Source: https://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/bio/biryukov/biografiya-biryukov-3-4.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-04.md.
In the autumn of that same year L. N. was visited by a former Russian émigré, the American William Frey.
Before relating their meeting, a few words should be said about the personality of Frey himself.
William Frey, whose real name was Vladimir Konstantinovich Geins, Russian by birth, by upbringing, and by the beginnings of his public activity, was educated in military schools, served in the Finland Regiment, and went through two military academies, the Artillery and the General Staff; already from his youth he was distinguished by outstanding abilities, carried out commissions in the most exact mathematical works and, besides his special education, possessed an all-round scientific learning. Disdaining the brilliant career that was opening before him, he, moved by higher moral impulses, emigrated in 1868 to North America, where he founded an agricultural farm on communistic principles. Frey’s commune fell apart after a few years; then he passed into a new commune, founded in the 1870s in Kansas by the Russian émigrés Tchaikovsky, Malikov, K. N. Alekseyev, and others. In this commune, besides the strong moral influence of his personality, Frey showed himself also as an author-popularizer of scientific knowledge. This commune too fell apart, and Frey, after long years of wandering, in the course of which he passed through the most varied stages of so-called “black labour,” removed to England.
Having gone to America a socialist-communist, he returned thence an orthodox positivist — that is, a follower of Auguste Comte, the founder of the “religion of humanity.” Frey accepted not only the propositions of Comte in his positive philosophy and classification of the sciences, but also all the propositions of his positive politics, morals, and religion, rejected by the greater part of European scholars and shared now by a small group of people forming a special church, which has preserved, unfortunately, under new names almost the whole of the Catholic cult and the Catholic hierarchy.
In the fact of Frey’s acceptance of this religion there was expressed his strong moral need to subordinate all modern science to social aspirations and to religious-moral ideals. In this striving to bring into accord the method that is in essence subjective, the religious, with the method that is in essence objective, that of positive science, and in the impossibility of attaining this, lies the whole tragedy of the matchlessly pure and strong soul of this remarkable man.
Throughout his long life in America Frey did not forget Russia and the Russians. The disturbances of the 1880s called forth in him a warm interest and a regret over so many lives spent with such doubtful results. It seemed to him that the religion of humanity ought to pacify the agitated minds and give a right outlet to the social instincts of Russian society.
And so in the summer of 1885 he went to Russia, and there it was that he learned of the activity of L. N., of his influence upon the living part of Russian society, of his writings, which were being circulated in manuscript in thousands of copies throughout Russia. Although in England he had had the opportunity of becoming acquainted with some of them, he had not pictured to himself the significance they had for Russian society.
His first thought was, as an apostle of the idea dear to him, to draw L. N. into the propaganda of the religion of Comte. He wrote him a respectful letter, in which he set forth the essence of his views, expressed a critical view of the writings of L. N., and, with complete tolerance toward his views, invited him to unite in a common effort for the good of humanity.
In order to understand their further relations more clearly, let us cite from this letter several thoughts that express the essence of the religion of humanity.
The whole teaching of the “religion of humanity” was concentrated by its founder into the following formula:
“In the name of humanity, love is our principle, order the foundation, and progress the aim of our activity. To live for others. To live openly.”
Further follows the development of each proposition of this formula.
Love excludes violence.
“…Violence against a single man,” says Frey, “becomes as terrible as against this or that part of a beloved being.”
“Brotherhood — the full, unconditional brotherhood of all men — replaces for us that half-and-half brotherhood which was realized by Christianity.”
“Equality ceases to be a remote possibility of the future: it becomes an indubitable fact in the present for everyone who understands that all the functions of the social organism are equally necessary and useful for the life of the whole.”
“Order means submission to the laws of nature, independently of whether they please us or not.”
This rule, at first sight quite natural, may easily lead to a complete indifferentism in the social sphere.
And indeed, Frey draws from this proposition the following conclusion:
“Our antipathies to the law-court, to the present economic order, to war must be tempered by historical and psychological considerations, in part expressed earlier. We see in them factors of social education, absolutely necessary in the beginning, conditionally useful now, and destined to pass into other, higher forms.
Progress is the aim of all our activity. Every man must take part in the general progress, must further it, and one of the chief means to this is moral self-perfecting.”
To live for others: in this principle Frey considers himself wholly at one with Lev Nikolaevich, and polemizes no longer with him, but with those European scholars and individualist philosophers who, seeing the immediate unrealizability of this ideal in practical life, cast it aside as a useless dream.
Finally he passes to the last proposition — “to live openly.”
“This means,” says Frey, “that everyone who professes the religion of humanity must above all strive for the correspondence of his words with his deeds, so as never to lower himself to the level of the present-day ‘public men’ who, like thieves and swindlers, are ashamed of, and hide, their private life from others.”
The sincerity with which his letter was written moved L. N. to send Frey an invitation to come to him for a personal talk. Frey did not delay in making use of this invitation, and their meeting took place, to their mutual joy, in the autumn of that same year.
Here is how Frey himself relates this meeting in a letter addressed to Russian society:
“Soon after receiving my letter, Lev Tolstoy wrote me a brotherly invitation to come to him, in order to clear up, by word of mouth, the misunderstandings that always accompany the compressed exposition of a new opinion. I hastened to make use of his invitation and spent with him five days unforgettable to me (from 7 to 12 October), in the course of which we clearly understood one another and distinctly saw that the greater part of our disagreements is of a temporary, non-essential character. The few differences that still stand as it were an obstacle to a complete spiritual union must be ascribed only to the individual qualities and the peculiar courses of development of thought in each of us, and do not at all represent those incommensurabilities which arise from a difference in the predominant motive.”
And further on in the same letter he says:
“Five days were enough to make clear our resemblances and our differences on religious-moral questions. We not only understood one another, but parted bound together by a spiritual kinship, a mutual respect, and a deep sympathy, in which a difference of opinion not only ceases to irritate one another but, on the contrary, is recognized as a natural and necessary factor in the efforts of humanity to resolve the vital questions of our time.”
Frey had expected to find in Tolstoy a fanatic of his own idea, and was surprised at his broad tolerance, which went so far that L. N. was willing to add one of Comte’s rules to the commandments of Christ. Frey relates this thus:
“To what a degree the teaching of Tolstoy differs from the generally accepted Christianity, how far it is from the narrow exclusiveness and intolerance of the theological and metaphysical systems, how strongly there beats in its interpreter the living need to relate critically and scientifically to everything around him and to perfect himself continually — this can be seen from the fact that L. T., almost from the first words of our meeting, declared his gratitude to Comte for the ethical rule ‘to live openly,’ since by it (here I shall give Tolstoy’s words almost verbatim) ‘a gap in the moral teaching of Christ is admirably filled, and therefore the last commandment of positivism ought to stand alongside the five commandments of Christ.’ A man who readily completes his teaching from other sources, who sees in the spiritual communion of men the highest control of private life and the best means for determining the boundary of the fullest possible fulfilment of the laws of morality, who recognizes in the brotherly communal life of believers the best school for self-perfecting — such a man cannot be reproached with an attempt to resurrect the former hierarchical, petrified Christianity.”
Upon L. N. Frey produced the most favourable impression. In several letters to his friends he recalls this meeting. Thus, in a letter to his sister-in-law, T. A. Kuzminskaya, he writes as follows:
“…Without you, Frey was here; you have heard of him — he is interesting and good in more than vegetarianism alone. A pity you were not present with him. You would have learned much. He has left me with the very best recollection. I learned much, was taught by him much, and much, it seems to me, I did not manage to learn. He is interesting in that from him there breathes the fresh, strong, young, vast world of American life.
…He lived seventeen years for the most part in Russian and American communes, where no one has any property, where all work not with the ‘head’ but with their hands, and where many — both men and women — are very happy.”
Still more interesting is L. N.’s opinion of Frey in a letter to me, in which L. N. speaks of Frey as a future valuable collaborator on the popular journal then proposed for publication.
“…Thank A. M. for Frey. As it seems to me, she appraised him more highly than anyone. He stayed four days, and I was sorry both then and now — every day I am sorry — that he is not here. In the first place, a pure, sincere, serious nature; then a fund of knowledge — not bookish, but of life, the most important kind — about how people are to live with nature and among themselves — an abyss of it. I asked him to be a collaborator on our for-the-present fantastic journal, and he promised. He could conduct three departments: 1) Popular hygiene, for the poor, practical hygiene: how, with small means, both in the country and especially in the towns, people are to live in a healthy way. In my opinion, he knows more about this branch than the whole medical faculty. This he promised. 2) The technique of the first tools of work: the axe, the saw, the poker, washing-presses and devices for kneading dough, and the like. We spoke with you about this. This he did not promise, and, in my opinion, one must look for such a man — only not a theorist, but one who, like Frey, has himself done everything, himself using those devices and presses which he describes. 3) These are his notes about life in America, about labour, about training oneself to it, about life on a farm, about life in communities. He promised, but it is doubtful whether he will write this soon. He was at the school with me, at the evening reading, and began a conversation with the peasants. You should have seen how they gaped at his stories.”
After this meeting Frey went off to the south. Thence, from Simferopol, he sent Lev N. a second long letter, and besides this he wrote, among other things, to L. N.:
“…Keep my note until such time as I call on you on my way back to Peter. This will happen in the first half of December. Whether you are by that time at Yasnaya Polyana or in Moscow, I hope you will spare a part of your time for me. I, too, desire to see you and once more to have a heart-to-heart talk with you, before I leave Russia. Your warm participation in my work and your friendly, brotherly disposition will sustain me far more strongly than I had supposed at first, before my acquaintance with you. And therefore I wish to take of both the one and the other from you in the greatest possible quantity.”
The second meeting took place in Moscow, as Frey had foreseen, in December of that same year.
At this time L. N. was writing with enthusiasm about science and art in the last chapters of his book What Then Must We Do?
In the 29th chapter of this book L. N. makes a cursory survey of the religious and philosophical systems that satisfied the demand of the crowd — that is, that pandered to and justified its deviations from a righteous life.
Such a system was the teaching about the fall and the redemption of man, which had taken the place of the accusatory teaching of Christ; a like substitution, in the sphere of philosophy, was the spreading of the system of Hegel with its principle “all that exists is rational,” which had triumphed over the accusatory teachings of Rousseau, Pascal, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and others. In the place of Hegelianism there appeared a new scientific system, that of positive philosophy.
And so the whole 30th chapter is devoted to an annihilating critique of this teaching. When Frey came again to L. N. in Moscow, L. N. read him these two chapters.
Since one of the chief propositions of that teaching which Frey followed was the subordination of scientific activity to religious-moral principles, Lev Nikolaevich hoped to meet with Frey’s sympathy for the exposition of his thoughts about how a scientific system had taken the place of religion and had abolished the guiding moral principle.
And Frey did indeed respond very sympathetically to the 29th chapter — that is, to the one in which there are subjected to criticism, in general, all religious and scientific systems that exclude the moral guidance of men; but upon reading the 30th chapter, in which L. N. ranks Auguste Comte among the founders of teachings that justify the error of the crowd, like Malthus, Darwin, Spencer, and others, Frey was indignant and, having stayed the night at L. N.’s in the study, rose early the next morning and there and then, at L. N.’s table, wrote him a second letter with an earnest request to destroy the whole 30th chapter and to correct the 29th, not calling “positive” the reigning vindicatory scientific theory, and setting Auguste Comte apart from the number of the founders of such theories.
But Frey’s arguments did not convince L. N., and the 29th and 30th chapters remained in the book What Then Must We Do? in their former shape.
We happen by chance to have preserved two redactions of these chapters: the one that Frey read, and a later redaction, with many corrections, but not one of them corresponds to Frey’s arguments.
Soon after this meeting, having returned to Petersburg, Frey began to prepare for England. His mission in Russia was ended, though it had not given large visible results. He had succeeded in interesting a small circle of the intelligentsia in his views and had probably sown good seed, since everywhere he called forth toward himself a personal sympathy and, in departing from Russia, left there many friends.
The note which Frey had sent L. N. from Simferopol, and which contained in itself the result of the Yasnaya Polyana conversation — the summing-up of those conclusions to which, as Frey thought, they had both come after the five-day friendly meeting — this voluminous manuscript long lay with L. N. without being touched; at last, at Frey’s insistence, he read it through, sprinkled it over with his notes in the margins, and answered the fundamental theses in which Frey, at the end of the article, had summed up his thoughts.
We shall give here in full these interesting answers and the general conclusion of Lev Nikolaevich.
Frey’s thesis. 1. Morality is grafted onto men neither by science in general nor by that science which investigates the laws of morality.
L. N.’s answer. It is no concern of mine how it is grafted; and besides, I cannot know this.
Frey’s thesis. 2. The moral instincts are awakened in men by purely sympathetic influences: in private life — by the influences of moral people and of one’s surroundings; in mass life — by the influence of a being (real or fictitious, it is all the same) which religion clothes in concrete forms and sets, in the power, the loftiness, and the brilliance of its moral perfections, immeasurably above separate men.
L. N.’s answer. Religion does nothing of the kind.
Frey’s thesis. 3. Humanity is the sole being — it is all the same whether it be fictitious, hypothetical, or real and organic — capable of calling forth in the foremost classes of Europe, by intellectual development, a religious feeling, since it alone, indisputably, possesses all human perfections.
L. N.’s answer. There is no such being.
Frey’s thesis. 4. The religion of the future is therefore the religion of humanity; it preserves all that was good in the former religions (that is, love and self-improvement), but is free of their defects, being the religion of progress, of science, of socialism, and of tolerance.
L. N.’s answer. God grant that we have a religion, but what it will be, I do not know; I know only that a religion of progress, of science, of socialism, and of tolerance cannot be.
Frey’s thesis. 5. The artist is obliged to make people receptive to good, and therefore not to disdain their religious feeling.
L. N.’s answer. Such particular people, called artists, I do not know; I know the obligation of everyone to live reasonably.
Frey’s thesis. 6. Common sense and the practice of life alike require that those who desire radical changes should set apart their teaching and activity from the people who maintain the existing order.
L. N.’s answer. A side consideration, the resolution of a question not under examination.
Frey’s thesis. 7. And therefore you, Lev Nikolaevich, as a man and as an artist, are obliged to become an open preacher of the religion of humanity, granting to yourself and to every one of its followers complete freedom in the determination of the path, in the spheres not fully, or not at all, investigated by science.
L. N.’s answer. And therefore I shall try to live until death sinning as little as possible — that is, not departing from reason. Finally L. N. writes the following conclusion:
“The whole misunderstanding rests on this: that you, in speaking of religion, understand by it something quite other than what I understand and what Confucius, Lao-tzu, Buddha, Christ understood. With you, religion must be invented or, at the least, devised — and such a one as would act well upon men and would accord with science and would, as it were, gather together and embrace all things, warming people, encouraging them to good, but not disturbing their life. I, however, understand (I flatter myself with the hope that I am not the only one) religion quite otherwise. Religion is the consciousness of those truths which are common to, comprehensible to, all men in all conditions, in all times, and as indubitable as that two times two is four. The work of religion is the finding and the expression of these truths; and when this truth is expressed, it inevitably changes the life of men. And therefore that which you call a scheme is not at all the arbitrary assertion of somebody, but is the expression of those laws which are always unchanging and are felt by all men. The work of religion is like the work of geometry: the relation of the legs to the hypotenuse always existed, and people knew that there was some relation, but when Pythagoras pointed it out and proved it, then it became the possession of all. And to say that a scheme of morality is no good because it excludes other schemes is just the same as to say that the theorem of the relation of the legs to the hypotenuse is no good because it violates other false suppositions.
To dispute the scheme (as you call it), the truth (as I call it) of Christ is impossible on the ground that it does not fit the invented religion of humanity and excludes other schemes (in your phrase), falsehood (in mine); but it must be disputed by showing directly that it is not true. Religion is composed not of a collection of words that may act well upon men; religion is composed of simple, evident, clear, indubitable moral truths, which detach themselves from the chaos of false and deceptive judgments — and such are the truths of Christ. Had I found such truths in Katkov, I should at once have accepted them. Upon this misunderstanding of yours — of what I, and indeed all religious people, hold to be religion, and upon the wish to put in the place of this a certain form of propaganda — rests the misunderstanding.”
And notwithstanding these great disagreements, L. N. preserved to the end of his life the very best memory of this remarkable man, who died in poverty, in England, in 1889 (*).
( The information about Frey was drawn by me partly from my own personal archive and personal recollections of him, partly from manuscripts preserved in the library of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Petrograd. )
In that same year, in the spring, there came to L. N. from the south of Russia a young man, a Jew of sympathetic appearance, of the intelligentsia and wholly given to the simple life, full of energy and of good wishes, and, having declared his complete agreement with L. N. in his views on the questions of life and religion, he resolved to remain living near him, in the village of Yasnaya Polyana. In order to enter into a closer communion with the people, he chose the post of teacher in the local rural school, set up by the zemstvo. Of course, a Jew could not be a teacher in a Russian school, and in order to obtain this right, he had to embrace Orthodoxy. He, without hesitating, decided upon this too. This conscious compromise with his conscience at the very first steps of his ideal life unpleasantly struck all those in whom he had called forth a sympathy by his outward appearance, by his character, and by his manner of life. Thanks to L. N.’s connections with the local public figures, Isaac Borisovich Feinerman — for so this young man was called — was admitted to teaching, and after his conversion to Orthodoxy considered himself already firmly settled in the Yasnaya Polyana school.
But when the matter came to the curator of the district, he did not confirm him, and Feinerman had to give up teaching. Then he settled as a simple labourer with one of the peasants and, living truly without any property, without any conveniences, performed all the peasant work. It may be too much to say that he had an influence upon L. N., but it is beyond doubt that, by his radicalism in the simple life and his persistence in the peasant manner of life and labour, he lent support to L. N.’s aspirations in this same direction, presenting a living example of the application to life of the foundations of his world-view.
He turned out to be married. Soon his wife arrived, a young, sympathetic Jewess with a child, and settled together with him in the peasant hut, with the intention of sharing with him his manner of life. But in family life the needs began to grow, money was wanted, and L. N. began to give them work copying his works that were prohibited by the censorship — for which there was then a great demand, and many people supported themselves by this copying. But the feminine character was not content with this casual earning, and the wife would come to the Tolstoys’ family to complain of the difficult situation and demanded of her husband a more profitable earning and the securing of the family’s future, which, of course, called forth painful family scenes. Living became hard, and Feinerman went off again to the south. At first he lived in colonies of intelligentsia farmers, learned the carpenter’s trade, earned by it for his family, visited the Jewish colonies, for a time was carried away by Zionism, and at last began to occupy himself with literature, and, by the admission even of L. N. — a very strict judge for beginning writers — revealed an undoubted literary talent. Afterwards he published a whole little book of stories from the life of L. N. Since he lived two or three years near L. N., saw him often, and, thanks to his intellectual abilities, vividly caught his thoughts and words, in all his stories one may find a spark belonging in truth to L. N. But this spark sinks and goes out in the lengthy literary décor with which these stories are abundantly furnished. And for people who knew L. N. closely it is hard to read them, since the style of these stories and the rendering of L. N.’s words are far from corresponding to the simplicity and force of speech of L. N. himself, and therefore these stories may lead astray people capable of taking at face value all that is written in them. These stories are signed with the pseudonym Teneromo, which represents the Latin translation of the surname Feinerman.
This whole panorama of persons passing before L. N. clearly delineates for us the new, varied, and at the same time peculiar ideal milieu into communion with which L. N. entered, acquiring for himself friends and like-minded companions, or simply those who sympathized with him, from all strata and ages — from the illiterate peasant to the philosopher-writer, and from the youth-schoolboy to the administrator.
A characteristic episode of that time was related by a certain judicial official — an episode pointing to L. N.’s attitude toward the violation of the rights of his property, in which he had by then already lost all interest.
“A case arose,” relates the former investigating magistrate M., “about the theft of cabbages some eighteen years ago at Yasnaya Polyana. The theft was carried on systematically, and in order to catch the thief a special watchman was assigned. One night they caught a peasant woman, Matryona, who, in answer to the reproaches addressed to her, declared that ‘there was nothing to eat.’
Under the escort of several men the old woman was taken to the neighbouring village, to the police constable. A report was drawn up. Matryona was put into the lock-up, and the inquiry was sent off to the district police officer, who at once handed it on to the justice of the peace. One early morning the proprietor of Yasnaya Polyana, L. N. Tolstoy, was walking in the fields, past the village. His attention was caught by a crowd standing about an old, lopsided hut. Weeping was heard.
‘Has someone died?’ he asked.
‘No, it is Matryona they are taking to prison.’
‘Matryona, the old woman, to prison?’ he was astonished. ‘What for?’
‘Why, for your own cabbages.’
‘How — for my cabbages? What cabbages?’
They began to tell him. At this time Matryona came out of the hut too, accompanied by the police constable. L. N. asked that the old woman be released, declaring that he forgave her. The constable explained to him that he now had no right to free her, since she had already been sentenced by the judge. Having asked that the carrying-out of the sentence be put off until the next day, L. N. hastened first into the town to the prosecutor, and then to his neighbour, the justice of the peace who had pronounced the sentence. The carrying-out of the sentence was immediately suspended. From Matryona there was accepted by the justice of the peace a petition for the restoration of the time-limit for lodging an appeal, and the appeal was lodged.
Two weeks later, in the district sessions of the justices of the peace, the case about the theft of cabbages was heard.
By the testimony of witnesses it was fully proved that Matryona had been caught in the act of the crime. Matryona herself frankly confessed.
The deputy prosecutor referred Matryona’s criminal act to attempted theft and, in view of the frank confession of the accused, petitioned for a mitigation of the punishment. The judges conferred long and brought in an unexpected resolution. Acquitting Matryona of the secret abstraction of cabbages, they found her guilty under Article 145 of the statute on punishments of the unauthorized plucking of vegetables, but not in the manner of theft, and sentenced her to a money penalty in the amount of five rubles.
The deputy prosecutor did not protest against this sentence. The five rubles for Matryona were paid by the justice of the peace who had pronounced the sentence.”
Soon Lev Nikolaevich had occasion to see that collision of the teaching of Christ with life which he had foreseen; as soon as the teaching of Christ in its pure form began to be circulated in society and among the people, there arose before many young people the question whether a Christian may perform military service. And the majority of sincere young people answered themselves: he may not. And so there begin refusals of military service, without which now not a single conscription passes off.
One of the first to refuse military service under the influence of the writings of Lev Nikolaevich that he had read was Alexei Petrovich Zalyubovsky. The news of this refusal reached Lev Nikolaevich, and he wrote to me about it in November 1885:
“…Yesterday I received a letter that greatly agitated me, from an officer of the Artillery Academy, Anat. Petrov. Zalyubovsky, the brother of that Zalyubovsky who last year refused military service in Moscow. I had thought that he was freed from front-line service and was living in Kishinev, but it turns out that they have been tormenting him for a whole year already, sending him by stages along with vagrants, lodging him in hospitals, transferring him from unit to unit, and have now banished him to the Trans-Caspian Region; and he still to this day continues, on the basis of the teaching of Christ, to refuse participation in killing. And he wrote to one or two people about this. I write to you: cannot you find out and do something? The matter was before the Minister of War and in the Main Staff. I ask one thing — that they deal with him according to the law, recognizing him as a so-called sectarian. As it is, they themselves do not know what to do, and frankly depart from the law and conduct the matter in secret. It would be a good thing, at least, that those in authority should know that this matter is no secret, and that there are people watching over the fate of Zalyubovsky. Can it be that the martyrdom of the first times of Christianity is again possible and necessary?
My wife is in Petersburg at the Kuzminskys’; call on her; I am sending her a copy of Zalyubovsky’s letter. Take counsel, think it over, and please write.
Could it not be printed somewhere about this? I would write of it with joy.”
Sofya Andreyevna, who had come to Petersburg to take trouble over the publication of the XIIth volume of the complete collected works of L. N., set about energetically the business of trying to ease the lot of Zalyubovsky; she was at the houses of various generals, and the result of her efforts was, if not an easing of his lot, then a hastening of Zalyubovsky’s case, for he was soon, by court-martial — that is, by order of the authorities — exiled to the Trans-Caspian Region, where he served out his punishment as a non-combatant soldier — that is, without bearing arms.
This year the whole family remained at Yasnaya Polyana until late autumn.
Sofya Andreyevna writes thus of L. N. to the friend of the house, Nik. N. Strakhov, on 12 September:
“Lev Nikolaevich writes little by little the second part of What Then Must We Do?, but more often goes into the forest to fell trees, to gather mushrooms, or ploughs; he is learning to manage the plough just as he does the axe.”
I happened that autumn to be at Yasnaya Polyana; I remember now the wonderful evening passed in Lev Nikolaevich’s study. The younger sons of L. N., now grown up, were then dear boys. We sat in a heap on the divan in the half-dark room, together with Lev Nikolaevich. He was merry and sociable. He proposed that each of us relate something remarkable from his own life. I remember that I related an episode from my service in the navy — how I once all but perished, colliding in a steam-launch with a steamer at night in the Kiel roadstead. The other stories I do not remember, but when the turn came to Lev Nikolaevich, he related to us how, in the Caucasus, during a battle with the mountaineers, a shell had burst at his feet and shattered to splinters the wheel of the cannon which he was at that moment laying.
We listened greedily to his story, but, besides this factual narrative, I remember well that I felt some inexpressible fascination from the whole setting, and from the voice and the nearness of Lev Nikolaevich, from a certain quiet, loving atmosphere that surrounded us, and this evening — one of the first evenings passed by me at Yasnaya Polyana — will never be effaced from my memory.
Many times afterwards I had occasion to converse with L. N., and the more private in character this conversation was, the more intimate it was, the more cordial were L. N.’s words, the more deeply they penetrated into the soul and the more firmly were they remembered.
But when Lev N. spoke in a more crowded assembly, there always arose in me the wish to sit at his feet and to look into his eyes, so as not to let drop a single word of his discourse. Great was his fascination.
Let us close this chapter with an interesting letter of L. N.’s to N. N. Strakhov, after reading his article on spiritualism.
In this letter L. N. makes bold generalizations, expressing a general view of idealist philosophy, giving a practical, vital sense to its chief principles.
“I have just read your two fine articles, dear N. N.; they pleased me greatly by the strictness and clarity of thought, by the simplicity of the disentangling of what is deliberately entangled. I read them, admiring the mastery of the work, but with a certain indifference and condemnation: why occupy oneself with such an artificial course of thoughts, like that feeling with which one works out the solution of a chess problem? Butlerov composed the problem; you solved it. It is wonderfully interesting, but what is it to me? The end of the article, however, acted upon me otherwise; it explained to me why you made and make such efforts, why you can so easily resolve such problems, and, chiefly, it showed me you, your soul, that in your soul which is at once alien and akin to me, which both draws us together and divides us. You never spoke out so before, or it is only now that I have understood you. The end of this article explained everything to me: both your partiality for Indian wisdom and for Madame Guyon, for the going-deep into oneself, and that last letter of yours, which grieved me very much on your account. You write, among other things, that more and more often you think of death, feel its approach, and are going out of the world, in which you see no gleam of light, nothing that would call forth a hope for the better. Why, this is an unhealthy state of soul. And here, in this article, the key to everything is given me. Cognition is, in a certain sense, a negation, a lowering, a removal from oneself of that which is cognized (and so on, down to the dash). This is perfectly just with respect to the cognition of the whole external world, with the exception of man — of all men — that is, of that which cognizes not in me alone, but also outside me. Cognition lowers and removes the external world, but only in order — and for the sake of — raising and bringing near man. And here is just where my seeming difference of mind with you lies. It seems to me that you set cognition and removal as the aim. I, however, hold it to be a means. The cognition of the world and of man, which lowers and removes the first and exalts and brings near the second, is only an instrument which one must take in hand before, and in order to, begin work. I, we all, have fallen from the sky into some sort of establishment. The first thing is — one must live, that is, put into action one’s hands, head, one’s movement and time — that is, work. In order to do this, one must understand — where am I? what am I? What is my destiny? (I underline this question, because for me it is the chief one, and it seems to me that with you it is left out.) And for this I must cognize. This cognition gives me a great satisfaction; but this satisfaction becomes a suffering (however much I may fan it) if I do not at once put this cognition — which has removed and lowered the external world and raised and brought near man, which has made clear for me, has arranged rightly for me, all the chaos surrounding me — if I do not put this cognition to the fulfilment of my destiny, to work, with my whole being, for that which has risen and been brought near for man. Very sad it was for me to learn of the death of Danilevsky. Still, I am glad that we came to love one another. I am sad for you. Forgive me for not having written you for a long time. From my soul I kiss you. Lev Tolstoy.
P. S. I have read over what I have written, and I fear it is not clear; yet it is dear to me to convey to you my whole thought (dear to me, the one I live by). It is for this alone that we, people who love one another, are needful to one another — to commune in spirit. It seems to me that the Indians, Schopenhauer, the mystics, and you make that error, justified by nothing, of recognizing the external world, nature, as an aimless phantasmagoria. The task of the spirit is the liberation from subjection to this external play of matter, but not in order to be liberated. Otherwise it would have been far simpler not to subject the spirit to this play at all. And everyone can liberate himself radically by killing himself. (I never believed in, nor understood, this dread of metempsychosis which guides Buddha.) The task consists in liberation, not for liberation, but for a liberated life — for labour, in these very same material conditions of life. A man who is liberating himself from a dungeon almost always thinks that the liberation is the very aim; and yet he is liberating himself in order to live. Just so do I picture your view. All is unreal, all is phantasmagoria, all is my representation and nothing more; this is so only so long as I am subjected to these phantoms. But as soon as I have liberated myself from subjection, then the phantoms become an instrument and a reality of realities; they constitute a necessary condition of my life of the spirit, when all these formerly strange and dreadful instruments of an establishment incomprehensible to me become so far comprehensible, necessary, and obedient, subjected to me. I fear that, in wishing to make my thought clear to you, I have entangled it the more. You, however, are one of those rare people who know how to understand the courses of thought of others. The material world is neither a phantom, nor trifles, nor evil, but it is that material and those instruments over which, and with which, we are called to work. I shall set to, without skill and without inclination, to plane, and, having battered my hands, I shall abuse the board and the plane; this same thing I do when I call the material world trifles or evil.”
And side by side with these philosophical reflections L. N. listens sensitively to the movement coming to birth among the labouring masses of the people, discerns in it a serious danger to the so-called existing order, and sympathizes with this movement. Here is how he expressed this in a letter to his sister-in-law of 17 October 1885:
“…With us all is well and very quiet. From the letters I see that with you it is the same, and in all Russia and Europe the same. But do not rely upon this quiet. The dull struggle against the Ankov pie (*) not only does not cease, but grows, and already here and there are heard the rumblings of the earthquake that is tearing the pie apart. I live only by this — by believing that the pie is not eternal, but eternal is the reason of man.”
( A jesting expression, used in L. N.’s family to denote a certain material well-being. (Note by P. B.) )