Chapter VIII): “Dans cette république parfaite, où la vertu des

citoyens sera réele, ils s’abstiendront de toute profession méchanique, de toute spéculation mercantile, travaux dégradés (dégradants?)[186] et _contraires_ à la vertu. Ils ne se livreront pas davantage á l’agriculture. Il faut du loisir pour acquérir la vertu” ...[187]

All his æsthetics has for its end (______)[188] virtue. And we with the Christian understanding of the brotherhood of man want to be guided by the ethical and æsthetical conception of the ancients!!

_Feb. 25. Nicholskoe. If I live._

_February 25. Nicholskoe._

I am alive. I have written a little--not as easily as yesterday. The guests have departed. Went for a walk twice. Am reading Aristotle. To-day I received letters ...

Yesterday, while walking, I prayed and experienced a remarkable sensation which is perhaps similar to that which the mystics excite in themselves by spiritual works; I felt myself to be a spiritual, free being bound by the illusion of the body.

_Feb. 26. Nicholskoe. If I live._

_Feb. 26, Nicholskoe._

I am alive. I am writing, so as to keep my resolution. To-day I wrote letters all morning, but I had no energy for work.

Went to Mme. Shorin.[189] I had a good talk with her. Perhaps even to some purpose. Just as Anna Michailovna[190] said to-day, that I helped her. And thanks be.

I copied the letter to Posha.

_Feb. 27. Nicholskoe._

Wrote this morning poorly, but cleared up something or other. Am well. Took a walk. Spoke with Tania. And that is all.

_Yesterday was Feb. 28. Nicholskoe._

I have written nothing. In the morning I worked badly. Received a letter from Chertkov and Ivan Michailovich and wrote to both. Walked and went to Safonovo.[191]

This morning I thought of something which seemed to me important, namely:

1) I wiped away the dust in my room and walking around, came to the divan and could not remember whether I had dusted it or not. Just because these movements are customary and unconscious I could not remember them and I felt that it was impossible to. So that if I dusted and forgot it, i.e., if I did an act unconsciously; then it is just the same as if it never existed. If some one conscious saw it, then perhaps it could be restored. But if no one saw it, or saw it unconsciously; if the whole complex life of many people pass along unconsciously, then that life is as if it had never existed. So that life--life only exists then, when it is lit by consciousness.

What, then, is this consciousness? What are the acts which are lit by consciousness? The acts which are lit by consciousness are those acts which we fulfil freely, i.e., fulfilling them we know that we might have acted otherwise. Therefore, consciousness is freedom. Without consciousness there is no freedom and without freedom there can be no consciousness (if we are subjected to violence and we have no choice as to how we should bear that violence, we do not feel the violence).

Memory is nothing else than the consciousness of the past, of the past freedom. If I were unable to dust or not to dust, I would not be conscious of dusting, if I were not conscious of dusting, I would not have the choice of dusting or not dusting. If I did not have consciousness and freedom, I would not remember the past, I would not unite it into one. Therefore the very basis of life is freedom and consciousness--a freedom-consciousness.

(It seemed to me clearer when I was thinking.)

_March 1, Nicholskoe._

... To-day I could not write anything in the morning at all--fell asleep. I took a walk both in the morning and in the evening. It was very pleasant.

I thought two things:

1) That death seems to me now just as a change: a discharge from a former post and an appointment to a new one. It seems that I am all worn out for the former post and I am no longer fit.

2) I thought about N as a good character for a drama; good-natured, clean, spoilt, loving pleasure but good, and incapable of conceiving a radical moral requirement.

I also thought:

3) There is only one means for steadfastness and peace: love, love towards enemies.

Yes, here this problem was presented to me from a special, unexpected angle and how badly I was able to solve it. I must try harder. Help me, Father.

_March 2, Nicholskoe. If I live._

_March 2, Nicholskoe._

I am alive. Entirely well. To-day I wrote pretty well. In the evening after dinner I went to Shelkovo. It was a very pleasant walk in the moonlight.

Wrote a letter to Posha. Received a letter from Tregubov. He is irritated because they intercept the letters. But I am not vexed. I have understood that one has to pity them, and I pity truly. To-morrow we go. We have been here a whole month.

_Yesterday was March 3rd. Moscow._

In the morning I did almost nothing. I stumbled up against the historic course of art. I took a walk. After dinner I left. I arrived at 10.

_March 4, Moscow._

Got up late. Handled my papers, wrote letters to Posha, Nakashidze. Went to the public library, took books. In the evening Dunaev and Boulanger were here. It is now late. I am going to bed. S. is at a concert.

_March 5. Moscow. If I live._

Heavens, how many days I have skipped: _To-day, March 9. Moscow._

Out of the four days, I wrote two days on art and to-day pretty much. I wanted to write _Hadji Murad_ very much and thought out something pretty well--touching. A letter from Posha. Wrote to Chertkov and Koni about the terrible thing that happened to Miss Vietrov.[192] I am not going to write out what I have noted.

I am still in the same peaceful, because loving, mood. As soon as I feel like being hurt or wearied I remember God and that my work is only one, to love, not to think of that which will be--and I feel better right away.

Tania is going to Yasnaya.

_To-day, March 15, Moscow._

Lived not badly. I see the end of the essay on art. Still the same peace. I thank God. I have just now written letters. It is evening. I am going into the tedious drawing-room.

_To-day, April 4, Moscow._

Almost a month I have not written (20 days), and I have lived the time badly, because I worked little. Wrote all the time on art, became confused these last days. And now for two days I haven’t written.

I have not lost my peace, but my soul is troubled, still I am master of it. Oh, Lord! If only I could remember my mission, that through oneself must be manifested (shine) divinity. But the difficulty is, that if you remember that alone you will not live; and you must live, live energetically, and yet remember. Help me, Father.

I have prayed much lately that my life be better. But as it is, the consciousness of the lawlessness of my life is shameful and depressing.

Yesterday I thought very well about Hadji Murad--that in it the principal thing was to express a deception of trust. How good it would have been, were it not for this deception. Also I am thinking more and more often of _The Appeal_.

I am afraid that the theme of art has occupied me lately for personal, selfish and bad reasons. _Je m’entends._

During this time I made few notes and if I had been thinking about anything I have forgotten it.

1) The world which we know and represent for ourselves, is nothing else than laws of co-relation between our senses (_sens_), and therefore, a miracle is a violation of these laws of co-relation, it therefore destroys our conception of the world. In the crudest form, it is thus: I know that water (not frozen) is always liquid. And its specific gravity is less than that of my body. My eyes, hearing, touch, demonstrate to me liquid water; and suddenly a man walks on this water. If he walked on the water, then it proves nothing, but only destroys my conception of water.

2) A very common mistake: To place the aim of life in the service of people and not in the service of God. Only in serving God, i.e., in doing that which He wants, can you be certain that you are not doing something vain and it is not impossible to choose whom you are to serve.

3) Church Christians do not want to serve God, but want God to serve them.

4) Shakespeare began to be valued when the moral criterion was lost.

5) (For _The Appeal_.) We are so entangled that every one of our steps in life is a participation in evil: in violence, in oppression. We must not despair, but we must slowly disentangle ourselves from those nets in which we are caught; not to tear ourselves through,--that would entangle us worse--but to disentangle ourselves carefully.

6)[193]

I am in a very bad physical condition, almost fever, and the black gloom that comes before, but up to now the spiritual is the stronger. Escorted Maude’s colony.[194] Ivan Michailovich is still free.[195] Everything is all right.

_Apr. 9. Moscow._

Have been ill. With calmness I thought that I would die. To-day I wrote well on Art. They have taken Ivan Michailovich. There was a search at Dunaev’s.[196] It is all right with the exiles.[197]

Outwardly I am entirely calm, inwardly not entirely. It is enough to bear in mind that everything is for the good, and when I bear that in mind as I do now--it is good.

_To-day May 3. Yasnaya Polyana._

Almost a month I have made no entries. A bad and sterile month.

I cut out and burned that which I wrote in heat.[198]

_To-day July 16. Y. P._

It is not one month that I have made no entries, but two and a half. I have lived through much, both the difficult and the good.[199] Have been ill. Very severe pains--I think in the beginning of July.[200]

I worked all this time on the essay on art, and the farther I get the better. I finished it and am correcting it from the beginning.

Masha married.[201]...

We do not quiet, moderate passion, the source of the greatest calamities, but kindle it with all our strength and then we complain that we suffer....

Good letters from Chertkov. A Kiev peasant was here, Shidlovsky.[202]

I feel that I am alone--that my life not only does not interest any one, but that they are bored and ashamed that I continue to occupy myself with such trifles.

I thought during this time:

1) A type of woman--there are men such also, but mostly it is women who are incapable of seeing themselves, as if their necks were stationary and they could not look back at themselves. It isn’t exactly that they don’t want to repent: but they can’t see themselves. They live as they do and not in another way, because this way seems good to them. And therefore if they do anything it is because it seems good to them. Such people are terrifying. And such people may be intelligent, stupid, good, wicked. When they are stupid and wicked it is terrible.

2) With a low moral standard, a firmness of judgment. The acts of all the best people are explained by what _I_ would have done. Christ preached out of vanity, condemned the Pharisees from envy, etc.

3) The second condition of art is novelty. To a child everything is new and therefore it has many artistic impressions. The new for us, is a certain depth of feeling, that depth in which a man finds his separate individuality from all. That is for indifferent art. For the highest, novelty lies only in religion, as religion is the most advanced world point of view.

4) (For the drama.) They bring to the table a man in tatters and they laugh at the inconsistency of it and at his awkwardness. Revolt.

5) When it happens that you thought of something and then forgot what you thought, but you remember and know the character of your thoughts: sad, dismal, oppressive, joyous, keen--and even remember their order: first it was sad, and then it became calm, etc.,--when you remember things that way, then it is exactly what music expresses.

6) A theme: A passionate young man in love with a mentally diseased woman.

7) God gave us His spirit--love, reason--in order to serve Him; but we use His spirit to serve ourselves--we use the axe to plane the handle.

I feel fully well and strong physically, but morally, weak. I feel like working and am able. I am going to make notes.[203]

_July 17. Yasn. Pol. If I live._

_July 17. Y. P._

Got up late, worked badly. There is neither concentration nor capacity to embrace everything. Nevertheless I have advanced. Masha came with Kolia ...

Yesterday I talked about love with N: that we madly kindle this passion and then we suffer from its exaggerations and excesses.

Went on my bicycle to Yasenki. I love this motion very much. But I am ashamed.

A letter from Chertkov; he is very ill. I value him very much. And how not value him.

It is now 10 o’clock. The Shenshins have left just now. I feel solemn and gloomy.

_July 18, 1897. Y. P. If I live._

I skipped three days. To-day _July 21_. _Y. P._

I am working well enough. I am even satisfied with my work. Though I change much. Everything has come to a head and has gained much. I have been reviewing everything again from the beginning.

The life around me is very wretched....

I do not know why: whether from the stomach or the heat or from excessive physical exercise--but in the evenings I feel very weak.

A good speech by Crookes as to how a microscopic man would look upon the world.[204]

Yesterday Novikov was here and he brought splendid notes by Michael Novikov.[205] Wrote letters: to Carus,[206] Ivan Michailovich. A letter from Evgenie Ivanovich.[207]

_July 22. Y. P. If I live._

_July 28. Y. P._

Six days that I haven’t written. Three or four days ago at night, I had an attack of cholera morbus and the day after I was absolutely ill and for two days I have been very weak and have written very poorly. To-day I am a little better.

The children were here: Iliushin’s family.[208] They are sweet grandchildren, especially Andrusha. Whatever notes I made, I will not write out to-day. Longinov[209] was here, a friend of Mme. Annenkov’s and to-day Maude and Boulanger.

_July 29. Y. P. If I live._

_To-day Aug. 7. Y. P._

During this time a pile of guests[210] ... two Germans, decadents; a naïve and a somewhat stupid one.... There were here: Novikov, the scribe, a very powerful man, and Bulakhov,[211] also a powerful one morally and intellectually. I live very badly, weakly. Very little goodness. To-day the Stakhoviches[212] and the Maklakovs[213] arrived also.

I continue to work on my essay on art and, strange to say, it pleases me. Yesterday and to-day I read it to Ginsburg, Sobolev, Kasatkin[214] and Goldenweiser. The impression it produces on them is exactly the same as it produces on me.

A letter from Crosby with a joyful letter from a Japanese.[215] From Chertkov good letters. The correspondence has been very neglected.

I am entirely alone and I weaken. I often say to myself that one must live serving, but when I enter life, though I do not exactly forget, yet I scatter myself.

I have written down much, but to-day I have no time to write it out.

Father, help me. I weaken.

I am going to write absolutely every day.

_Aug. 8. Y. P. If I live._

A peasant was here who had his arm torn by a tree and amputated. He ploughs with a loop attached.

_Aug. 9._

Stakhovich arrived. Read the essay. The tenth chapter is bad. I worked pretty much. Have written poor letters. I must write to Posha and to Ivan Michailovich.

There is noted in the book:

1) A servant makes life false and corrupt. As soon as you have servants, then you increase your wants, complicate life and make it a burden. Instead of joy when you do things yourself, you have vexation and the principal thing, you renounce the main duty of life; the fulfilment of the brotherhood of man.

2) The æsthetic and the ethical are two arms of one lever: to the extent that you lengthen and lighten one side, to that extent you shorten and make heavier the other side. As soon as a man loses his moral sense, he becomes particularly responsive to the æsthetic.

3) People know two Gods: one whom they want to force to serve them, demanding from him by prayers the fulfilment of their desires, and another God, one whom we ought to serve, to the fulfilment of whose will, all our desires ought to be directed.

4) It is a common phenomenon that old people love to travel, to go far and to change places. Is it not a foreseeing and a readiness for the last journey?

_Aug. 15. Y. P._

I am continuing to work. Am advancing.

Lombroso was here--a limited, naïve little old man. The Maklakovs. Leo arrived with his wife.[216] Boulanger--a nice man. Wrote letters to everybody: Posha and Ivan Michailovich and Van-der-Veer. The oppressive Leontev[217] was here.

There was something I wanted to write very much, but have forgotten....

A revolting report concerning the missionary congress in Kazan.[218]

There is noted: “Woman’s character”--and I remember that it was something very good. Now I have forgotten. It seems to me that it was that the peculiarity of woman’s character is that her feeling alone guides her life, and that reason only serves her feeling. She cannot even understand that feeling can be made subservient to reason.

2) But there are not so many women--as there are such men--who do not hear, do not see, the unpleasant, do not see it just as if it didn’t exist.

3) When people haven’t the power to get rid of superstition and they continue to pay tribute to it, and at the same time when they see that others have freed themselves, they grow angry at those who have freed themselves. “But I suffer when I commit stupidities and he is free.”

4) Art, i.e., artists, instead of serving people, exploit them.

5) From the time I became old, I began to confuse people, ... belonging or being marked in my mind as one type. So that I do not know N, N N, but I know a collective personality to which N, N N, belong.

6) We are so accustomed to the thought that everything is for us, _that the earth is mine_, that when we have to die, we are surprised that my earth, something belonging to me, will remain and I won’t. Here the principal mistake is in thinking the earth as something acquired and complementary to me, when it is I who am acquired by the earth, an appendage to it.

7) How good it would be if we could live with the same concentration, do the work of life--principally; communion among people--with that concentration with which we play chess, read music, etc.

_Aug. 16. Y. P. If I live._

_To-day Sept. 19. Y. P._

More than a month I have made no entries. Things are the same and the work has been advancing all the time. And it could advance still more as to form, but there is absolutely no time. Such an amount of work! A typist is making the final copy on a Remington. I have reached the 19th chapter, inclusive.

During this time the important thing was the expulsion of Boulanger.[219]

My work has been interrupted occasionally only by a letter to the Swedish papers about the Dukhobors[220] on the occasion of the Nobel prize.

Also ill health interrupted: a terrible boil on the cheek. I thought it was a cancer, and I am happy that it was not very unpleasant to think that: I am receiving a new appointment; one which in any case, isn’t slipping past me.

St. John was here.[221]

My work was interrupted also by the arrival of the Molokans from Samara--in reference to their children which were taken away.[222] I wanted to write abroad and even wrote a very violent, and what seemed to me, strong letter, but changed my mind. It was not to be done before God. I have to try again.

To-day I wrote letters: to the Emperor,[223] to Olsuphiev,[224] to Heath,[225] and to E. I. Chertkov,[226] and saw the Molokans off.

I wanted to write from my notebooks, but it is late. I am going to bed.

_Sept. 20. Yasn. P. If I live._

_Sept. 20. Y. P._

Let me write even a few words. The boil still bothers me very much. I have no full _liberté d’esprit_. I wrote the Swedish letter to-day, and in the evening translated it into Swedish[227] with the Swede.

I am not writing from the notebook, but I will note that which entered my head with special vividness.

Our life is so arranged that all our care for ourselves, the use of our reason (our spiritual forces) for the care of ourselves, brings only unhappiness. And yet this egotism is necessary in order to live a separate life. That is His mysterious will. As soon as you live for yourself, you perish; when you live beyond yourself, there is peace and joy both for yourself and for others.

_Sept. 20. Y. P. If I live._

_To-day Sept. 22. Y. P._

... Yesterday I finished the translation with Langlet.

To-day I was busy with Art, but it didn’t go at all, and therefore the preceding did not please me.

S. arrived to-day.

At night I thought of the separation of lust from love, and that ether is a conception outside of the senses.

It is now past twelve in the morning. I am waiting for Ilya and Andrusha. I have just now written a letter to the editor of the _Tagblatt Stockholm_, and to Chertkov.

_September 23. Y. P. If I live._

_Oct. 2. Y. P._

I am working all the time on Art. The abscess is going away. I should have liked more peace. Yes ...

_To-day Oct. 14. Y. P._

... I am still writing on art. To-day I corrected the 10th chapter. I cleared up the vague parts.

I must write out the notebooks; I am afraid I have forgotten much.

1) There is no greater prop for a selfish, peaceful life, than the occupation of art for art’s sake. The despot, the villain, must inevitably love art. (I have jotted down something on this order, but I can’t recall it now.)

2) I imagined clearly to myself how joyous, peaceful, and fully free a life could be, if one gave oneself entirely to God, i.e., in every instance in life to seek only one thing: to do that which He wants--to do that in sickness, in offence, in humiliation, in suffering, in all temptations and in death--which would then be only a change in appointment. Weakness, the non-fulfilment of that which God wants--what happens then? Nothing: There is a return to the consciousness that only in its fulfilment is life. The moments of weakness--they are the intervals between the letters of life, not life. Father, help me.

3) I saw in my sleep how I think, I say, that the whole matter lies in making an effort, that very effort which is spoken of in the Gospels: “The Kingdom of God is attained by effort.” Everything that is good, everything that is real, every true act of life is accomplished through efforts; make no effort, swim with the current and you do not live. But, however, the ... doctrine preaches that effort is sin, it is pride, it is relying on one’s own strength: the lay doctrine says the same thing: effort by oneself is useless; organisation, surroundings do everything. What error! Effort is more important than anything. Every least little bit of effort: the conquering of laziness, greed, lust, wrath, depression--is the most important of important things; it is the manifestation of God in life; it is _Karma_; it is the broadening of one’s “self.” Whatever had been marked off is guess work.[228]

4) Details for _Hadji Murad_: 1) The shadow of an eagle over the slope of a mountain; 2) at the river, on the sands, are tracks of horses, animals, people; 3) riding into the forest, the horses snort keenly; 4) from behind a clump of trees a goat jumped out.

5) When people are enthusiastic about Shakespeare, Beethoven, they are enthusiastic about their own thoughts, dreams, which are called forth by Shakespeare, Beethoven, just as people in love do not love the object of their love, but what it calls forth in them. In this enthusiasm, there is no true reality of art, but absolute boundlessness.

6) Only then can one understand and feel God when one has understood clearly the unreality of everything material.

7) Not long ago, in the summer, I felt God clearly for the first time; that He existed and that I existed in Him; and that the only thing that existed was I in Him: in Him, like a limited thing in an unlimited thing, in Him also like a limited being in which He existed.

(Horribly bad, unclear. But I felt it clearly and especially keenly for the first time in my life.)

In general, I don’t know why, but I haven’t the same religious feeling which I had when I formerly wrote my Journal for no one. The fact that it was read and that it can be read, kills this feeling. But the feeling was precious and helped me in life. I am going to begin anew from the present date, the 14th, to write again as before--so that no one will read it during my life time. If there will be thoughts worth it, I can write them out and send them to Chertkov.[229]

8) A man incapable of repentance has no salvation from his sins. Even if his sins are pointed out to him, he only gets angry at those who point them out, and a new sin is added.

9) All attempts to live on the land and feed oneself by one’s own labour have been unsuccessful, and could not help being unsuccessful in Russia, because it is necessary for a man of our education feeding himself by his own labour, to compete with the peasant--who fixes the prices, beating them down by his offer. But he was brought up for generations in stern life and stubborn work, while we were brought up for generations in luxurious life and idle laziness. From this it does not follow that one ought not to try to feed one’s self by one’s own labour, but only that it is impossible to expect its realisation in the first generation.

10) All calamities which are born from sex relations, from being in love, come from this, that we confuse fleshly lust with spiritual life, with--terrible to say--love; we use our reason not to condemn and limit this passion, but to adorn it with the peacock feathers of spirituality. Here is where _les extremes se touchent_. To attribute every attraction between the sexes to sex desire seems very materialistic, but, on the contrary, it is the most spiritual point of view: to distinguish from the realm of the spiritual everything which does not belong to it, in order to be able to value it highly.

11) Everything that I know is the product of my senses. My senses demonstrate to me my limits, coming in contact with the limits of other beings. This sensation, or the knowledge of limits, we recognise and cannot recognise otherwise, than as matter. And in this matter we see either only matter or beings who like us are bound by limits. The beings near to us in size, from the elephant to the insect, we know--we know their limits. The beings that are far from us in size, like atoms or like the stars, we recognise as matter only. But besides these two kinds of beings which we know by our senses, we must inevitably acknowledge still other beings (not spiritual beings like us,--that is obvious) not recognisable by our senses, but which are material, i.e., they also form limits. Such beings are atoms, ether. The presence of these beings, the admission of which is demanded by our reason, undoubtedly proves that our senses give us only a one-sided and a very limited knowledge of other beings and of the outer world. So that we can imagine for ourselves such beings endowed with such senses (_sens_) for whom ether would give the very same reality, as matter for us.

(It is still unclear, but understandable.)

12) If we would always remember that our tongue was given us for the transmission of our thoughts, and the capacity of thinking for the understanding of God and His law of love, and that therefore you must talk only then when you have something good to say! But when you cannot say anything good, cannot keep back the bad--then be silent, even all your life.

13) As soon as you have a disagreeable feeling towards a man, it means there is something you don’t know. And you ought to find out: you ought to find out the motives of that act which was disagreeable to you. And as soon as you have understood the motives clearly then it can anger you as little as a falling stone.

14) You get angry at a woman because she does not understand--or she understands, but does not do that which her reason tells her. She is unable to do it. Just as a magnet acts on iron and does not act on wood, so are the conclusions of reason not binding on her--have no motor power. For her feeling is binding, and the conclusions of reasons are so only when they are transmitted by authorities, i.e., by the feeling of the desire not to remain behind others. So that she will not believe and will not follow an obvious demand of reason, if it be not confirmed by an authority; but she will believe and follow the greatest absurdity if only every one does it. She cannot do otherwise. But we get angry. There are also many men like that--womanish.

15) One has to serve others, not oneself, if only for the reason that in the serving of others there is a limit and therefore it is possible here to act rationally, build a house for him who is without, buy cattle, clothes; but in the serving of oneself there is no limit: the more you serve, the worse it is.

16) Time is only for the body: it is the relationship of beings with the various limits seen by us, to beings whose limits we do not see; to the movement of the sun, the moon, the earth, to the movement of the sands in the hour-glass. And therefore time is for that which we call the body, for that which has limits; but for that which has no limits: for the spiritual--there is no time. Therefore you remember only those times in which you lived spiritually. (Unclear, but was clear.)

17) We suffer from ourselves, from the demands of our “self,” and we all know that the only means for not suffering from that “self,” is to forget it. And we seek forgetfulness in distractions, in occupations with art, science, in wine, in smoking--and there is no real forgetfulness. But God made it so that there should be only one real forgetfulness, one that is real and always at hand--in the care for others, in the serving of others.

But I forgot this and I live a terribly selfish life, and therefore I am unhappy.

18) I went past the out-houses. I remembered the nights that I spent there, and the youth and the beauty of Duniasha (I never had any relation with her), her strong, womanly body. Where is it? It has been long nothing but bones. What are those bones? What is their relation to Duniasha? There was a time when those bones formed a part of that separate being which had been Duniasha. Then this being changed its centre and that which had been Duniasha became a part of another being, enormous, inconceivable to me in magnitude, which I call earth. We do not know the life of the earth, and therefore we think it dead, just like an insect who lives one hour thinks my body dead, because he does not see its movement.

19) Space is the relation of various limited beings among themselves. It exists. But time is only the relation of the movement of living beings among themselves, and the movement of matter which we consider dead.

20) The most horrible of all is intoxication: of wine, of games, of money greed, of politics, of art, of being in love. It is impossible to speak with such people as long as they haven’t slept it off. It is terrible.[230]

The letter to Stockholm has been printed.

_Oct. 15. Y. P. If I live._

_To-day Oct. 16. Y. P._

Did not write yesterday. My health is entirely improved.... From Olga Dieterichs, a letter from Chertkov. It is evident that as a result, he and she also have lived through difficult times.[231]

Last night and to-day, I wanted to write _Hadji Murad_. Began it. It has a semblance of something, but I did not continue it, because I was not in full mastery. I ought not to spoil it by forcing. Up to now the _Peterburgskia Viedomosti_ has not printed it.[232]

I have noted:

1) I have noted many resolutions, rules, which if I could remember, I would live well. But the rules are too many, and it is impossible to remember them always. The same thing as to imitations of art: the rules are too many, and to remember them always is impossible; it ought to come from within, be guided by feeling. The same thing in life. If only you are touched by feeling, if you live in God, then you would not recede from a single rule and you would do more than is in the rules. If one could only always be in this state.

But to-day, just now, I was in the worst mood. I was angry with everything. What does it mean? How explain this state to oneself?

2) This explanation came to me: the soul, the spiritual essence, can live in its own centre or within its own limits. Living in itself, it is not conscious of its limits; living in the periphery it incessantly and painfully feels its limits. A release from this state is the recognition of the illusion of the material world, to go away from the limits, to concentrate in oneself. (Unclear.)

_Oct. 17. Y. P. If I live._

_Oct. 17. Y. P. 12 midnight._

... Help me, Lord, to act not according to my will, but according to Thine. Received a letter from N about Beller and other ministers who preach the inconsistency of military service and Christianity,[233] and about Chertkov, that he was fussy, had sinned and had fallen ill.[234]

Am correcting the 10th chapter, it is about to be sent off.[235]... My letter was printed in the _Peterburgskia Viedomosti_.

I thought: The road of all evil and of all suffering is not so much ignorance as false knowledge--deception. _The Appeal_ ought to be finished with an appeal for all to help towards the abolition of deception.

_Oct. 18. Yasn. Pol. If I live._

Yesterday I made no notes; _to-day Oct. 19_. _Y. P._

... Both yesterday and to-day I felt great apathy, although I was well. I don’t feel like working. Corrected Chapters 13, 14, 15. I received the re-copied chapters from Moscow and the conclusion. Yesterday I went to Yasenki. To-day I chopped wood and carried it. Novikov was here. Viacheslav[236] spent the night. To-day a letter from Boulanger. I want to write to him right away and to my wife. I ought to write to Salomon.

Solitude nevertheless is very pleasant.

_Oct. 20. Y. P. If I live._

_To-day Oct. 21. Y. P._

Received proof of the Carpenter article from _Sieverni Viestnik_ and began to write a preface. Corrected _Art_, received letters from Chertkov and Boulanger.

Yesterday my work didn’t go. Went to Yasenki.

Just now, remaining alone after my work, I asked myself what I should do, and having no personal desire (except the bodily demands arising only when I want to eat or sleep) I felt so keenly the joy of the knowledge of the Will of God, that I need and want nothing but to do what He wants. This feeling arose as a result of the question which I myself put to myself when I remained alone in the silence: Who am I? Why am I? And the answer came so clearly by itself: No matter who and what I am, I have been sent by some one to do something. Well, let me do that work. And so joyously and so well did I feel my fusion with the Will of God.

This is my second live feeling for God. Then I simply felt love for God. At this moment, I cannot remember how it was; I only remember that it was a joyful feeling.

Oh, what happiness is solitude! To-day it is so good: you feel God.

_Oct. 22. Y. P. If I live._

_Oct. 22. Y. P._

I am writing in the evening. All day I did not feel like working. I slept badly.... I corrected the 11th chapter in the morning, in the evening I began the 12th. I was unable to do anything--there is a boil on my head and my feet perspire. Is it from the honey? Aphanasi[237] and Maria Alexandrovna were here.

It is evening now. I am alone and horribly sad. I have neither doubts nor hurts, but am sad and want to cry. Oh, I must prepare myself more, more, for the new appointment.

A letter from Grot;[238] I ought to give him “Concerning Art.”

Thought only this:

In childhood, youth, the senses (_sens_) are very definite, the limits are firm. The longer you live, the more and more do these limits become wiped out, the senses get dulled--there is established a different attitude towards the world.

_Oct. 23. If I live._

_Oct. 26. Y. P._

A very strange thing: It is the third day that I cannot write. Am displeased with everything that I have written. There is something new and very important for _Art_, but I cannot express it clearly in any way.

A letter from Vanderveer. It is now morning, will go to the post.

_To-day Nov. 10. Y. P._

I have lived through much these two weeks. The work is still the same; I think I have finished it. To-day I have written letters and among them one to Grot to be set up in type. S was here, she left for Moscow from Pirogovo, where we went together. It was good there. Since I have come home, my back has ached and in the evening I have fever. Alexander Petrovich[239] is writing in the house....

To-day I wrote 9 letters. One letter to Khilkov,[240] remained. How terrible, his affair and condition. Mikhail Novikov was here and also a peasant-poet from Kazan.

Have been thinking:

1) The condition of people who are befogged by a false religion is just the same as in blindman’s-buff: they tie their eyes, then they take them by their arms, and then they turn them around and finally let them go. The same with everybody. Without this they do not let them go. (For _The Appeal_.)

2) The most usual judgment about Christianity, especially among the new Nietzschean reasoners, is that Christianity is a renunciation of dignity, a weakness, a submissiveness. It is just the contrary. True Christianity demands above everything else the highest consciousness of dignity, a terrible strength and steadfastness. It is just the contrary: The admirers of strength ought to debase themselves before strength.

3) I walked in the village, and looked into the windows. Everywhere there was poverty and ignorance. And I thought of the former slavery. Formerly, the cause was to be seen, the chain which held them was to be seen; but now it is not a chain--in Europe they are hairs, but they are just as many as those which held Gulliver. With us the ropes are still to be seen, well--let us say the twine; and there there are hairs, but they hold so tightly that the giant-people cannot move.

There is one salvation: not to lie down, not to fall asleep. The deception is so strong and so adroit that you often see that those very people which it sucks and ruins, defend the vampires with passion and attack those who are against them....

_November 11, Y. P. If I live._

_November 11, Y. P._

Since morning I have been writing _Hadji Murad_--and nothing has come of it. But it is becoming clear in my head and I feel like writing very much. I wrote a letter to Khilkov and to others, but I shall hardly send the one to Khilkov. Maria Alexandrovna was here. My health is entirely good.

_November 12, Y. P. If I live._

_November 12, Y. P._

To-day Peter Ossipov came:[241] “In our place they have begun to sell indulgences.” The Vladimir-ikon was there and it was ordered through the village elder, that the people be driven to the Church.[242]

N. found ore and considers it very natural that people shall live under the ground, in danger of their lives, and he will receive the income.

... The most important thing is that I have decided to write _The Appeal_; there is no time to postpone it. To-day I corrected _On Science_. It is evening now, have taken up two versions of _The Appeal_, and am going to work on it.

_Nov. 14, Y. P._

... One thing I want: To do what is better before God. I don’t know how yet. I slept badly at night; bad thoughts, wicked ones. And I am apathetic, no desire to work. Corrected the preface _On Science_.

I made the following notes:

1) I read of the behavior of the English in Africa. It is all terrible. But the thought came to my head: Perhaps it was unavoidably necessary in order that enlightenment should penetrate these peoples. At first I was absorbed in the thought and it occurred to me that thus it had to be done. What nonsense! Why should not people, living a Christian life, go in simply like Miklukha-Maklai,[243] live with them, but is it necessary to trade, make drunkards of them, kill? They say: “If people were to live as Christians, they would have no work.” Here is the work and it is an enormous work: while the Gospels are being preached to all creation.

2) Science, losing its religious basis, has begun to study trifles--in the main, it has ceased to study important things. From that time on was formed the theory of experimental science, Bacon.

3) I was thinking, _pendant_ to _Hadji Murad_, of writing about another Russian brigand, Gregori Nicholaev. He should see the whole lawlessness of the life of the rich, he should live as a watchman of an apple-orchard on a rich estate with a _lawn-tennis_.[244]

4) To-day I am in a very bad mood, and it is very difficult for me to remember, to imagine to myself what I am when I am in a good mood. But it is absolutely necessary, so as not to despair and not do something bad when in a bad mood, to abstain from every activity. Is it not the same in life? One ought not to believe that I am this good-for-nothing which I feel myself to be, but to make an effort, remember what I am _there_, what I am in _spirit_, and live according to that remembered “self,” or do not live at all--abstain.

5) “_Toute réunion d’hommes est toujours inférieure aux éléments qui la composent._”[245] This is so because they are united by rules. In their own natural union, as God has united them, they are not only not lower, but many times higher.

I read Menshikov’s article. There is much that is good in it: about one-God and many Gods, and much that is very weak; the examples.[246]

_Nov. 15, Y. P. If I live._

_Nov. 15, Y. P._

I worked badly on the preface to Carpenter. After dinner, in the blizzard, I went to Yasenki. Took Tania’s letter. Returned--and here for the first time I knew prostration. Then drank tea--recovered. Read but did nothing. Wrote a letter only to Maude in answer to his remarks.[247]

I thought this trifle: that love is only good then when you are not conscious of it. It suffices to be conscious of the love, and moreover to rejoice in it--and there is an end to it.

_Nov. 16, Y. P. If I live._

_To-day, Nov. 17. Y. P._

For the second day, I have been thinking with special clearness about this:

1) My life, my consciousness of my personality, gets weaker and weaker all the time, will become still weaker and will end in coma, and in an absolute end of the consciousness of my personality. At the same time, absolutely simultaneously and in the same tempo with the destruction of my personality, that thing will begin to live, and will live ever stronger and stronger, that which my life made, the results of my thought, feelings; it is living in other people, even in animals, in dead matter. And so I feel like saying that this is what will live after me.

But all this lacks consciousness, and therefore I cannot say that it lives. But who said that it lacked consciousness? Why can I not suppose that all this will be united in a new consciousness which I can justly call _my_ consciousness, because it is all made from my consciousness? Why cannot this other new being live among these things which live now? Why not suppose that all of us are particles of consciousness of other higher beings, such as we are going to be?

“My Father has many dwellings.”[248] Not in the sense that there are various places, but that the various consciousnesses, personality, are inter-enclosed and interwoven one into the other. In fact, the whole world as I know it, with its space and time, is a product of my personality, my consciousness. As soon as there is another personality, another consciousness, then there is an entirely different world, the elements of which are formed by our personalities. Just as when I was a child, my consciousness awoke little by little (which made it so that even when a child, an embryo, I saw myself as a separate being), so it will awake and is awakening now--in the consequences of my life, in my future “self” after my death.

“The Church is the body of Christ.”[249] Yes, Christ, in his new consciousness, lives now through the life of all the living and dead and all the future members of the Church. And in the same way each one of us will live through his own church. And even the most valueless man will have his own valueless and perhaps bad church, but a church which will create his new body. But how? This is what we cannot imagine, because we cannot imagine anything which is beyond our consciousness. And there are not many dwellings, but many consciousnesses.

But here is the last, most terrible, insoluble problem: What is it for? For what is this movement, this passing over from some lower, more separate consciousnesses, into a more common, higher one? For what--that is a mystery which we cannot know. It is for this that God is necessary and faith in Him. Only He knows it and one must have faith that so it ought to be.

2) And again I thought to-day, entirely unexpectedly, about the charm--exactly the charm--of awakening love, when against the background of joyous, pleasant, sweet relationships, that little star suddenly begins to shine. It is like the perfume of the linden or the falling shadow from the moon. There is no full-blown blossom yet, no clear light and shadow, but there is a joy and fear of the new, of the charming. This is good, but only when it is for the first time and the last.

3) And again I thought about that illusion which all are subjected to, especially people whose activity is reflected on others--the illusion that, having been accustomed to see the effects of your acts on others, you verify the correctness of your acts by their effect on others.

4) I thought still further: For hypnotism it is necessary to have faith in the importance of that which is being suggested (the hypnotism of all artistic delusions). And for this faith, it is necessary to have ignorance and cultivation of credulence.

To-day I corrected the preface to Carpenter. Received a telegram from Grot. I want to send off the 10th chapter. A sad letter from Boulanger.

Well, _Nov. 18, Y. P._ _If I live._

_To-day, Nov. 20. Evening._

Wrote the preface to Carpenter. Thought much about _Hadji Murad_ and got my materials ready. I still haven’t found the tone.

... I think with horror of the trip to Moscow.[250]

Last night I thought about my old triple remedy for sorrow and offence:

1) To think how unimportant it will be in 10, 20 years, just as is unimportant now that which tortured you 10, 20 years ago.

2) To remember what you did yourself, to remember those deeds which were no better than those which are hurting you.

3) To think of that which is a hundred times worse, and might be.

This could be added; to think out the condition, the soul of the man who makes you suffer, to understand that he cannot act in any other way. _Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner._

The most important and the strongest and the surest of all is to say to oneself: Let there not be my will, but Thine, and not as I wish but as Thou wilt; and not that which I wish but that which Thou wilt. My work, then, is under those conditions in which Thou hast placed me, to fulfil Thy Will. To remember that when it is difficult, it is just this very thing which has been assigned to you, it is the very instance which will not be repeated, in which you may have the happiness of doing that which He wishes.

Father, help me to do only Thy Will.

...

To-day I corrected the Carpenter translation. My stomach is not good; bad mood and weakness.

_Nov. 21, Y. P. If I live._

_Nov. 21, Y. P._

I am still thinking and gathering material for _Hadji Murad_. To-day I thought much, read, began to write but stopped at once. Went to Yasenki, took S’s letter.[251] Received nothing.

Maria Alexandrovna was here. She is evidently tired, a poor girl and nice.[252]

I thought and noted down:

1) I thought about death--how strange it is that one does not want to die, although nothing holds one--and I thought of prisoners who have become so at home in their prisons that they do not want to leave them for freedom and are even afraid to. And so we have become at home in the prison of our life and are afraid of freedom.

2) We have been sent here to do the work of God. In this sense, how good is the parable about the servants who in the absence of their master, squander his fortune away instead of doing his work.

3) When you are angry, when you do not love some one, know that it is not you, but a dream, a nightmare, a most horrible nightmare. As when they stop mowing in order not to spoil the grass, so it is here. One ought to pray.

Rozanov discusses Menshikov and makes fun of him.[253] How ... (I have forgotten) made fun of Nicholai, but he remained silent and smiled at me gaily. How touching this always is.

_Nov. 22, Y. P. If I live._

_Nov. 22, Y. P._

I saw very clearly in a dream, how Tania fell from a horse, has broken her head, is dying, and I cry over her.

_Nov. 24, Y. P._

... Yesterday and to-day I prepared some chapters to send them off to Maude[254] and to Grot. There have been no letters for a long time either from Maude, or from Chertkov. To-day there was a nice letter from Galia. Exquisite weather; I took a walk far on the Tula road.

In the morning I worked seriously revising _Art_. Yesterday I worked on _Hadji Murad_. It seems clear.

During this time I thought:

1) What a strange fate: at adolescence--anxieties, passions begin, and you think: I will marry and it will pass. And indeed it did pass with me, and for a long period, 18 years, there was peace. Then there comes the striving to change life and again the set-back. There is struggle, suffering, and at the end, something like a haven and a rest. But yet it wasn’t so. The most difficult has begun and continues and probably will accompany me unto death....

2) It would be easy to treat erring people mildly, simply, patiently, with compassion, if these people would not argue and would not argue in such a truth-like fashion. One has to answer these arguments somehow or other, and this you cannot stand.

3) Each of us is in such a condition that whether he wants to or does not want to, he has to do something, to work. Every one of us is on the treadmill. The question lies only in this, on which step will you stand?

_Nov. 25. Y. P. If I live._

_Nov. 25, Y. P._

... Corrected _Art_, it is pretty good; wrote a letter to Maude. A good letter from Galia.

Have been thinking:

1) It always seems to us that we are loved because we are good, but it does not occur to us that we are loved because they who love us are good. This can be seen if you listen to what that miserable, disgusting and vain man says whom with a great effort you have pitied: he says that he is so good you could not have acted otherwise. The same thing, when you are loved.

2) “Lobsters like to be boiled alive.” That is no joke. How often do you hear it, or have said it yourself or are saying it: Man has the capacity of not seeing the suffering which he does not want to see. And he does not want to see the suffering which he himself causes. How often I have heard it said about coachmen who are waiting, about cooks, lackeys, peasants at their work, that they are having a good time--“Lobsters like to be boiled alive.”

_Nov. 26. Y. P. If I live._

_To-day, Nov. 28, Y. P._

Two days I haven’t written. I am still busy with _Art_ and the preface to Carpenter....

This morning Makovitsky arrived, a nice, mild, clean man. He told me many joyful things about our friends. I went to Yasenki: a letter from Maude, a good one, and from Grot--not a good one.[255]

All these days, have not been in a good mood. How to be in Moscow in such a state?

Have been thinking:

1) Often it happens that you are speaking to a man and suddenly he has a tender, happy expression, and he begins to speak to you in such a way that you think he is going to tell you something most joyful, but it turns out--he is speaking about himself. Zakharnin[256] about his operation, Mashenka[257] about her audience with Father Ambrose[258] and his words.

When a man speaks about something which is very near to him, he forgets that the other one is not he. If people do not speak about abstract or spiritual things, they all speak necessarily about themselves, and that is terribly tedious.

2) You dash about, struggle--all because you want to swim in your own current. But alongside of you, unceasing and near to every one, there flows the divine and infinite current of love, in one and the same eternal course. When you are thoroughly exhausted in your attempts to do something for yourself, to save yourself, to secure yourself--then drop all your own courses, throw yourself into that current--and it will carry you and you will feel that there are no barriers, that you are at peace forever and free and blessed.

3) Only not to love oneself, one’s very self, one’s own Leo Nicholaievich (Tolstoi)--and you will love both God and people. You are on fire and you can’t help but burn; and burning you will set fire to others and you will fuse with that other fire. To love oneself means to be niggardly with one’s light and to put out the fire.

4) When a man says an obvious untruth or an offence to you, then certainly he doesn’t do it from joy: and both are very difficult. If he does it then evidently he can’t do otherwise, and doing it, he suffers. And you, instead of pitying him, get angry at him. On the contrary, you ought to try to help him.

5) The tragedy of a man kindly disposed, wishing only the good, when in this state and for this state, which he cannot help but count as good, he meets hissing malice and the hatred of people.

_Nov. 28. If I live. Y. P._

_To-day, Dec. 2. Y. P._

Agonising, sad, depressed state of body and spiritual force, but I know that I am alive and independent of this condition, yet I feel this “self” but little....

I was busied all this time with corrections and additions to _Art_. The principal thing during this time, was that Dushan was here whom I love very much and learned to love still more. Together with the Slavonian Posrednik, he is forming a center of a small, but I think divine work.[259] From Chertkov there is still no news.

An anguish, a soft, mild, sweet anguish, but yet an anguish. If I were without the consciousness of life, then probably I would have had an embittered anguish.

Have been thinking:

1) I was very depressed at the fear of vexation and severe conflicts, and I prayed God--prayed almost without expecting aid, but nevertheless I prayed: “Lord, help me to go away from this. Release me.” I prayed like this, then rose, walked to the end of the room and suddenly I asked myself: Have I not to yield? Yes, to yield. And God helped--God who is in me, and I felt light-hearted and firm. I entered that divine current which flows there alongside of us always and to which we can always give ourselves when things are bad.[260]

2) I had a talk with Dushan. He said that since he has become involuntarily my representative in Hungary, then how was he to act. I was glad for the opportunity to tell him and to clarify it to myself that to speak about Tolstoyanism, to seek my guidance, to ask my decision on problems, is a great and gross mistake. There is no Tolstoyanism and has never been, nor any teaching of mine; there is only one eternal, general, universal teaching of the truth, which for me, for us, is especially clearly expressed in the Gospels. This teaching calls man to the recognition of his filiality to God and therefore of his freedom or his slavery (call it what you want): of his freedom from the influence of the world, of his slavery to God, His will. And as soon as man understands this teaching, he enters freely into direct communication with God and he has nothing and no one to ask.

It is like a man swimming in a river with an enormous overflow. As long as the man isn’t in the middle current, but in the overflow, he has to swim himself, to row, and here he can be guided by the course taken in swimming by other people. Here also I could direct people while I myself approach the current. But as soon as we enter the current, then there is no guide and cannot be. We are all carried along by the strength of the current, all in one direction, and those who were behind can be in front. When a man asks where shall he swim, that only shows that he has not yet entered the current and that he from whom he asks, is a poor guide if he were unable to bring him into the current, i.e., to that state in which it is impossible--because it is senseless--to ask. How ask where to swim, when the current with irresistible force is drawing me in a direction that is joyous to me?

People who submit themselves to a guide, who have faith in him and listen to him, undoubtedly wander in the dark together with their guide.

I think I have finished _Art_.

_Dec. 3. Y. P. If I live._

My work on _Art_ has cleared up much for me. If God commands me to write artistic things, they will be altogether different ones. And to write them it will be both easier and more difficult. We shall see.

_To-day, Dec. 6, Moscow._

On the 4th I went to Dolgoe.[261] I had a very tender impression from the ruined house; a swarm of memories.

Almost two days that I haven’t written. I only prepared the chapters on _Art_ and packed my things ... I have jotted down nothing. I woke feeling badly.

_Dec. 7, Moscow._

... I was at Storozhenko’s.[262] Kasatkin was here[263] in the evening. I asked for examples. In the morning I corrected _Art_.

I jotted down nothing: there is much bustle. Health good.

_Dec. 8, Moscow. If I live._

_To-day, 11th._

I have already spent so many days in Moscow. I have done almost nothing, only corrected _Art_. A pile of people and letters. Thank God the most important is good, i.e., I have done nothing that I ought not to have done. To-day I wrote a letter to Gali.

It seems to me that the divisions of _Art_ have turned out just as they were before.

A sad impression was produced by what N told about Chertkov[264] and by the letter of Ivan Michailovich. Moreover, A, B, C, D,--they are all suffering. Well, it is forgivable in them, but how can a Christian suffer?

During this time N N’s condition became clear. He is mentally diseased, like all people who are non-Christians.

I have consented to give to Troubetskoi by instalments.[265]

A sad letter from Chertkov. I want to write to him.

_Dec. 12, Moscow. If I live._

_To-day, the 13th. Morning._

I wrote a letter to the Chertkovs. It seems to me I have corrected the 16th chapter very well.

Yesterday I read the correspondence of Z on the sex-problem and I was very indignant and I spoke disagreeably to him at Rusanov’s.

Rusanov has the head of Hadji Murad. This morning I wanted to write _Hadji Murad_--I lost the outline.

I wrote down something. I now want to write out the themes which are worth while and which can be treated as they ought to be:

1) Sergius, 2) Alexander I, 3) Persianninov, 4) the tale of Petrovich--the husband, who died a pilgrim. The following are worse: 5) the legend of the descent of Christ into hell and the reconstruction of hell, 6) a forged coupon, 7) Hadji Murad, 8) the substituted child, 9) the drama of the Christian resurrection and perhaps 10) Resurrection--the trial of a prostitute, 11) (excellent) a brigand killing the defenceless, 12) a mother, 13) an execution in Odessa.[266]

It is depressing in the house, but I want to be and will be joyous.

I am going to write out only two things:

1) That the physical union with an accidental husband is one of the means established by God for the spread of His truth: for the testing and the strengthening of the stronger and for the enlightenment of the weaker.

2) For people professing filiality to God, not to rejoice in life, to yearn, is a dreadful sin, an error. If you understood that the end of life is the activity for God for no personal ends, then nothing could hinder this activity, could hold it back. The main thing is that life willy-nilly goes forward to the better: one’s own life and the life of the world. How not rejoice at this movement? One has only to remember that life is movement.

I write and I sleep and therefore express myself badly. Until evening, if I live.

_To-day, December 14, Moscow. Morning._

Yesterday I received an unpleasant letter from Chertkov and sent him an answer (about the publications).[267]

The day before yesterday, I read the correspondence of Z about sex relations and became vexed and went to the Rusanovs’ and met Z there and showed my condemnation of him sharply. That tortured me and I wrote him a note yesterday apologising and I received a nice answer which touched me.

I feel very ill. I am in the worst mood and therefore am dissatisfied with everything and cannot love. And just now am thinking:

We find sickness a burden; but sickness is a necessary good condition of life. Only it alone (perhaps not alone, but one of the most important and generally common conditions) prepares us for death, i.e., for our crossing over into another life. Therefore indeed it was sent to every one: to children, to adults, to old people, because all, at all ages, die. And we find it burdensome. The fact that we find sickness burdensome shows only that we do not live as we ought to: both a temporary and at the same time an eternal life--but we live only a temporary life.

Sickness is the preparation for the crossing-over and therefore to grumble against sickness is just the same as grumbling against cold and rain. One ought to make use of them and not grumble. In fact, only those who live playing, get angry at the rain, but those who live seriously rejoice at it. The same with sickness. More than this: not only sickness but a bad mood, disappointment, sorrows, all these help to detach oneself from the worldly and facilitate the crossing-over into the new life.

I am now in such a state of crossing-over.

_Evening, the 14th._

The whole day I have been ill and I am in the worst mood. I cannot master myself and everything is disagreeable and burdensome. I did nothing. I read and talked.

_Dec. 15, Moscow. If I live._

_To-day, December 17._

To-day, I am still in the very worst spirits. I am struggling with ill-will. I gave the essay away.[268] Telegraphed to England. No answer as yet.[269]

A pile of people here, all evening. To-day I wrote twelve letters, but did not work at all.

To-day I thought the very oldest thing: That one ought to perfect oneself in love, in which no one can interfere and which is very interesting. But love is not in exclusive attachments, but in a good, not in an evil attitude to every living being.

Wrote letters: 1) Posha, 2) Masha, 3) Ivan Michailovich, 4) Prince Viazemsky, 5) Bondarev, 6) Strakhov, 7) the school teacher Robinson, 8) Priest, 9) Crosby, 10) Chizhov,[270] 11) Nicholaev in Kazan, and 12) ----[271]

I am finishing the note-book in a bad mood. To-morrow I begin a new one. To-day I am also displeased with the essay on art.

_The diary of the year 1897, Dec. 21, ’97. Moscow._

I am beginning a new notebook, almost in a new spiritual mood. Here are already 5 days that I have done nothing. I am thinking out _Hadji Murad_, but I have no desire or confidence. _On Art_ is printed. Chertkov is displeased and those here also.[272]

Yesterday I received an anonymous letter with a threat to kill, if I do not reform by the year 1898; time is given only up to 1898. I was both uneasy and pleased.[273]

I am skating. A sign of an inactive mood is that I have noted down nothing.

Just now I read through Chekhov’s, _On a Cart_. Excellent in expressiveness, but rhetorical as soon as he wants to give meaning to his story. There is a remarkable clearness in my mind, thanks to my book on art.

_Dec. 26, ’97. Moscow._

The day before yesterday I fell ill and I am still not well.[274] I am reading much. My heart is heavy. Evening.

_Dec. 27, ’97. Moscow. If I live._

_To-day, Dec. 29, ’97. Moscow. Morning._

I thought of _Hadji Murad_. All day yesterday a comedy-drama, “The Corpse,”[275] took shape. I am still unwell. Yesterday I was at Behrs’.[276]

I have received letters with threats of killing. I regret that there are people who hate me, but it interests me little and it doesn’t disturb me at all.

Have jotted down something.

A conversation with N: what a pitiable youth: understanding everything and at the same time not having the capacity to put anything in the right place and therefore he is living in unimaginable confusion.

Have been thinking:

1) They say usually that Christ’s teaching, the real Christ’s teaching ... destroys all union, that it is a disuniting “individualism.” How false this is! Christianity only therefore preaches personal salvation, “individualism,” as they say, because this personal salvation is indispensable, accessible, joyous to all, and therefore inevitably unites people--not mechanically by the pressure of force from without or by stirring with “culture,” but chemically by an inner, indissoluble union.

2) Sometimes you complain that they do not love your soul, but love or do not love your body, and you are angry at them, condemning them, but you do not see that they cannot do otherwise: for them your soul, the holy of holies of your soul, that which--as you know--is the only real thing, the only thing that acts--is nothing, because it is invisible, like the chemical rays of the spectrum.

3) There are people, mainly women, for whom the word is only the means for an attainment of an end, and it is entirely devoid of its fundamental significance which is to be an expression of reality. These people are sometimes terribly strong. Their advantage is like that which a man would have who in fencing took off the cork from the rapier. His adversaries are bound by conditions that ... No, the comparison is not good. The best of all: they are like a gambler in cards, a sharper. I will find one.

The examples of this are such: a man wants, for instance, to steal; he takes other people’s money; he says that he was charged to do it, they asked him to, and he believes that he was asked to. And the proof of the untruth of his evidence he refutes with a new lie. He kills: the murdered one suffered so, that he begged him to kill him. He wants to do something nasty or something foolish. Well, to turn all the furniture upside down or to debauch--and he explains in detail, how it was recognised by doctors, that it was necessary to do this periodically, etc. And he convinces himself that it is so. But when this proves to be not so, he does not hear, he brings forth his own arguments and then at once forgets both his own arguments and other people’s. These people are terrible, horrible.

4) The spiritualists say that after death the soul of people lives on and communicates with them. Soloviev, the father,[277] said truly, I remember, that this is the Church dogma of saints, of their intercession and of prayers to them. Evgenie Ivanovich also said truly that as the Pashkov Sect is a taking out of the dogma of the Redemption alone and the adaptation of everything to it, so spiritualism is the taking out of the dogma of saints, and the adaptation of everything to it.

5) But I say the following in regard to this dogma of the soul: What we call the soul, is the divine, spiritual, limited in us in our bodies. Only the body limits this _divine_, this _spiritual_. And it is this limiting which gives it a form like a vessel gives form to a liquid or a gas which is enclosed in it. But we only know this form. Break the vessel and that which is enclosed in it will cease to have that form which it has and will spread out, be carried off. Whether it combines with other matter, whether it receives a new form--we know nothing about this, but we know for a fact that it loses that form which it had when it was limited, because that which limited it was destroyed. The same with the soul. The soul after death ceases to be the soul and remaining a spirit, a divine essence, becomes something other, such that we cannot judge.

I wrote the preface to Chertkov.[278]

_Dec. 30. Moscow. If I live._

1898

Two days have passed. _Jan. 1st._

I meet the new year very sad, depressed, unwell. I cannot work and my stomach aches all the time.

Received a letter from Verkholensk from Phedoseev about the Dukhobors, a very touching one.[279]

Still another letter from the editor _The Adult_ about free love.[280] If I had time, I would like to write about this subject. Probably I shall write. The most important is to show that the whole matter lies in appropriating to oneself possibilities of the greatest enjoyment without thinking of consequences. Besides, they preach something which already exists and is very bad. Why would the absence of outer _restraint_[281] improve the whole thing? I am, of course, against any regulation and for full freedom, but the ideal is chastity and not pleasure.

I have been thinking during this time only one thing and it seems an important thing, namely:

1) We all think that our duty, our vocation, is to do various things: bring up children, make a fortune, write a book, discover a law in science, etc. But for all the work is only one thing: to carry out one’s own life--to act so that life would be a harmonious, good, and rational matter. And the work ought to be not before people, to leave behind one a memory of a good life, but the work is before God: to present to Him oneself, one’s soul, better than it was, nearer to Him, more submissive to Him, more in harmony with Him.

To think so--and principally to feel so--is very difficult: One always wanders off for human praise. But it is possible and ought to be done.

Help me, Lord. I sometimes feel this and do at this moment.

_Jan. 2. Moscow. If I live._

_To-day, already the 4th._

I am a little better. I want to work. Yesterday Stasov and Repine,[282] coffee.... When will I remember that _much talk is much bother_?

I received a pamphlet uncensored.

Only one thing has to be noted down: that all life is senseless, except that which has for its end the service of God, the service of the fulfilment of the work of God, which is unattainable to us. I shall write that out later. Now I am in a hurry.

Dear Masha arrived, later Tania with Sasha.[283]

_Jan. 5. Moscow. If I live._

_To-day, Jan. 13._

It is more than a week that I haven’t written and I have done almost nothing. I have been ill all the time, and depressed. At times, I am good and calm, and at times uneasy and not good. The day before yesterday was difficult. Then the peasants arrived: Bulakhov, with St., Pet., and two from Tula. I felt so light-hearted and energetic. One need not yield to one’s own circle, one can always enter the circle of God and His people.

It is long since I have been so depressed. A letter from Posha. Wrote to Posha, Ivan Michailovich, Chertkov, Maude and Boulanger.

I am still endeavouring to find a satisfactory form for _Hadji Murad_ and I still haven’t it, although it seems I am nearing it.

... To-day a telegram about the work, “_What is Art?_”

Have made some notes and I think important ones.

1) Something of enormous importance and ought to be expounded well. Organisation, every kind of organisation, which frees from any kind of human, personal, moral duties. All the evil in the world comes from this. They flog people to death, they debauch, they becloud their minds and no one is to blame. In the tale of the resurrection of hell, this is the most important and new means.[284]

2) Each one of us is that light, that divine essence, love, the Son of God, enclosed in a body, in limits, in the coloured lantern which we have painted with our passions and habits--so that everything we see, we see only through this lantern. To raise oneself so as to see above it, is impossible; on top there is the same kind of glass through which we see even God, through the glass which we ourselves have painted. The only thing which we can do is not to look through the glasses, but to concentrate in ourselves, recognise our light and kindle it. And this is the one salvation from the delusions of life, from its suffering, from its temptations. And this is joyful and always possible.

I do this, and it is good.

3) Dreams--they are nothing else than the looking on the world not through the glasses, but only on the glasses, and on the interweaving of various designs interwoven on the glasses. In sleep you only see the glasses; when awake, the world, through the glasses.

4) A woman can, when she loves a man, see merits in him which he has not, but when she is indifferent, she is unable to see a man’s merits other than through the opinion of others. (However, I think it is untrue.)

5) The following when I wrote it, seemed to me very important:

Christians strive to a union, and unite among themselves and with other people by the Christian tool--by unity, humility, love. But there are people who do not know this means of union, do not believe in it and who endeavour to unite (all people endeavour to unite) with other means, outer ones, with force, threats. It is impossible to demand of these people who do not know, who cannot understand the Christian means of union, that they do not make use of their means; but it is absolutely unjust and unreasonable when these un-Christian people impose their own lower means of union upon people knowing and using a higher means. They say, “You Christians, you profit by our means; if you have not been robbed and killed, it is thanks to us.” To this the Christians answer, that they don’t need anything which force gives them (as is really the fact for a Christian).

And that is why, though it is legitimate for people not knowing a higher means of union, to use a lower, it is illegitimate, that they look upon their own lower means as a general and unique one, and want to compel those for whom it cannot be necessary to use it. The principal step before humanity now consists in this, that people should not only recognise and admit the means of Christian union, but that they should recognise that it is the highest, the one to which all humanity is striving and to which it will inevitably reach.

6) When you are full of energy, then you live, and you ought to live for this world; when you are sick, then you are dying, i.e., you begin to live for that other after-death world. So that in either phase, there is work. When you are sick, dying, then concentrate in yourself and think about death and about life after death, and stop longing for this one. Both processes are normal and in both there exists work proper to each state.

I feel somewhat fresher spiritually.

_Jan. 14, Moscow. If I live._

_To-day, 18._

My health is a little better. It is now evening. Wrote letters, 1) Chertkov; 2) Dubrovin; 3) Dubrovsky; Tver; 4) Tula: N. l. Kh.; 5) Nakashidze; 6) Ivan Michailovich.

To-day the plot of _Hadji Murad_ became clearer than ever before.

_Jan. 19. Moscow._

Depressing and unproductive. I cannot work. Several times a week I remember that everything disagreeable is only an _Ermahnung_ for an advance onward towards perfection.

Help, Father. Come and dwell within me. You already dwell within me. You are already “me.” My work is only to recognise Thee. I write this just now and am full of desire. But nevertheless I know who I am.

_To-day, Feb. 2. Moscow._

Very weak and apathetic. All the time I either read or corrected proofs of _Art_. There is much to be noted. But I have neither strength nor desire. There have been no events, no letters.

_Feb. 3, Moscow. If I live._

_February 3, Moscow._

I am still as unproductive intellectually. In the morning it flashed across my mind that I left out the places in _Art_ about the trinity, and doing no work, I went to Grot and from there to the publishing house. I returned past two, read, lay down, dined. _Tarovat_[285] arrived, then Menshikov, Popov, Gorbunov, and then--Gulenko,[286] Suller.[287]

Read Liapunov’s _The Ploughman_. I was very touched.[288]

Have noted down the following:

1) In moments of depression I want to ask help from God. And I may ask it. But only such help which might help me and not interfere with any one else. And such help is only one thing: love. Every other kind of help, material help, not only might, but must come in conflict with the material good of others. Only love alone--the enlargement of love in oneself--satisfies everything which one can want and does not come in conflict with the good of others. “_Come and dwell within us._”

2) Women do not use words to express their thoughts, but to attain their ends, and it is this purpose they hunt in the words of others. That is why they so often understand people wrong side out. And this is very disagreeable.

3) The meaning of life is only one: self-perfection--the bettering of one’s soul. “Be perfect like our Father in Heaven.”

When things are difficult, when something tortures you, remember that in life, only you are the life--and immediately it will become easier. And joyful. As a rich man rejoices when he gathers his wealth, so will you rejoice if you place your life only in this. And for the attainment of this, there are no barriers. Everything which appears like sorrow, like a barrier in life--is a wide step which offers itself to your feet that you may ascend.

4) If you have the strength of activity then let it be a loving one; if you have no strength, if you are weak, then let your _weakness_ be a loving one.

5) Inorganic matter is simply the life of that which we do not understand. For fleas the inorganic is my finger-nail. In the same way, evil is the non-understood good.[289]

6) To serve God and man, but how, with what? Perhaps the possibility doesn’t exist? It is not true: the possibility has always been given you--to become better.

7) Man is an ambassador, as Christ said, an ambassador indeed for whom the important thing is only to fulfil the errand given to him, and it doesn’t matter what is thought about him. Let them think badly--sometimes it is necessary. Only let the errand be fulfilled.

8) One of the most common errors consists in this, that people are considered good, malicious, stupid, intelligent. Man flows on and every possibility is in him: he was stupid, and has become intelligent; he was wicked and has become good, and the reverse. In this is the greatness of man. And therefore it is impossible to judge man as he is. You have judged and he is already another. It is impossible to say--I do not love him: you have said it and he is already another.

9) ...

10) The fact that the end of life is self-perfection, that the perfection of the immortal soul is the only end of the life of man, is already true because _every other end_ in the view of death, is senseless.

11) If man deliberates upon the consequences of his act, then the motives of his act are not religious.

12) The paper-knife on my knees fell over on account of its weight, and it seemed to me that it was something alive, and I shuddered. Why? Because there is a duty to everything living and I grew frightened lest I hadn’t fulfilled it, and lest I had crushed, squeezed a living being.

13) ... In this lies the whole matter--to destroy this hypnosis.

14) It is impossible not to wish that our acts be known and approved. For him who has no God, it is necessary that his acts be known and approved. But for him who has God, it is sufficient that they be known. By this can it be verified if a man has God.

_4th Feb. Moscow. If I live._

_To-day, the 5th. Morning._

I do not feel like writing at all. All these last days, especially yesterday, I have been feeling and applying to life, the consciousness that the end of life is one: to be perfect like the Father, to do that which He does, that which He wants from us, i.e., to love; that love should guide us in the moments of our most energetic activity, and that we breathe with it alone in the moments of our greatest weakness. Whenever there is something difficult, painful, then it suffices to remember this, and all this difficulty, this pain, will vanish and only the joyous will remain.

To a man who seriously, truly uses his reason, it is obvious that all ends are closed to him. One alone is reasonable: to live for the satisfaction of the demands of God, of his conscience, of his higher nature. (It is all the same thing.) If this is to be expressed in time, then to live so as to prepare one’s soul to the passing-over into a better world: if this is to be expressed accurately in terms outside of time, then it is to fuse one’s life with its timeless principle, with the Good, with Love, with God. I am afraid only of one thing, that this strong consciousness acting beneficially on me, that the only thing reasonable and free and joyous is the life in God, be not calloused, that it do not lose its effect of lifting me out of the petty annoyances of life, and of freeing me. Oh, if that could be so to every one and if it could be so forever! In this light last night I considered the various manifestations of life and I felt so well and joyous. I will await the examination. I shall prepare for it.

When I wrote out the notes, I forgot:

1) How absurd is the argument of the enemies of moral perfection, that a man, sacrificing himself really, will sacrifice his perfection for the good of others, i.e., that a man is ready to become evil, in order to act well. If one understands by this that a man is ready to act badly before people, if only he could thereby fulfil the demands of his conscience and not serve a certain cause or even certain people, then this is true. The serving of a cause and of people can sometimes coincide, and can sometimes not coincide with the demands of conscience; and not serving a certain cause or people, can sometimes coincide and can sometimes not coincide with the demands of conscience. These are individual cases.

2) To doubt that the source of all evil is false religious teaching, can only be done by a man who hasn’t thought of the causes of the daily manifestations of social life. The causes of all these manifestations are thoughts--thoughts of people. How then could false thoughts not have an enormous influence on the social system? People, some of them, are well off in a false system based on false thoughts; it is natural that they support false thoughts, false-religious teaching.

3) I cannot write and I suffer, I force myself. How stupid! As if life lay in writing. It does not even lie in any outer activity. It is not as I will, but as Thou wilt. It is even fuller and more significant without writing. And here now I am learning to live without writing. And I am able to.

4) I see that I have made a note and have already said it here, namely, that to perfect oneself does not mean to prepare oneself for a future life[290] (that is said for convenience, for simplicity of speech); but to perfect oneself means to get nearer to that basis of life for which time does not exist and therefore no death, i.e., to carry one’s “self” more and more away from the bodily life into the spiritual.

5) Evgenie Ivanovich says about N: she is at peace only when one occupies oneself with her. Any occupation with anything not concerning her, does not interest her. Every such occupation with other people offends her. It seems to her that she bears the life of every one near her, that without her everybody would be lost. For the least reproach, she insults every one. And in 10 minutes she forgets it, and she hasn’t the least remorse.

This is the highest degree of egotism and madness, but there are many grades approaching this. At bottom, to think that I live for myself, for my own enjoyment, for fame, is absolute potential madness. In living--it is impossible not to live for oneself, impossible not to defend oneself when attacked,[291] not to fall on the food when hungry; but to think that in this is life, and to use that very thought given you to see the impossibility of such a life, to use it for the strengthening of such a separate individual life, is absolute madness.

6) A wife approaches her husband and caressingly speaks to him as she did not speak before. The husband is moved, but this is only because she has done something nasty.

7) Jean Grave,[292] “_L’individu et la Société_,” says that revolution will only then be fertile when _l’individu_ will be strong-willed, disinterested, good, ready to help his neighbour, will not be vain, will not condemn others, will have the consciousness of his own dignity, i.e., will have all the merits of a Christian. But how will he acquire these virtues if he knows that he is only an accidental chain of atoms? All these virtues are possible, are natural, in fact, their absence is impossible when there is a Christian world-point-of-view--that is, that we are sons of God sent to do His Will; but in a materialistic world-point-of-view these virtues are inconsistent.

It is now past one. I am going downstairs. I am going to write to-morrow.

_Feb. 6. Moscow. If I live._

_To-day, Feb. 19. Moscow._

It is long since I have made any entries.[293] At first I was ill. For about 5 days I have been better. During this time I was correcting, putting in things and spoiling the last chapters of _Art_. I decided to send away Carpenter with the introduction to _Sieverni Viestnik_. Was correcting the preface also. The general impression of this article “On Science” as well as that of the 20th chapter--is remorse.[294] I feel that it is right, that it is necessary, but it is painful that I hurt and grieve many good people who err. It is obvious that .0999 will not understand why and in the name of what I condemn science, and will be indignant. I should have done that with greater kindness. And in this I am guilty, but it is now too late.

The last time I wrote, I expressed fear lest the carrying over of myself from this worldly life, the offending, the irritating one, into the life before God, the eternal life (now, here) which I experienced would become lost, would become calloused. But here 13 days have passed and I still feel this and felt it all the time and rejoiced and am rejoicing.

Sometimes I begin to lay out patience, or hear an irritating conversation, contradiction, or am dissatisfied with my writing, with the condemnation of people, or I regret something--and suddenly I remember that it only seems so to me, because I am bent over searching on the floor, and it suffices to straighten up to my full height and everything that was disagreeable, irritating, not only vanishes, but helps the joys of triumph over my human weakness.

I haven’t yet experienced this in strong physical suffering. Will it endure? It ought to endure. Help, Lord.

Otherwise I am very joyous.

I am joyous, that in old age there has been disclosed absolutely a new condition of the great indestructible good. And this is not imagination, but a change of soul as clearly perceived as warmth and cold, it is a going over from confusion, suffering, to a clearness and peace and a going over which depends upon myself. Here, in truth, is where wings have sprouted. As soon as it becomes difficult, painful, to walk on foot, you spread the wings. Why not always then on wings? Evidently, I am still too weak; still untrained; and perhaps a rest is necessary.

It is interesting to find out if this state is an attribute of old age, if young people can experience it also? I think that they can. One must accustom oneself to this. This indeed is prayer.

“You must hide something, be afraid of something, something tortures you, something is lacking,”--and suddenly: there is nothing to hide, nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be tortured over, nothing to want. The main thing is to go away from the human court into God’s court.

Oh, if this would only hold out unto death! But even for that which I have experienced, I am grateful to Thee, Father.

I jotted down the following:

1) People can in no way agree to the unreality of all that is material. “But a table exists and always, even when I go out of the room it is there, and for all it is the same as it is for me,”--they generally say. Well, and when you twist two fingers and roll a little ball under them do you not unquestionably feel two? It is certainly so, every time I take up a little ball in that way there are two and for every one who takes up a ball in that way there are two, and nevertheless there are no two little balls. In the same way, the table is a table only for the twisted fingers of my senses, but it is perhaps half a table, a thousandth of a table--in fact, no part of a table at all, but something altogether different. So that what is real is only my ever recurring impression, confirmed by the impressions of other people.

2) ... I acted badly when I gave my estate to the children. It would have been better for them. Only it was necessary to have been able to do this without violating love, and I was unable.

3) You are often surprised how intelligent, good people can defend cruelty, violence, savage superstitions...? But it is sufficient to remember the exilings, the oppressions, the offences, which are beginning to penetrate the working-classes and you see that this is only a feeling of self-preservation. Only by this is explained the tenacity of life....

4) Pharesov told me about Malikov’s[295] teaching. All this was beautiful, all this was Christian: be perfect like your Father; but it was not good that all this teaching had for its end influence over people and not inner satisfaction, not an answer to the problem of life. Influence on others is the main Achilles’ heel.

So that my condition, which is false for people, is perhaps the very thing necessary.

5) ... In order to wipe out one’s sin, one ought to ... repent before all the people for the deception, to say: forgive me that I have deceived you ... What a strong scene! And a true one.

6) Our art with its supplying of amusement for the rich classes, is not only similar to prostitution, but it is nothing else than prostitution.

_Feb. 20. Moscow._

_To-day, Feb. 25. Moscow._

Have made no entries; corrected something. Wrote letters to-day, more than 7 letters. But I can’t write anything, although I haven’t stopped thinking about _Hadji Murad_ and _The Appeal_.

_Feb. 26. Moscow. If I live._

Have made no entries for more than three weeks. To-day _March 19_. _Moscow._

Finished all my letters. During this time wrote serious letters:

1) To the American colony,[296] 2) _Peterburgskia Viedomosti_ about the Dukhobors;[297] 3) to the English papers also about the Dukhobors, and 4) a preface to the English edition _What is Art_--about the censor distortions.[298]

My inner life is the same. As I foresaw, the new consciousness of life for God, for the perfection of love, has become dulled, weakened, and when I needed it, these days, it proved itself to be, if not exactly ineffectual, yet less effectual than I expected.

The principal event during this time was the permission to the Dukhobors to emigrate.

_What is Art?_ seems to me to be entirely finished now.

...

I have worked very little during all this time. I made rather many notes; I shall try to write them out:

1) One of the greatest errors in summing up a man, is that we call, we define a man as intelligent, stupid, good, evil, strong, weak. But man is everything, all possibilities, is a flowing matter.[299] This is a good theme for an artistic work and a very important one and a good one, because it destroys malicious judging--“the cancer”--and assumes the possibility of everything good. The workers of the devil, convinced of the presence of bad in man, achieve great results: superstition, capital punishment, war. The workers of God would attain greater results, if they believed more in the possibility of good in people.

2) They want to become the masters of China--the Russians, Japan, England, the Germans: there are quarrels, diplomatic struggles, there will even be military ones. And all this is only for the mixing of the yellow race into one Christian batter, the propagating and the assimilating of ideas like the Crusades and the Napoleonic wars.

3) Lebon writes: “Not only are they going to make food in laboratories, but there will be no need for labour.” People have so badly distributed their two functions, food and labour, that instead of joy, these functions are a torture to them and therefore they want to be freed from them. It is just the same as if people would so pervert their functions of perspiration and breathing, that they would seek a way of changing them by an artificial method.

4) The longer you live, the less time there remains for life. For an endless duration of life, there would then be absolutely no life.

5) Only when you live without consideration of time, past or future, do you live a real, free life for which there are no obstacles. You are only then dissatisfied, in straits, when you remember the past (the offences, the contradictions, even your own weaknesses) and when you think of the future: will something be or will it not be? Only at one point, do you fuse with God and live your divine essence: in the present (even when you live your animal life). Whenever you use your reason to consider what will be, then you are weak, insignificant; but whenever you use it to do the will of Him who sent you, then you are omnipotent, free. You can even see this in the way you immediately weaken, become deprived of strength, when you consider the consequences of your act.

_To-day, March 21. Moscow._

I continue copying. I am very indisposed, weak, but thank God, in peace, I live in the present. Just now I put in order the papers on _Art_.

6) Socialists will never destroy poverty and the injustice of the inequality of capacities. The stronger, the more intelligent, will always make use of the weaker, the more stupid. Justice and equality of goods will never be attained by anything less than Christianity, i.e., by negating oneself and by recognising the meaning of one’s life in the service to others.

7) I have written down the same as in the 5th, but differently. In order to live with God, by God and in God, it is necessary not to be guided by anything from without. Neither by that which was nor by that which can be; to live only in the present, only in this, to fuse with God.

8) Intelligent Socialists understand that for the attainment of their ends the principal thing is to lift the working men intellectually and physically. This is possible to be done only by religious education, but they do not understand this and therefore all their work is in vain.

9) “Seek the Kingdom of God and His Right, the rest will follow you”--this is the only means of attaining the ends of Socialism.

10) For _The Appeal_:

All are agreed that we live not as we ought to or as we could. The remedy of some is this: a religious fatalism and, still worse, a scientific, evolutionary one. Others comfort themselves by the gradual bettering and bettering of things by themselves: the step by step people. The third assert that everything will establish itself when things will reach their very worst (Socialism), when the Government and the rich classes will control everybody fully, i.e., the working-men, and then the power will somehow or other make a somersault not only to working-men, but to unerring disinterested self-sacrificing working-men, who will then direct all affairs without error and without sin. The fourth say that to improve the whole matter, it is possible only by the destruction of evil people, the bad ones. But there is no indication where the bad people end and where the harmless ones, if not the good ones, begin. Either they will destroy every one as bad or as in the big revolution they will catch the good ones with the bad. As soon as you begin to judge strictly, no one will remain in the right. What is to be done? But there is only one instrument: a religious change in the soul of people. And it is this change which is interfered with, by all imaginary remedies.

11) My body is nothing else than that piece of everything existing which I am able to govern.

12) The whole world is that which I sense. But what am I? It is that which acts.

13) How good it would be to write a work of art, in which there would be clearly expressed the flowing nature of man: that he, one and the same man, is now a villain, now an angel, now a wise man, now an idiot, now a strong man, now the most impotent being.

14) Every man, as all people, being imperfect in everything, is nevertheless more perfect in some one thing than in another. And these perfections, he puts over another human being as a demand, and condemns him.

15) It is impossible to serve, not “God and mammon,” but “mammon and God.” The service of mammon--every kind of vanity--is a hindrance to the service of God. Peace, solitude, even boredom, is a necessary condition to the service of God. In Moscow religiously they are the most savage of people. In Paris--they are still more savage.

16) There is a kind of English toy called _peepshow_: behind a little glass, now one thing is shown, now another. This is the way one ought to show man--_Hadji Murad_: a husband, a fanatic, etc.

17) Not long ago I experienced a feeling, not exactly a reasoning, but a feeling--that everything that is material, and I myself with my own body, is only my own imagination, is the creation of my spirit and that only my soul _exists_. It was a very joyous feeling.

18) ... does on the other hand the same thing that a false religious education does; it accustoms people to deny their reason.

19) There are two points of view of the world: 1) the world is something definitely existing, that is, existing in definite forms, and 2) the world is something continually flowing, being formed, going towards something. In the first point of view, the life of humanity also appears as something definite, consisting in the peaceful use of the goods of the world. In this point of view--there is a continuous dissatisfaction, and discontent with the construction of the world. It does not fulfil the demands which are presented. In the second point of view, the life of humanity is conceived as something which in itself changes and helps to the change and the attainment of the ends of the world. And in this point of view there is no dissatisfaction or discontentment with the construction of the world. And if there is discontent, it is only with one’s self, for one’s insufficient harmony to the movement of the world and in not helping this movement. (Unclear.)

20) Administrative ambition and greed of misers are therefore alluring, because they are very simple. For every other end of life one has to reflect much, to think, and often you do not see the results clearly. And here it is so simple: where there was one decoration there will be two: where there was one million there will be two, etc.

21) I spoke to Evgenie Ivanovich and said to him that I envy his freedom; but he said to me that things are very difficult for him just on account of this freedom and even on account of the authority and the responsibility which is connected with it. So that it only seems to me, that some one is better off and that another is worse, as the strong man to the weak, the healthy to the sick, the rich to the poor. And it became suddenly clear to me that all the differences in our conditions in the world are as nothing compared with our inner conditions. It is just the same, as it would be a matter of indifference if a man fell from a boat into the Azov Sea, the Black, the Mediterranean or into the ocean, in comparison with whether he was able to swim or not.

22) I spoke with P about the woman question. There is no woman question. There is the question of freedom of equality for all human beings. The woman question is only quarrel hunting.

23) The more one is guilty before his own conscience, though hidden, the more willingly and involuntarily he seeks the guilt of others and especially those before whom he had been guilty.

24) As soon as you go away into the past or the future, you go away from God and then you immediately become lonely, deserted, unfree.

25) I began to think about myself, about my own hurts and my own future life--and I came to my senses. And it was so natural to say to myself: and you, what business is Leo Nicholaievich (Tolstoi) of yours? And I felt better. Thus there is the one who is hindered by the base, stupid, vain, sensual, Leo Nicholaievich.

26) As soon as you begin to think of the future, you begin to guess. If the patience comes out, then this will happen. But this is madness! And it is bound to come, because to think of the future is the beginning of madness.

I have finished everything. It is now past one, the 21st.

_March 22. Moscow. If I live._

_April 12. Moscow._

Among the events during this time was the arrival of the Dukhobors,[300] the cares for their emigration, the death of Brashnin.[301] Occupations: _Carthago delenda est_[302] and _Hadji Murad_. Worked rather little. The spiritual state rather good. Visitors--most of them peasants, young, good ones.

Since yesterday have been in a very depressed mood. I am not surrendering, I do not disclose myself to any one, but to God. I think that is very important. It is important to keep silent and to suffer a thing through. Otherwise the suffering will go over to others and will make them suffer, but here it will burn itself down in yourself. That is the most precious of all.

This thought helps very much, that in this lies my task, in this is my opportunity to elevate myself, to approach perfection somewhat. Come and dwell within me so that my baseness will be stifled. Awake in me.

I want to cry all the time.

Thought and noted:

1) I found jotted down: “Every victory over the enemy is an enlargement of one’s own strength.” I ought to remember that now especially. There is a struggle going on between my spiritual and animal self, and all that I gain for the former, by all this will I weaken the latter. I carry over from one scale of the weights to another. If I fall into temptation, it means a rolling down the road to evil; if I resist, it is the beginning of a rolling on a new road towards the good.

2) It is astonishing how we get accustomed to the illusion of one’s own individuality, separateness from the world. We see, we feel--that life compels us every minute to feel our union and dependence on the world, makes us feel our incompleteness; and we nevertheless believe that we ourselves, our very selves, is something in the name of which we can live. However, when you understand this illusion clearly, then you are surprised, how you could not have seen that you are not a piece of a whole, _but a manifestation in time and space, of something timeless and infinite_.

Women have always recognised the power of men over them. And it could not have been otherwise in an unchristian world. Men are the stronger and men have ruled. It was the same in all the worlds (with the exception of the doubtful Amazons and the law of maternity), and it is the same now among .0999 of mankind. But Christianity has appeared and has recognised perfection not in strength but in love, and by this all the subjected, the captive, the slaves and the women have been freed. But that the freedom of slaves and women be not a calamity, it is necessary that the freed be Christians, i.e., that they affirm their life in the service of God and people, and not in the service of themselves. Slaves and women are not Christians, and nevertheless they are freed. And they are terrible. They act as the main-spring of all the calamities of the world.

What must be done? Bring slaves and women back again into slavery? That is impossible to do, because there is no one who will do it: Christians cannot subject. And non-Christians will no longer surrender themselves into slavery, but will fight. They will fight among themselves and one or the other will subject and hold the Christians in slavery. What must be done? One thing must be done: attract people to Christianity, turn them into Christians. It is possible to do this only by fulfilling in life the law of Christ.

Help me, Lord. Help me. Come into me, awake in me.

_Apr. 13. Moscow. If I live._

_To-day April 27. Grinevka._[303]

The 3rd day here. I am all right. A little indisposed....

The latter days in Moscow I spent finishing _Carthago delenda est_. I am afraid I have not finished it, and that it is still before me. Still I did quite a lot. Here I have not worked at all.

The misery of the famine is by far not as great as it was in 1891. There are so many lies in all the affairs among the upper classes, everything is so tangled up with lies that it is never possible to answer any question, simply--for instance, is there a famine? I am going to try to distribute as well as I can the money which has been contributed.

Yesterday there was a conversation about the same thing: Is exclusive love good? The résumé is this: a moral man will look on exclusive love,--it is all the same whether he be married or single--as on evil and will fight it; the man, who is little moral, will consider it good and will encourage it. An entirely unmoral man does not even understand it and makes fun of it.

The _Russkia Viedomosti_ was suspended because of the Dukhobors and of me; that is too bad and I am grieved.[304]

1) The proverb: for a good son you do not have to make a fortune, for a bad one, do not leave one.

2) I have made the following note: “God doesn’t know when the awakening of people will take place.” This is what it means: I think that the life of humanity consists in a greater and greater awakening, in an enlightening. And this awakening, this enlightening, will be done by people themselves (by God in people). And in this is life, in this is the good, and therefore this life and this good cannot be taken away from people.

3) My awakening consisted in this, that I doubted the reality of the material world. It lost all meaning to me.

_To-morrow Apr. 28. Grinevka. If I live, I’ll finish._

_To-day Apr. 29. Morning. Grinevka._

Felt great weakness. Am better since yesterday. But unable to write anything. Went to Lopashino,[305] took notes.[306]

Read Boccaccio--it is the beginning of the master-class, immoral art.

No letters. Serezha was here.[307]

I continue. Thought:

1) You look deeply into the life of man, especially of women,--and you see from what world point of view their acts flow, and you see, principally, how inevitably all argument against this world point of view recoils and you cannot imagine how this world point of view will be changed--in the same way as how a piece of a date-stone has grown through a date. But there are conditions when a change is produced and accomplished from within. Live man can always be born, from seeds there are sprouts.

2) I look into the future, and ask: were I to act as I ought to, would everything then be all right, would all obstacles then be destroyed? This question is pleonism. The question is this, whether, were I to act in a realm where there were no obstacles, would there then be any obstacles?

3) It is remarkable how we are without understanding and without gratitude. God arranged our life so, that he forbade us all false paths, that everything drives us from these false, harmful paths, impoverishing us to ruination, and making us suffer, onto the only free, always joyous path of love--but we nevertheless do not go on this path and we complain that we suffer from the attempts of going on the false, ruinous paths.

4) One of the most urgent needs of man, equal with and even more urgent than eating, drinking, sex desire, and the existence of which we often forget, is the need to manifest oneself, to know that it is I who have done a thing. Very many acts which are otherwise inexplicable, are explained by this need. One ought to remember this both in their bringing up, and in dealing with men. The main thing is that one has to try to make this an activity and not a boast.

5) Why is it that children and simple people are by such an awful height higher than the majority of people? Because their reason is not perverted by the deception of faith or by temptations or by sins. Nothing stands on their road to perfection, while adults have sin and temptation and deception on theirs. The former have only to walk forward, the latter must struggle.

6) They spoke about love and falling in love, and I made the following conclusion for myself: a moral man fights falling in love and exclusive love, an unmoral man--condones it.

7) Children are selfish without lies. All of life teaches the aimlessness, the ruination of selfishness. And therefore old people attain unselfishness without lies. These are two extreme limits.

8) I began to consider soup-kitchens and the purchase of flour, and money, and my soul became so unclean and sad. The realm of money, i.e., every kind of use of money, is a sin. I took money and undertook to use it only so as to have a reason for going away from Moscow and I acted _badly_.

9) I thought much about _The Appeal_, yesterday and to-day. It became rather clear how a bad arrangement of life results in religious deception. If something is unclear in one’s mind, if life is disorderly and you don’t want anything.... (Somehow I haven’t succeeded.)

10) In my sleep I thought to-day that the shortest expression of the meaning of life is this: the world moves, perfects itself; the task of man is to take part in this movement, to submit himself to it and to help it.

My weakness still continues. I have written this out very badly.

_May 4. Grinevka. (Evening.)_

Yesterday there was a whole house full of guests: The Tsurikovs, Mme. Ilinsky,[308] Stakhovich. I have done nothing during the day. In the morning I wrote a letter to Chertkov[309] and to S[310] and to still some one else. The day before yesterday I was in Sidorovo and at Serezha’s.[311] In the morning I read Chertkov’s article.[312] It is very good.

The 1st of May, Lindenberg[313] was here and a teacher[314] and they went to Kamenka. On the 30th, I went to Gubarevka.

What hurts me, is that I seem to have lost entirely the capacity for writing. To my shame I am indifferent. Latterly in my sleep, I thought keenly about the contrast between the crushed people and the crushers, but did not write it out.

To-day, yes and in the preceding days, it seemed to me that _Hadji Murad_ became clear, but I could not write it. It is true they interfered.

Thought:

1) Just as an athlete follows the growth of his muscles, so you ought to follow the growth of love, or at least the decrease of evil and lies--and life will be full and joyous.

2) Yesterday there was a discussion about the old question: what is better--to take part in evil, to endeavour to diminish it (...) or to keep away from it? The eternal objection is:--“There will be anarchy”--yes, but now it is worse than anarchy: injustice.--“What, then, if to begin everything from the beginning; the strong will again offend the weak.” Yes, everything from the beginning again, but with this difference, that while now we continue the cruelty and injustice which have been established in heathen barbaric times, we now live in the light of Christianity and the cruelty and injustice will not be the same cruelty and injustice.... (It isn’t quite all right, but it was.)

3) I look about me and the lines which I see I force into that form which lives in my imagination. I see white on the horizon and involuntarily I give this white the form of a church. Is it not in this way that everything we see in this world takes on the form which already lives in our imagination (consciousness), which we carried over from our former life? (An idea.)

Exquisite weather. Friendly, hot Spring. I am at peace and am well.

_May 5. Grinevka. If I live._

_To-day May 9. Grinevka._

During these days we had visitors: Masha, Varia. I go every day somewhere to open a soup-kitchen. I am not writing at all. I feel weak. Yesterday there was a rain storm. I went to Bobrika. To-day I went to Nicholskoe. I went to Gubarevka and returning through the wood, thought.... I don’t feel like writing, later I shall write out two thoughts, very important ones:

1) One, that I cannot put before me, that which tortured me before: my destruction.

2) That the other life begins to attract me, only the process of getting there is terrible. If only I could arrive safely, everything there will be all right;

3) To-day I thought that the object of faith is only one--God. This I must write out, explain.

To-day I am in a very weak state.

_May 10. Grinevka. If I live._

_To-day May 11. Grinevka._

Yesterday I wrote a little on _The Appeal_.[315] Then I went to Mikhail’s Ford.

Saw Strakhov in my sleep,[316] who said to me that I should write out clearly, for the plain man, what God is. “You ought to write it, Leo Nicholaievich,” (Tolstoi.)

To-day my stomach ached a little. I didn’t dine and wrote much on _The Appeal_. It seems to be taking form. I am feeling fresh in the head, a thing I haven’t felt for a long time. Thanks to my gymnastic exercises, I have become convinced for the first time, that I am old and weak and I must stop physical exercise entirely. This is even pleasant.

I forgot for a moment, my rule, not to expect anything from others, but to do what one ought to do oneself before God,--and there arose in me an evil feeling.... But I remembered, asked in good faith what was necessary and I felt better.

1) There is one object of faith--God, He who sent me. He who sent me, He who is everything of which I feel myself to be a part. This faith is indispensable and satisfying. If you have this faith then there is no room for any other. Everything else is trust and not faith. You can only have faith in that which undoubtedly is, but which we cannot embrace with our reason.

2) Yesterday I thought that the form of thinking--categories--are not seven but four: cause, matter, space, time. But only one: movement, encloses everything in itself. Movement is a change of place, therefore there is space; change of place can be swifter and slower, therefore there is time; and a preceding movement is a cause, a following one, an effect; that which is displaced is matter. Everything is movement. Man himself moves incessantly and therefore everything explains itself to him by movement alone.

3) The most harmful effect of an evil act is that when a man accomplishes it he frees himself from the demands of his conscience. “We eat animals, therefore why not hunt?”--... and so you have no need to stand on ceremony ... etc.

4) A strange thought came to me. Our whole life is in this, that we consider ourselves a separate unit, an individual, a man. But besides this being specialised, individualised, from all others, chemistry discloses for us entirely different separate units, acids, nitrogen, etc. They are separate and therefore they have life. (Nonsense.)

_May 12. Grinevka. If I live._

_To-day May 15. Morning. Grinevka._

Within these two days I went to Mtsensk,[317] Kukuevka, and yesterday to Batyevo.[318] Wrote _Hadji Murad_ unwillingly. I have exercised again.[319] It is stupid, almost an insanity. Wrote a poor letter to Posha. I am pleased with every one here.

Just now I have reread this journal and it did not leave me very dissatisfied. Oh, if I would only remember more my transitory, subservient condition here!

Have made no entries. My health would be good if my back weren’t aching. Began to write letters. Not succeeding. One must wait peacefully and live before God.

_May 16. Grinevka. If I live._

_To-day May 19. Grinevka._

Sonya was here. She arrived the 17th. This morning she went away. I have been trying to write these two days. Can’t do anything. An exceptional weakness and pain in my spinal column.

_To-day May 20. Evening. Grinevka._

This morning I wrote rather much on _The Appeal_. In the evening I wrote 13 letters. Went nowhere. My back is better. The main thing, is that my brain is working and I am happy.

Received 500 roubles, and 1000 roubles are lying in Cherni.[320]

I am not going to write any more, although I have many notes.

_To-day May 27. Grinevka. In the morning._

During this time I wrote _The Appeal_ and finished the article on the condition of the people.[321]

Just now I am writing to write out my notes--there is much that has to be written out--that everything which is said in Paul (Corinthians xiii) about love has to be said, and even more--about the renunciation of oneself. It is impossible to lay up love within oneself--but the renunciation of oneself is possible. It suffices to renounce oneself and love will arise.

I thought this, because just now in the morning, I began to remember all the difficulties which might arise from the distribution of the contributions, about everything which had to be done for the Dukhobors, for my own writing, and of which I had done nothing, and about all my weaknesses, errors, about my joyless life with the children, and such as I had not wanted it to be, and my lack of consequence--and it sufficed only to negate myself, my own desires, and immediately all wrong passed away, both of the past and the future, and one thing remained, the need of service in the present. How time vanishes remarkably in the consciousness of one’s mission.

_To-day, I think, June 12. Yasnaya Polyana._

I went with Sonya (my daughter-in-law)[322] to the Tsurikovs, Aphremovs, and the Levitskys.[323] I have a very pleasant impression and fell in love with many; but fell ill and did not do my work and made a lot of fuss both for Levitsky and the household.[324]...

It is four days since I arrived in Yasnaya and I am recovering nicely. Wrote many letters.

I received almost 4,000 roubles, which I cannot use this year.[325]

Masha is here with her husband and Iliusha. The Westerlunds were here.[326]...

To-day, entirely unexpectedly, I began to finish _Sergius_.[327] No news from England.[328]

I have made many notes.

1) I cannot remember now what and how I thought it: this is the note: “You are often too strict with people, and he, poor man, is good for nothing.”

2) Although I noted it before, I can’t help but repeat: ...

3) ...

4) The life of the world is one, i.e., in the sense that it is impossible to apply the conception of number to it. Plurality comes only from the partitions of consciousness. For a universal consciousness there is no number, no plurality.

5) Non-resistance to evil is important not therefore only, because a man has to act so for himself, for attaining the perfection of love, but also because only non-resistance alone stops evil, localises it in itself, neutralises it, does not permit it to go farther, as it inevitably does, like the transmission of movement to elastic balls, if there be no force which would absorb it. Active Christianity is not in doing, creating Christianity, but in absorbing evil.

I feel very much like writing out the story, _The Coupon_.[329]

6) Death is the crossing-over from one consciousness to another, from one image of the world to another. It is as if you go over from one scene with its scenery to another. At the moment of crossing over, it is evident that that what we consider real, is only an image, because we are going over from one image into another. At the moment of this crossing-over, there becomes evident, or at least one feels, the most actual reality. Because of this, the moment of death is important and dear.

7) For a universal consciousness, for God, matter does not exist. Matter is only for beings, separated one from another. The limits of separateness is that which we call matter, in all its infinite forms.

8) It is impossible to remember sufficiently that the life of all beings is continuous movement. Almost all our misery comes from the fact that we do not know this or forget this. And imagining that we do not go forward, but that we stand still, we grasp the beings moving alongside of us--some going faster, some going slower than we--we grasp them and hold on as long as the force of the movement does not tear us away. And we suffer.

9) We are all rolling down a slope, going down lower and lower to the plain. Every attempt to hold to one’s place, only makes the fall bigger, the more you hold on.

10) We are sent to cross this sloping path, carrying across it that light which is entrusted to us. And all that we can do--is to help each other on the road to carry this light; but we hold back, pushing each other down, extinguishing our light and that of the others. (It isn’t good, not what I wanted to say.)

11) I know, that when people yawn in front of me, I can become infected, and therefore I say to myself: I don’t want to yawn and I won’t. I have learned to do this as to yawning, but I am only beginning to learn this as to anger.

12) The sight depresses me strangely ... of those owning the land and compelling the people to work. How my conscience is struck. And this is not something reasoned, but a very strong feeling. Was I wrong in not giving my land to the peasants? I don’t know.

13) Lieskov made use of my theme and badly.[330] I had an exquisite thought--three problems: What was the most important time? what man? and what act? The time is the immediate, this minute; the man--he with whom you have immediate business; the act, to save your soul, i.e., to do the act of love.[331]

14) It is impossible to save humanity from that deception in which it is caught.... Only a religious feeling can give the counterstroke and conquer.

_June 13. Y. P. If I live._

_June 14. Y. P. Evening._

Both days I wrote _Father Sergius_. It is coming out well. Wrote letters. To-day there was a christening.[332]

I still cannot be fully good.... It is difficult, but I do not despair.

_To-day June 22. Y. P._

On the 16th I fell very ill.[333] I never had felt so weak and so near death. I am ashamed to have made use of the care which they gave me. I could do nothing. I only read and made some notes. To-day I am a great deal better. Ukhtomsky[334] was pleased with my article,[335] but nevertheless he refused to print it. I telegraphed to Menshikov that he should try the _Viestnik Evropa_ and the _Russki Trud_.[336] I am afraid I am going to become tiresome.

The youth have been driven away. For they have forbidden that the flour that was bought be sold.[337]

... Received a letter from Chertkov, a good one. The Dieterichs arrived.[338] Dear Dunaev was here. They talked about the great riot of the factory workers. I shall finish later.

_To-day June 28. Y. P. Evening._

I am only now recovered, and am experiencing the joy of _convalescence_. I feel nature very vividly, keenly, and have a great clarity of thought.

I wrote a little on _The Appeal_. To-day I wrote _Father Sergius_ and both are good. Wrote many letters yesterday. All that I received yesterday were unpleasant: from N, but principally from Gali, with the news that they have all quarrelled.[339] Posha is going to Switzerland and Boulanger to Bulgaria.

Tania went to Masha’s....

There is only one thing; one real thing that has been given us: to live lovingly with one’s brothers, with every one. One must renounce oneself. I wrote that to my friends and I am going to be strict with myself.

Here is what I have written down....

I have just read up to this point, where everything that is difficult can be made to vanish when you throw off the illusion of a personal life, when you recognise your mission in the service to God, and that it would be good to experience this in physical suffering, whether it will stand physical suffering. And here was a chance to experience it and I forgot and did not experience it. It is too bad. But the next time.

Have written down:

1) Paul Adam[340] gives the peasants a cruel characteristic, especially the working men: they are vulgar, selfish, slaves, fanatics--perhaps all this is just, but the one thing, that they can live without us and we cannot live without them, wipes out everything. And therefore it is not for us to judge. (Something is wrong here.)

2) It is especially disagreeable for me when people who have lived little and thought little, do not believe me, and not understanding me, argue with me about moral problems. It would be the same for which a veterinary surgeon would be hurt, if people who were not familiar with his art were to argue with him. The difference is only in this, that the art of the veterinary, the cook, the samovar-maker or any kind of art or science, is recognised as an art or a science where only those people are competent who have studied that realm; in the matter of morality every one considers himself competent, because every one has to justify his life. But life is justified only by theories of morality. And every one makes them for himself.

3) I have often thought about falling in love, about the good, ideal falling in love, which is exclusive of every sensuality, and I cannot find either place or meaning for it. But its place and meaning is very clear and definite: it is to lighten the struggle between sex desire and chastity. Falling in love ought to be for a young man who cannot keep to full chastity before marriage, and to release the young men in the most critical years, from 16 to 20 or more, from the torturing struggle. Here is the place for falling in love. But when it breaks out in the life of people after marriage, it is out of place and disgusting.

4) I am often asked for advice as to the problem of owning land. It is my old custom to answer: that it is unsuitable for me to answer such problems, just as it would be unsuitable for me to answer the problem how to make use of the ownership or the labour or the rent of a bonded serf.

5) People who stand on a lower moral plane or religious world point of view cannot understand people standing on a higher plane. But that there should be a possibility of union between them, there has been given to people standing on a lower plane the instinct for the good and a respect for this good. If there is not this instinct and respect, then it is very bad. But in our society, among so-called educated people, this is getting to be less and less.

_To-day June 30. Y. P._

I am still ill, and very weak. But I think I am improving, and my spiritual state is good. The day before yesterday I received a letter about the quarrel in England.[341] I wrote to them. It is very sad and very instructive. Yesterday I received a letter from Khilkov with a letter from Miss Pickard about the Dukhobors.[342] I wrote letters to Crosby, and Willard[343] and Khilkov. The affair of the Dukhobors is important and big and evidently something will come out of it which is entirely different from what we are preparing, but it is God’s affair. To-day Mme. Annenkov arrived. Menshikov telegraphed that Gaideburov[344] will print with omissions. During these days I wrote _Sergius_--it isn’t good.

I am going to continue to write out the former:

6) ...

7) A man is a being separated from all others, who feels his limits. Among the number of general limits by which he separates himself from other beings, are his limits which are in common with that being incomprehensible to him--the earth. Death is the destruction of all the various common limits with other beings and always of the common limit of the being of the earth--a fusion with earth. Every sickness, wound, old age, is a destruction of these limits.

8) The work of life is to love. It is impossible to love expressly those people unworthy of love; but it is possible not to love--to behave well, in a good way, toward such people in every given moment.

9) I remembered keenly what a matter of enormous importance was complete truthfulness in every detail, in everything, the avoidance of all outer false forms. And I decided to keep to this. _It is never too late to mend._[345]

10) The minister said to the murderer: “Oh brother, don’t worry. God has pardoned even greater sinners. But who are you? Don’t lose heart. Pray.” The murderer burst into tears.

11) How great and stable seemed the happiness of the American people, and how unstable it proved to be, like all happiness not founded on life, according to the law of Christ. The Spanish-American War, Jingoism.

12) I have often prayed (almost without believing, to try out) that God arrange my life as I wish. To-day I simply prayed my customary morning prayer and rather attentively. And after this prayer, I recalled my wish and wanted to add a prayer about the fulfilment of this wish, and tried to address God about it. And immediately I realised my mistake--that it would be very much better if everything was not according to my will, but according to His. And without the least effort and with joy I said: “Yes, let there not be my will, but Thine.”

13) A spiritual life means that you should see the connection between cause and effect in the spiritual world and that you be guided in life by this connection. Materialists do not see this connection and therefore do not take it as a guide for their acts, but they take as a guide for their acts the physical, causal connection, the one which is so complicated that we never fully know it, because every effect is an effect of an effect; but the fundamental cause of everything--is always spiritual. (Not clearly expressed, but important).

14) Epictetus says this very thing when he reproaches people for being very attentive to the phenomenon of the outer world--to that which is not in our power and being inattentive to the phenomenon of the inner, to that which is in our power.

15) To many it seems that if you exclude personality from life and a love for it, then nothing will remain. It seems to them that without personality there is no life. But this only appears so to people who have not experienced self-renunciation. Throw off personality from life, renounce it, and then there will remain that which makes the essence of life--love.

16) (For _The Appeal_) ...

_To-morrow, July 1st. If I live._

_July 6. Y. P._

Am entirely well. Yesterday I took leave of Dunaev and Mme. Annenkov, who were here. I live very badly. I cannot reconcile myself to the will of God.

To-day I thought:

The life of Christ is very important as an instance of that impossibility of man to see the fruits of his labours. And the less so, the more important the work. Moses could enter into the promised land with his people, but Christ could in no way see the fruit of his teaching even if he had lived up to now. This is what one has to learn. But we want to do the work of God and to receive human reward.

_July 17. Y. P. ’98. Morning._

There was nothing very special during these 11 days. I have decided to give my novels away, _Resurrection_ and _Father Sergius_, to be printed for the Dukhobors.[346]

S. went to Kiev.

An inner struggle. I believe little in God. I do not rejoice at the examination, but am burdened by it, admitting in advance that I won’t pass. All last night I didn’t sleep. I rose early and prayed much.

To-day the Dieterichs and the Gorbunovs arrived. It was pleasant with them. Took hold of _Resurrection_, and in the beginning it went well, but from the moment when I became alarmed, these two days, I have been unable to do anything. I took a very nice walk.

I wrote a letter to Järnefelt[347] and prepared a postscript. This is the only important thing. But I haven’t the strength to withstand the customary temptation.[348] Come and dwell within us. Awake the resurrection in me!

I have made many notes. I will hardly have time to write them out now.

1) Brooding leads to dreams, dreams to passions, passion to devils. (From _Love for the Good_.)[349]

2) The æsthetic pleasure which you receive from Nature is attainable to all. Every one is affected by it differently, but it affects every one. Art should have the same effect.

3) How difficult it is to really live for God alone. You think you are living for God, but as soon as life jolts you, as soon as that support in life to which you are holding on, fails you, then you feel that there is no holding power in God and you fall.

4) For _Father Sergius_: Alone he is good, with people he falls.

5) What an obvious error: to live for worldly ends. Whenever the purpose is not narrowly egotistic then this purpose is not quickly attained in life. Moses did not enter the promised land and Christ despaired of His labour: “Why hast Thou abandoned me?”...

6) There is no peace, either for him who lives for worldly ends among people, or for him who lives for spiritual ends alone. There is peace only then when a man lives for the service of God among people.

_To-day, July 20. Y. P._

A letter from S and from Masha. I still do not sleep, but things are settling themselves in my soul, and as always, suffering is of benefit. Yesterday I went to Ovsiannikovo, spoke with Ivan Ivanovich.[350] Yesterday I worked well on _Resurrection_.

It is morning now. I am not continuing to write out from the notebooks, but I am going to write out what I--not being asleep--have just now been thinking; it is an old but easily forgotten thing, and an important one which should be also told to N with whom they talked last night. Namely:

1) Life for oneself is a torture, because you want to live for an illusion, for that which does not exist, and it not only cannot be happy, but it cannot be at all. It is the same as dressing and feeding a shadow. Life exists only outside of oneself, in the service of others, and not in the service of one’s near ones, beloved ones--that is again for oneself--but in the service of those whom we do not love, and better still, in the service of enemies. Help, Father. The terrible error is that one confuses sex-love, love for children, for friends, with love of people through God, of people to whom you are indifferent, and still more of enemies, that is, of erring people.

_Aug. 3. Pirogovo._

Again everything is in the old way, again my life is horrid. I have lived through very much; I haven’t passed the examination. But I do not despair and I want a re-examination. I passed the examination exceptionally badly, because I had the intention of going over to another institution. It is just these thoughts one must throw away, then one will learn better.

During this time Sonya returned and dear Tania Kuzminsky was here. The work on _Resurrection_ goes very badly, although it seems to me I have thought it out much better. The 3rd day in Pirogovo. Uncle Serezha[351] is not as good as he was before: he is not in the mood. Maria Nicholaievna.[352] For two days nothing has come into my head.

During this time there was alarming news about the condition of the Dukhobors[353] and that Mme. M. N. Rostovtzev was put in prison.[354] For a long time there has been no letter from Chertkov. Perhaps they intercept them.[355]

Am going to continue to write out that which I had not written out:

1) ...

2) There are two methods of human activity--and according to which one of these two kinds of activity people mainly follow, are there two kinds of people: one use their reason to learn what is good and what is bad and they act according to this knowledge; the other act as they want to and then they use their reason to prove that that which they did was good and that which they didn’t do was bad.

3) It is absolutely clear that it is much more profitable to do everything in common, but the reasoning about this is insufficient. If the reasoning were sufficient then it would have happened long ago. The fact that it is seen among Capitalists is unable to convince people to live in common. Besides the reasoning that this is profitable, it is necessary that the heart be ready to live like that (that the world point of view should be such that it would harmonise with the indications of the reason), but this is not so and will not be so until the desires of the heart are changed, i.e., the world point of view of people.

4) Even if that which Marx predicted should happen, then the only thing that will happen, is that despotism will be passed on. Now the capitalists rule, but then the directors of the working people will rule.

5) The mistake of the Marxists (and not only they, but the whole materialistic school) lies in the fact that they do not see that the life of humanity is moved by the growth of consciousness, by the movement of religion, by an understanding of life becoming more and more clear, general, meeting all problems and not by an economic cause.

6) The most unthought thing, the error, of the theory of Marx is in the supposition that capital will pass from the hands of private people into the hands of the government, and from the government, representing the people, into the hands of the workers....

7) There is nothing that softens the heart so much as the consciousness of one’s guilt, and nothing hardens it so much as the consciousness of one’s right.

8) Working people are so ... that it seems to them they have no outlet. Salvation lies in truth, in preaching and professing it.

9) They prove the law of the conservation of energy; but energy is nothing else than an abstract notion, just the same as matter. But an abstract notion is always equal to itself. In fact, this is nothing else than as if we were to begin to prove that the law of gravitation, notwithstanding seeming departures, exists unchangingly in everything. (Unclear and perhaps untrue.)

10) The belief in miracles has for its basis the consciousness that our world just as it is, is the product of our senses. But the error lies only in supposing that the miraculous, that is, that something which is against the laws of reason, when applied to our senses, can happen for us with our tool of consciousness, i.e., with our senses. That which is against our laws of reason, when applied to our senses, can happen for other beings, for beings with other senses, just as our tool of consciousness, our sense, is only one particular instance from the innumerable quantity of other possibilities.

11) It is a great error to think that the reason of man is perfect and can disclose everything to him. The limitation of reason is best seen and most obvious from the fact that a man cannot solve (he clearly sees that he cannot) the problems of infinity: for each time there is still more time, for each space there is still more space, for each number there is still a number, so that all time and space is unknowable.

12) The reason of man is just as weak and insignificant in comparison (and in an infinite number of times more so) with that which is, as is the reason (the means of perception) of a beetle and an amæba in comparison with the reason of man. The reason of man in comparison, not only with the highest reason, but with the reason which is higher than his--is just the same as the understanding of a complicated problem of higher mathematics or even of algebra for a man not knowing mathematics, to whom it seems insoluble, as are the problems of the infinity of space and time to us. While the problem is simple and clear for one knowing mathematics. The difference is only in this, that one can learn mathematics, but no study will help to solve the problem of space and time. This is the limit of the possibility of our knowledge under our reason.

13) I pray God that He release me from my suffering which tortures _me_. But this suffering is sent to me by God in order to release me from evil. The master whips his cattle with the whip in order to drive them from the burning yard and save them, and the cattle pray that he do not whip them.

14) There are common, sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional, misunderstandings of my opinions which I confess irritate me:

a) I say that God ... is not God and that God is that which alone is--the unattainable good, the beginning of everything: against me they say, that I deny God;

b) I say that one ought not to resist violence by violence: against me they say, that I say it is not necessary to fight evil;

c) I say that one ought to strive towards chastity and that on this road the highest grade will be virginity, and second a clean marriage, the third not a clean, that is, not a monogamous marriage: against me they say, that I deny marriage and I preach the destruction of the human race.

d) I say that art is an infectious activity and that the more infectious art is, the better it is. But that this activity be good or bad, does not depend on how much it satisfies the demands of art, i.e., its infectiousness, but on how much it satisfies the demands of the religious consciousness, i.e., morality, conscience; against me they say that I preach a _tendence_ art, etc.

15) Woman--and the legends say it also--is the tool of the devil. She is generally stupid, but the devil lends her his brain when she works for him. Here you see, she has done miracles of thinking, far-sightedness, constancy, in order to do something nasty; but as soon as something not nasty is needed, she cannot understand the simplest thing; she cannot see farther than the present moment and there is no self-control and no patience (except child-birth and the care of children).

16) All this concerns women, un-Christians, unchaste women, as are all the women of our Christian world. Oh, how I would like to show to women all the significance of a chaste woman. A chaste woman (not in vain is the legend of Mary) will save the world.

17) People are occupied with three things: 1) to feed themselves, i.e., to continue their existence, 2) to multiply--to continue the existence of the specie, and 3) to fulfil that for which they had been sent in the world: to establish the kingdom of God. For this there is one means--to perfect oneself. Almost all people are occupied with the first two matters, forgetting the last, which at bottom is the only real work.

18) The decline of the moral consciousness of humanity lies in the greatest part of the people being placed in such a situation that all interest in life for them is only to feed and to multiply. It is just the same as if the master kept his cattle, caring only that they be fed, or better, that they do not die from hunger and that they multiply, and never received any income from them: no wool, or milk, or work from them--from these cattle. The Master who sent us in this world requires from us, besides existence and its continuation, also the labour He needs.

19) For _Resurrection_. It was impossible to think and remember one’s sin and be self-satisfied. But he had to be self-satisfied in order to live, and therefore he did not think and forgot.

20) It is impossible to demand from woman that she valuate the feeling of her exclusive love, on the basis of moral feeling. She cannot do it, because she hasn’t got a real moral feeling, i.e., one that stands higher than everything.

To-day I plan to go home.

_Aug. 4. Y. P. If I live._

Why does the 4th of August come to my mind as if it were important? Nothing important has happened.

_To-day, August 24. Y. P._

During this time I received no letters from Chertkov and am very perplexed.[356] I think that during this time the Dukhobors were here. Letters from Khilkov, from Ivan Michailovich. I answered them all. To-day Sullerzhitsky arrived.[357] I am working all the time on _Resurrection_ and am pleased, even very much so. I am afraid of shocks.

... And I feel well. A full house of people: Mashenka,[358] Stakhovich, Vera Kuzminsky,[359] Vera Tolstoi.[360]

I am copying:

1) People were sent into the world to do the work of God, but they quarrelled, fought and established things in such a way that for some, there is no time to do the work, because they have to feed themselves, and for others there is no time, because they have to guard that which they took away. What a waste of strength! It is just as if workers had been sent to work and given food; some have taken the food away and they have to guard it and the others have to get food, and the work stands still.

2) People live in the world not fulfilling their mission--it is the same way as if factory workers were only busied with how to lodge themselves, feed themselves and amuse themselves.

3) One of the most important tasks of humanity consists in the bringing up of a chaste woman.

4) I often think that the world is such as it is, only because I am so separated from all the rest. As soon as my separateness from _Everything_ will end, then the limits will be torn away and other limits will be established--and then the world will become altogether different for me.

5) You wish to serve humanity? Very well. That which you wish to do, another will do. Are you satisfied? No, dissatisfied, because the important thing for me is not what will be done, but what _I_ will do; that I do my work. This is the best proof that the matter is not in the doing, but in the advancement towards the good.

Is it possible that I am advancing? Help, Lord.

6) How difficult it is to please people: some need one thing, others another. They need both my past and my future. God is one, and His Will in respect to me is one, and He wants only my present, what I am doing this minute is what He wants. And what was, has been, and what will be, isn’t my business.

7) Egoism, the whole egoistic life, is legitimate only as long as reason has not awakened. As soon as it has awakened, then egoism is lawful, only to that degree in which one has to sustain oneself as a tool necessary for the service of people. The purpose of reason--is the service to people. All the horror lies in its being used for service to oneself.

8) Man gives himself to the illusion of egoism, lives for himself--and he suffers. It suffices that he begin to live for others, and the suffering becomes lighter and there is obtained the highest good in the world: love of people.

9) As one disaccustoms oneself from smoking or other habits, so one can and must disaccustom oneself from egoism. When you wish to enlarge your pleasure, when you wish to exhibit _yourself_, when you call forth love in others, stop. If you have nothing to do for others, or you have no desire to do anything, then do nothing--only don’t do anything for yourself.

10) The Bavarian told about their life. He boasts about the high degree of freedom, but at the same time they have compulsory religious teaching, a crude Catholic one. That is the most horrible despotism. Worse than ours.

_Aug. 25. Y. P. If I live._

_Nov. 2. Y. P._

It is horrible to see for what a long time I have made no entries: more than two months. And not only has there been nothing bad, but rather everything was good. The Jubilee was not as repulsive and as depressing as I expected.[361] The sale of the novel and the receipt of the 12,000 roubles which I gave to the Dukhobors was well arranged.[362] I was displeased with Chertkov[363] and I saw that I was at fault. A Dukhobor arrived from the province of Yakutsk. I liked him very much[364] ...

Masha is pitiable in her weakness, but she is just as near in spirit....

But glory to God and thanks be to Him that he has awakened it in me and has kept it burning so that it is natural for me either to love and rejoice, or to love and to pity. And what happiness!

Archer was here yesterday, arriving from Chertkov--I liked him.[365] There is much to do, but I am all absorbed in _Resurrection_, being sparing with the water and using it only for _Resurrection_. It seems to me it won’t be bad. People praise it, but I don’t believe.

Everything that I noted--it was all very important--I will write out later, but now I want to write that which I just now, walking on the path, in the evening, not only thought but felt clearly:

1) Under my feet there is the frozen, hard earth; around, enormous trees; overhead a cloudy sky; I fed my body, I feel pain in the head; I am occupied with thoughts on _Resurrection_; and yet I know, I feel in all my being, that both the firm and frozen earth and the trees and the sky and my body and my thoughts--all this is only a product of my five senses, my image, the world, made by me because such is my partition from the world. And that it will be sufficient for me to die--and all this will not disappear but will become transformed, as they make transformations in the theatres: from bushes and stones, they make castles, towers, etc. Death is nothing else than such a transformation, dependent from another partition from the world, another personality: Here I consider as myself, my body with my senses, and then something else will detach itself to be myself. And then the whole world will become something else. But the world is such and not something else, only because I consider myself as this and not as something else. But there can be an innumerable quantity of divisions of the world. (This is not entirely clear for others, but for me--very.)[366]

_Nov. 3. If I live._

_Nov. 14. Y. P._

Again I have not noticed how 11 days have passed. Have been very intensely occupied with _Resurrection_ and am making good progress. Am absolutely near the end. Serezha and Suller were here and both went away to the Caucasus with my letter to Golitsin.[367] S. arrived yesterday. Very well. It is a long time since I have felt so well and keen, intellectually and physically.

I cannot make out what I have written out and what I haven’t.[368]

1) How difficult it is to please people! In order to please them it is necessary that the past and the future meet their demands. But in order to please God, one has only to satisfy His demands in the present.

2) To live for others seems difficult--just as to work seems difficult. But just as in work, in the care for others there may be the best reward: love of others may and may not be; while in labour there is an inner reward, you work to the end, get tired, and you feel good.

3) The poetry of the past occupied itself only with the strong of the world: with the Czars, etc., because the strong of the world appeared as the highest and the most complete representatives of the people. But if you take the plain people, then it is necessary that they express general phenomena ... (Unclear.)

4) If you do not permit yourself to live for yourself, then involuntarily, from boredom, you begin to live for others.

5) Woman, just like man, is endowed with feeling and brain, but the difference is in this, that men mostly consider themselves and their feelings bound by the commands of reason, while women consider their feelings binding for themselves and for their reason. The same thing, but only in different places.

6) You get angry at the philosopher who reasons, who considers that the main basis of the life of man is his material nature; but this man does not know the spiritual, but knows only material effect and therefore he cannot think otherwise.

7) You think that you are alone and you suffer from loneliness; yet you are not only in harmony, but you are one with every one; only artificial and removable barriers separate you. Remove them--and you are one with every one. The removing of these barriers according to your strength is the business of life.

8) If a man considers his animal being as himself, then he will represent God also as a material being, a ruler who rules materially over material things. But God is not such, God is spirit and does not rule over anything, but lives in everything.

9) ... If people could have been so deceived, then there is no deception into which they would not fall.

10) I have noted down that it is depressing because there is no life, but only an egoistic existence. I cannot remember what else I could have meant by this.

11) God manifests himself in our consciousness. When there is no consciousness--there is no God. Only consciousness gives the possibility for the good, for continence, service, self-sacrifice. Everything depends to what consciousness is directed. Consciousness directed to the animal “self” kills, paralyzes life. Consciousness directed to the spiritual “self” rouses, lifts, frees life. Consciousness directed to the animal “self” strengthens, ignites passion, creates fear, struggle, the horror of death. Consciousness directed towards the spiritual “self” frees love. _This is very important and if I live, I will write it out._

12) Death is a change of consciousness, a change of that which I can recognise as myself. And therefore fear of death is a horrible superstition. Death is a joyous event standing at the end of each life. Suffering is sent to people to hold them back from death. Otherwise every one understanding life and death, would struggle towards death. But now it is impossible to go towards death unless through suffering.

13) The greatest act in life is the consciousness of one’s _self_, and its consequences are benevolent or most terrible, according to whether you direct your consciousness towards the spirit or towards the body.

14) In order to get rid of moral suffering (and even physical) there are two means: to destroy the cause of suffering or the feeling in one’s self which produces suffering. The first is not in man’s power, the second is. (I am repeating Epictetus).

15) The moral progress of humanity advances only because there are old people. The old people become kinder, wiser, and give over that which they have lived through to the following generations. If this were not so, humanity had not advanced; and what a simple method!

16) If man looks on life materially, then old people do not become better, but worse, and there is no progress.

17) Technical progress is greeted by every one, is pushed on by every one; the moral, the religious progress, is held back by the priests. From this come the main calamities in life.

_November 15. Y. P. If I live._

It seemed to me that I made no entries for about three days and now it is ten days. _To-day, Nov. 25. Y. P._

... I promised to arrive December 6th.[369]... I feel also like going to Pirogovo. We are alone: Tania, Masha, Kolia. Only Liza Obolensky.[370] I am still diligently occupying myself with _Resurrection_.

Last night I thought out an article on why the people are corrupted. They have no faith of any kind. They christen naïve infants and then they consider every reasoning about faith (perversion) and every lapse, as a capital crime. Only the sectarians have faith. Perhaps I am going to bring that into the _Appeal_. What a pity. I thought it out well at night.

_Resurrection_ is growing. It can hardly be compressed into 100 chapters.[371]

I have noted down the following and I think it is very important (which might be good for the Declaration of Faith):

1) We are very much accustomed to the reasoning as to how the life of other people, people in general, should be arranged. And such kind of reasoning does not seem strange to us. And yet such kind of reasoning could in no ways exist among religious and therefore free people; such reasoning is the consequence of despotism, ... In this way reason ... They say: “If I had the power I would do so and so with the others.” That is a dangerous error, not only because it tortures, deforms people who have to undergo violence ... but it weakens in all people the consciousness of the necessity of improving themselves, which is the only effective means of influencing other people.

2) To-day I thought about this from another angle. I recalled the words of the Gospel: “And the pupil is not higher than the teacher; if he learns then he will be like the pupil.” We, the rich master-classes, teach the people. What would happen if we succeeded in teaching them so that they become as we are?

3) They talk, they write, they preach about the knowing of God. What a horrible blasphemy, and horrible admission of the non-understanding of what God is and what we are. We, a particle of the infinite whole, wish to understand not only this whole, but its causes, the origin of the whole. What absurdity and what a recognition of godlessness, or a recognition of God of that which is not God. We can only know that He is, Τὸ ὄν, He exists, and we can only conclude by ourselves, what He is not.

4) Love is God. Love is only the recognition that God is not flesh, not passion, not egoism, not malice. (Doubtful.)

5) Violence rules our world, i.e., malice, and therefore there is always found in society a majority of dependent, unstable members: women, children, stupid ones--brought up on malice, and who side with malice. But the world ought to be ruled by reason, by goodness; then all this majority would be brought up on goodness and would side with it. In order that this should take place it is necessary that reason and goodness manifest themselves, and undismayed, assert their existence; that is very important.

6) The complexity of knowledge is a sign of its falseness. That which is true is simple.

7) How bad it is that people seeking perfection are pained at calumny, at a deserved bad name (or better still, at an undeserved). Calumny, a bad name, gives an opportunity, drives toward an activity, the value of which is only in our conscience. This is so rare, so difficult, and so useful. Involuntary simpleness is the best school for goodness.[372]

8) I have noted down: “_Justice is insufficient. It is ...[373] necessary to oppose._” I cannot remember what this means.

9) Physical labour is important, because it prevents the mind from working idly and aimlessly.

10) Perhaps it is more important to know what one ought not to think about, than to know what one ought to think about.

11) Women are weak and they not only do not want to know their own weakness, but want to boast of their strength. What can be more disgusting?

12) A good man if he does not acknowledge his mistakes and tries to justify himself can become a monster.

13) ...

Now _Nov. 26_. _Morning. Y. P._

Did not sleep and thought:

1) Evil is the material for love. Without evil there is none and can be no manifestation of love. God is love, i.e., God manifests Himself to us in victory over evil, i.e., in love. The question of the origin of evil is just as absurd as the question of the origin of the world. It is not “whence comes evil?” that one must know, but “how to conquer it? How to apply love?”

1899

_Jan. 2. Yasnaya Polyana._

The last time I wrote it was November 25, which means a month and a week. I made entries in Yasnaya Polyana, then I was in Moscow, where I did not make one entry. At the end of November I went to Pirogovo. I returned on the first and since that time have not been quite well--the small of my back ached and still aches, and lately I have had something like bilious fever. It is the second day that I am better.

All this time I have been occupied exclusively with _Resurrection_.[374] I have had some communications about the Dukhobors,[375] an innumerable pile of letters. Kolechka Gay is with me, with whom it is a rest to be.... I am calm in the fashion of an old man. And that is all.

There is quite a lot to write out. I am going to write it out on the pages I skipped. Lately I feel as if my interest in _Resurrection_ has weakened, and I joyously feel other, more important, interests, in the understanding of life and death. Much seems clear.

Made an entry, the 2nd of January. To-day, _Feb. 21_. _Moscow._

More than six weeks that I have made no entries. Am all the time in Moscow. At first _Resurrection_ went well, then I cooled off entirely.[376] I wrote a letter to the non-commissioned officer[377] and to the Swedish papers.[378] For about three days I have again taken up _Resurrection_. Am advancing.

Students’ strike. They are trying to drag me in all the time.[379] I am counselling them to hold themselves passively, but I do not feel like writing letters to them.

... As to me--my back is better. There is living with us, an interesting and live Frenchman, Sinet,--the first religious Frenchman.[380] There is very much that I ought to write out. Have been in a very bad mood; now all right.

_Feb. 22. Moscow._

_June 26. Yasnaya Polyana._

Four months that I have made no entries. I will not say I have lived badly all this time. I have worked and am working diligently on _Resurrection_. There is much that is good, there is that, in the name of which I write. During these days I have been gravely ill; now well....

Difficult relations because of the printing and translating of _Resurrection_,[381] but most of the time am calm.

Neglected correspondence. They continue sending money for the famine-stricken, but I can do nothing else but send it to them through the post.[382] Kolichka is with me helping me in the work.

...

I continue to write out from my note-book:

14) Nearing the place of destination, one thinks more and more often of that place to which one is nearing. Thus also while nearing death, the change of destination.

15) Only always to remember that there is no other meaning in life, no other way of finding the joy of life, but through fulfilling His will. And how peacefully and joyously one could live!

16) In time of illness, to fulfil His will by preparing oneself for the going over into another form.

17) It seems to us that the real labour is the labour on something external: to make, to collect something; property, houses, cattle, fruit; but to labour on one’s own soul--that is just phantasy. And yet every other labour except on one’s own soul, the enlarging of the habits of good, every other labour is a _bagatelle_.

18) They do not obey God, but adore Him. It is better not to adore, but to obey.

19) No matter what the work you are doing, be always ready to drop it. And plan it, so as to be able to leave it.

20) The machine ... is a terrible machine. If we would have clearly understood its danger, we would never have permitted it to be formed.

21) It seems strange and immoral that a writer, an artist, seeing the suffering of people, sympathises less than he observes, in order to reproduce this suffering. But that is not immoral. The suffering of one personality is an insignificant thing in comparison with that spiritual effect, if it is a good one, which a work of art will produce.

22) Humanity, it is an enormous animal who seeks and cannot find what it needs. Very slowly, sensations call forth emotions, and emotions are transmitted to the brain and the brain calls forth acts. The activity of the liberals, Socialists, revolutionaries, are attempts to galvanise, to compel the animal to act by arousing its motor nerves and muscles. But there is one organ which does everything when it is not impaired; in the animal it is the brain, in the people, religion.

23) I am depressed and I ask God to help me. But my work is to serve God and not that He should serve me.

24) An individual, personal life is an illusion. There is no such life; there is only function, a tool, for something.

25) ... is vestigial, having no application, like the appendix.

26) We complain at our depressed spirits, but they are necessary. Man cannot stay on that height to which he sometimes rises; but man rises and then hypnotises himself for the time of his depression and in the time of his depression he already acts from the view-point that was disclosed to him in the moment of rising. If only to know how to make use of those moments of rising and to know how to hypnotise oneself!

27) The evil of the world, its cause is very simple. Every one seeks _midi à quatorze heures_--now in the economic system, now in the political. I just now read the discussions in the German parliament, on how to keep the peasants from running to the cities. But the solution of all problems is one and no one recognises it and it does not even seem to be of interest to them. But the solution is one, clear and undoubted: ... The salvation is one: the destruction of false teaching.

28) The difference between people: N thinks about death, and that does not lead him farther than the question of how and to whom he should leave his money, where and how be buried. And Pascal also thinks about death.

29) ...

30) There is no future. It is made by us.

31) The infinity of time and space is not a sign of the greatness of the human mind, but on the contrary, it is a sign of its incompleteness, of its inevitable falsity.

32) We think of the future, we build it; but nothing future is important, because the important thing is to do the creative work of love, which can be done under every possible condition; and therefore it is altogether indifferent, what the future will be.

33) We get angry at circumstances, are pained, wish to change them, but all possible circumstances are nothing else than indications as to how to act in different spheres. If you are in need, you must work, if in prison--think, and if in wealth, free yourself ... etc.

It is just like a horse getting angry with the road on which he is being led.

34) The press--that is a lie: _with a vengeance_.[383]

35) Everything is divided. Only God unites us, living in everything. That is why He is love.

36) The conception of God to a religious man, is continuously destroyed and being replaced by a new, higher conception.

37) ...--is not only the loss of labour, of lives, but the loss of the good.

38) With many people it is possible to live only when you treat them as you would a horse: not to take them into consideration, not reproaching them, not suggesting, but only finding a _modus vivendi_. It is about them: “Not to cast pearls” ... It is terrible, but without this rule, it would be worse.

39) Is it possible to imagine to oneself a Socialist working-man with faith in the Iversk Ikon? Then, first of all, there must be a religious emancipation.

40) We are all agreed that only he is free who has overcome passion, and yet knowing this, we seriously trouble ourselves with the freeing of people who are full of passions.

41) A rational conviction can never be complete. A full conviction can only be irrational, especially with women.

42) Answer good for evil and you destroy in an evil man all pleasure which he receives from evil.

43) God is love. We know God only in love, which unites everything. You know God in yourself through the striving towards this union.

44) One continually thinks that the good will be good for him. But the good is, or it is not--it is not something that _will be_.

45) The important thing lies in thoughts. Thoughts are the beginning of everything. And thoughts can be directed. And therefore the principal task of perfection is--to work on thoughts.

_June 27. If I live. Y. P._

_To-day July 4th. Y. P._

All this time I have been ill with my usual stomach sickness. The work which absorbed me very much, has stopped.

Christ as a myth;[384] and Kenworthy’s book, a rational exposition of the life of Christ. The first is better. There is need of a philosophy of moral economy, i.e., of religious truth. There is such a thing.

I have had many good thoughts, being ill and nearing death. I think often with pain of brother S.

I have noted down the 4th:

1) The government destroys faith, but faith is necessary. Some violating themselves believe in the miraculous, in the absurd; others in science. But in which? In the contemporary. But in the contemporary, there is 99/100 of lie and error. In every contemporary science there are lies. Truth revealed by God is of course the right, it is religion; and truth obtained by the reason of man, by science, is also of course, the right. But the matter lies in recognising what is discovered by God and what has been gained by human reason.

2) Death is the destruction of those organs by means of which I perceive the world as it appears in this life; it is the destruction of that glass through which I looked and a change to another.

3) Educated people using their education not for the enlightenment and freeing of the working-classes, but for befogging them, are like workers using their strength not for sustaining life but for destroying it. These are the intellectual Pugachevs, Stenka Razins, only a thousand times more dangerous.

_July 5. Y. P. If I live._

_To-day September 28. Y. P._

Have worked all the time on _Resurrection_; now I have stumbled on the third part. It is long since I have made no progress.

... I have wrought for myself a calm which is not to be disturbed: not to speak and to know that this is necessary; that it is under these conditions one ought to live.

There are here Ilya, Sonya[385] with the children, Andrusha with his wife, Masha with her husband.

I am thinking more and more often about the philosophic definition of space and time. To-day, if I have time, I am going to write it out.

I read an interesting book about Christ never having been, that it was a myth.[386] The probabilities that it is right--there are as many _for_ it, as there are _against_.

Yesterday with the help of Masha I answered all the letters; many remained unanswered. I am still ill; rarely a day without pain. I am dissatisfied with myself, also morally. I have let myself go very much--I do not work physically and I am occupied with myself, with my health. How difficult it is to bear sickness resignedly, to go unto death without resistance--and one must.

I have been thinking during this time:

1) Women demanding for themselves the work of man and the same freedom, mostly demand for themselves unconsciously the freedom for licence, and as a result go down much lower than the family, though aiming to stand higher than it.

2) What is this memory which makes from me one being, from childhood unto death? What is this faculty connecting separate beings in time, into one? One ought to ask not what is it that unites, but what divides, these beings. The faculty of time divides, beyond which I cannot see myself. I am one indivisible being from birth until death; but to manifest and to know myself, I must do so in time. I am now such as I was and will be; but one who had to and even will manifest myself and know myself in time. I have to manifest myself and know myself in time--for communion with other beings and for influencing them.

3) I plucked a flower and threw it away. There were so many of them, it was no pity. We do not value these inimitable beauties of living beings and destroy them, having no pity not only for plants, but for animals, human people. There are so many of them. Culture, civilisation, is nothing else than the ruin of these beauties and the replacing them ... with what? The saloon, the theatre ...

4) They reproach you with malice, debauchery, lies, thefts, bring proof, etc. What is to be done? Answer the question with What time is it? Are you going to take a swim? Have you seen N N, etc. That is the best and only means of bearing these accusations and even clearing them up.

5) The dearest thing on earth is the good relation between people; but the establishment of these relations is not the result of conversation--on the contrary, they become spoiled by conversation. Speak as little as possible, and especially with those people with whom you want to be in good relation.

6) In eating, I destroy the limits between myself and other beings; creating children, I do almost the same thing. The results of the destruction of material limits are visible; the results of the destruction of the spiritual limits and the union resulting from this are invisible, only because they are broader.

7) “People are divided (divided from other beings), and this appears to them as space. The fact that they are inseparable in essence appears to them as time.” That is the way I have noted it. Space divides, time unites. But this is untrue. Both time and space are dividers and they form the impossibility of realising unity. (Unclear, but I understand. I will make it clear later.)

8) Brotherhood is natural, proper to people. Non-brotherhood, divisions, are carefully nurtured.

9) Sometimes one feels like complaining childishly to some one (to God), to beg for help. Is this feeling good? It is not good: it is a weakness, a lack of faith. That which more than anything resembles faith--the beseeching prayer, is in truth a lack of faith--a lack of faith that there is no evil, that there is nothing to ask for, that if things are going badly with you, then it only demonstrates that you ought to improve yourself, and that there is going on, that very thing which ought to be, and under which you ought to do that which has to be done.

10) Just now I wrote this coldly, understanding with difficulty that state in which you wish to live for God alone, and I see through this how there are people who absolutely never understand this, not knowing any other kind of life besides the worldly, for people. I know this state, but cannot just now call it up in myself, but only remember it.

11) Everything which lives without consciousness, as I live when I sleep, as I lived in the womb of my mother, lives not materially, i.e., not knowing matter, but lives. But life is something spiritual. Endeavouring to remember my state before consciousness, on the threshold of consciousness, I know only the feeling of depression, satisfaction, pleasure, suffering, but there is no conception of my body or of another’s. The conception of body (matter) manifests itself only when consciousness is manifested. The conception of body manifests itself only, because consciousness gives understanding of the presence in one’s self of the basis of everything (spiritual). And at the same time, as I know that I am the basis of everything, I know also that I am not the whole basis, but a part of it. And it is this being a part of a whole, these limits separating me from the whole, I know through my body: through my own body and the bodies surrounding me.

12) If you desire something, if you are afraid of something, that means that you do not believe in that God of love which is in you. If you had believed in Him, then you could not have wanted anything or have been afraid, because all desires of that God which lives in you are being always fulfilled, because God is all-powerful; and you would never have been afraid, because for God there is nothing terrible.

13) Not to think that you know in what the will of God really lies, but to be humble; and then you will be loving. And the will of God in relation to you, lies only in this.

14) People convincing others that reason cannot be the guide of life are those in whom reason is so perverted, that they clearly see that they have been led into a swamp.

15) The only instance where a man can and ought to occupy himself with himself, is when he feels unhappy. Unhappiness is the best condition for perfection, the ascent to the higher steps. Unhappiness is a sign of one’s own imperfection. One ought to rejoice at these instances: it is the preparation of one’s self for work, a spiritual food.

16) Now I am an ordinary man, L. N. (Tolstoi), and animal, and now I am the messenger of God. I am all the time the same man, but now I am the public and now I am the judge himself with the chain, fulfilling the highest responsibilities. One must put on the chain more often.

Latterly I have got out of the habit, have weakened. I have only just now remembered.

17) Man is a being beyond time and beyond space who is conscious of himself in the conditions of space and time.

18) Games, cards, women, races, are alluring because they have been thought out for the _blasés_. It is not for nothing that the wise teachers have forbidden them. Artificial play is corrupting. They are needed for the _blasé_, but the simple working people need the very simplest plays without preparation.

19) Only then will you produce true love, when you will resist offence, overcome offence with love, will love your enemy.

20) They desire, they are excited, they suffer only for trifles or for bad things. The good things are accomplished without excitement. It is from this that the word heart means malice. (_Serdit_, to get angry, to put into a passion, comes from _sertse_, the heart.--_Translator’s note._)

_To-day Oct. 2. Y. P._

I am still ill,--I am not suffering, but I feel threatened constantly. Morally I am better--I remember God in myself more often, and death. It seems to me I have come out of the difficult place in _Resurrection_.... Kolichka went away. Sonya arrived--she is ill.

I am continuing to write out from the notebooks:

1) I have made this note: Space comes from the consciousness of limits, from the consciousness of one’s own separateness; I am one, and the world is another. And in the world are similar beings with limits: 2, 3, 4, ... to infinity.

These beings can find place only in space. From the consciousness of limits comes also time. I have thought this out again and can express it in this way: Separateness, the non-all-comprehensiveness of our _selves_, is expressed in recognising a part of moving matter as ourselves. The part of matter which we recognise as ourselves gives us an understanding of space; that part of motion which we recognise as ourselves gives us a conception of time.

Or, in other words: We cannot imagine a part of matter in any other way than in space. To imagine a part of motion, we cannot in any other way than in time. Space comes from the impossibility of imagining two or many objects beyond time. Time comes from the impossibility of imagining two, many objects beyond space. Space is the possibility of representing to one’s self two, many objects at one and the same time. Time is the possibility of representing to one’s self two, many objects, in one and the same space (one goes out, the other enters).

Divisions cannot be in one space, without time. If there were no time (motion) all objects in space would be unmoving and they would form not many objects, but one space, undivided and filled with matter. If there were no space, there could be no motion and our “self” would not be separated by anything from all the rest. My body understood by me as my “self,” and understanding all the rest, is that part of matter which moves for a definite time and occupies a definite space.

(Not good, unclear, perhaps even untrue.)

2) Anarchy does not mean the absence of institutions, but only the absence of those institutions to which people are compelled to submit by force, but those institutions to which people submit themselves voluntarily, rationally. It seems to me that otherwise there cannot be established and ought not to be, a society of beings endowed with reason.

3) “Why is it that after sin, suffering does not follow that person who committed the sin? Then he would see what ought not to be done”--because people live not separately but in society and if every one suffered from the sin of each one, then every one would have to resist it.

4) Conscience is the memory of society assimilated by separate individuals.

5) In old age you experience the same thing as on a journey. At first your thoughts are on that place from which you are going, then on the journey itself, and then on the place to which you are going.

I experience this more and more often, thinking of death.

6) It is true that a great sin might be beneficial, by calling forth repentance before God, independently from human judgment. Such a sin leads one away from the realm of human judgment, from vanity, which masters man and hides from him his relation to God.[387]

7) The physical growth is only a preparation of material for spiritual work, the service to God and man which begins with the withering of the body.

_To-day Oct. 13. Y. P._

I am still not fully well. It is as it ought to be. But that does not hinder from living, thinking and moving towards a fixed goal. _Resurrection_ advances poorly. Have sent away four chapters, I think not passable by the censor, but at least I think I have settled on one point, and that I won’t make any more great important changes. I do not cease thinking of brother Sergei, but because of the weather and ill health I cannot make up my mind to go.... Sonya was in Moscow and is going again to-day. To-day I had a kind of intellectual idleness, not only to-day, but all these latter days. For _Resurrection_ I have thought out good scenes. Concerning separateness which appears to us as matter in space and movement in time, I am thinking more and more often and more and more clearly.

I have also received Westrup’s pamphlets from America about the money,[388] which struck me by explaining everything that was unclear in financial questions and reducing everything as it ought to be, to violence.... If I get time I will write it out. I have another important, joyous thought, although an old one, but which came to me as a new one and which makes me very happy, namely:

1) The principal cause of family unhappiness--is because people are brought up to think that marriage gives happiness. Sex attraction induces to marriage and it takes the form of a promise, a hope, for happiness, which is supported by public opinion and literature; but marriage is not happiness, but always suffering, which man pays for the satisfaction of his sex desire. Suffering in the form of lack of freedom, slavery, over-satiety, disgust of all kinds of spiritual and physical defects of the mate which one has to bear; maliciousness, stupidity, falsity, vanity, drunkenness, laziness, miserliness, greed and corruption--all defects which are especially difficult to bear when not in oneself but in another person, and from which one suffers as if they were one’s own; and the same with physical defects: ugliness, uncleanliness, stench, sores, insanity, etc., which are even more difficult to bear when not in oneself. All this, or at least something of this, will always be and to bear them will be difficult for every one. But that which ought to compensate: the care, satisfaction, aid, all these things are taken as a matter of course; while all defects as if they were not a matter of course, and the more one expected happiness from marriage the more one suffers.

The principal cause of this suffering, is that one expects that which does not happen, and does not expect that which always happens. And therefore escape from this suffering is only by not expecting joys, but by expecting the bad, being prepared to bear them. If you expect all that which is described in the beginning of “The Thousand and One Nights,” if you expect drunkenness, stench, disgusting diseases--then obstinacy, untruthfulness, even drunkenness, can, if not exactly be forgiven, at least be a matter of no suffering and one can rejoice that there is absent that which might have been, that which is described in “The Thousand and One Nights”: that there is no insanity, cancer, etc. And then everything that is good will be appreciated.

But is it not in this, that the principal means of happiness in general lie? And is it not therefore that people are so often unhappy, especially the rich ones? Instead of recognising oneself in the condition of a slave who has to labour for himself and for others, and to labour in the way that the master wishes, people imagine that every kind of pleasure awaits them, that their whole work lies in enjoying them. How not be unhappy under this circumstance? Then everything: work and obstacles and illnesses--the necessary conditions of life--appear as unexpected, terrible calamities. The poor, therefore, are less often unhappy: they know beforehand that before them lie labour, struggle, obstacles, and therefore they appreciate everything which gives them joy. But the rich, expecting only joys, see a calamity in every obstacle, and do not notice and do not appreciate those goods which they are enjoying. “Blessed be the poor, for they shall be comforted; the hungry, for they shall be fed; and woe unto ye, the rich.”

_Oct. 14. Y. P. If I live._

_Oct. 27. Y. P._

We are living alone: ... Olga,[389] Andrusha, Julie[390] and Andrei Dmitrievich.[391] Everything is all right, but I am often indisposed: there are more ill days than healthy ones and therefore I write little. Sent off 19 chapters,[392] very much unfinished. I am working on the end.

I have thought much, and perhaps well:

1) About the freedom of the will, _simply_: Man is free in everything spiritual, in love: he can love or not love, more and less. In everything remaining he is _not_ free, consequently in everything material. Man can direct and not direct his strength towards the service of God. In this one thing (but it is an enormous thing), he is free: he can pull or be driven.

2) ... of the workers, prostitution and many other things, all this is a necessary, inevitable consequence and condition of the pagan order of life in which we live, and to change either one or many of these, is impossible. What is to be done? Change the very order of this life, that on which it stands. How? By this, in the first place, by not taking part in this order, in that which supports it ... etc. And, second, to do that in which man alone is absolutely free: to change selfishness in his soul and everything which flows from it: malice, greed, violence, and everything else by love and by all that which flows from it: reasonableness, humility, kindness and the rest. It is impossible to turn back the wheel of a machine by force,--they are all bound together with cogs and other wheels--but to let the steam go which will move them or not let it go is easy; thus it is terribly difficult to change the very outer conditions of life, but to be good or bad is easy. But this being good or evil changes all the outer conditions of life.

3) Our life is the freeing of the enclosed--the expansion of the limits in which the illimitable principle acts. This expansion of the limits appears to us as matter in motion. The limit of expansion in space appears to us as matter. That part of matter which we recognise as ourselves we call our body; the other part we call the world. The limit of expansion in time we call motion. That part of motion which we recognise as ourselves we call our life; the other part we call the life of the world. All of life is the expansion of these limits, the being freed from them.

(All unclear, inexact.)

_Nov. 20. Moscow._

Much I have not written out. I am in Moscow.... For 70 years I have been lowering and lowering my opinion of women and still it has to be lowered more and more. The woman question! How can there not be a woman question? Only not in this, how women should begin to direct life, but in this, how they should stop ruining it.

All morning I have not been writing and have been thinking two things:

1) We speak of the end of life--although it is true, not the one which we understand, but the one which would be understood by the highest reason. The purpose is just the same as the cause. The cause is looking backward, the purpose is looking forward, but the cause, the conception of the cause (and therefore of an end) appears only then when there is time, i.e., a being is limited in his conceptions by time. And therefore for God, and for man living a Godly life, there is no purpose. There is life in which consciousness grows (?[393]) and that is all.

2) A drop fusing with a great drop, a pool, ceases to be and begins to be.

_To-day December 18. Moscow._

Almost a month I have not written. Have been severely ill.[394] Had acute pain for one day, then a respite, and weakness. And death became more than natural, almost desirable. And so it has remained now, when I am getting well--that is a new, joyous step.

Finished _Resurrection_. Not good, uncorrected, hurried; but it has fallen from me and I am no longer interested. Serezha is here, Masha and her husband, Maria Alexandrovna.

I am all right. Have not yet begun to write anything. More than anything I am occupied with ______,[395] but I have no desire for anything very much, am resting. Wrote letters.

I am attempting to write out my notes:

1) (Trifles) about many-voiced music. It is necessary that the voice say something, but here there are many voices and each one says nothing.

2) One of the principal causes of evil in our life is the faith cultivated in our Christian world, the faith in the crude Hebrew personal God, when the principal sign (if one can express it so) of God is that he is not limited, by anything, consequently not personal.

3) One should conquer death--not death, but the fear of death coming from a lack of understanding of life. If only you understand life and its necessarily good purpose--death--then you cease to fear it, to resist it. And when you cease to fear it, you cease to serve yourself, a mortal, and you will serve an immortal: God, from whom you came and to whom you are going.

4) Matter is everything which is accessible to our senses. Science forces us to suppose matter inaccessible to our senses. In this realm, there can be beings composed of that matter and perceiving it, matter inaccessible to our senses. I do not think that there are such beings; I only think that our matter and our senses perceiving it, are only one of _innumerable_[396] possibilities of life.

5) “I am a slave, I am a worm, I am a Czar, I am a God.”[397] Slave and worm true, but Czar and God untrue. It is in vain that people attribute a special significance and greatness to his reason. The limits of human reason are very narrow and are seen at once. These limits are the infinity of space and time. Man sees the final answers to the questions he asks himself, recede and recede in time and also in space, and in both these realms.

6) I read about Englehardt’s book: _Evolution, the Progress of Cruelty_.[398] I think that here there is a great deal of truth. Cruelty has increased mainly because division of labour has been brought to pass, which assists the increase of the material wealth of man. Every one speaks of the benefits of the division of labour, not seeing that the inevitable condition of the division of labour, besides the _mechanising_ of man, is also the removing of those conditions which call forth a human, moral communion between people. If we are doing the same work, as agricultural labourers, then naturally there would be established between us an exchange of service, a mutual aid, but between the shepherd and the factory-weaver, there can be no communion.

(This seems untrue; I shall think it over.)

7) What would God’s attitude be towards prayer, if there were such a God to whom one could pray? Just the same as would be the attitude of the owner of a house where water had been introduced and to whom the inhabitants would come to ask for water. The water has been introduced. You have only to turn the tap. In the same way everything has been prepared for men which is necessary to them, and God is not at fault that instead of making use of the clean water which was there, some of the tenants carry water from a stagnant pond, others fall into despair from lack of water and beg for that which had been given them in such abundance.

8) ...

9) One can by personal experience verify the truth, that God, a part of Whom is my own _self_, is love, and by the experimental way convince one’s self of this truth. As soon as love is violated, life ends. There is no desire to do anything, everything is depressing, and on the contrary, as soon as love is restored, as soon as you have made peace with those whom you quarrelled, forgiven, received forgiveness--then you wish to live, to act, everything seems easy and possible.

10) It would be good to express even in approximate numbers and then graphically, that quantity of labour, of working days, which rich people use up in their lives. Approximately more or less, this could be expressed by money. If I spend 10 roubles a day, that means that 20 men are working constantly for me. (Unclear, not what I want to say.)

11) They generally say: “That is very deep, and therefore not to be fully understood.” This is untrue. On the contrary. Everything that is deep is clear to transparency. Just as water is murky on top, but the deeper it is, the more transparent.

12) One small part of people, about 20 per cent., is insane by itself, possessed by a mania of egoism, which reaches to the point of concentration of all spiritual strengths on oneself; another, the greater part, almost 80 per cent., is hypnotised by the scientific, by the artistic ... and principally ... hypnotism, and also does not make use of its reason. Therefore progress in the world is always attained by the insane possessed by the same kind of insanity by which the majority is possessed.

13) I experience the feeling of peace, of satisfaction, when I am ill, when there takes place in me the destruction of the limits of my personality. As soon as I get well I experience the opposite: restlessness, dissatisfaction. Are these not obvious signs that the destruction of the limits of personality in this world, is the entrance of life into new limits?

I have finished.

_December 19. Moscow. If I live._

_To-day December 20. Moscow._

My health is not good. My spiritual condition is good, ready for death. In the evenings there are many people. I tire. In number 51,[399] _Resurrection_ did not appear and I was sorry. This is bad.

I thought out a philosophic definition of life. To-day I thought well about _The Coupon_.[400] Perhaps I shall write it out.

_Notes_

NOTES TO THE TEXT

BY V. G. CHERTKOV

[1] With the words, “I continue,” Tolstoi begins a new note-book of the Journal; this note-book presupposes another which the editors have only in separate fragments. The previous note-book ended with the following note:

“October 8, 1895, Y. P.

“(I am beginning an entry to-day with just what I finished two days ago.)

“I have only a short time left to live and I feel terribly like saying so much: I feel like saying what we can and must and cannot help believing--about the cruelty of deception which people impose upon themselves; the economic, political and religious deception, and about the seduction of stupefying oneself--wine, and tobacco considered so innocent; and about marriage and about education and about the horrors.... Everything has ripened and I want to speak about it. So that there is no time for performing those artistic stupidities which I was prepared to do in _Resurrection_.

“But just now I asked myself: but can I write, knowing that no one will read? And I experienced something of disappointment; but only for a time; that means that there was some love of fame in it. But there was also the principal thing in it--the need before God.

“Father, help me to follow the same path of love. And I thank Thee. From Thee flows everything.”

[2] In the original, merely the initials of the phrase are used. Thus Tolstoi would often finish what he had written during the day with I. I L. (If I live), marking ahead in this fashion the date of the following day.

[3] Countess Sophia Andreevna Tolstoi, born Behrs, 1844, wife of Tolstoi. In the Journal, Tolstoi calls her S., S. A., or Sonya.

[4] “Catechism” Tolstoi called that systematic exposition of his philosophy in the form of questions and answers which he had begun about this time. In the text, he calls this work, The Declaration of Faith, or simply, The Declaration. (See entries December 23, ’95, and further.) In the following year, 1896, Tolstoi abandoning the catechism form, continued and finished the work, which, in 1898, was published under the title _Christian Doctrine_ by _The Free Press_ (_Swobodnoe Slovo_) issued by A. and V. Chertkov, England, and later in 1905, it appeared also in Russia.

[5] Tolstoi never returned to the continuation and revision of the plot of the story _Who is Right?_ which had been begun by him about this time, and so it has remained unfinished. The beginning of the story as it was written by Tolstoi, is printed in his collected works (see the full collection of works by Tolstoi, edited by P. Biriukov, published by Sytin, 1913).

[6] I.e., with Katiusha Maslov and not with Nekhliudov, as the first form of the novel was begun.

[7] John C. Kenworthy, an English Methodist minister, a writer and lecturer, who shared at that time the opinions of Tolstoi and who founded in England an agricultural colony composed of his co-thinkers. The author of the work, _Tolstoi, His Life and Works_, London, 1902. There was printed abroad in the Russian Language in the journal of _The Free Press_ (1899, No. 2, England) his _The Anatomy of Poverty_. They were lectures to the English workingmen on political economy, which struck Tolstoi favourably and which he included in the manuscript which was then being issued under the title of _Archives of L. N. Tolstoi, No. II_, and to which he even wrote an introduction. In later life, Kenworthy fell ill of nervous prostration and was taken to a sanatorium.

[8] Albert Shkarvan, a Slav, who shared Tolstoi’s opinions. An army surgeon in the hospital in Kashai (Hungary), he resigned from this service in February, 1895, for religious reasons, for which he was imprisoned for four months.

[9] The Russian sect of Dukhobors, living in the Caucasus in 1895, to the number of several thousand souls, upon the suggestion of their leader, Peter Vasilevich Verigin, who was at that time in exile, gave notice to the authorities that they would no longer take the oath or serve in military service, and, in a word, would no longer take any part in governmental violence, and in the night from the 28th to the 29th of June of that year, burned all their weapons. Cossacks were sent against them and after some executions, two hundred were put in prison, many were exiled from their native land and forced to live in Armenian, Georgian and Tartar villages in the Province of Tiflis; about two or three families in a village, without land and with the prohibition against intercourse among themselves. Those Dukhobors who remained in active service and refused to serve, were sent away to disciplinary regiments. (See _Dukhobors_, by P. Biriukov, 1908, publishers, _Posrednik_; besides there is much material pertaining to the history and the movement of the Dukhobors printed in various issues of _The Free Press_.)

[10] The manager of the Moscow Little Theatre, Walts, used to call on Tolstoi for the purpose of receiving information about the staging of his drama, _The Power of Darkness_.

[11] Ivan Ivanovich Bochkarev (died 1915), former revolutionary Slavophile who suffered much for his convictions. He became acquainted with the group of people around Tolstoi because of his belief in vegetarianism, to which he arrived independently of any one. In his personal conversations with Tolstoi, Bochkarev disputed his religious convictions, heatedly denying all his religious metaphysics. At this time he lived near the village of Ovsiannikovo, six versts from Yasnaya Polyana, on the estate of Tolstoi’s daughter, T. L. Sukhotin.

[12] Prince Nicholai Leonidovich Obolensky, the grandnephew of Tolstoi--later married to Tolstoi’s daughter, Maria Lvovna.

[13] Maria Alexandrovna Schmidt, an old friend, who shared Tolstoi’s opinions and whose personality and whole life, Tolstoi esteemed very highly. In the Journal of February 18, 1909, he wrote, “I never knew and do not know any woman spiritually higher than Maria Alexandrovna.” In the eighties, when class-teacher in the Nicholaievsky Orphan Asylum in Moscow, Mme. Schmidt made the acquaintance of the forbidden works of Tolstoi, upon which she left the asylum and went to live on the land, and up to her death supported herself by the labours of her own hand. The last ten years of her life she lived near the village of Ovsiannikovo, on the estate of T. L. Sukhotin, procuring her livelihood by the sale of the berries and vegetables from her own garden and the dairy products from her cows. She died October 18, 1911.

[14] With Bochkarev.

[15] Alexander Nikiphorovich Dunaev, an old friend of the Tolstoi family, later one of the directors of the Moscow Commercial Bank.

[16] Constantin Nicholaievich Zyabrev, nick-named “Bieli” (White), a peasant from Yasnaya Polyana, who was also called by the villagers, “the Blessed.” Tolstoi liked to speak with him. He lived in the greatest poverty and never bothered about the next day. At the time of the visit, mentioned in the Journal, he was already near death and soon passed away. Some years before this, Tolstoi helped him to rebuild his cabin.

[17] Dr. Ivan Romanovich Bazhenov, who lived at this time in Vladivostok, sent Tolstoi his manuscript essay on the necessity of calling an ecumenical council and asked his opinion on this question. In the copy of the Journal at the disposal of the editors, and perhaps in the original of the Journal, it was written Bozhanov.

[18] A letter from G. F. Van-Duyl from Amsterdam. In the letter of November 18th, Tolstoi answered his letter as follows:

“Once a man has understood and is permeated with the consciousness that his true happiness, the happiness of his eternal life, that which is not limited by this world, consists in the fulfilment of the will of God and that against this will ... then no consideration can force this man to act against his true happiness. And if there is an inner struggle and if, as in that case about which you spoke, family considerations come out on top, it only serves as a proof that the true teaching of Christ was not understood and was accepted by him who could not follow it; this only proves that he wanted to appear as a Christian, but he was not so in reality.”

[19] Paul Ivanovich Biriukov, one of Tolstoi’s nearest friends and followers, who later wrote his biography (two volumes, published by _Posrednik_, Moscow). Tolstoi often calls him Posha in the Journal.

[20] The editors were unable to discover the title of this pamphlet.

[21] Maria Vasilievna Siaskov, an amanuensis, who was employed for many years in the publishing house of _Posrednik_.

[22] Tatiana Andreevna Kuzminsky (born Behrs), a sister-in-law of Tolstoi, wife of Senator A. M. Kuzminsky.

[23] _Konevski_, this is the way Tolstoi called the novel, _Resurrection_, which he had begun then, the subject of which he adopted at the end of the eighties from stories told by the well-known Court-worker, A. Th. Koni.

[24] Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), the great German philosopher. Tolstoi evidently read the translation by Ph. V. Chernigovitz, _Aphorisms and Maxims_, in two parts, 1891–1892. Tolstoi, as early as 1869, wrote to A. A. Fet: “Do you know what the present summer meant to me? Continual enthusiasm over Schopenhauer and a pile of spiritual pleasures which I never have experienced before.... Schopenhauer is one of the greatest geniuses among people.”

[25] That which was noted down in his pocket note-book--Tolstoi had the habit of putting down thoughts which came to him and which seemed to him important in a pocket note-book which never left him. Later he copied the most valuable thoughts into his Journal, revising, more or less, as he went along. In rewriting from the note-book Tolstoi often began the entry with these words, “I have been thinking” or “I have it noted.”

[26] See Note 4.

[27] This essay, entitled _Shameful_, pointing out the cruelty and senselessness of corporal punishment which the law at that time applied to the peasants, was printed with omissions and alterations in the Russian newspapers and later abroad in full in _Leaflets of The Free Press_, No. IV, England, 1899; later it was printed in _The Full Collected Works of L. N. Tolstoi_, published by Sytin, subscribed and popular editions, volume XVIII.

[28] In the Moscow Little Theatre.

[29] N, a young artist living in the home of the Tolstois, after refusing military service on account of religious convictions, was placed in the military hospital in Moscow in the ward for the diseases of the heart, where he was visited by Tolstoi. Later, various difficult experiences and spiritual changes led him to agree to military service....

[30] Nicholai Alexeievitch Philosophov, father of Countess S. N. Tolstoi, wife of Count I. L. Tolstoi.

[31] A. A. Shkarvan sent Tolstoi his letter entitled “Why It Is Impossible to Serve as a Military Doctor.” Later this letter, in revised form, appeared in his book, _My Resignation from Military Service. Notes of a Military Doctor_. (Published by _The Free Press_, England, 1898, Chapter IV.)

[32] Maria Lvovna Tolstoi (1872–1906), second daughter of Tolstoi, afterwards married to Count N. L. Obolensky.

[33] Count Ilya Lvovich Tolstoi (born 1866), second son of Tolstoi. Has written a book, _My Recollections_ (Moscow, 1914).

[34] Vladimir Grigorevich Chertkov and his wife, Anna Constantinovna (born Dieterichs). V. G. Chertkov made the acquaintance of Tolstoi in 1883. For biographical information about him see under “Biography of L. N. Tolstoy” by P. Biriukov (Volume II, 1913) and also in the pamphlet, _Tolstoi and Chertkov_, by P. A. Boulanger (Moscow, 1911) and in the essay of A. M. Khiriakov: “Who Is Chertkov?” (_Kievski Mysl_, 1910, No. 333, December 2nd).

[35] Soon Tolstoi began this drama (see entry of January 23, 1896), which he called _And Light Lights Up Darkness_. This drama, having to a great extent a biographic character, portrays the torturing condition of a man who has gone through an inner religious crisis, and who lives with his family which, not understanding him, interferes with his attempts to change his life according to the truth revealed to him. This was first printed with a great many censor deletions in _The Posthumous Literary Works of L. N. Tolstoi_ (edited by A. L. Tolstoi, 1911, Volume II).

[36] The Englishman, John Manson, came to Tolstoi with a request for his opinion on the collision between the United States and England on account of the boundaries of Venezuela. Tolstoi answered by an extensive letter which was published under the title, “Patriotism or Peace?” and printed abroad (by Deibner in Berlin, and others.) It was not printed in Russia.

[37] Ernest Crosby (1856–1907), an American social-worker, a poet and writer. When he was a representative of the United States in the International Court in Egypt, he read Tolstoi’s _On Life_, which caused an upheaval in his soul. As a result, he left the Government service and devoted his life to the propaganda of the social-religious views of Tolstoi and the social-economic views of Henry George. He founded The Social Reform League, the object of which was the discussing of the problems of reorganisation of contemporary life on the basis of justice and equality, and the furthering of the actual realisation of this reorganisation.

[38] E. N. Drozhin, a district school teacher, in 1891, refused military service at the recruiting in the city of Sudzha in the Province of Kursk. He was sentenced to be sent to a disciplinary battalion and stayed fifteen months in the Voronezh disciplinary battalion. Here he fell ill of consumption and the doctors pronounced him unfit to continue military service, upon which he was transferred to the state’s prison to finish his sentence. He died in the Voronezh prison on January 27, 1894, from inflammation of the lungs which he contracted at the time of his transfer ... from the disciplinary regiment to the prison. The story of his refusal from military service is described in detail in the book by E. I. Popov: _Life and Death of E. N. Drozhin, 1866–1894_, published by _The Free Press_, England, 1899. Tolstoi wrote an appendix to this book in which he expressed the opinion that such people like Drozhin “by their activity help....” In reference to this article the well-known German writer, Frederick Spielhagen, printed an open letter to Count Leo Tolstoi in the newspapers, in which he considered Tolstoi guilty of Drozhin’s death, a useless one, according to Spielhagen, for the abolition of war and the establishment of universal peace. This letter was translated into Russian in 1896 and appeared as a separate pamphlet.

[39] See Note 36.

[40] A voluminous letter devoted to the problem of non-resistance to evil by violence and the relation of contemporary American writers to it.

[41] Count Andrei Lvovich Tolstoi, born 1877, fourth son of Tolstoi. In this year he served in the Tver military as a volunteer (before the prescribed age).

[42] Nicholai Michailovich Nagornov, husband of Tolstoi’s niece, Varvara Valerianovna. In the letter to A. K. Chertkov of January 13, 1896, Tolstoi wrote: “We had a death lately. Nagornov died, the husband of my niece. She loved him passionately and they lived together remarkably happily ... no one knows anything of him, but the good.... My heart feels solemn and good because of this death.”

[43] Fedior Kudinenko, a peasant, a co-thinker of Tolstoi, a former _gendarme_.

[44] See note 29.

[45] Dushan Petrovich Makovitsky (Dušan Makovický), a Slovak, who later became one of the closest friends and followers of Tolstoi, spent six years in Yasnaya Polyana from the end of 1904 to the day Tolstoi left, in the capacity of family doctor, and was near Tolstoi until the latter’s death. At this time he lived in his native land, in Hungary, taking part in the publication of translations into the Slavonian of Tolstoi’s books and of writers near to him in spirit. The article here mentioned is “Instances of Refusal from Military Service among the Sect of the Nazarenes, in Hungary.” Printed in _Leaflets of the Free Press_, England, 1898, No. I.

[46] The Nazarenes, a sect spread in Hungary, Chorvatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Switzerland and the United States, whose members refuse military service.

[47] Nicholai Nicholaievich Strakhov (1828–1896), a friend of the Tolstoi family, a noted writer and philosopher, highly valued by Tolstoi as a man and a literary critic. He had an extensive correspondence with Tolstoi, which was published by the Tolstoi Museum Society in Petrograd, 1914.

[48] The family of the Counts Olsuphiev was very much liked by Tolstoi. This is what he wrote about them to V. G. Chertkov on February 9, 1896: “They are such very simple and good people, that the difference between their opinion and mine, and not the difference but the non-recognition of that by which I live, does not bother me. I know that they cannot, but that they want to be good and that they have gone as far as they could in that direction.”

[49] Nicholai Vasilevich Davydov, an old friend of the Tolstoi family, being appointed at this time President of the Tula District Court, was presented to the Emperor and had a long conversation with him about Tolstoi, answering the questions asked him by the Emperor. At present, N. V. Davydov is President of the Tolstoi Society in Moscow.

[50] Alexander Ivanovich Ertel (1855–1908), a well-known writer, author of the novel _The Gardenins_ and other stories and novels. The essay by Ertel which Tolstoi mentions was published in _Nedielia_ in 1896, No. III, under the title, “Is Russian Society Declining?” He objected to Tolstoi who said in the article “Shameful” that one ought not to _ask_ about the abolition of corporal punishment, but “one must and ought only to denounce such a thing.” “The way of denunciation and repentance is tested and is being tested--” wrote Ertel, “but in itself it is not sufficient for successful struggle against evil. For the greatest effectiveness in this struggle of changes, the _judicial_ path of ‘petitions, declarations and addresses,’ deserves every kind of sympathy from the side of historical rationalism as well as from the Christian point of view.” Later Tolstoi, highly appreciating the popular style of Ertel, wrote a preface to the posthumous edition of his works, Moscow, 1909.

[51] See Note 38.

[52] M. A. Sopotsko, at one time in the beginning of the Nineties shared some of Tolstoi’s views in relation to the outer life, but never understood the essence of his religious philosophy. Later Sopotsko became a supporter of Orthodoxy and frequently attacked Tolstoi and his friends in print.

[53] Marian Zdziechowski, a professor in the Cracow University, a well-known social worker. In the _Sieverni Viestnik_ for the year 1895, No. 7, under the pseudonym M. Ursin, he contributed an article: “The Religious Political Ideals of Polish Society.” In respect to this article Tolstoi wrote him a long letter which was printed abroad and later was reprinted in the _New Collection of Letters of L. N. Tolstoi_, collected by P. A. Sergienko (published by Okto, 1911), from which by order of the Moscow Court it was deleted. After this