The Journal of Leo Tolstoi (First Volume—1895-1899)

Chapter VIII; and also the _Recollections_ in the _Children’s

Chapter 3541 wordsPublic domain

Magazine_, Mayak, 1913, by V. S. Morosov, a former pupil of the Yasnaya Polyana school in the beginning of the Sixties).

[103] A village within four versts from Yasnaya Polyana.

[104] Leonilla Fominishna Annenkov (1845–1914), an old friend of Tolstoi’s and an adherent of his philosophy, the wife of a Kursk landlord, the well-known scholarly lawyer, K. N. Annenkov (1842–1910). She made the acquaintance of Tolstoi in 1886 and from that time on corresponded very much with him. Completely sharing the opinions of Tolstoi, she applied them with a rare sequence to life and she was noted for her remarkable abundance of love which attracted every one who met her. Tolstoi valued her highly, considering that she had “a clear mind and a loving heart.”

[105] _Farther on one line is crossed out._ A note of Princess M. L. Obolensky in the copy at the disposal of the editors.

[106] It weighed upon him that certain persons to whom he did not want to show his Journal had read it nevertheless. In the last years of his life he was compelled to hide the current Journal somewhere in his rooms, and the finished note-books he gave away in safe keeping.

[107] A village four versts from Yasnaya Polyana, where the Chertkovs lived in summer.

[108] Declaration of Faith.

[109] The note of July 19, 1896, he evidently originally inserted in a note-book from which he later wrote it out in his Journal.

[110] Tolstoi’s brother, Count S. N. Tolstoi.

[111] This article under the title of “How to Read The Gospels and What Is Its Essence” was printed at first in the edition of _The Free Press_, 1898, and after in 1905 in Russia. (See the complete works of Tolstoi published by Sytin, Popular Edition, Volume XV.) The central thought of this article is that in order to understand the true meaning of the Gospels, one has to penetrate those passages which are completely simple, clear and understandable. Tolstoi advises all those who wish to understand the true meaning of the Gospels to mark everything which is for them completely clear and understandable with a blue pencil and marking at the same time with a red one, around the words marked in blue, the words of Christ Himself as differing from the words of the Apostles. It is those places marked by the red pencil which will give the reader the essence of the teaching of Christ. Tolstoi in his own copy of the Gospels made such marks which he mentions later in the Journal with the words: “Marked the Gospels.”

[112] Hadji Murad, one of the boldest and most remarkable leaders of the Caucasian mountaineers who played a big rôle in the struggle of the mountaineers with the Russians in the Forties of the Nineteenth Century. In 1852 he was killed in a skirmish with the Cossacks. Tolstoi heard much about him as early as the beginning of the Fifties, when he himself took part in the fight with the mountaineers. A month after the above-mentioned note in the Journal, Tolstoi made a rough sketch of his story, _Hadji Murad_, on which he worked with interruptions until 1904. This story was printed for the first time in his _Posthumous Literary Works_ (published by A. L. Tolstoi,