---
layer: reference
lastUpdated: 2026-05-27
tags: [research, biryukov, doukhobors]
lang: en
source: tolstoy-lit.ru
volume: 3
chapter: 3
---

# Volume III, Chapter 3. The Burden of Life. A Sense of Mission. The Land Question

**Source:** https://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/bio/biryukov/biografiya-biryukov-3-3.htm

**Text:** P. I. Biryukov (1860–1931), *Biography of L. N. Tolstoy*, Volume III. Public domain.
**Translation:** English translation for the tolstoy.life research platform (2026-05-27), from the continuous Russian capture in [`../ru/chapter-03.md`](../ru/chapter-03.md).

---

In the middle of the 1880s the government's struggle against the revolutionary movement was at its height. The victims were many, and to Lev Nikolaevich there flowed in the entreaties of relatives of the sufferers for the easing of their lot. L. N. rarely refused help of this kind, and would pass the request on to his influential friends. One of these was his kinswoman, Countess Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya; and so, in 1884, we see a whole series of L. N.'s letters in which he asks her to obtain this or that indulgence for political exiles. And among these letters there are lines exceedingly characteristic of L. N. Into the petitioning on behalf of the exiles there is woven the question of faith, and L. N., as it were, fends off his friend's attempts at his conversion. In May 1884 he writes:

> "It will be very sad if Armfeldt is not permitted to live with her daughter. She has already begun to hope. I want to say, and I will say: in what kind of world do we live, if, in order that a mother should be able to live with her unhappy daughter — unhappy because she is kept at penal labour by people of our own world — if for this one must beg, implore, scheme, and bestir oneself?
>
> If there still are missionaries, if there are people who love their brethren (not those who are at penal labour, but those who keep them there), then here are the ones whom one must convert from morning till night: the sovereign, the ministers, the commandants, and the rest. Convert them — you live among them — instil into them that if it lies in their power to ease the lot of the unhappy and they do not do it, then they are heathens, and very unhappy."

A little later he defends himself still more resolutely:

> "I am very grateful to you, dear friend," he writes to A. A., "for your sympathy, and I know (I feel it by the tone of your letter) that you will do everything possible, and will do it from the heart. I love you very much for this. But observe: I, by my bad, false, seductive faith — I, though by heart a far less good man than you, yet I, by my bad, devilish faith, feel and say nothing toward you but what is good and loving; whereas you, by your good faith, notwithstanding your true goodness, your love for me, my entreaties not to convert me (that is, to put it politely, not to say disagreeable things to me) — you cannot refrain from saying at once the most painful and offensive thing that can be said to a man: namely, that that which is his holy of holies is hellish pride.
>
> I love and respect your faith; I dislike only evil — and you too ought to dislike it.
>
> I await your instructions with impatience, and I thank you and love you very much; but, for the sake of all that is holy to you, understand that for others, too, there is something holy" (*).

(* The Tolstoy Museum. The Correspondence of L. N. Tolstoy with Countess A. A. Tolstaya, vol. I. *)

But their relations remained friendly. In one of the subsequent letters he says to her: "I am the same as ever, in general, and toward you in particular — that is, I count you a person near and dear to me." Of course, A. A. repaid him in kind.

In February 1885 L. N., living in Moscow, reported in a letter to Sofya Andreyevna, who was then in Petersburg, that two "class-mistresses" had been to see him in the morning. These class-mistresses were Marya Alexandrovna Schmidt and Olga Alexeyevna Barsheva. They were destined — especially the former — to become the very closest friends of L. N. It fell to me to hear from the lips of Marya Alexandrovna the story of how she and her companion came to be acquainted with L. N. Being both religiously Orthodox, they nevertheless idolized L. N. as a great writer, the creator of *War and Peace*, *Anna Karenina*, and the rest. And then there reached them the rumour that Tolstoy had written a Gospel. Religious feeling here mingled with reverence before genius, and they resolved to obtain this work at all costs. In their naïveté they turned first of all to the Synodal shop, knowing that there Gospels were sold. At the Synodal shop they were told that they knew nothing of this; and that if a new work of Tolstoy's had appeared, then one must apply to Wolf's bookshop, and he would obtain it. They went there. There they were told that they had heard of the existence of such a Gospel, but that it was forbidden, and so they could not sell it. Their desire to read it was so strong that they resolved to go to Lev Nikolaevich himself and ask him to give them this book to read. It is precisely of this visit that L. N. tells Sofya Andreyevna in his letter to Petersburg in February 1885. L. N. received them kindly and gave them what they asked. Having read it for the first time, they were in great confusion and even in indignation. To their traditional religious feeling certain realistic expressions, unaccustomed to the ear, which L. N. had used with respect to the Mother of God, seemed blasphemous. Nevertheless many pages of this book seized hold of their moral sense. They began to re-read this work, and as they read deeper into it, the new, profound meaning of the Gospel opened itself to them; they began to read all that L. N. had written, and soon abandoned the official position they had held, and took up a simple, working life. One of the trades by which they earned their living was the copying of L. N.'s works that had been forbidden by the censorship, and one may say that hundreds of copies came out from under their hands and were spread over Russia. We shall meet again with these remarkable people in the description of L. N.'s further life.

Simultaneously with the intense intellectual and moral work that went on within L. N., his further religious development was also proceeding. The new step to which he was raised by his searching religious consciousness was the doctrine of mission — of being sent. He sets it forth in letters to two of his friends, written almost at the same time — to V. G. Chertkov and to N. N. Ge, in February 1885. We give here the first, as the fullest version of the exposition of this doctrine:

> "One side of Christ's teaching, bound up with all the rest, and even the foundation of the whole, was hidden from me by the deification of Christ — namely, his teaching about being sent. Recall how many times he said: 'The Father sent me, I am sent, I do the will of him that sent me.' These words were always unclear to me.
>
> God could not send God, and another meaning I did not understand, or understood unclearly. Only now has the simple, clear, and joyful meaning of these words opened itself to me. I came to the understanding of them through my own doubts and sufferings. Without this teaching there is no resolution of all those doubts that torment every disciple of Christ. The meaning is this: that Christ teaches all men that life which he holds to be the truth for himself. And his own life he holds to be a mission, the fulfilment of the will of him that sent him. And the will of him that sent him is the reasonable (good) life of the whole world.
>
> Consequently, the work of life is the bringing of truth into the world. Life is given to man (according to the teaching of Christ), with his reason, only that he should bring this reason into the world; and therefore the whole life of man is nothing other than this reasonable activity of his, directed toward other beings in general — not toward men only. Thus did Christ understand his life, and thus he taught us to understand ours. Each of us is a force conscious of itself, a flying stone that knows whither and wherefore it flies, and rejoices that it flies, and knows that of itself it is nothing — a stone — but that all its significance lies in this flight, in the force that flung it, that its whole life is this force. And indeed, apart from this view — that is, apart from the view that every man is an envoy of the Father, called into life only in order to fulfil the will of the Father — apart from this view, life not only has no meaning, but is repulsive and dreadful. And, on the contrary, one need only thoroughly understand and make one's own this view of life, and life becomes not only meaningful and clear, but beautiful, joyful, and significant. Only with this view are all the doubts of struggle and all fears done away. If I am an envoy of God, then my chief task lies not only in fulfilling the five commandments — in having no property, in not giving myself up to lust, and the like — all these are conditions under which I am to fulfil my mission. This too is now for me the chief meaning of my mission; but my chief task lies in living, bringing into the world by all the means that are given me that truth which I know, which has been entrusted to me. It may happen that I myself shall often be bad, shall be untrue to my calling — all this cannot for a moment destroy the significance of my life: to shine with that light which is within me, so long as I can, so long as the light is within you. Only with this teaching are done away the idle regrets that this or that is or was not as I should have wished, and the idle desires for something definite in the future; the fear of death is done away too, and the whole of life is transferred into the one present. Death is done away by this: that if my life has merged with the activity of bringing reason and good into the world, then the time will come when the physical annihilation of my personality will further that which has become my life — the bringing of good and reason into the world."

And from this moment the whole further life of L. N. becomes a fulfilment of the will of the Father of life who had sent him.

But the fulfilment of this mission was not always easy for him. Thus, for example, while he was writing the book *What Then Must We Do?*, with a full consciousness of the falsehood, egoism, and every sort of temptation around him, in the dazzling light of the ideal that had risen before his consciousness, he meets among the people close to him — his family, his friends — at best indifference and unconcern, and often hostility and bitter reproaches. And the life around him of those nearest to him goes counter to all that he had suffered through and held to be unshakable truth.

His inner state at that time is admirably expressed in his letter to V. G. Chertkov, to whom, as to a friend, he confided his most secret thoughts. Here is this letter, written in June 1885:

> "In my last letter I wrote to you that it was well with me; but now, replying to your second letter from England, received yesterday, it is not well with me. The literary work does not go forward, the physical work is almost aimless — that is, not compelled by necessity — there are almost no relations with the people around me (beggars come, I give them coppers, and they go away), and before my very eyes, in the family, there goes on around me a systematic corruption of the children, a hanging of millstones about their necks. Of course, I am to blame; but I do not wish to pretend before you, to display a calm that is not there. I do not fear death; I even desire it. But this very thing is bad; it means that I have lost that thread which is given me by God for guidance in this life and for full satisfaction. I am muddled, I wish to die, plans come to me to run away or even to take advantage of my position and to turn my whole life upside down. All this only shows that I am weak and vile, while I should like to accuse others and to see in my position something exceptionally hard. It has been very hard for me now these six days already, but I have one consolation: I feel that this is a temporary state. It is hard for me, but I am not in despair; I know that I shall find the lost thread, that God will not forsake me, that I am not alone. But it is at such moments that one feels the lack of close, living people — of that community, that church, which the Pashkovites have, which the Orthodox have. How well it would be for me now to lay my difficulties before the judgment of people who believe in the same faith, and to do what they would tell me. There are times when one pulls of oneself and feels strength within one; but there are times when one wishes not to rest, but to give oneself up to others whom one trusts, that they should direct one. All this will pass, and if I live, I will write to you how and when it passes. Yesterday, together with your letter, I received a letter from Obolensky. He writes that Sibiryakov is seeking a place, the means of life, and calls hopeless the position in which he finds himself, and toward which I have been passionately striving these ten years now.
>
> When I pity myself, I say to myself: can it be that I shall have to die without having lived even one year outside that mad, immoral house in which I am now forced to suffer every hour, without having lived even one year as a human being, reasonably — that is, in the country, not in a manor-house yard, but in a peasant hut, among the toilers, toiling together with them according to my strength and abilities, exchanging labours, feeding and clothing myself as they do, and boldly, without shame, telling everyone that Christian truth which I know? I wish to be frank with you, and I tell you everything; but thus I think when I pity myself, and at once I correct this reasoning, and I do so now. Such a desire is a desire of outward goods for myself — the same as the desire for palaces, and wealth, and glory — and therefore it is not of God. It is a desire to set the cross-bar of the cross crosswise; it is discontent with the conditions in which God has placed me; it is a faulty fulfilment of the mission. But the point is that now I, as an envoy, am in a complex and difficult position, and I do not always know how best to fulfil the will of him that sent me. I shall wait for explanations. He has never refused them, and has always given them in good time" (*).

(* The Chertkov Archive. *)

Remarkable in this letter is the depth and subtlety of its spiritual self-analysis. L. N. here renounces not only material, but moral luxury as well. He reaches the limit of self-denial. He already longs to go away, to live in moral freedom, but he counts this a moral luxury, and resolves rather to endure this moral want, to bear upon himself these moral fetters, so as not to break love with the people near to him. Many times the feeling of freedom broke through these chains he had voluntarily laid upon himself, and in him there arose again the desire to go away. Such a "breaking-through" took place that same year, 1885, in December.

Sofya Andreyevna describes it thus in a letter to her sister:

> "There happened what has already happened so many times: Lyovochka fell into an extremely nervous and gloomy mood. I am sitting, writing; he comes in — I look — his face is terrible. Up till then we had been living splendidly: not one unpleasant word had been said, nothing at all. 'I have come to say that I want to divorce you, I cannot live like this, I am going to Paris or to America.'
>
> You understand, Tanya, if the whole house had crashed down on my head, I should not have been so astonished. I ask in amazement: 'What has happened?'
>
> 'Nothing; but if you keep loading more and more onto the cart, the horse stops and cannot pull it.' — What was being loaded on, no one knows. But there began shouting, reproaches, coarse words, all worse and worse, and at last I bore it and bore it, scarcely answering anything; I see the man is mad, and when he said that 'where you are, the air is infected,' I ordered a trunk to be brought and began to pack. I wanted to come to you, if only for a few days. The children came running, an uproar. Tanya says: 'I will go away with you — what is all this for?' He began to entreat me to stay. I stayed; but suddenly there began hysterical sobbing — sheer horror, just think — Lyovochka shaking and jerking all over with sobs. Then I felt sorry for him; the children, four of them — Tanya, Ilya, Lyolya, Masha — are crying at the top of their voices; a stupor came over me, I could neither speak nor weep, I kept wanting to talk nonsense, and I am afraid of this and keep silent, and I keep silent for three hours — kill me if you like, I cannot speak. And so it ended. But the anguish, the grief, the rupture, the painful state of estrangement — all this remained in me. You understand, I often ask myself, almost to madness: well, now what is it for? I do not take a step out of the house, I work at the edition till three in the morning, I am quiet, I have loved everyone and remembered this time as never before — and what for?
>
> The subscription to the edition is going so strongly that all day, as in an office, I sit and manage all the business. I have hired a workman for the packing and the running about. It is terribly tiring and hard. I have taken in 2,000 in twenty days. Two articles Pobedonostsev has finally forbidden. Yesterday I received a very courteous letter from him, and a refusal.
>
> Well, after this affair, yesterday we parted almost amicably. Lyovochka set off with Tanya, the two of them, for an indefinite time, to the country, to the Olsufyevs, sixty versts away, on Sultan, the two of them in a tiny little sledge. They took a heap of fur coats, provisions, and today I have already received a letter that they had a very merry and good journey, only they tipped over six times. I am glad that Lyovochka has gone off to the country, and to a good family at that, and to good keeping. I attribute all these nervous outbursts and gloom and sleeplessness to vegetarianism and to overtaxing physical labour. Perhaps he will come to his senses there. Here, with the heating of stoves, the carting of water, and the rest, he has worn himself out to gauntness and to a nervous state" (*).

(* The Archive of T. A. Kuzminskaya. *)

But in Lev Nikolaevich such episodes called forth a feeling of tenderness and repentance, and the heavy feeling vanished then, when he succeeded once more in calling up love toward those who "knew not what they did." This mood of L. N.'s comes out vividly in his letter to Chertkov, written by him during his stay with the Olsufyevs at the end of that year:

> "I marvel why people do not love, and are ashamed, to be pitiable: to me there is nothing more joyful than just this feeling of compassion. I deserve it from all sides. I should like to say much to you, but I will put it off until we meet, if God so wills. I have spent eight days here, and it has been almost well with me. What is not well is the complete lack of understanding of that in which my life consists, and the luxurious, idle life; but what is well is the kindness, the honesty, and the purity, and not the love, but the respect that all of them have for me. Besides, my own were here — Seryozha, Tanya, and Lyolya — and now there are still two here. On Christmas Day itself it happened that I went out to walk along unfamiliar, deserted, wintry country roads, and I walked the whole day and all the while thought, repented, and prayed. And my soul has been the better for it ever since. I kept repeating one thing: Our Father — Father of us all men, a father not earthly but heavenly, eternal, from whom I came forth and to whom I shall come — hallowed be for us Thy essence (name) — (Thy essence is love). May Thy essence — love — reign, so that, as in heaven the movement and life of the luminaries are accomplished lovingly, harmoniously — Thy will — so likewise harmoniously, lovingly may our life go here according to Thy will. The food of life — that is, of love toward men, of intercourse with men — give us in the present; and forgive, make it that what was before should have no influence upon me, upon my life, and therefore I impute to no one of men what they have done before against me. Lead me not into temptation that seduces me from without, but chiefly — deliver me from the evil one, from the evil within me. In it is pride, in it is the desire to do what one wishes, in it are all misfortunes — from it deliver me!
>
> Please do not show my letter to everyone. It is unclear, strange, what I write; but he who walks the roads that I do will understand me — you. I prayed, as always, with joy and a consciousness of reviving. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death. This I have learned through my own flanks. I did not love, I had malice toward those near me, and I was dying and died. I began to fear death — not to fear it, but to stand bewildered before it. But I had only to restore love, and I rose again. God help us not to die. Tomorrow, if I am alive, I shall go to Moscow. Come, we will talk everything over. I want very much to work, but for a long while now I have had no strength. I had forgotten Christ's first commandment: be not angry. So simple, so little, and so immense. If there be one man whom you do not love — you are lost, dead. This I have learned by experience."

His friend, of course, fulfilled his wish — did not, during his lifetime, show this letter "to everyone." But now, when his bodily covering has mouldered away, for his spirit there is already no longer "everyone" and "not everyone," and we hold that the publication of this letter will only add a new bright ray to the life of his great soul.

But the discord of ideas in his family life yielded to no attempts on L. N.'s part.

In one letter of this same period S. A. categorically declares: "In our life — the life which I am supposed to be leading — one cannot fall in with Lyovochka's convictions."

It is hard to conceive a more tragic setting for L. N.'s life. All ablaze with self-denying service to his neighbour, having simplified his life, finding solace in plain peasant labour both in the country and in the town, he meets among the people close to him either complete lack of understanding, or indifference, or hostility, or a contemptuously condescending irony.

Often, wearied by this struggle, L. N. would drive or walk away from the town to Yasnaya Polyana, and there rest in the simple, labouring life. Having laid in a store of strength, he would return again to the family. Here is how S. A. describes one of these returns in a letter to her sister T. A.:

> "...Lyovochka returned on the 1st of November. We all grew cheerful at his arrival, and he himself is very sweet, calm, merry, and brisk. Only he has changed his habits yet again. Everything new, with each new day. He gets up at seven o'clock, when it is still dark. He pumps water for the whole house, hauls a huge tub on a sledge, saws long logs, and chops them, and stacks them by the cord. He does not eat white bread; he positively goes nowhere. Today I drove him in the little sledge to have his portrait taken, to the photographer in Gazetny Lane..."

How great was his joy when he noticed in the family glimmers of a true understanding of life.

One of the first to give him this joy was his elder daughter, Tatyana Lvovna. Here is what L. N. wrote to her in October 1885:

> "...For the first time you have expressed yourself clearly, that your view of things has changed. This is my one dream and possible joy, which I do not dare to hope for — that of finding in my own family brothers and sisters, and not that which I have seen until now: estrangement and deliberate opposition, in which I see either contempt, not for me but for the truth, or a fear of something..."

And at once L. N. tries to give his daughter advice on how to fortify herself upon this new path:

> "...It is more important for you to tidy your room and to cook your own soup (it would be well if you could arrange it — could squeeze through all that hinders this, especially opinion) than whether you marry well or ill."

This letter he writes from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow, and in such terms he describes his own way of life:

> "...I live very well. I see no one except A. Petr. (whose resources are very limited), and if I believed in happiness — that is, if I thought one ought to notice and to desire it — I should say that I am happy. I do not see how the days pass, but I think I am doing what one ought, what that which set me here to live wants of me."

The times of this hard inner struggle alternate with intense creative work, and this alternation is joyfully noted by his family.

In September S. A. writes to her sister:

> "...Without you he has written a wonderful tale, read it to us, and we were all delighted. Now he is carefully reworking it and giving it to my edition. Then he has taken all those fragments to look over and correct that are to go into the new edition: 'The Story of a Horse,' 'The Death of Iv. Ilyich,' and others. In a week they must be printed, since everything is drawing to a close."

And further on, already in December of the same year:

> "...The other day Lyovochka read us a fragment from a story he has written — a little gloomy, but very good; the way he writes it is just as though he had lived through something important, when he read even so small a fragment. He named it to us: 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich.' Lyovochka has been very sweet all this while, brisk, affectionate even toward strangers. He is finishing off an article and promises, after this article, to continue this story he read to us. God grant it."

A few words must be said about the tale that Sofya Andreyevna mentions in her letter to her sister.

Thinking about literature for the people, L. N. set himself, in the artistic form of a folk tale — with all the usual magical trappings and devils — to express in humorous form his critical attitude toward the contemporary order, and, in the lightest, most accessible form, to set forth his social ideals. And at this time, in the autumn of 1885, he writes the tale "Of Ivan the Fool and His Two Brothers, Simeon the Warrior and Taras the Big-Belly, and the Mute Sister Malanya, and the Old Devil and the Three Little Devils." Now this tale has flown around the whole world in millions of copies, translated into many languages. Its simple but profound meaning will for a long time yet serve as a guiding thread in the resolution of many complex questions of social life. In "Simeon the Warrior and His Kingdom" L. N., by his own words, makes apt artistic-critical allusions to the development of militarism in the kingdom of Nicholas I, while "Taras the Big-Belly" is a prototype of the capitalist order that comes to take its place. And the single law of Ivan's kingdom — "whoever has calluses on his hands, come to the table; but whoever has no calluses, to him the scraps with the swine" — will serve as an eternal indictment of the parasitism of the privileged classes. Of course, this irony was not understood, and many of the intelligentsia, out of an excess of cleverness, took offence at this tale, seeing in it an insult to all thinking humanity, and openly boycotted it.

Among the common people, by our own personal experience, it had great success.

The very creation of artistic works was for him poisoned by the consciousness that everything he wrote would be sold at a dear price to the rich, that a very small part of it would become accessible to the people, and that the money realized from the sale of an expensive edition would support that idle and luxurious life which he had pitilessly condemned for himself, and which he held to be a moral, intellectual, and physical poison for his children.

The complete collected works of L. N. Tolstoy, with which S. A. was occupied at that time, was her first venture in the publishing field.

L. N.'s first impulse, when his Christian views had fully taken shape, was to renounce all literary rights and to begin giving away his property to the poor.

This intention of his met with so passionate a protest from his family — chiefly from his wife — that L. N. came to doubt the rightness of his decision. He was categorically informed that if he began giving away his property, then a guardianship would be established over him for prodigality arising from mental derangement. Thus, the madhouse threatened him, and his property would nevertheless remain in the hands of the family. So he changed his decision.

In seeking a way to rid himself of property without violating the interests of the family, or, at the least, without rousing in the family an unkind feeling, L. N. tried yet another expedient.

Coming into Sofya Andreyevna's room, he said to her approximately the following: "It is so hard for me to own and dispose of property that I have firmly decided to rid myself of it, and so I turn first to you: take everything — the house, and the land, and the works — and dispose of them as you see fit; I will make out for you whatever document is needed."

Of course, this was uttered with great agitation in his voice, and was met in the same way by Sofya Andreyevna. Not feeling herself able to take everything upon her own responsibility, she categorically refused. "If you consider this an evil, why do you want to heap it all on me?" — she answered him, parrying the blow.

Then there remained to Lev Nikolaevich only one thing: to resort to half-measures and to a gradual freeing of himself from property — which he did in the course of his life.

The first such half-measure was the transfer to S. A. of the right to publish his works.

The first edition of the collected works of L. N. by Sofya Andreyevna was made in 1885, in twelve volumes; volume XII was wholly new and contained several folk tales written by L. N. for *Posrednik* ("The Intermediary"): the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," "Kholstomer," and fragments of his article "What Then Must We Do?" that had been passed by the censorship. Unfortunately, this volume XII was not sold separately, which was of course profitable for the publisher, since readers, in order to obtain volume XII, had to buy the whole collection; this measure called forth the just indignation of many admirers of L. N., and, among other things, coarse attacks in print from the then-popular critic N. K. Mikhailovsky. All this, of course, brought L. N. no little suffering.

In March L. N. went to the Crimea, in order to see off there his great friend Prince Leonid Dmitrievich Urusov, who was then vice-governor in Tula.

A few words ought to be said about this remarkable man. He had a peculiar influence upon Lev Nikolaevich. Notwithstanding his high administrative position, he shared L. N.'s views and was one of the first men of the higher circle to express his sympathy to L. N. He translated *What I Believe* into French under the title *Ma religion* and published this book in Paris. This edition served, probably, as the chief instrument for the spread of L. N.'s new views in Western Europe and America. Of Prince Urusov's other labours, let us point to his translation into Russian of the *Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius* — a translation that for a long time remained the only one in the Russian language. Prince Urusov, living in Tula, often visited L. N. both in Moscow and at Yasnaya Polyana, and was a friend of the house in the Tolstoy family. A grave illness compelled him to withdraw to the Crimea, whither, in the spring of 1885, Lev Nikolaevich saw him off, and where he died in the autumn of that same year.

At first L. N. joined Urusov at the estate of the latter's relatives, the Maltsovs, the well-known wealthy factory-owners, in the Bryansk district, Orel Province, at their estate of Dyadkovo. In his letters to Sofya Andreyevna L. N. describes the extraordinary luxury of the Maltsovs' style of life. L. N. regarded it with tolerance, as a guest; what interested him, as always, was the life of the working people around them. He inspects the factories, the workrooms, goes to the market, and describes his impressions thus in a letter to his wife:

> "Up to now I have not happened to write. And it is shameful to live without work. Everyone works, only not I. Yesterday I spent the time in the square, in the taverns, at the factory, alone, without a cicerone, and saw and heard much that was interesting, and saw the real labouring people. And when I see them, there always come to me, more strongly than usual, these words: everyone works, only not I. Today again at Maltsov's, in this luxury. In two days again in luxury and idleness. It seems as though one were moving from one almshouse into another."

On the 11th of March they set off, making their way south. At Kharkov there was a halt, and L. N. took advantage of it to visit his friend Rusanov and the friend of his deceased brother Dmitry, Professor Jacobi.

In a letter to his wife he describes this visit to Kharkov thus:

> "I am writing from Kharkov, at eight o'clock in the evening. We leave in an hour. At Kharkov we stopped seven hours. I left the prince and went into the town on the horse-tram, which comes right up to the station, to buy provisions, mineral waters for Urusov, and to carry out Dmokhovskaya's commission through Rusanov. I was at the court, waited a long time for Rusanov, and at the end did wait for him. Then I went past the university, recalled Jacobi, Mitenka's comrade, professor of hygiene, asked for him, and called on him. He is with his family — a sweet, intelligent, and pleasant man. We had not seen each other for forty years. He did not recognize me. We talked together, and he took me straight to Rusanov, at whose place I drank tea, and so I have come along. Both the one and the other impression are very pleasant."

In one of the following letters L. N. relates his impressions of the Crimea, whose nature acted upon L. N. especially through its memories; in a letter from the station "Baidar Gates," halfway from Sevastopol to Simeiz, where they had to feed the horses, L. N. writes:

> "We are feeding here and have met a gentleman travelling to Moscow and also feeding. This turned out to be the younger Abrikosov. He recognized me and had read me, and so had his wife, whom he was taking to the Crimea; and I am taking advantage of his arriving before the post. The weather is splendid, hot in the mountains over which we travelled. Urusov took a landau that does not open, and worse than a coach, and I climbed up onto the trunk, onto the box. I rode and did not so much think as let new, good thoughts of a new order come running to me. Among other things, one: how about that! I am alive and can still live! And another: how to live out this last stretch in a godly way — that is, well. This is very stupid, but it is joyful to me.
>
> The flowers are blooming, and in a blouse alone it is hot. The forest is bare, but in the keen spring air the scents mingle — now of a withered leaf, now of human excrement, now of a violet — and all is jumbled together. We drove through those places that seemed impregnable, where the enemy batteries had been, and, strange to say, the memory of the war is even joined with a feeling of vigour and youth. What if it had been the memory of some national festival, of a common cause — for such things can be! Still on the box I composed an English milord. And it is good. Again I thought, on the occasion that Urusov, sitting in the coach, kept urging on the driver, while I came to love, sitting on the box, both the driver and the horses — that how unhappy are you, rich people, who know neither that in which you ride, nor that in which you live (that is, how the house is built), nor what you wear, nor what you eat. The peasant and the poor man know all this, prize it, and receive more joy from it. You see that I am brisk and kind in spirit. If only there were not the uncertainty about you and the children. I kiss them all. I embrace you. They have brought up the horses for Abrikosov, he is leaving."

Living in the Crimea with Urusov at his relative Maltsov's, L. N., as was his custom, looked closely at the life of the people. In one of the letters to his wife he writes:

> "Today I again got up early, and, having drunk coffee, went with Urusov to a Tatar village. There we met an old man of sixty-five: he is going to work two versts away, up the mountain. I proposed to him that he hire me to work. He agreed, for a rouble. But this turned out to be a joke. He had taken me for a rich man. And he began to offer to sell me land. And he showed the land and praised it. For six desyatins he asks 6,000. There are vineyards there, and tobacco, and chestnuts, and figs, and walnuts. I went with him as far as his plantation. We clambered over the rocks, and in a remote spot we found, in a little hollow — his four sons, in white shirts, are digging up the vineyard with mattocks, while he prunes. I worked a while with them and went home."

The artist's desire for new impressions was so strong that he did not even wish to work with the pen: in the same letter he writes:

> "I have not set about working: too sorry to lose the chance of seeing." But nevertheless, yielding to Chertkov's requests, he writes there a small story for the people, under the title "Ilyas." This story was published by *Posrednik*, both in a kopeck booklet and in the form of a text to a *lubok* picture drawn for this purpose by the artist Kivshenko. Taking advantage of his being in the Crimea, Lev Nikolaevich called in at the estate of N. Ya. Danilevsky, Mshatka, in order to make the acquaintance of the friend of his friend, N. N. Strakhov. The meeting was very joyful and left in both of them the very best memory.

On this Crimean journey a strange occurrence befell L. N. Having stopped at Sevastopol, L. N. went to walk over the former sites of the fortifications that had served as the theatre of military operations in the Sevastopol campaign. While walking, he found an old shell. Returning to Sevastopol, he showed this shell to an artillery officer of his acquaintance, who had served with him at Sevastopol, and the latter explained to him that this shell was very rare, that in the Sevastopol campaign it had only been tried out, and that, so far as he recalled, only one shot had been fired with this shell. And when he began to recall the circumstances of this shot, it turned out that this shot had been fired precisely by that battery which L. N. had commanded. Thus, after thirty years, he had found the single shell that he himself had fired.

On the 24th of March L. N. returned to Moscow.

He continues his correspondence with his ailing friend Prince L. D. Urusov, who was still living and slowly fading away in the Crimea. In June L. N. wrote him, among other things, the following definition of "What is the word?":

> "...Of late I am more and more convinced that men quite vainly pride themselves on having an advantage over the animals in the supposed gift of the word — that is, the capacity to communicate their own and, consequently, to understand the thoughts of others. Such a gift men in general have never had and have not. And the saying of the diplomat, that the word was given to men in order to conceal their thoughts, is not at all a joke, but a dreadful truth. I would only add this further: that it is used by men for the same purpose for which it is used by birds — by nightingales — for the pleasure of combinations of sounds and formal images, for personal pleasure, but in no way for the communication of thoughts... It may very well be that some nightingale, too, or a cuckoo, has whistled or cuckooed some new thought as to how to improve the life of these birds. The results are just the same. And are not the results of my and your logical arguments just the same, *comme si l'on chantait*. Yes, in the beginning was the word; the word is the holy of holies of the soul, and not the whistle of a bird. And this word is the one divinity that we know, and it alone makes and re-creates the world. It is dreadful only when one confounds it with the word — the product of the human larynx, tongue, and lips."

N. Ya. Danilevsky, having become acquainted with L. N. and grown interested in his personality, inquires about him of Strakhov; and the latter, having come to Yasnaya Polyana that same year to stay a while, writes to Danilevsky of how L. N. and those living with him pass the time. Here is this interesting letter:

> "...I found Yasnaya Polyana filled with women and children — some thirty persons — and among them two men, Lev Nikolaevich and Kuzminsky. Such it was fourteen years ago too, when I first drove out to it, only younger and not so populous; many have been born since then... L. N. was unwell and out of sorts, and complains to this day, though he has recovered a little. He set about at once reading me his article on money, very witty, but not fully grasping the question. Then I read the old, unfinished story 'The Horse,' then the new stories: 'Where Love Is, There Is God,' 'If You Let the Fire Slip, You Won't Put It Out,' 'The Candle,' 'Two Old Men.' All this he does for those popular editions which I showed you; the two last stories are astonishing in their artistry and in their wonderful meaning; they are taken from folk tales. He occupies himself exclusively with this.
>
> I sleep in his study, get up at eight o'clock, drink coffee and breakfast. About eleven he comes to me, himself tidies and sweeps the study, washes, and we go to the croquet — that is, under the maples, beside the croquet lawn, where the elder members of both families drink their morning coffee. After an hour or an hour and a half we disperse; he goes off to the study, and I to the pavilion, in which I am now writing to you, and which appeared only this spring. At five o'clock dinner; each family separately. At eight o'clock the children's tea; at ten o'clock tea and supper for the grown-ups; both families come together and pass the time until midnight, then disperse. It is exceedingly crowded and motley; between dinner and tea there are walks, bathing, and every kind of idleness. His correspondence is enormous — that is, he receives many letters with requests for money and for advice, which he does not answer. But, besides this, he corresponds with people working at the publishing of booklets and pictures for the people. In a word, his literary activity is in full swing. His wife is now reading the proofs of the new edition of the collected works, and I have been helping; besides, she is putting in order and copying out all the old manuscripts. In the new collection something unpublished too will be printed."

This same spring of 1885 I received from Lev Nikolaevich my first letter. It is hard to convey the impression of rapture, of tenderness, and of a certain happy pride, when I took in my hands the envelope with the address written in his large, peculiar hand.

Here is this letter:

> "Many thanks to you, dear Pavel Ivanovich, for your visit to Gribovsky and for your letter — so circumstantial and clear. If he is mad, then it is not for me to judge of his madness, because I myself have long been just such a madman, in my sixth decade. And in my second decade, like him, I should long ago have been sitting in one of those dens which are called hospitals.
>
> Please, go to Medvedsky and convey to him your own and my impression — from Gribovsky's letter and from yours. Gribovsky's views are very interesting to me. If you see him again and he expresses them to you, let me know them in general outline. If he considers Christianity the truth, then we must coincide. Very, very grateful to you, and I rejoice in communion with you. Lev Tolstoy."

V. M. Gribovsky, for the visit to whom, and for the reports concerning whom, L. N. thanks me, was then an eighteen-year-old schoolboy; now he occupies a considerable post in the pedagogical world.

He had written to L. N. that, having read his *Confession*, he had felt a spiritual closeness to him, and he continues thus:

> "To you, a man far removed from me in social position, a man unknown to me, I wish to lay open my soul and to convey my thoughts for testing. At eleven I was an atheist; at sixteen I reached the thought of the uselessness of life and of suicide. Fate brought me to literal destitution, made me bear every sort of humiliation, led me into dens of wild dissipation and debauchery; I saw every kind of suffering of our educated and our simple proletariat; I took part in the conspiracies of the Poles; I moved about in every sort of political circle; I sat in a madhouse; I was under police surveillance — and with all this I am a schoolboy, I am eighteen years old, and I am the son of a poor retired official. But I bore all the hardships, got onto a certain road, made clear to myself the absurd mechanism of all the circles, with my own suffering understood what I needed, and came to know a new religion."

This eighteen-year-old youth, who had lived through so much, who had read through all the philosophers and theologians and found in them no satisfaction, writes to L. N. with youthful ardour and naïveté: "You are the first who wishes to free philosophy from its enchanted circle, to apply it to actual life and to make it accessible to everyone, founding thereby a new school. As a man, as a writer, as a philosopher — you are a remarkable personality, and one may bow down before you."

It was just at this time that I was with L. N. in Moscow, and he asked me to call on Gribovsky and to convey to him my impression — which I, of course, hastened to do; and the result of this errand was this first letter to me from Lev Nikolaevich.

We became very close then, Gribovsky and I, and he helped me in the work of *Posrednik* and zealously spread our editions.

He at last visited L. N. and gave several articles to *Nedelya* (The Week) with an account of his visit; in these articles Gribovsky, artfully interweaving reality with fancy, makes L. N. answer his questions and rejoinders with the words of his own *Confession*, then still under the ban. And in this form he succeeded in getting into print a considerable part of Lev Nikolaevich's *Confession*.

L. N.'s communication with Gribovsky continued in writing too. The youth's ardour and impetuosity, notwithstanding all his reverence for L. N., did not permit him to free himself from the social superstitions he had taken in and absorbed, and these superstitions hindered him from fully understanding L. N.'s thoughts. Especially hard for him was it to assimilate the teaching of non-resistance to evil by force. And so he turns to L. N. with a letter in which he expresses his doubts on this point, and receives from him the following reply:

> "Not to resist evil by force does not mean not to resist evil, but means not to resist evil by force. It grieves me that you, understanding so subtly and truly much else, have got muddled in this — not in your reasoning, but in your wishing. To prove the uselessness and inapplicability of all the limitations of this principle is useless. They are too clear and indubitable. It is said only this: that men, under the influence of suffering from pain, from offence, and from evil in general, are inclined to do that to which animals are inclined — to give back evil for evil. And so it is said that this is a temptation of error. What is there here to interpret? It is just the same as if it were said: men are inclined to look at what excites their sensuality. By not looking, it will be easier to conquer sensuality. And here comes the official who does not wish to give up the ballet, and begins to cross-examine me: how is one not to look at naked women? Well, but, he will say, one may pull out a drowning woman, one may examine patients as a doctor? Search in your own soul, dear friend, whether there is not in it something superfluous that hinders you from understanding the clear and simple. Else you do what I often meet with. A man lives in a house built without a plumb-line and a square, and, applying the plumb-line and the square, sees that the house is crooked; but, in order not to say this, he begins to make geometrical calculations by which it should come out that obtuse or acute angles are right ones. Mend your health; I am very glad to know you, and I have come to love you. Have you read Rousseau's *Émile* and *Confession*? — Read them. L. T." (*).

(* The Archive of P. I. Biryukov. *)

Sending me a copy of this letter, Gr. adds: "This letter shed much light upon my understanding of L. N.'s teaching." After my departure from Petersburg, at the end of the 1880s, our communication ceased, and Gribovsky, continuing his education, took a professorial chair in one of the Russian universities.

My gravitation toward Lev Nikolaevich was then very strong: by some inner instinct I was aware that on this path I should find good. But my conscious, theoretical convictions had as yet by no means assumed an integral, formed character. Doubts assailed me, the fear of losing the old traditional faith, and when the voice of the higher reason called me forward and encouraged me to the struggle, it seemed to me a tempter, summoning me to perdition. And so, in one of these moments of wavering, I turned to L. N. for advice and help, having set forth to him, as best I could, the chief motives of my doubts; and he answered me with a long letter, in which he more than once cites passages from my letter and refutes my arguments.

Needless to say what a strong impression this letter made upon me, what order it brought into my then-wandering thoughts. Here is this letter:

> "In vain, P. I., do you not listen to your Mephistopheles: he says nothing but sense. If you listened to him and carried your conversation with him through to the end, you would never have the shadow of that doubt and dividedness which I consider the most dangerous and pitiful spiritual disease. He says: 'Believe your reason and the immutable laws of its logic; look at the bloody history of mankind, vanishing into infinity, and, probably, having no end. This is the most important thing, which one must always keep in view.' Again he says to you: 'In vain do you think to establish good by some (here it is unclear what means he is denying) senseless, childish way; but embrace with your reason, armed by science, the whole boundless world, and do not think to violate the laws of cause and effect and of development. You have the power to direct the action of these laws for the good of yourself and of others: study them, in order to be able to make use of them.' All this he says admirably. This alone is what I too say and think. And I do not know why you call such a reasonable voice a 'reptile.' It alone is what one must follow. First of all one must learn which of all the laws governing the world are, firstly, the most important, and, secondly (the chief thing), which I am called to make use of — that is, those whose application is most accessible to me. And by these considerations one must establish the right order in the study of the laws and their application: first to understand and learn to make use of those laws which are most accessible to me, on which the happiness of myself and others more depends, and which are therefore more binding upon me; then, having learned these laws and applying them, to occupy oneself with the following ones, in turn (in the sense of accessibility and bindingness), and so on, down to the very last laws accessible to the mind of man. And therefore the voice tells you quite justly: 'Embrace the whole boundless world with reason armed by science...' Science consists in just this: in knowing this order, in knowing what we can and ought to know first, what after, and that which we cannot know. It says justly, too, that every other path is a childish dream. The renewal of the world by means of spectral analysis or of love is one and the same childish dream; that which is not a dream is only activity in accord with the immutable laws of reason. The voice also advises us to remember the history of mankind, full of sufferings and acts of violence. And in this I agree with it. This one must always remember. To remember that these sufferings have been lessened and are being lessened in mankind only thanks to the activity of reason armed by science (understanding by science not the counting of insects, of stars, the telephone, and spectral analysis, but the study, according to its importance, accessibility, and bindingness, of the laws of the world). And that I, since I am a being endowed with that means which lessens sufferings, am bound to apply it — the more so since this application affords to man, to me, the one good, free, not destroyed by death."

Our little educational centre had already begun to draw upon itself the attention of public men, and to the depot there began to come, from various quarters, requests for the compiling of libraries. Among other things there came a request for the compiling of a library for prisoners in a jail.

I turned for advice to Lev Nikolaevich, and he answered me:

> "...I was unwell and therefore did not answer you soon. Libraries in jails are a very important matter, and to my mind to occupy oneself with them is a very good deed. This is a time of leisure, which the working man often does not know all his life. How many, I know, inner upheavals have been accomplished in prisons among the political prisoners, beginning with the Decembrists. I know of cases among the peasants too. Syutaev asked my advice: whether it would be good to do some not-sinful deed, but such a one as would get him put into jail — in order to preach there. Into the prison library, I think, it would be good to include the Gospel of Matthew at two kopecks and the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (the Kiev edition). It is sold in Kiev. Have you it in the depot? How well it would be to print it separately and cheaply — even the whole, but better the first five chapters. In the journal *Detskaya pomoshch* (Children's Aid) my translation has been printed, with a preface and an afterword. Might one not try to get it through the censorship, without mentioning, above all, my name?"

That same summer Lev Nikolaevich was visited by another Danilevsky — Grigory Petrovich, the well-known writer and the then editor of *Pravitelstvenny Vestnik* (The Government Herald).

His description of his visit to Yasnaya Polyana gives an interesting picture of L. N.'s way of life and thought at that time, and therefore, supplementing the picture sketched by N. N. Strakhov, we give here several extracts from his article.

> "The stone, two-storeyed Yasnaya Polyana house, in which Count L. N. Tolstoy now lives almost without leaving it for some twenty-five years already (since 1862), was remodelled by him from his father's wing. The place where the great old house had stood is to the left and not far from the new one. It is overgrown with lindens, marked out in their thicket by the remains of a few stones of the former foundation. Here, beneath the lindens, stand plain benches and a table, at which in summertime the count's family gathers for dinner and tea. A bell, fastened to the trunk of an old elm, summons hither, beneath the lindens, the members of the count's family from the house and the garden.
>
> By this elm there usually gather, among others, the Yasnaya Polyana and other neighbouring inhabitants who have need to talk with the count about their village wants. He comes out here and willingly converses with them, helping them by word and deed. He, not far from his own yard, some fifteen years ago, planted a whole little grove of young firs. The firs have risen to almost twice a man's height and have given no little comfort to their planter. Recently the count took it into his head to walk out into the field, to admire the firs, and returned from there much grieved. More than a dozen of his favourite, handsome firs proved to have been pitilessly cut down at the root and carried off out of the grove. He was vexed both at the occurrence and at his own displeasure. 'Again my old former feeling of vexation at such a loss has returned,' he said; and having learned that, by the household inquiries, the culprit proved to be a household thief, who had secretly carted off the firs into the town just before a holiday, he asked one thing only: that this case should not be brought to the knowledge of the countess — his wife.
>
> The count spoke with sympathy of art, of his native literature and its best representatives. He warmly mourned the death of Turgenev, of Melnikov-Pechersky, and of Dostoevsky. Speaking of the sensitive, loving soul of Turgenev, he heartily regretted that this writer, so devoted to Russia, so supremely artistic, had had to live the best years of his mature creative work outside his fatherland, far from sincere friends and deprived of the joys of a native, loving family.
>
> 'He was an independent, searching mind to the end of his life,' the count L. N. expressed himself of Turgenev, 'and I, notwithstanding our once fleeting quarrel, always held him in high esteem and warmly loved him. He was a true, independent artist, who did not stoop to a conscious service of the fleeting demands of the moment. He might err, but even his errors were sincere.'
>
> Most sympathetically of all the count spoke of Dostoevsky, recognizing in him an inimitable psychologist and knower of the heart, and a wholly independent writer of independent convictions, whom for long they did not forgive in certain layers of literature, just as one German, according to Carlyle, could not forgive the sun the circumstance that one cannot at any given moment light one's cigar from it.
>
> ...We fell to talking of the various artistic devices in literature, painting, and music. 'Recently I happened to read one book,' said, among other things, the count L. N., halting before some little logs thrown across a brook, 'these were the poems of a young Spanish poet who had died. Besides the remarkable talent of this writer, I was occupied by his biography. His biographer cites the account given of him by an old woman, his nurse. She, among other things, noticed with alarm that her charge not infrequently passed nights without sleep, sighed, uttered aloud some words, went out by moonlight into the field, to the trees, and there remained for whole hours. One night it even seemed to her that he had gone mad. The young man rose, dressed in the dark, and went to the nearest well. The nurse after him. She sees that he drew up a bucket of water and began to pour it out little by little upon the ground; he poured it out, drew up another, and again began to pour it out. The nurse in tears: "the lad has gone off his head." But the young man did this with the aim of seeing and hearing more closely how, in the still night, by the moon's radiance, the streams of water pour and splash. This he needed for his new poem. In this instance he was verifying his memory and the poetic impressions that had lodged in it — by nature herself, just as painters in certain cases have recourse to the aid of models, whom they set in the requisite positions and dress in the necessary garments. Reading my own and other writers, I involuntarily feel which of them is true to nature and to the task he has taken up, and which is false. Some fashionable and much-lauded author, especially among the foreign ones, you cannot get through from the first page, however you strain. Even the threat of corporal punishment, it seems, could not make me read certain an author...'"

Soon, in the conversation, the land question was touched upon, and L. N. expressed to Danilevsky several original thoughts:

> "...In the wake of the visible and radical rout of the old gentry landed estate, in a certain part of society there is a particularly ardent and sincere endeavour to encourage and to force upon the peasants the purchase of gentry and other lands. But for what? Is it in order that there should be no landlords in the world at all? It turns out that it is by no means with that view, but in order at once to invent, artificially to make, new landlord-peasants. And not only that: into this they have drawn, besides the former serfs, who never thought of it, the state peasants too, turning them from free users, quit-renters of the free crown lands, into bondaged landed proprietors — that is, again into landlords. But who will guarantee that all this will not, in the course of time, seem insufficient to the new landlord-peasants, and that they, for their harsh rural toil and for their village privations and burdens, will not justly begin to seek the former privileges, and, among other things, to become noblemen? They forget the example of China, of Turkey, of the greater part of the ancient East. There all the land is crown land, state land, and only those make use of it, for a certain quit-rent to the government, to the treasury, out of all estates, who actually, by one means or another, by personal labour or by capital, work it. For such a purpose the buying-up into the treasury, and through the mediation of the treasury, of private lands would rather have both its justification and an outcome useful to the state. To this manner of using the land the attention of Western and, especially, of American scholars has long been turned — for example, George and others. This, beyond doubt, is a matter of the distant future, but, amid contemporary European doctrines, one ought not to forget that too by which the great ancient East lives and on which, through a series of millennia, it is founded."

In the conversation with Danilevsky we meet for the first time L. N.'s reference to the writings and the views of Henry George. Shortly before this, L. N. had written to Chertkov:

> "I was unwell for a week and was absorbed in George and his latest and first book, *Progress and Poverty*, which produced a very strong impression upon me. Read it when you have time. Obolensky must read it. This book has been noticed, but not appreciated, because it destroys all that scientific cobweb, the Spencer-and-Mill one — all that pounding of water — and directly summons men to a moral consciousness and to action, and even defines the action. There are weaknesses in it, as in everything human, but this is real human thought and heart, and not scientific trash. I have arranged here to find out his address, and I want to write him a letter. I see in him a brother, one of those whom, by the teaching of the apostles, one loves more than one's own soul."

Subsequently L. N. laboured much over the spread of the ideas of Henry George, of which we shall make mention in its place.