The Journal of Leo Tolstoi First. Volume—1895-1899. Лев Толстой
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Название: The Journal of Leo Tolstoi First. Volume—1895-1899

Автор: Лев Толстой

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СКАЧАТЬ when she was not yet born: “Where was I then?” I would have answered: “You were asleep and had not yet waked up here.” Conception, birth, childhood are only a preparation to an awakening, which we see, but not the sleeping ones.

      30) The error in which we find ourselves when we consider our separate beings as ourselves is the same as when a traveller counts only one stage as the whole road, or a man, one day as his whole life.

      31) Read about … and was horrified at the conscious deception of men …

      32) “An eraser.” I have forgotten. I shall recall it.

      Have written up to dinner. It is now 2 o’clock and I am going to dine.

      May 28, Ysn. Pol. 12 o’c. noon.

      It is already several days that I am struggling with my work84 and am making no progress. I sleep. I wanted to scribble it somehow to the very end, but I can’t possibly do it. Am in a wretched mood, aggravated by the emptiness, by the poor, self-satisfied, cold emptiness of my surrounding life.

      In the meantime I have been to Pirogovo.85 I have a most joyous impression; my brother Sergei86 has undoubtedly had a spiritual transformation. He himself has formulated the essence of my faith (and he evidently recognises it as true for himself); to raise in oneself the spiritual essence and to subject to it the animal element. He has a miraculous ikon and he was tortured by his undefined attitude to it. The little girls87 are very good and live seriously. Masha has been infected by them. Later there were at our house: Salamon,88 Tanyee.89…

      A terrible event in Moscow – the death of three thousand90– I somehow can not express myself as I ought to. I am indisposed all the time, getting weaker. In Pirogovo, there was the harnessmaker, an intelligent man. Yesterday a working-man came from Tula, intelligent. I think a revolutionist. To-day a seminary student, a touching case.

      I am advancing very, very badly in my work. Rather boring letters because they demand polite answers. I have written to Bondarev,91 Posha, and to some one else. O yes; Officer N. was here too. I think I was useful to him. Splendid notes by Shkarvan.92

      Yesterday there was a letter from poor N.93, whom they have driven off to the Persian frontier, hoping to kill him. God help him. And don’t forget me. Give me life, life, i. e. a conscious, joyful serving of Thee.

      In the meantime, I thought,

      1) It is remarkable how many people see some insoluble problem in evil. I have never seen any problem in it. For me it is now altogether clear that that which we call evil is that good, the action of which we don’t yet see.

      2) The poetry of Mallarmé,94 and others. We who don’t understand it, say boldly that it is humbug, that it is poetry striking an impasse. Why is it that when we hear music which we don’t understand and which is just as nonsensical, we don’t say that boldly, but say timidly: yes, perhaps one ought to understand it or prepare oneself for it, etc. That is silly. Every work of art is only a work of art when it is understandable, I do not say for all, but for people standing on a certain level of education, on the same level as the man who reads poetry and who judges it.

      This reasoning leads me to an absolutely certain conclusion that music before any other art (decadence in poetry and symbolism and other things in painting) has lost its way and struck an impasse. And he who has turned it from the road was that musical genius Beethoven. The principal factors are the authorities and people deprived of æsthetic feeling who judge art.

      Goethe? Shakespeare?95 Everything that goes under their names is supposed to be good and on se bât les flancs in order to find something beautiful in the stupid and the unsuccessful, and taste is entirely perverted. And all these great talents – Goethe, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Michael-Angelo – side by side with exquisite things, produced not only mediocre ones, but disgusting ones. The mediocre artists produce a mediocrity as regards value and never anything very bad. But recognised geniuses create either really great works or absolute stuff and nonsense; Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven, Bach, and others.

      3) To place before myself the most complex and confused thing which demands my participation. On all sides it seems there exist insoluble dilemmas; it is bad one way and worse the other. And it is only necessary to carry over the problem from the outer realm into the inner, into one’s own life, to understand that this is only an arena for my inner perfection, that it is a test, a measure of my moral development, an experiment as to how much I can and want to do the work of God, the enlargement of love, and everything resolves itself so easily, simply, joyously.

      4) A mistake (sin) is the use of reason, given me to recognise my essence in the love for everything which exists, in acquiring the good for my separate being. As long as man lived without a reasoning consciousness, he fulfilled the will of God in acquiring the good for himself and in struggling for it and there was no sin; but as soon as reason had awakened, then there was sin.

      5) The harness-maker, Mikhailo, says to me that he does not believe in a future life, that he thinks that when a man dies, his spirit will leave him and will go away. But I say to him: “Well, go off then with this spirit; then you won’t die.”

      May 29, Ysn. Pol. If I live.

      It seems to me, June 6, Ysn. Pol.

      The principal thing is that during this time I have advanced in my work,96 and am advancing. I write on sins and the whole work is clear to the end.

      Finished Spier – splendid.

      The economic movement of humanity by three means: the destruction of ownership of land according to Henry George97; the inheritance which would give over accumulated wealth to society, if not in the first generation, then in the second; and a similar tax on wealth on an excess of over 1000 rubles income for a family or 200 for each man.

      To-day the Chertkovs arrived. Galia98 is very good.

      The day before yesterday a gendarme came, a spy, who confessed that he was sent after me. It was both pleasant and nasty.99

      During this time have thought principally the following:

      1) When a man lives an animal life, he does not know that God lives through him. When reason awakens in him, then he knows it. And knowing it, he becomes united with God.

      2) Man in his animal life has to be guided by instinct; reason directed to that which is not subject to it, will spoil everything.

      3) Is not luxury a preparing for something better, when there is already a sufficiency?

      Yesterday was not the 6th, but the 8th. To-day, June 9, Y. P.

      I have written little and not very well. It seems to me that it is getting clearer. In the morning I had a conversation with the workingmen who came for books. I remembered the СКАЧАТЬ

<p>84</p>

Declaration of Faith, later re-named The Christian Doctrine.

<p>85</p>

The estate of Tolstoi’s brother, S. N. Tolstoi, in the district of Krapivensk, in the Government of Tula, 35 versts from Yasnaya Polyana.

<p>86</p>

Count Sergei Nicholaievich Tolstoi (1826–1904). See for him in Biography of L. N. Tolstoi by P. Biriukov and in My Recollections by Count I. L. Tolstoi, Moscow, 1914.

<p>87</p>

The daughters of Count S. N. Tolstoi: Vera, Varvara and Maria Sergievna.

<p>88</p>

Charles Salomon, the translator of some of Tolstoi’s works into French, and a professor of the Russian language in the higher institutions in Paris.

<p>89</p>

Sergei Ivanovich Tanyeev (1856–1915), composer, at one time director at the Moscow Conservatory, an acquaintance of the Tolstoi family, who lived three summers (1894–1896) in Yasnaya Polyana.

<p>90</p>

On the Khodinka field at the time of the coronation celebration of May 18, 1896. In the beginning of the year 1910, Tolstoi wrote a little story called Khodinka, printed for the first time in his Posthumous Literary Works, Volume III, published by A. L. Tolstoi, Moscow, 1902.

<p>91</p>

Timofei Nicholaievich Bondarev (1820–1898), a peasant of the district of the Don. In 1867 he was exiled to Siberia for conversion to the Jewish faith and lived in the district of Minusinsk, in the Province of Yeniseisk, to the end of his life. Wrote a work called Industriousness and Parasitism, or The Triumph of the Agricultural Worker (issued with abbreviations in 1906 in Petrograd by Posrednik,) in which he proved the moral obligation of each man to do agricultural work. Tolstoi wrote a long introduction to this work. As to the impression which this work produced on Tolstoi, he himself wrote in his book What Then Shall We Do? (1884–1886) the following: “In all my life, two Russian thinkers had upon me a great moral influence and enriched my thought and clarified my philosophy. These people were not Russian poets, scholars, preachers – they were two remarkable men who are now living, and who all their life laboured in the muzhik labour of peasants, Siutaev and Bondarev.” In his letter here mentioned to Bondarev, Tolstoi touched upon those religious problems which Bondarev asked him. For more details about Bondarev see in the article of C. S. Shokhor-Trotsky: “Siutaev and Bondarev” (in the Tolstoi Annual, 1913), Petrograd, 1914, issued by the Tolstoi Museum Society, following which are printed ten letters by Tolstoi to Bondarev and some writings of Bondarev himself.

<p>92</p>

My Refusal From Military Service, The Memoirs of an Army Physician, issued by The Free Press, 1898, England. Tolstoi read this work even before, in manuscript, and at this time probably was re-reading it. In his letter to A. A. Shkarvan of December 16, 1895, Tolstoi wrote: “Your memoirs are interesting and important to the highest degree. I read them with spiritual joy and was touched.”

<p>93</p>

See Note 29.

<p>94</p>

Stephane Mallarmé (1842–1898), French poet, considered one of the most prominent Symbolists. For a more detailed opinion of him by Tolstoi, see his book, What Is Art? Chapter X.

<p>95</p>

Goethe (1749–1832), the German poet. See for Tolstoi’s opinion of him in his Journal, September 13, 1906. Earlier in 1891, in his letter to Countess A. A. Tolstoi, Tolstoi wrote: “As to Goethe, I do not like him at all. I don’t like his conceited paganism.”

Shakespeare (1564–1616). See Tolstoi’s article about him “On Shakespeare” and “On The Drama” and the opinion in his journal March 15, 1897.

<p>96</p>

Declaration of Faith.

<p>97</p>

Henry George (1839–1897), noted American social worker and writer on economic questions. In his numerous works, chiefly on agrarian questions, he was a warm defender of the destitute and the oppressed. George considered the existence of private land ownership as the principal cause of the existence of poverty; appearing as its opponent, he suggested the abolition of all existing taxes, substituting for them a single tax on the value of land; by means of this reform, land would pass into the hands of people cultivating it by their own labour, because for people who did not work it, it would be unprofitable to own great stretches of land, since they would have to pay a large amount of taxes on them.

Tolstoi sympathised very much with George’s scheme and wrote much about it (The Great Sin, The Only Possible Solution of the Land Question, A Letter to a Peasant and some chapters in Resurrection and others). Of the works of George, Tolstoi recognised as the best his Social Problems, to the Russian translation of which he wrote a preface. In the last years of George’s life, Tolstoi was in correspondence with him; in his letter to him of 1894 Tolstoi among other things wrote: “The reading of each one of your books clarifies for me much which formerly was not clear to me and convinces me more and more of the truth and practicality of your system” [translated from the Russian from a translation from the English. —Translator’s note]. On the occasion of George’s death, Tolstoi wrote to Countess S. A. Tolstoi on October 24, 1897: “Serezha told me yesterday that Henry George was dead. Strange to say, his death struck me as the death of a very close friend. The death of Alexandre Dumas produced the same impression upon me. One feels as if it were the loss of a real comrade and friend.” Many works of George’s are translated into the Russian; there is a splendid biography of him written by S. D. Nicholaev, and published by Posrednik: The Great Fighter for Land Liberation, Henry George, Moscow, 1906.

<p>98</p>

Anna Constantinovna Chertkov.

<p>99</p>

In the letter to Count L. L. Tolstoi of June 7, 1896, Tolstoi related the incident as follows: “Yesterday a remarkable event happened to me. Two or three times there came to me a young civilian from Tula asking me to give him books. I gave him some of my articles and spoke with him. He was, according to his convictions, a Nihilist and an Atheist. I told him from the bottom of my heart all that I thought. Yesterday he came and gave me a note: ‘Read it,’ he said, ‘then tell me what you think of me.’ In the note it was written that he was a junior officer in the gendarmerie, a spy, sent to me to find out what is going on here, and that he became unbearably conscience-stricken and that is why he disclosed himself to me. I felt pity and disgust and pleasure.”