Part 3

“I am trying to like and appreciate the modern writers, but it is so difficult. Dostoevsky often wrote so badly, so weakly and incompetently, from the point of view of technique; but what a lot he always has to say! Taine said that for one page of Dostoevsky’s he would give all French novels.

“And technique has now reached a wonderful perfection. A Mme. Lukhmanov or Mme. D. writes quite wonderfully. What are Turgenev or myself compared with her! She could give us forty points’ start of her!”

Tolstoi has recently re-read all Chekhov’s short stories. To-day he said of Chekhov:

“His mastery is of the highest order. I have been re-reading his stories with the greatest pleasure. Some, as, for instance, ‘Children,’ ‘Sleepy,’ ‘In Court,’ are real masterpieces. I really read one story after another with great pleasure. And yet it is all a mosaic; there is no connecting inner link.

“The most important thing in a work of art is that it should have a kind of focus, _i.e._ there should be some place where all the rays meet or from which they issue. And this focus must not be able to be completely explained in words. This indeed is one of the significant facts about a true work of art--that its content in its entirety can be expressed only by itself.”

Tolstoi finds a great likeness between the talents of Chekhov and Maupassant. He prefers Maupassant for his greater joy in life. But, on the other hand, Chekhov’s gift is a purer gift then Maupassant’s.

Sergeenko, I don’t remember in what connection, recalled a poem by Lermontov.

Tolstoi said:

“He had indeed a permanent and powerful seeking after truth! Pushkin has not that moral significance, but the sense of beauty is developed in him more highly than in any one else. In Chekhov, and in modern writers generally, there is an extraordinary development of the technique of realism. In Chekhov everything is real to the verge of illusion. His stories give the impression of a stereoscope. He throws words about in apparent disorder, and, like an impressionist painter, he achieves wonderful results by his touches.”

Tolstoi likes M. Gorky very much as a man. He begins, however, to be disappointed with his work.

Tolstoi said of him:

“Gorky lacks a sense of proportion. He has a familiar style which is unpleasant.”

Tolstoi wrote a short preface to Von Polenz’s novel _Der Büttnerbauer_.

On that occasion he said:

“As I read the novel, I kept saying to myself: ‘Why did not you, you fool, write this novel?’--indeed, I know this world; and how very important it is to point out the poetry of peasant life! Men with their civilization will cut down this lime tree here, this forest; they will lay pavements and make houses with tall chimneys, and they will destroy the boundless beauty of natural life.”

On my asking him whether he had ever tried to write such a novel, Tolstoi said that he had done so several times long ago.

Tolstoi said of Grigorovich:

“He is now old-fashioned and seems feeble, but he is an important and remarkable writer, and God grant that Chekhov may be a tenth part as important as Grigorovich was. He belonged to the number of the best men who found an important movement. He has also many artistic merits. For instance, in the beginning of his _Anton Goremika_, when the old peasant comes home and gives his son or grandson a twig, it is a moving incident which depicts the old peasant as well as the simplicity and artlessness of his life.”

Of Turgenev, Tolstoi said:

“He was a typical representative of the men of the ’fifties--a radical in the best sense of the word. His struggle against serfdom is remarkable, and also his love for what he describes; for instance, the way he describes the old man in _Old Portraits_. And then there is his sensitiveness to the beauties of nature.”

Speaking of the province of criticism, Tolstoi said:

“The value of criticism consists in pointing out all the good that there is in this or that work of art, and in thus directing the opinion of the public, whose tastes are mostly crude and the majority of whom have no feeling for beauty. Just as it is difficult to be a really good critic, so it is easy for the most stupid and limited man to become a critic; and as good critics are needed, so bad critics are merely harmful. It is a particularly absurd and cheap habit of critics to express, in talking of other people’s work, all sorts of personal ideas which have nothing to do with the book they are criticizing. This is the most useless gossip.”

_July 7th._ Tolstoi said that all human vices can be reduced to three classes: (1) anger, malevolence; (2) vanity; and (3) lust--in the widest sense of the word. The last is the most powerful.

In the morning, at coffee, Tolstoi sighed and said:

“Yes, it is hard, it is hard.... It is hard because falsehood and arrogance prevail in the higher ranks of society, and because there is much darkness among the people. The other day two sectarians of the priestless sect came to me from Tula: one a young one, evidently of little understanding, and the other an old man, who, while we talked, kept putting on his spectacles. The old man turned out to be understanding, wise, and said many things to the point, as though he agreed with my religious views; and yet when I offered them tea they refused because they had not brought their tea things with them.”

On the occasion of the Boxer rising Tolstoi said:

“It is terrible that it should happen in such an awful way. But, although it is difficult to foresee, yet it is to be expected that after the war a greater understanding will take place between Europeans and the Chinese; and I think that the Chinese are bound to have a most beneficial influence on us, if only because of their extraordinary capacity for work and of their ability to grow more on a small plot of land and obtain better results than we do on a space a dozen times larger.”

Tolstoi compares the present state of Europe with the end of the Roman Empire. The Chinese, in his opinion, play the part of the “barbarians.”

Tolstoi said to-day:

“All our actions are divided into those which have a value, and those which have no value at all, in the face of death. If I were told that I had to die to-morrow, I should not go out for a ride on horseback; but if I were about to die this moment, and Levochka here” (Leo Lvovich’s son, who passed across the terrace at that moment with his nurse) “fell and burst into tears, I should run to him and pick him up. We are all in the position of passengers from a ship which has reached an island. We have gone on shore, we walk about and gather shells, but we must always remember that, when the whistle sounds, all the little shells will have to be thrown away and we must run to the boat.”

Sophie Andreevna, who was present during some of the talks, argued all the time, and answered Tolstoi in a very feminine way. When Sophie Andreevna on a walk said that a woman, while her husband writes novels and philosophical articles, has to bear, to give birth to, and to rear her children, and how difficult all this is, Tolstoi became indignant and exclaimed with a bitterness that was rare in him:

“What terrible things you are saying, Sonechka! A woman who is annoyed at having children and does not desire them is not a woman, but a whore!”

In the evening we sat on the balcony: Tolstoi, Sergeenko, and myself.

Tolstoi wondered at the illogicality of women, and turning to me said:

“Peter Alexeevich and myself have a right to speak about women, but you have none. One must have a wife and daughters to do this. Daughters are perhaps the more important of the two. Daughters are the only women who are not ‘women’ at all to a man, and who can be known fully from the beginning. With sisters such a relation is impossible, for one grows up side by side with them; a certain rivalry enters into the relation, and one cannot know one’s sister, entirely, as a whole.”

Sergeenko asked Tolstoi’s advice as to how to educate his son sexually.

Tolstoi said to him:

“These questions are so dangerous that it is better that parents should not speak of them at all to their children. It is only necessary to watch the influence of surroundings. At times a vicious boy, or one who is not vicious at all, but spoilt in this sense, can corrupt a whole circle of boys. It is best of all that a growing boy should be as much as possible among young girls. But there are among modern girls some that are worse than young men. If a feeling of romance is felt for any girl, this is the best protection against immorality....”

_July 12th._ Yesterday I returned home. On the day of my departure during our walk Sophie Andreevna was talking about the sale of the Samara estate, which she has completed for four hundred and fifty thousand roubles (Tolstoi originally bought the estate cheap), and by the sale of which Andrey, Michael, and Alexandra will get 150,000 roubles each. This money was the topic of conversation during the last few days, and how the sons meant to buy this or some other estate. At the end of the walk Tolstoi and myself found ourselves ahead of the others. Suddenly he gave a heavy sigh.

I asked him: “Why do you sigh, Leo Nikolaevich?”

“If you knew how painful it is to me to hear it all! I have it always on my conscience that I, with my wish to renounce property, once bought estates. It is funny to think that it seems now as if I had wished to make provision for my children, and in doing so I did them the greatest injury. Look at my Andryusha. He is completely incapable of doing anything, and lives on the people whom I once robbed and whom my children keep on robbing. How terrible it is to listen to all this talk now, to watch it all going on! It is so opposed to my ideas and desires and to everything I live by.... Oh! that they would spare me!...”

Tolstoi was silent for a time, and then said:

“Why did I suddenly begin complaining?”

At that moment Tatyana Lvovna came up, and our conversation turned on other subjects.

Tolstoi talked about poetry.

“When a poem deals with love, flowers, etc., it is a comparatively innocent occupation until the age of sixteen. But to express in verse an important and serious idea without distorting the idea is almost impossible. How very difficult it is to express one’s thoughts by words only, so that every one understands just what you want to express! How much more difficult, then, it is when the writer is bound by metre and rhyme! Only the very great poets have succeeded in doing it, and rarely too. Perfectly false ideas are often hidden behind verses.”

An undergraduate who had written an article upon Tolstoi in reply to Nordau’s criticism came, and turned out to be a foolish young man. Tolstoi had been unwell for the last few days and in a bad temper, so that he came to us quite upset and said:

“No, it is time, it is time for me to die! They stick to some single idea, which they arbitrarily choose from the rest, and go on and on repeating: Non-resistance! non-resistance! How am I to blame for it?”

Sophie Andreevna said to me:

“The private life of famous men is always distorted in their biographies. They are sure to make me out a Xantippe. You must take my side, Alexander Borisovich!” ...

During our walk Sophie Andreevna showed me the spot which is called “the apiary,” and said:

“There actually was an apiary here once. Leo N. was at one time mad about bees, and used to spend whole days in the apiary. We often drove here, taking a samovar and having tea here. Once Fet came here, and we went to join Leo N. at the apiary. It was a wonderful evening; we sat here for a long time; and there were many glow-worms in the grass. Leo N. said to me: ‘Now, Sonia, you always wanted emerald earrings; take two glow-worms for earrings.’ Thereupon Fet wrote a poem in which were these lines:

In my hand is thy hand--what a marvel! On the ground are two glow-worms, two emeralds.”

At another point Sophie Andreevna showed me the field where Tolstoi and Turgenev once stood when shooting, and she was with them.

Sophie Andreevna said:

“It was the last time Turgenev stayed at Yasnaya, not long before his death. I asked him: ‘Ivan Sergeevich, why don’t you write now?’ He answered: ‘In order to write I had always to be a little in love. Now I am old, I can’t fall in love any more, and that is why I have stopped writing.’”

_December 27th._ Last night I was at the Tolstois’. There were Tolstoi, Ilya, and Andrey (Tolstoi’s sons). A message arrived that Tatyana Lvovna had given birth prematurely to a stillborn child; a day before, news reached Yasnaya Polyana that the son of Leo Lvovich, a boy of about two, was dead. Sophie Andreevna left for Yasnaya. There was an atmosphere of depression.

Tolstoi played chess with me. Later P. S. Usov came, who also played a game of chess with Tolstoi. We began to talk. Tolstoi became animated. The post arrived. There were three letters from Chertkov. In one of them there were many pages of closely written manuscript.

Tolstoi glanced at it and said:

“It is probably a woman’s writing. How nice it would be if one need not read it!”

The manuscript, however, turned out not to be from a woman, so that Tolstoi put it aside to read it.

Referring to his daughter’s misfortune, Tolstoi said:

“I am not sorry that my daughters have no children; I cannot be glad that I have grandchildren. I know that they will inevitably grow up to be idlers. My daughters are certainly anxious that this should not be so, but considering the surroundings in which they will have to be brought up, it is very difficult to avoid it. All my life long I have had these surroundings, and, however much I struggle, I can do nothing. Now, during the Christmas season I can’t bear to look at this mad extravagance; these visits. What a terrible absurdity it is!”

Usov was saying in what circumstances a doctor has the right to bring on birth artificially, thereby killing the baby.

Tolstoi replied:

“It is always immoral. For the most part, when there are various ways of relieving the patient, oxygen, etc., it is difficult to abstain from using them; but it would be better if they did not exist. We shall all die without fail, and the doctors’ activity is directed towards fighting death. But to die--in ten days or in ten years--is all the same. How terrible it is that it is always concealed from the patient that he is dying! We are none of us accustomed to look death in the face!”

Usov defended the activity of doctors, considering it a useful one.

Tolstoi said:

“It is for this reason that I consider the activity of doctors harmful: people are crowded in towns; they are infected with syphilis and consumption; they are kept in terrible conditions, and then millions are spent on the establishment of hospitals and clinics. But why not spend that energy, not in curing people, but in improving the conditions of their lives? While numbers of healthy, useful peasants are infected with all sorts of diseases, and are worn out by work beyond their strength, so that they die at thirty instead of seventy, some useless old woman who is quite incurable has spent upon her all the treatment that medicine can supply.

“All modern sciences do the very opposite of what they set out to do. Theology hides moral truths, jurisprudence obscures in every possible way the conception of justice, the natural sciences teach materialism, and history distorts the true life of the people. Darwin’s theory is in agreement with the crude fable of Moses. All discussions on Darwinism are polemics against Moses.

“Every young man growing up in Russia passes through a terrible contagion, a sort of moral syphilis; in the first place, the Orthodox Church, and then, when he frees himself from that, the doctrines of materialism. The best physiologists, like Krafft-Ebing or Claude Bernard, openly admit that, however carefully we investigate even a simple cell, there is always some _x_ in its composition which we do not understand. Consequently the complex of organisms and the social conditions of life are an _x_ raised to the _x_ degree. And if we cannot investigate a cell completely, then how can we realize the laws which govern the life of human societies? Yet some blockhead like B. assures us that it is all very simple, and the science of history can deduce immutable laws by which human life is shaped.

“Look at all our historians: what dull, stupid men they are! For instance, Solovev. He was an incredibly dull man. And when some one gifted appears among them--a Granovsky, Kostomarov, Kudryavzev--and you ask, ‘What after all have they done?’ it turns out that they have done nothing of any importance or value. Take Kluchevsky, for instance: what has he done? He talks brilliantly, toys with the liberal point of view about Catherine the Great, and says that she was a whore--well, we knew that without him. Or take the man who dances the mazurka in the Moscovskya Vedomsti, Ilovaisky--he is an historian too!

“What should be taught at school? Long ago, when I was interested in education, I came to the conclusion that school teaching ought to consist of two branches only, of languages and mathematics. This is the only positive knowledge that one can give a pupil. There is no humbug about this. Either you know it or you don’t know it. Besides, from this fundamental knowledge all science can develop. From mathematics come astronomy, physics, natural sciences. From languages, history, geography, and so on. But with us, who is taught and what are they taught? To-day I walked in the street. Drunken men were going about, swearing obscenely, dragging women after them. Who has ever said a single word to these men about their moral needs? What did we teach them?

“The other evening I was coming home from the Turkish bath and walked near the theatres. Policemen on horseback were lounging about; coachmen with buttocks like this” (Tolstoi illustrated it with his hands) “and rows of buttons on their backs sit on the boxes. And in the illuminated theatres, crowded with people, a divine service is performed: a silly and distorted story _Sadko_ (an opera) is acted, or ‘When we dead awaken’ is played. It’s sheer madness!”

1901

_Moscow, February 1st._ Tolstoi began about a couple of months ago to learn Dutch, and now he reads quite easily, at the age of seventy-three!

He has an original way of learning languages: he gets the New Testament in the language he wants to know, and whilst reading it through he learns the language.

Tolstoi said to me recently about modern art:

“The sense of shame is lost. I cannot call it anything else--the sense of æsthetic shame. I wonder if you know the feeling? I feel it most strongly when I read something that is artistically false, and I can call it nothing else but shame.”

With regard to his play, _The Corpse_, Tolstoi said to me:

“The son of the wife of the man I described came to me, and then the man himself. The son on behalf of his mother asked me not to publish the play,[1] because it would be very painful to her, and also because she was afraid of the consequences. I of course promised.

“Their visit was very interesting and useful to me. Once more, as so many times before, I was convinced how much feebler and more unreal are the psychological motives which one invents oneself in order to explain actions. The actions of one’s imaginary characters are then the motives which guided those people in real life. After talking to these people I cooled to my work.”

On another occasion, in the dining-room downstairs, animated conversation was going on among the younger people. Tolstoi, who was resting in the next room in the dark, afterwards came into the dining-room and said to me:

“I lay there and listened to your talk. It interested me from two points of view: it was interesting simply to hear young people talking, and then it was also interesting from the dramatic point of view. I listened and said to myself: This is how one ought to write for the stage. It is not one speaking and the others listening. It is never like that. It is necessary that all should speak, and the art of the writer consists in making what he wants run through it like a beautiful thread.”

_March 8th._ Yesterday Tolstoi was in good form. At tea he laughed and joked. The conversation was about luxury.

Tolstoi said:

“How much more money people spend nowadays than they used! When Sophie Andreevna and I lived in Yasnaya, our income from the Nikolsky estate was about five thousand roubles and we lived superbly. I remember when Sophie Andreevna bought little mats to lay by the beds, it seemed to me a useless and incredible luxury. And now my sons--I seem to have about twenty of them--squander money right and left, buy dogs, horses, gramophones. I asked myself then, why buy carpets when we have slippers? Certainly we did not go barefoot, but, behold, Riepin painted me _décolleté_, barefooted, in a shirt! I have to thank him for not having taken off my nether garments! And he never asked me, if I liked it! But I have long since got used to being treated as if I were dead. There, in the Peredvizhni exhibition, you will see the Devil (Riepin’s ‘Temptation of Christ’), and you’ll also see the man possessed by the Devil!”

On February 25th Tolstoi’s excommunication was announced. That day Tolstoi and A. N. Dunaev went on some business to a doctor and came into the Lubiansky Square. In the square, by the fountain, the crowd recognized Tolstoi. At first, as Dunaev relates, an ironical voice was heard: “Here’s the Devil in the likeness of a man!” This served for a signal. The crowd threw themselves like one man on Tolstoi. All shouted and threw up their hats. Tolstoi was confused; he didn’t know what to do and walked away almost at a run. The crowd followed him. With great difficulty Tolstoi and Dunaev managed to get a sledge at the corner of Neglinny. The crowd wanted to stop the cabman and many held on to the sledge. At that moment a troop of mounted police appeared, let the cab through, and immediately made a ring and cut off the crowd.

On the occasion of his excommunication Tolstoi received, and is still receiving, a number of addresses, letters of sympathy, etc. One lady sent him a piece of holy bread and a letter in which she said that she had just received the Sacrament and took the Host for his benefit. She ends her letter: “Eat it in health and pay no heed to these stupid priests.”

_August 9th._ I was the other day in Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoi is hale and hearty. I have not seen him like that for a long time.

The conversation was about Russian writers.

Tolstoi said:

“I was fond of Turgenev as a man. As a writer, I do not attribute particular importance to him or to Goncharov. Their subjects, the number of ordinary characters and love scenes, have too ephemeral an importance. If I were asked which of the Russian writers I consider the most important, I would say: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Hertzen, whom our Liberals have forgotten, and Dostoevsky, whom they do not read at all. Well, and then: Griboedov, Ostrovsky, Tyutchev.”

Of Gogol’s works Tolstoi does not like _Taras Bulba_ at all. He far prefers _The Revisor_ (_Inspector General_), _Dead Souls_, _Shinel_, _Koliaska_ (“it’s a masterpiece in miniature”), _Nevsky Prospect_. Of Pushkin’s works, he considers _Boris Godunov_ a failure.

It is characteristic that in making his selection Tolstoi said:

“I do not speak of myself; it’s not for me, but for others, to judge of my importance.”

That evening in his study Tolstoi said to me: