intercourse with nature, he does a useful work. But when he stands by a piece of machinery in a Morosov’s factory all his life long, manufacturing textiles which he will never see, and neither himself nor any one of his people will ever use, then he is a slave and perishes in slavery.

“Railways, telephones, and the other accessories of the civilized world--all that is useful and good. But if one had to choose either the whole of this civilization, for which not hundreds of thousands of ruined lives are required, but only the certain destruction of one single existence, or, on the other hand, no civilization at all, then no thank you for this civilization with its railways and telephones, if a necessary condition of them is the destruction of human life.”

_February 24th._ On the 18th and 20th I was at the Tolstois’. On the 18th Tolstoi went to the “Pod Deviche” playhouse and afterwards to a dirty public-house, where there is an extraordinary amount of drunkenness and debauchery, to make observations.

Tolstoi said:

“Twenty years ago I saw at the ‘Pod Deviche,’ _Churkin_, a play composed by a drunken tramp, and this time I saw _Stenka Rasin_--and it is all the same thing. Murder and violence are represented as heroic and are acclaimed by the crowd. And it is remarkable that whilst every word in a book which may enlighten the minds of the people is carefully struck out by the censorship, such performances are readily allowed, under the police inspector’s censorship. During the last twenty years probably over a million people have seen these _Churkins_ and _Rasins_.”

In telling this, Tolstoi recollected how he was once in a workhouse where the priest explained the Gospels:

“The passage was read where Christ says: ‘It is said: thou shalt not kill; but I say unto you, do not be angry without cause.’ The priest began to explain that one must not be angry without cause, but, if the authorities become angry, that is right and as it should be. ‘Do not kill’ also does not mean that one should never kill. In war or at an execution, killing is necessary and is not a sin. This is the only chance that an illiterate person has to understand the meaning of the Gospels, for in church all the chapters are either indistinctly read by the sexton, or shouted so loud that they are perfectly unintelligible--and this is the way in which the Gospels are explained to the people!”

A long talk about the Boers and the English took place.

Tolstoi said:

“I always consider that moral motives are effective and decisive historically. And now, when the universal dislike of the English is so clearly pronounced--I shall not live to see it, but it seems to me that the power of England will be much shaken. And I say this not out of an unconscious Russian patriotism. If Poland or Finland rose against Russia and success were on their side, my sympathy would be on their side as the oppressed.

“The Russian people, speaking impartially, is perhaps the most Christian of all in its moral character. It is partly to be explained by the fact that the Gospels have been read by the Russian people for nine hundred years; Catholics don’t know the Gospels even now, and other races came to know the Gospel only after the Reformation.

“I was struck when I saw in the streets of London a criminal escorted by the police, and the police had to protect him energetically from the crowd, which threatened to tear him to pieces. With us it is just the opposite: police have to drive away by force the people who try to give the criminal money and bread. With us, criminals and prisoners are ‘little unhappy ones.’ But now, unfortunately, there is a change for the worse, and our abominable Government tries with all its might and main to rouse hatred against the condemned. In Siberia, even prizes are given to any one who kills an escaped prisoner.”

_April 29th._ The conversation was on Shakespeare. Tolstoi is not very fond of him. Tolstoi said:

“Three times in my life I have read through Shakespeare and Goethe from end to end, and I could never make out in what their charm consisted.”

According to Tolstoi, Goethe is cold. Among his (Goethe’s) works he likes many of the lyrics and _Hermann and Dorothea_. He does not like Goethe’s dramatic works, and his novels he considers quite weak. Tolstoi did not speak about _Faust_.

Tolstoi is very fond of Schiller, and said: “He is a genuine man!” He loves almost all his works, particularly _The Robbers_ and _Don Carlos_, also _Mary Stuart_, _William Tell_, and _Wallenstein_.

Then A. M. Sukhotin, a man over seventy, read aloud Turgenev’s _Old Portraits_ superbly. Tolstoi did not remember the story, and was in great delight over it. He said:

“It is only after reading all these moderns that one really appreciates Turgenev.”

Tolstoi remembered Turgenev with great love. He said, in passing:

“When Turgenev died I wanted to read a paper about him. I wanted especially, in view of the misunderstandings that there had been between us, to remember and relate all the good that was so abundant in him, and to tell what I loved in him. The lecture was not given. Dolgorukov did not allow it.”

The conversation turned on Chekhov and Gorky. Tolstoi as usual praised Chekhov’s artistic gift very highly. The lack of a definite world conception grieves him in Chekhov; and in this respect Tolstoi prefers Gorky. Of Gorky Tolstoi said:

“You know what he is from his works. Gorky’s great and very serious essential defect is a poorly developed sense of proportion, and this is extremely important. I pointed out this defect to Gorky himself, and as an instance I drew his attention to his misuse of the method of animating inanimate things. Then Gorky said that in his opinion it was a good method, and gave an instance of it in his story _Malva_, where it says: ‘the sea laughed.’ I replied to him that, if on certain occasions the method might be very successful, nevertheless one ought not to abuse it.”

Yesterday Ushakov asked Tolstoi about Gromeka. Tolstoi and Tatyana Lvovna spoke a great deal about him.

Tolstoi said:

“He was a sympathetic, passionate, and gifted man. He shot himself when still a young man, it was said because he was mentally deranged.”

Tatyana Lvovna says, by the way, that Gromeka was her first admirer and proposed to her when she was sixteen.

Tolstoi values Gromeka’s criticism very much. He said:

“It was a pleasure to me that a man who sympathized with me could see _even_ in _War and Peace_ and in _Anna Karenin_ a great deal of what I was afterwards to say and write.”

Tolstoi also said:

“When I wrote the story _What Men Live by_, Fet said, ‘Well, what do people live by? By money, of course.’”

I observed that Fet had probably said it in joke. Tolstoi replied:

“No, it was his conviction. And, as often happens, what people try very stubbornly to get, they do get. Fet all his life long wanted to become rich, and he became rich. His brothers and sisters, it seems, went out of their minds, and all their fortunes came to him.”

Fet wrote in Tatyana Lvovna’s album that the unhappiest day of his life was the one when he saw that he was going to be ruined.

I talked a good deal with Tolstoi to-day. Tolstoi said about current events:

“I am not so much horrified at these murders in the Transvaal, and now in China, as by the open declaration of immoral motives. They used at least to cloak themselves hypocritically in good motives, but now that this is no longer possible they express all their immoral and cruel intentions and claims openly.”

We spoke about the abolition of deportation. Tolstoi considers it worse than the other method. He said:

“Instead of making it possible for a man to order his life in a new place, he is put into prison. The Government has already voted six and a half millions for the enlargement of prisons. And this money will again be flayed off the peasants, for there is nowhere else to take it from.”

Of our courts of justice Tolstoi said:

“How absurd our courts are can be seen at each stage. For example, take the case of the Tula priest. How was it that the Tula court acquitted him, and then after the acquittal the Oriol court sentenced him to hard labour for twenty years? If such uncertainty is possible, what are those verdicts worth? Indeed, it depends on a thousand accidents: the temper of the jurymen, the behaviour of the prisoner at the bar--the prisoner bursts into tears, and the impression produced secures his acquittal. It is merely a game of heads and tails! It would be simpler and easier to say: Heads or tails, and to give sentence accordingly. It simply baffles me how decent people can be judges!”

Of the case of S. I. Mamontov, Tolstoi said:

“One is certainly very sorry for him: he is an old, unhappy man; but, on the other hand, you have to remember that the man has squandered twelve millions, or whatever it may be; he certainly spent between one and two hundred thousand roubles per annum, and is then acquitted, while another wretched man steals a trifle and is condemned for it. And in his case, too, money was spent on expensive lawyers. This reminds me of the anecdote I read in the papers. A cashier who embezzled twenty-five thousand roubles came to a lawyer to ask him to undertake his defence. The lawyer asked him: ‘Is there any more money left?’ The cashier said that there was another twenty-five thousand. Then the lawyer said: ‘Take the rest and give it to me, and then I will undertake your case.’

“And why should the jury be able to pardon? Only the plaintiff can pardon; but the jury whom he has not hurt have nothing to pardon him for.

“I once talked to N. V. Davidov, and said to him that all punishment may be dispensed with, yet an enquiry ought to be made; and when the crime is proved, they should go to the criminal and accuse him in the presence of all of his crime, and should bring forward the proof of his guilt. It is quite likely that the man will say: ‘Be damned to you, it is none of your business!’ But still I think that this method would more often give positive results than the existing system of punishment.”

Speaking of the Government, Tolstoi said:

“I wonder why they have not put me into prison yet? Particularly now, after my article on ‘Patriotism.’ Perhaps they have not read it yet? It ought to be sent to them.”

Tolstoi spoke again of his indifference to modern complicated music:

“I tried to accustom myself to modern dissonances, but these are all a perversion of taste. A modern composer takes a musical idea, now and then even a lovely one, and twists it round and round without end or measure, combines it with other themes, and, when at last he manages to express something simple, one is ready to heave a sigh of relief and say: Thank God!”

_July 4th._ Yesterday Tolstoi said to me:

“Buddha says that happiness consists in doing as much good as possible to others. However strange this may seem on the face of it, yet it is true without a doubt: happiness is only possible when the struggle for personal happiness is renounced.”

Then Tolstoi smiled and said:

“And yet you play the piano! But certainly that is better than many other things. At any rate you need not pass sentence on any one, or commit murder.”

Tolstoi said of newspapers:

“At present the newspaper infection has reached its ultimate limits. All the questions of the day are artificially puffed up by the newspapers. The worst danger is that the newspapers present everything ready made, without making people stop to think about anything. A liberal Kuzminsky, or even a Koni, takes his fresh newspaper with his morning coffee, reads it, goes to his court, where he meets others who have just read the very same newspaper, and the contagion is spread!”

Tolstoi went on to say:

“It has suddenly become perfectly clear to me that the evil lies in regulations, _i.e._ the chief thing is not that people do wrong, but that some force others to do a wrong which is considered to be right. Hitherto not a single one even of the most extreme socialist doctrines has dispensed with compulsion. But slavery will only cease when every one is free to choose his work and the time needed for it.

“People always put an end to things by asking: ‘Well; let us suppose that we have liberated the slave, what will follow next? How is it going to be done?’ I do not know how it is going to be done, but I do know that the existing order is the greatest evil, and therefore I must try to take as little part as possible in keeping it going. But what will come in place of that evil--I do not and must not know. For what reason did we, the well-to-do classes, take upon ourselves the rôle of the controllers of life? Let the freed slaves arrange things for themselves. I know only this, that it is bad to be a slave and worse still to own slaves, and therefore I must rid myself of the evil. That’s all.”

Tolstoi wanted to take for the motto of his new book, _The Slavery of our Times_, Marx’s saying that since the capitalists made themselves masters of the working classes the European governments lost all shame.

Tolstoi praised Elzbacher’s book on anarchy, in which the doctrines of seven anarchists are expounded: of Godwin, Proudhon, Max Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, B. P. Tucker, and Tolstoi himself.

Tolstoi said:

“I myself can remember at the beginning of the socialist movement in Russia that the word ‘socialist’ was only spoken in a whisper; but when Professor Ivanyukov in the first years of the eighties openly wrote his book on socialism, it was already a widely spread doctrine in Western Europe. It is in the same way that the public now regard anarchism, often crudely identifying this doctrine with the throwing of bombs.”

Of Elzbacher’s book Tolstoi said:

“At the end of the book is an alphabetical index of the words used by the seven anarchists. It appears that the word _Zwang_, compulsion, violence, is absent only in the exposition of my views.”

Sergeenko was telling Tolstoi about Volinsky’s book on Leonardo da Vinci, and said it was a fine book.

Tolstoi remarked:

“Yes, it seems to be one of those books which are good in that it is not necessary to read them.”

Tolstoi said yesterday about doctors and science generally:

“How trivial and unnecessary are all our sciences! It is true that exact sciences--mathematics and chemistry, although quite unimportant for the improvement of moral life, are at any rate exact and positive. But, although medical science has a great deal of knowledge, that amount is nothing in proportion to what is needed in order actually to know anything. And what is the good of it?”

I replied to Tolstoi that, although in theory it may be so, yet in practice, when some one is ill, one always wants to help them.

To this Tolstoi replied:

“It often happens that if some one is seriously ill, those around him, at the bottom of their hearts, want him to die, in order to be rid of him--he is in their way.”

Tolstoi said to Sophie Andreevna:

“It’s time for us to die,” and he quoted Pushkin’s lines:

“And then our heir in a lucky moment will crush us down with a heavy monument.”

_July 5th._ Tolstoi went for a walk to-day with myself and P. A. Sergeenko. We passed through the splendid young fir-tree forest on the left of the road to Kozlovka.

Tolstoi said: