Source: https://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/bio/biryukov/biografiya-biryukov-3-11.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-11.md.
At the beginning of 1890 there was noticeable, in the Tolstoy family at Yasnaya Polyana, a certain lull — a reaction after the stormy Christmas merriment that had accompanied the staging of The Fruits of Enlightenment.
L. N.’s daughters opened a school for the Yasnaya Polyana children in the house of one of the household serfs. The chief person occupied with this work was Marya Lvovna.
But this school did not last long, about two months. It had been opened without the permission of the proper authorities, and as soon as word of the existence of a school directed by L. N. reached those authorities, an order was made for its closing. This order was carried out by the governor himself, N. A. Zinovyev, who was very sympathetically disposed toward L. N.; he often had to find himself in such an awkward position. And it was precisely this inevitably double relation of his toward L. N. that led to his dismissal from the post of governor of Tula and to his transfer to another province.
Lev Nikolaevich was occupied with the final polishing of The Fruits of Enlightenment.
In April the comedy was staged at Tsarskoye Selo, in the Chinese Theatre, in the presence of the Sovereign, and had great success. It was printed in the collection In Memory of Yuryev.
In L. N. himself there went on a constant inner labour and the working-out of a new, higher, loving relation toward the milieu around him — toward his family circle, and toward the circle of his numerous visitors, both those belonging to his former circle, for the most part not sympathizing with his new views, though showing him respect and admiration for his artistic genius, and toward visitors of a new type, his like-minded companions, in whom he prized above all sincerity, a truthful relation toward that mode of life which was being subjected to criticism by an awakened consciousness, but from which it was so hard to cleanse oneself.
His inner labour was reflected most clearly in the entries of his diary. There, too, we find the thoughts called forth by his reading of certain books and journals that interested him, received by him in great number from all corners of the world.
Here are several extracts from his January diary of 1890:
3 January 1890, Yasnaya Polyana.
“A prophet, a true prophet — or, still better, a poet (one who creates) — is a man who thinks ahead and understands what people, and he himself, will feel. I am such a prophet for myself. I always think what I do not yet feel — for example, the injustice of the life of the rich, the need of labour, and so on — and then very soon I begin to feel that very thing.
…I was reading: someone said to Emerson that the world would soon come to an end. He answered: ‘Well, I can get alone without it’ (*). Very important.
( Yes, but I shall do without it too. )
We seek intellect, strength, kindness, perfection in all this, but perfection is not given to man in anything: there can be no perfection in anything, neither in intellect nor in kindness — there can be one thing only: a correspondence to where you are, ‘in sein Platz passen’ (*). This one can attain, and then comes full tranquillity and satisfaction. The chief thing gives this — humility.”
( To fit into one’s place. )
5–9 January.
“The first stage — to pay back for evil; the second — to bear the evil; the third — to pity the one who is doing evil; the fourth — to help him. This is what one must learn.”
Already from these few extracts one may observe that by this time — that is, toward the end of the 1880s and the beginning of the 1890s — there is to be noted in L. N.’s spiritual state a certain turn, or rather an ascent to the next step of the moral ladder. This change we observe in the fact that L. N. ceases to consider it important to expend his spiritual energy upon the struggle with the outer world surrounding him, and ever more definitely and insistently points to the humble bearing of the discrepancy of the outward setting with the inner consciousness, and to the necessity of directing all of man’s powers upon this inner cleansing of himself. A note of this kind we meet both in his February diary and in his later diary, and the same thoughts he expresses in his letters of that time to his friends.
On 11 February he records:
“The chief temptation in my position is this: that life in the abnormal conditions of luxury — allowed at first so as not to violate love — afterwards seizes one with its temptation, and one does not know whether one lives thus out of fear of violating love or out of submission to temptation.”
This danger of a passive relation to outward conditions disturbed him also from another side, and he turned to those close to him, asking for reproof. I must confess that it fell to me too to write to L. N. a few words about the painful impression made upon me by the news of the noisy merriment at Yasnaya Polyana, in which L. N. took part. Of course I did not fail to express to him also that this news had not in the least diminished my respect and love for him. In answer to this, in a letter to me full of his usual tenderness, he says:
“Thank you, dear friend, for your letter and for the truth. We love you too — believe this. Let life and its forms be as they will, hereafter; but let love be inseparably with us. Your letter, again, touched me egoistically. It is wholesome for me to remember that I live badly, and that under the pretext of avoiding enmity I submit to my own weaknesses, to the lusts of the body. My friend, loving me, write to me — not softening it, but in the most severe form — the judgments about me that condemn me, naming no one. You have heard many such.”
To write a severe reproof to L. N. was scarcely within my power. Wishing to fulfil his request exactly, I gathered all that I could in my mind — all the serious things I had heard said in judgment of him — and wrote it to him, to which I received a prompt reply:
“Thank you, dear friend, for the prompt answer and for its content. This is not quite what I wish, but it too is good, and for it, thanks. Here is what they say about me: that instead of living well, I live badly, and out of my bad life write counsels on how to live well — that is true, and that is what I need. And the rest is all true too, but it is not what I need, the real pointing-out of sin. If only it had pricked me a little more — because it is the truth — and had had effect. Let us help one another. Help me. People turn to me for help, and how I need it myself!”
Rumours of the Christmas festivities, the performance, and the merriment at Yasnaya Polyana penetrated into the press, and obliging journalists wrote it all up in an exaggerated form, going to such absurdities as the assertion that there had been a ball at Yasnaya Polyana at which L. N. danced in a tailcoat. Perhaps someone of those present had told this by way of a joke, which was taken for hard cash. Be that as it may, this news disconcerted many of L. N.’s admirers, and one of them, a Mr. Vorobyev, who was then stationmaster on one of the southern railways, applied to L. N. for an explanation, and received from him the following reply:
“To explain what in the newspaper report is untrue I do not consider possible in a letter, nor is it needful. The one thing you need is to know whether I continue to look upon life in the same way, and whether I try to live as I have set forth in my writings. To this question I answer that the nearer I draw to bodily death, the more undoubted to me is the truth of the view of life I have expressed, the more imperative for me are the demands of my conscience, and the more joyful it is to me to follow them. And here is just where I am afraid — judging by your first reply to my letter and by today’s letter — that with you the fulfilment of the demand of conscience is determined otherwise than with me. Each of us, having come to know the truth, finds himself in a certain position, far from the truth, in ties — ties knotted and drawn tight by dead loops, by our sins — with the people of the world. And to a man who has come to know the truth, it seems above all that the chief thing he ought to do consists in this: to go out at once, at all costs, from the conditions in which he finds himself, and to put himself in such conditions that, being in them, it should be clearly visible to people that I live by the law of Christ, and to live in those conditions, showing people an example of the true Christian life. But this is not so: the demands of conscience consist not in being in this or that position, but in living without violating love toward God and one’s neighbour. A Christian will always strive toward a life pure from sin, will always choose such a life, if for its attainment there be not required of him acts that violate love; but the point is that never is a man so little bound by his own and others’ sins to the past as to be able, without violating love toward God and his neighbour, at once to enter into such an outward position. Every Christian, among worldly people, finds himself in such conditions that, in order to draw near to that position, he must first unravel the knots of former sins by which he is bound to people, and therefore his chief and first task consists in this: to unravel these knots, by the law of love toward God and his neighbour, and not to draw them tighter, and, above all, not to hurt those to whom he is bound. The Christian’s business lies not in some particular position, in the position of a husbandman or the like, but in the fulfilment of the will of God. And the will of God is this: to answer all the demands of life as love toward God and toward people requires. And therefore one can in no way determine the nearness or remoteness of oneself and others from the ideal of Christ by the position in which a man finds himself, or by the acts which he performs.
The Christian’s aversion to worldly life will always be one and the same and cannot change, and therefore the acts of a Christian will always incline toward this: to go away from the evil, the vanity, the luxury, the cruelty of worldly life, and to come to the lowest, most despised position in the worldly sense. But in what position a Christian will find himself will depend on the conditions in which the consciousness of the truth has overtaken him, and on the degree of his sensitiveness to the sufferings of others. His acts may bring him to the gallows, to prison, to the doss-house, but they may also bring him to the palace and to the ball. What is important is not the position in which a man finds himself, but the acts that have brought him to the position in which he is; and the judge of those acts can be only he himself and God.”
In one of the letters of L. N.’s to me already cited, of 15 June 1890, he makes a long and interesting postscript, sharing with me material for a literary work I had begun on the history of true Christianity. The work had been called forth by certain reflections which I had communicated to L. N. apropos of the world exhibition held in Paris in 1889, where the progress of outward, technical, and pagan culture had been shown to all the world with such brilliance, headed by the famous Eiffel Tower. I had ventured the timid thought that this marvel of technology does not signify the true progress of mankind, and that this progress must be sought in another sphere — namely, in a more consistent carrying-out into life of Christian principles, of which we had already seen examples. From this premise I passed to an enumeration of similar examples in the past, and this brought me to the thought of writing a history of true Christianity — that is, a history not of the dominant churches, as is usually written, but a history of the persecuted heresies. L. N. greatly sympathized with this work and encouraged me in it (*). In this postscript he writes the following:
( The work was begun by me and thought through, and material was gathered in considerable quantity; but, unfortunately, the circumstances of life diverted my energy to other things. More finished was the introduction, under the title “The Springtime of Mankind,” printed in the journal The Spiritual Christian. The rest of the work, brought by me down to the tenth century, lies in manuscript, and I greatly hope to resume it on the completion of the biographical work. )
“How good it would be to continue and to write what you have begun. I recently learned that in the 1840s of our century, in Italy, in the mountains, there lived people under the guidance of one man, Lazaroni, who professed non-resistance to evil and practical Christianity. They were ordered to disperse. They did not obey. They were fired upon, and several were killed, and Lazaroni with them. I have been promised detailed information. There are also the ‘Nazarenes’ in Serbia; they were established in the 1850s. About them I have somewhere information in a letter, very brief. Together with this, one ought to gather all that has arisen and is arising among us: Syutaev, the Cossack in Siberia (you remember the manuscript, of Morozov, I think), Zosima, Emelyan, and many others.
Such a collection — at first historical, with brief descriptions of the teachings of the so-called heresies and with the bringing-out of their chief practical-Christian significance, then of the contemporary manifestations of the same — would be a priceless book. In the preface one ought to underline this: that, just as Christianity in its beginning, under Christ and under the apostles and under the martyrs, was always humble, almost secret, so it has remained to the end, so it is even now, with this difference only — that formerly it seized tens of people, and now seizes tens of thousands. And that triumphant, brilliant, victorious — as the churches represent it — it never was, and by its very nature cannot be. By its nature it is humble and unnoticeable; it seizes the human soul, and all mankind, without any crash, so that one does not even know when it entered and grew strong.”
And further on, in the same letter, he passes now to the inner questions of life:
“Have you noticed the penetration of malice — of that which we call malice, but which is nothing other than the same kindness and love by which the world lives, only entangled and out of its place? I say this apropos of the benefit we receive from condemnations, and the greater the benefit, the more they are imbued with malice. It is like some sort of sulphuric acid which eats away the dirt in all the nooks and crannies. The more venomous, the better. Were we pure, this sulphuric acid would not be employed upon us; but our nastiness, in calling it forth, calls forth the feeling of spoiled love, which presents itself as malice and eats away, and which is very, very useful. And just as we are accustomed to regale people with wine, with meat, to overfeed them, thinking to do them good, so we overfeed them with flattery. But, loving them, we ought to let them fast a little, go hungry, and feel how they act upon others.”
Outer life went on its course.
In February L. N. once again made a journey to Optina Pustyn. The occasion of this journey was the wish to visit his sister, who was then living already in the newly built Shamordino convent, near the town of Belyov.
L. N. set out with his daughters and first made for his sister by way of Belyov; not finding her at home, he made for Optina Pustyn, where his sister was temporarily staying as a guest. The Elder Ambrose was then weak and made upon L. N. an impression of pity. More interesting and congenial to him at that time seemed his kinsman Shidlovsky, who had long since been a monk. Besides this, on this occasion L. N. had a prolonged conversation with the well-known Leontyev, a former collaborator of Katkov’s, also already tonsured as a monk.
L. N. was struck by the deep superstition of Leontyev, who believed in the healing power of some little sand from the elder’s grave and seriously offered it to L. N. when the talk turned to some ailment from which L. N. was suffering.
Sofya Andreyevna, in her reminiscences, gives extracts from L. N.’s diary of that time. Here is the most interesting:
“On the morning of the 27th we drove to Optina Pustyn. We arrived early. Mashenka is there and speaks of Ambrose, and all that she says is dreadful. It is confirmed, what I saw at Kiev: the young novices are saints, God is with them; the old ones are not saints, the devil is with them.
Yesterday I was with Ambrose, we spoke of various faiths. I say: where we are in God — that is, in the truth — there we are all together; where we are in the devil — that is, where we are in falsehood — there we are all asunder…
Boris Shidlovsky moved me to tenderness; Ambrose, on the contrary, is pitiful in his temptations to the point of impossibility… On him it is plain that the monastery is sybaritism…”
“28 February. I attained, on this visit, a tolerance toward Orthodoxy. I was with Leontyev, we conversed splendidly. He said: ‘You are hopeless,’ and I said: ‘And you are hopeful…’”
Probably the journey to the monastery and the new contact with monastic life called forth in L. N. the thoughts that he recorded in his diary on his return from his journey.
“9 March. To set right the monastic life, to make of it a Christian one, is possible in two ways:
1) To cease taking money from others — that is, the labour of others — and to live by one’s own labour.
Or 2) to abolish all the outward rites, all that is forbidden by the Gospel — common prayers in the temples (Matt., ch. VI) — and all that is bound up with this. The one holds up the other, like two boards set up as a lean-to.”
On his return to Yasnaya, L. N. made one more journey, to his brother S. N. at his estate Pirogovo, and there fell ill with jaundice.
Having recovered from his illness, he wrote to me:
“I will write you at least a few words, dear friend P., that you may know the present state of me. I have been ill. Three attacks of jaundice — and I have grown very weak. Now, it seems, I am better; but in soul, thank God, it has been, and is, very well with me. Write more in detail about yourself, about your spiritual state. We all live and grow, and what you wrote me — that you feel taking place in you not an upheaval but a step upward — I understood thus, and it interests me, both because I love you and because this is the process common to us all. This process does not end in old age.
What are you occupied with? What share is physical, what share is mental labour? How are your relations with people? What of I. D.? I embrace him. Khilkov was with me during my illness. I have grown still closer to him. Dunaev was here, Zolotaryov Vasily, Rakhmanov, Pastukhov. Do you know him? From the Academy of Arts. Feinerman has gone off to Alyokhin. Mitrofan Alyokhin invites him to his own. He has few people. Butkevich An. has remained at Glodossy. I do not know what you know from I. D. that is not so. Yes, all these movings-about — I cannot interest myself in them. But the spiritual movement is like spring: you have not had time to mark one flower that has opened before another bursts into bloom, and that one is setting its bud. And this is no dream, but the most real reality.”
Not long before this, N. N. Ge had made his usual winter journey, carrying his picture every year to the travelling exhibition in Petersburg. As always, he called on the way upon L. N. in Moscow or at Yasnaya Polyana, and showed his picture first of all to him, awaiting his strict judgment.
The picture this time was Christ and Pilate; N. N. Ge had given it the title What Is Truth, without a question mark, in accordance with L. N.’s interpretation of this passage in his translation of the Gospel, where he holds this phrase, flung by Pilate at Christ, to be not a question addressed to him but an ironic remark of the sceptic Pilate, to the effect that of truth it is not even worth discoursing, since all hold that there is no such thing.
L. N. prized this picture highly and considered it an epoch in the history of painting. In his religious reflections he not infrequently recalled it. Thus, he records on 9 March in his diary:
“The churches have made of Christ a God, a saviour, in whom one must believe and to whom one must pray. Evidently his example has become unnecessary. The work of true Christians lies precisely in this: to undo this divinity (Ge’s picture). If he is a man, then he is important by his example, and will save only as he saved himself — that is, if I shall do the same as he.”
This picture, like every significant work, called forth much dispute among the connoisseurs of art. There appeared rapturous admirers of it and complete deniers. The deniers were of two kinds: some denied it from the standpoint of traditional aesthetics, others from the standpoint of the Church religion. The latter, as those standing in power, prevailed, and the picture was removed from the exhibition.
Nik. Nik., for whom the question of exhibiting the picture and of selling it had also an enormous material significance — since only on the sum realized could he continue to live with his family and to work further — was, of course, grieved by this removal of the picture, but bore it meekly and consoled himself with the thought that the prohibition had an enormous ideational significance. After this prohibition of the picture he wrote to me, among other things, from his farmstead:
“Apropos of the picture, I have received here two extraordinarily good letters, dear to me: one from a student, extraordinarily rapturous, the other from a barrister. Yes, I do not complain, and I understand that they were bound to forbid it. Not loving Christ, one cannot see a truthful representation of him. The heathen and the priests do not need this. What they need is the deification of the body; the spirit they do not acknowledge and do not love.”
L. N., wishing to help N. N. extricate himself from his difficult material position, set about taking trouble for the sale of this picture. For Nik. Nik., of course, the most agreeable thing would have been the acquisition of this picture by Tretyakov, for exhibiting it in the gallery. And L. N. asked that Tretyakov be told his opinion that this picture must constitute an epoch in painting. And P. M. Tretyakov, wishing to have from L. N. himself a confirmation of this opinion, applied to him with a letter, to which he received the following answer:
“Thank you for your kind letter, esteemed P. M.
What do I mean by the words ‘Ge’s picture will constitute an epoch in the history of Christian art’? The following:
Catholic art expressed predominantly the saints, the Madonna, and Christ as God. So it went down to the latest time, when attempts began to depict him as a historical personage.
But to depict as a historical personage the personage who for centuries was, and now is, acknowledged by millions of people to be God, is awkward: awkward because such a representation calls forth dispute. And dispute disturbs the artistic impression. And so I see many and various attempts to get out of the difficulty. Some disputed outright, with zest — such with us are the pictures of Vereshchagin, and even Ge’s Resurrection; others wished to treat these subjects as historical — with us, Ivanov, Kramskoy, and again Ge’s The Last Supper; a third sort wished to ignore all dispute, and simply took the subject as one familiar to all and concerned themselves only with beauty — Doré, Polenov — and the thing kept not coming off.
Then there were still attempts to bring Christ down from heaven as God, and from the pedestal of a historical personage, onto the soil of beautiful everyday life, lending to this everyday life a religious, somewhat mystical lighting. Such are Ge’s Mercy, and the French artist’s Christ in the Guise of a Priest, barefoot, among children, and others. And it all kept not coming off.
And then Ge took the simplest motif, and one now comprehensible after he has taken it: Christ and his teaching not in words alone, but in deed, in collision with the teaching of the world — that is, the motif which then constituted, and now constitutes, the chief significance of the appearance of Christ, and a significance not in dispute, such as both churchmen, who acknowledge him to be God, and historians, who acknowledge him to be an important personage in history, and Christians, who acknowledge the chief thing in him to be his moral teaching, cannot but agree with.
In the picture there is depicted, with complete historical truth, that moment when Christ had been led about, tormented, beaten, dragged from one lock-up to another, from one authority to another, and brought to the governor — a most good-natured fellow, who has no concern whatever with Christ, nor with the Jews, and still less with some sort of truth, of which this ragamuffin discourses to him, who is acquainted with all the teachings and philosophies of Rome; he has concern only with the higher authorities, that he may not blunder before them. Christ sees that before him is a man gone astray, swollen with fat, but he does not venture to reject him by his appearance alone, and therefore begins to set forth to him the essence of his teaching; but the governor cannot be bothered. He says: ‘What sort of truth is that?’ and goes off. And Christ looks with sadness at this impenetrable man.
Such was the situation then; such a situation repeats itself thousands, millions of times everywhere, always, between the teachings of truth and the representatives of this world. And this is expressed in the picture. This is true historically and true for the present day, and therefore it grips the heart of every one in whom there is a heart.
Well, just such a relation toward Christianity constitutes an epoch in art, because of pictures of this kind there can be an abyss, and there will be.”
This picture was indeed acquired by P. M. Tretyakov. But, before being exhibited in the gallery, the picture had to make a journey to America. To convey it thither there undertook the assistant barrister Ilyin, who afterwards somehow strangely fell away from this affair, but who at first seemed a sincere man, devoted to it.
Part of the money received from Tretyakov was used for the dispatch of this picture. To ensure its success, again L. N. came to the rescue, having written a long and interesting letter to the American Kennan, who had visited him back in 1887. In this letter he sets forth from a new side the significance of this picture, and in passing expresses interesting thoughts in general about Christian religious painting:
“This past winter there appeared at the Petersburg exhibition of the Itinerants a picture by N. Ge — Christ before Pilate, under the title What Is Truth (John, XVIII, 38). Not to speak of the fact that the picture is painted by a great master (a professor of the Academy) and an artist known for his pictures — the most remarkable being The Last Supper — this picture, besides its masterly technique, drew the particular attention of all by the force of expression of the fundamental thought, and by the novelty and sincerity of its relation to the subject. As Swift, I think, truly says, that we shall find that to be the best fruit which the birds have pitching it (), this picture called forth such terrible attacks that it was removed from the exhibition and forbidden to be shown. Now one advocate (I do not know him) has resolved, at his own expense and risk, to convey the picture to America, and yesterday I received a letter saying that the picture has departed. The aim of my letter is to draw your attention to this picture, which in my opinion constitutes an epoch in the history of Christian painting, and, if it produces upon you — as I am almost certain it will — the same impression as upon me, then I wish to ask you to assist its comprehension by the American public, to interpret it. The sense of the picture, to my view, is the following. In the historical respect it expresses that minute when Jesus, after a sleepless night, during which, bound, he had been led from place to place and beaten, was brought to Pilate. Pilate lives only by the interests of the metropolis and, of course, relates with contempt and a certain disgust to those disturbances — and religious ones at that — of the coarse, superstitious people whom he governs. It is here that the conversation takes place (John, XVIII, 33, 38), in which the good-natured governor wishes to descend, en bon prince*, to the barbarous interests of his subordinates, and, as is proper to important people, has formed for himself a notion of the very thing about which he is asking, and himself speaks ahead, not even interested in the answer. With a smile of condescension (I suppose) he says: so you are a king! Jesus is worn out, and one glance at that well-groomed, self-satisfied face, dulled by a life of luxury, is enough to understand the abyss that divides them, and the impossibility, or the terrible difficulty, for Pilate to understand his teaching. But Jesus remembers that Pilate too is a man and a brother — gone astray, but a brother — and that he has no right not to disclose to him the truth which he discloses to people, and he begins to speak (37). But Pilate stops him at the word — truth. What can a ragged beggar tell him, the friend and companion of Roman poets and philosophers, about truth? He is not interested in hearing out what this Jew can tell him, and it is even a little unpleasant to him that this vagabond can imagine that he can instruct a Roman grandee, and therefore he stops him at once and shows him that about this word and notion ‘truth’ men cleverer, more learned, and more refined than he and his Jews have thought, and have long since decided that one cannot know what truth is, that truth is an empty word. And having said ‘What is truth’ and turned on his heel, the good-natured and self-satisfied governor goes off to himself. But Jesus pities the man and is afraid for that abyss of falsehood which separates him and such people from the truth, and this is expressed in his face. The merit of the picture, in my opinion, lies in this: that it is truthful (realistic, as they say now) in the most genuine sense of the word. Christ is not such as it would be pleasant to see, but precisely such as a man must be who has been tormented a whole night and is being led off to be tormented. And Pilate is such as a governor must be. As for an epoch in Christian painting, this picture produces it because it establishes a new relation toward Christian subjects. This is not a relation toward Christian subjects as toward historical events, as many demanded — and always unsuccessfully, because the abdication of Napoleon or the death of Elizabeth represent something important by the importance of the persons depicted; but Christ, at the time when he was active, was not only not important, but not even noticeable, and therefore pictures from his life will never be historical; the relation toward Christ as God produced many pictures, the highest perfection of which is long since behind us. At the present time attempts are being made to depict the moral understanding of the life and teaching of Christ. And these attempts have hitherto been unsuccessful. But Ge found in the life of Christ such a moment as was important for him, for his teaching, and which is just as important now for us all and repeats itself everywhere and in all the world — in the struggle of the moral, rational consciousness of man, manifesting itself not in the brilliant spheres of life, with the traditions of a refined, good-natured, and self-confident violence which suppresses this consciousness; and of such moments there are many, and the impression produced by the depiction of such moments is very strong and fruitful.”
( We recognize the best fruits because the birds have pecked at them. )
The picture safely returned from America and is now in the Tretyakov Gallery.
The story The Kreutzer Sonata, written by L. N. in the preceding year, 1889, and forbidden in the collection in memory of Yuryev, continued to spread rapidly in numerous manuscripts, hectographed copies, and foreign editions. Everywhere it raised serious and heated disputes for and against the ideas expressed in it; lectures were read, compositions were written, criticisms. And L. N. received especially many letters with approvals, with censures, and with questions clarifying this or that proposition of the story. L. N. patiently read through all this material, and to the letters that seemed to him serious he carefully replied.
The propositions expressed in letters and conversations led L. N. to various thoughts on these questions.
Interesting are the indications of the sources of certain fundamental thoughts expressed in The Kreutzer Sonata. This indication we find in L. N.’s diary of that time:
“Many of the thoughts which I have expressed of late belong not to me, but to people who feel a kinship with me and turn to me with their questions, perplexities, thoughts, plans.
Thus, the fundamental thought — or rather, the feeling — of The Kreutzer Sonata belongs to one woman, a Slav, who wrote me a letter comical in its language but significant in its content, about the oppression of women by sexual demands. Afterwards she was with me and left a strong impression.
The thought that the verse of Matthew, ‘if thou look upon a woman with lust,’ and so on, relates not only to other men’s wives but to one’s own as well, was conveyed to me by an Englishman who wrote this.
And so, many others.”
The relations toward The Kreutzer Sonata were of the most varied kind. For L. N. this was in part a touchstone for the discerning of people, and in his diary he records such a thought:
“I was thinking apropos of how certain people relate to The Kreutzer Sonata. It seems to them that this ‘certain someone’ is a peculiar man, while in me, they say, there is nothing of the kind. Can they really find nothing?
There is no repentance, because there is no movement forward; or there is no movement forward, because there is no repentance. Repentance is the breaking-through of the egg or the seed, in consequence of which the embryo begins to grow and is subjected to the action of air and light; or it is the consequence of growth, by which the egg is broken through.
Yes, that same important and most essential division of people: people with repentance and people without it.”
With great joy L. N. met sympathy for the views expressed in The Kreutzer Sonata. Thus, he wrote, among other things, to Khilkov:
“It greatly gladdened me that you approved The Kreutzer Sonata — that is, that you think the same. The thoughts expressed there were very strange and unexpected to me myself when they came to me clearly. And sometimes I thought, is it not because I am old that I look thus? And therefore the judgment of people such as you is important to me. Now I have written an afterword to this — it was demanded of me by many, Chertkov among them — that is, to express clearly and definitely how I look upon marriage. And today I finished it, and with a Danish translator who was with me I sent off this afterword to Petersburg. I will send it to you, and again your opinion is interesting to me.”
L. N. himself did not consider this afterword needful, and yielded to the entreaties of his friends with a heavy heart.
He writes, among other things, to a young man who had expressed his sympathy:
“I shall be very glad to read what you have written about my story.
The other day I wrote an afterword to it, which it proved necessary to write: so boldly did people pretend that they did not understand what is written there.”
And to Chertkov’s first proposal about this he answered with a refusal. Here is what he wrote to him:
“In my memory, chiefly, are your notes on my story. All is perfectly true, with all I agree, but the afterword, though I have begun to write it, I shall hardly write, and therefore the passage about the ideal of mankind being not fruitfulness but the fulfilment of the law of the attainment of the Kingdom of God, coinciding with purity and abstinence — this passage must be left as it is. It is hard for me now to occupy myself with this, and I simply cannot — one cannot escape misunderstandnisses.”
In its final form, but with certain omissions, by demand of the censorship, the “afterword” was printed in Grot’s journal Questions of Philosophy and Psychology.
Interesting is L. N.’s answer to the criticism of L. E. Obolensky. Here is what L. N. wrote to him in April 1889:
“I have received your letter, Leonid Yegorovich, and I was greatly grieved by the irritation against my story which I found in it. It seems to me that the cause is this — that there it is said that the wrongness, and therefore the calamitousness, of sexual relations proceeds from that view, common to all the people of our world, that sexual relations are an object of enjoyment, of pleasure, and that therefore for the man the woman — and one ought to add, for the woman the man — is an instrument of enjoyment, and that the liberation from the wrongness and calamitousness of sexual relations will come when people cease to look upon this so. So thinks P. (Pozdnyshev), having suffered from this view, which he shares with all. To this is added that the outward intellectual education of women, received at the courses, cannot attain this aim, as many are inclined to think, because no education, however scientific, can change the view upon this subject, since it does not even set itself this aim. It seems to me that I am not mistaken in this. And therefore it seems to me that you are not right in this, not right also in those irritable attacks upon the narrator, exaggerating his defects, whereas by the very conception of the story Pozdnyshev gives himself away completely, not only in that he abuses himself (to abuse oneself is easy), but in that he deliberately conceals all the good traits which, as in every man, must have been in him. And in the ardour of self-condemnation, exposing all the usual self-deceptions, he sees in himself one living abomination only.
Well, that is what I have to say to your letter. Truly, it is so. And if you consider it calmly, you, with your critical moral sense, will surely agree with me.
For the merit of my writings and the approval of them are of little interest to me. Soon I shall die, and ever more and more often I think of life in view of death, and therefore one thing only is interesting and important to me — not to do harm by my writing, not to lead astray, not to give offence. This I am afraid of, and I hope that I have not done it. Well, until we meet!”
But there were also many true appreciators of it. I remember that after one of the readings-aloud of this story, in Chertkov’s flat in Petersburg, Iv. Leont. Shcheglov, clutching his head, exclaimed: “What Tolstoy has done to us! Why, everything is said here, and there is nothing more to write!”
We have already seen what opinion of it N. N. Strakhov expressed, having heard the reading of this work for the first time at the Kuzminskys’. After this he managed to read it once more at his own home, and so, in April 1890, he writes to L. N.:
“With The Kreutzer Sonata — in the literary respect — I have completely made my peace, seeing how your story acts. Of course you know that the whole winter through they spoke of nothing else, and that instead of ‘how is your health?’ they usually asked: ‘have you read The Kreutzer Sonata?’ The censorship did you a great service in delaying its printing, and the Sonata is now known even to those who never read Ivan Ilyich or What Men Live By — or who read them and got exactly nothing out of them. But the Sonata is written so that it has caught everyone, even the most muddle-headed, who would have fallen only into a stupid, sweet rapture had it been written in the full artistic manner. How natural it was that you hastened to express the moral! This sincerity and naturalness acted more strongly than any artistry. You are, in your way, the only writer of your kind: to command artistry in such a superlative degree and not to be content with it, but to come out straight into prose, into bare reasoning — this only you know how, and are able, to do. The reader at the same time feels that you write from the heart, and the impression comes out irresistible. Various opinions I shall not relay to you, though much most amusing stupidity was uttered. The striking thing is that most often they did not notice the moral aim, did not see the condemnation of egoism and dissoluteness; so thoroughly have all grown used to the habits of egoism and dissoluteness that they were simply offended at you — why do you attack the inevitable, and that with which we live so excellently? Only young, intelligent people, only sensitive and intelligent women understood your reproof, acknowledged the evil against which you had risen, and sympathized with the preaching of chastity. Countess Al. Andr. Tolstaya astonished me — she fired straight out: ‘What? Does he want the cessation of the human race?’ — As though it lay upon anyone as a duty to take trouble for the continuation of this race! Perhaps we ought to set up breeding-studs!”
As we have already mentioned earlier, in the period of L. N.’s life that we are describing, he felt with especial intensity the necessity of inner spiritual labour and drew back before attempts to alter the outward forms, to attain outward results. On this account he has interesting notes in his diary, and the same thoughts are developed by him in his letters to friends, especially abundant at this time. In the diary a wavering is still noticeable. Thus, he writes:
“9 March. The chief difference in the influence not of Christianity but of moral consciousness upon life is this: that for some, certain positions, estates, institutions of the world are acknowledged unshakable, and within those positions they try to follow the indication of Christianity or of the moral teaching; while for others, the real ones, there arises the question of the positions themselves, of the estates, of the ordering of life, and all is subject to change. For the some, Christianity is a guide for acts in certain positions; for the others, it is a test of the lawfulness of the positions themselves.
The rich, high-placed man ought to put his wealth to use… and so on. Yesterday I read in New Christianity: ‘Christ must be in social life, in politics, in business.’ — How is that, ‘Christ in business’?
It is all the same as ‘Christ in Kicking’ or ‘Killing.’
Yes, before all things one must instil into these people that all positions, from the husbandman to the executioner, are graded by their morality; and therefore it is not enough to be good in one’s position: one must choose this position or that.
17 March. Two types: one relates critically not only to acts but also to position — for example, cannot take the post of a government official, cannot collect and keep money, take interest, and so on, and in consequence of this is always in want, in poverty, cannot feed his family, or even himself, and through his weakness puts himself into a position humiliating for himself and burdensome for others — to ask; the other relates critically only to his own acts, but accepts his position without criticizing it, and, having once put himself in the position of an official, of a rich man, feeds himself and his family abundantly, and helps others, and is a burden to no one (imperceptibly, at least).
Which is better? Both — but in no case the latter.”
And here, in the entry of the same day, he passes now to the consciousness of the greatest importance of inner spiritual development.
“One must not try to do good, but try to be pure. Man carries within himself a diamond, a prism, which he may cleanse or not cleanse. As far as this diamond is cleansed, so far does the light of God shine through it — shines both for the man himself and for others. And therefore the whole business of man is inward: not in the doing of good, not in the shining for people, but only in the cleansing of oneself. And the light, and the good for people, are the inevitable consequence of the cleansing.”
From yet another side L. N. defined the true character of man’s moral labour upon himself:
“A living man, who goes forward to where it is lit before him by a moving lantern, and who never reaches the end of the lit place, and the lit place goes on ahead of him.”
In contrast to human rules and the ancient law of Moses, which gave rules established once and for all — rules which L. N. compared to a lantern standing motionless upon a post, and having passed which a man falls again into darkness — L. N. pointed to the inner, new law of Christ, likening it to a lantern carried by the man himself upon a pole before him.
In this spirit he writes to his friends. We shall give here, by way of example, two letters, written to two different persons. These letters are interesting both in themselves and especially in that each of them, treating essentially one and the same theme, conveys it as applied to the addressee.
Thus, in the letter to Khilkov, L. N. tries to destroy his faith in outward organization, in the commune, and convinces him from this side of the necessity of inner labour, of the increase of love. Here is this letter:
“You also say that you do not like self-perfecting: it is too indefinite and broad. I understand this… I have thought about this very thing — and it has a connection with the questions about communes and about forms — thus (the parable of the gardeners)… The true life is given to man under two conditions: 1) that he do good to people (and good is only one thing — to increase love toward people: to feed the hungry, to visit the sick, and so on — all only in order to increase love toward people); and 2) that he increase the power of love given to him. The one conditions the other: good deeds that increase love in people are such only when, in performing them, I feel that love is increasing in me, when I do them lovingly, with tenderness; and love increases in me only when I do good deeds and call forth love in other people. So that, if I do good deeds and remain cold, or if I perfect myself and think that I am increasing love in myself, but this does not call forth love in people (another time it calls forth even evil), then this is not the thing. Only then — and we all know this — do I know for certain that the thing is right, when both I love more and people become from this more loving (incidentally, this is the proof that love is one single essence — God is one in all — by disclosing him in oneself, you disclose him in others, and the reverse).
And so, I think, that every ordering, every definition, every halting of the consciousness upon some state, is a preponderance of the care for the increase of love in oneself — self-perfecting without good deeds. The coarsest form is standing upon a post, but every form is more or less such a standing. Every form separates one from people, and consequently from the possibility of good deeds and of calling forth love in them. Such, too, are the communes, and this is their defect, if they are acknowledged as a permanent form. Standing upon a post, and going off into the desert, and living in a commune, may perhaps be needful to people temporarily, but as a permanent form it is an obvious sin and unreason. To live a pure, holy life upon a post or in a commune is impossible, because the man is deprived of one half of life — communion with the world, without which his life has no meaning. To live constantly thus, one must deceive oneself, because it is too plain that, just as it is impossible by some chemical process to separate out a circle of pure water in the current of a turbid river, so it is impossible, in the midst of the whole world living by violence for lust, to live alone, or among a few saints. For one must buy or rent land, a cow; one must enter into relations with the outer, non-Christian world. And it is precisely in these relations that the most important and needful thing lies. To go away from them is impossible, nor should one. One can only deceive oneself. For the whole business of the disciple of Christ is to establish the most Christian relations possible with this world.
Imagine that all the people who understand the teaching of truth as we do should gather together and settle on an island. Would that really be life? And imagine that the whole world, all people, go willy-nilly along one and the same path by which we go; but the people who understand as we do, who stand on the same step (at present), are scattered over all the world, and we have the joy of meeting with them, of learning of them and of their works. Is that not better? And it is just this that is so.
You say: one cannot love Herod. I do not know. But I know, and you know, that one must love him; I know, and you know, that if I do not love him, it pains me, that I have no life (1 Epistle of John, 14), and therefore one must strive to work, and one can.
I picture to myself a man who has lived his whole life among those who love him, in love, but who did not love Herod; and another, who put all his powers into love toward Herod and remained indifferent to those who loved him, and for twenty years did not love, but in the twenty-first came to love Herod and made Herod come to love him and other people — I do not know which is better. ‘And if ye love them which love you, what singular thing do ye?’”
The second letter was written to E. I. Popov, a man of an entirely different type, very much inclined toward inner spiritual struggle and wholly alien to outward, organizational strivings; but he too had not escaped the outward ideal and set himself a moral ideal that was definite — of an outward form, or at least of a degree — and L. N. tries to guard him from this infatuation and writes to him thus:
“That of which I wrote to you continues to occupy me. This is needful to us all, to all people. And any help at all in the one work needful to all is precious. I was thinking about this and did not finish writing to you, it seems, this also:
What weakens us in our struggle with temptation is that we set ourselves in advance the thought of victory, set ourselves a task beyond our strength, a task whose fulfilment or non-fulfilment is outside our power. We, like the monk, say to ourselves in advance: I vow to be chaste, understanding by this an outward chastity. And this, in the first place, is impossible, because we cannot picture to ourselves the conditions into which we may be placed and in which we shall not withstand the temptation. And, besides, it is bad; bad because it does not help toward the attainment of the aim — the approach to the greatest chastity — but, on the contrary.
Having decided that the task lies in observing outward chastity, men either go away from the world, flee from woman, like the monks of Athos, or castrate themselves and neglect that which is most important of all: the inner struggle with the imaginations, in the world, among temptations. This is all the same as a warrior who should say to himself that he will go to war, but only on the condition that he is sure to conquer. Such a warrior will have to flee from real enemies and to wage war with imaginary ones. Such a warrior will not learn to make war and will always be a poor one.
Besides, this setting of oneself the task of outward chastity, and the hope — sometimes the certainty — of realizing it, is disadvantageous also for this reason: that, in striving toward it, every temptation to which a man succumbs, and still more a fall, at once destroys everything, makes one doubt the possibility, even the lawfulness, of the struggle. ‘So, then, it is impossible to be chaste, and I have set myself a false task.’ And it is finished, and the man gives himself wholly to lust and is mired in it. This is all the same as a warrior with an amulet, which in his imagination secures him against being either killed or wounded. Such a warrior loses his last courage and flees at the slightest wound — a scratch.
The task can be one thing only: the attainment of the greatest chastity possible — for my character, my temperament, the conditions of past and present — not before people, who do not know that with which I have to struggle, but before God and myself. Then nothing violates, nothing halts the movement; then temptation, even a fall, all is led toward the one eternal aim — the withdrawal from the animal and the approach to God.
And this is just what brings me to the most important thing, of which I also wrote, but did not say to the end.
All the deeds which a man performs may be divided into three categories of deeds: some — those which we do without asking ourselves about them, whether they are good or bad, doing them without noticing them; others — such deeds as we, as Paul says, consider bad, but do all the same, such deeds as we wish to do but do not always do, or do not wish to do, but nevertheless sometimes do; and a third — such deeds as we wish to do and always do, or do not wish to do and never do. The first category of deeds are those which have not yet come under the judgment of our conscience, but out of which, as our life moves on, ever more and more deeds come under judgment and pass into the second category. The third category of deeds are those which have already passed the judgment of our conscience and, having been divided into good and evil, desirable and undesirable, have become the possession of our moral nature — this is our growth of life, our sole and inalienable wealth, acquired by life. (This is, for instance, that whereas formerly I could brawl, get drunk, fornicate, and the like, now it is not that I do not wish to, but that I already cannot.) So that the first category is the material for working-up by life; the third category is the finished thing, perfected by life, lying in the storeroom; the second category is that which is now on the workbench, being worked.
And how wonderfully happy, joyful is the position of people: willy-nilly, in life this third category is worked up: a man matures — grows wiser in mind and in experience; he ages — the passions weaken, and the business of life is accomplished. And if in this business one place the whole meaning, the whole aim of life, then there is the constant joy of constant success.
So, to understand this, and to be conscious of which deeds belong to which category, and to strain all attention upon the second category — this will help in the struggle.”
To everyone who has read this letter the closeness of its beginning to the subject of L. N.’s story Father Sergius will strike the eye. The thoughts set forth in it occupied L. N. so strongly that his artistic imagination created for him, in sleep, the images expressing these thoughts. And thus arose the subject of Father Sergius. L. N. first saw it in a dream and then related this subject in a letter to V. G. Chertkov, and the latter copied it out and returned it to L. N., asking him not to abandon this fine beginning. Lev Nikolaevich began to develop the subject and, carried away, wrote a wonderful artistic work.
For all this inner, spiritual struggle much strength was needed, and L. N. found it, and counselled others to find it, in prayer. And again, in this same year 1890, we find many thoughts about prayer, scattered both through the entries of his diaries and through his letters to friends; we shall try to set side by side the most interesting of them, in order to give a notion of L. N.’s relation at that time to this important lever of the spiritual life.
Here are extracts from his diary of 1890, from July to December, clearly indicating the course of the development of the thought about prayer, which led him to the consciousness of the necessity of complete humility.
16 July 1890.
“Much and often have I thought these days, I pray about what I have thought hundreds, thousands of times, but otherwise — namely, that I should like, just so, by the spreading of His truth not in word but in deed, by sacrifice, by the example of sacrifice, to serve God. And it does not come off. He does not allow it.
Instead of this I live, leading, together with all the children, a dirty, base life, which I falsely justify by saying that I cannot violate love. Instead of a sacrifice, of a triumphant example — an operatic, base, pharisaic life, repelling people from the teaching of Christ.
But Thou knowest what is in my heart and what I wish. If it is not fated, if I am not needed by Thee for this service, but am needed for manure, Thy will be done.
This is a vile egoism. And one cannot justify oneself by saying that I wish the success of the work of establishing the Kingdom of God and therefore grieve. There is no need to grieve about this; it will be done without me too.
Do I wish it for myself? Yes. ‘But give us this day our daily bread’: Give me the true life. And this life exists, and is given, and there is nothing to ask for.
Lord, Father, I love Thee, take me. And I thank Thee for this — that Thou hast revealed Thyself to me, hast not hidden Thyself from me.”
30 June 1890.
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Deep is the meaning of this. All disquiet is only from non-humility. If one is ready for every humiliation, then what tranquillity!
“And how easy: ‘And learn of me, for I am meek and lowly, humbled in heart. Be humble, and then only will ye find rest unto your souls.’”
5 July 1890.
“I prayed when I met N. He said that thought does not always act with equal force. Yes, one can pray only when a new ray penetrates into the heart; or rather — it is prayer, when a new ray has penetrated into the heart and you live by the light of this ray.
How good it was for me when I could call up, not the thought of God, but could stand before His face. And then it was lost. Not altogether, but lost.
Then there was the consciousness that one cannot, must not, grieve over the fact that I cannot serve God as I wish — as a preacher — that He knows for what He needs me. And one must do just that.
Then there was the consciousness of joy, of tranquillity, of humiliation, of humility. ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’ I thought that the trouble is that I have allowed the spirit of ill-will to arise within me, and that what is needed is love.
Today again I vividly recalled how good it would be so to humble oneself.”
19 August 1890.
“When one prays ‘Forgive us our debts,’ and so on, one must remember thoroughly one’s sins and thoroughly one’s stupidities.
Well, I am angry at the dullness of people; and was it so long ago that I dreamed of horses, of the Tsar’s making me a present of the wooded preserve surrounding Yasnaya Polyana?
For the non-Christian there are no limits to stupidities and nastinesses, and all are equal, and one cannot be angry at any of them.”
9 November.
“Today I thought during prayer:
‘And neither will your heavenly Father forgive you, if each of you forgive not from his heart his brother all his trespasses.’ This has the meaning that how can I wish my sins to be forgiven me, to have no consequences for me, not to torment me — all my trespasses — if even that I cannot forgive. If in my heart, which could let out of itself the traces left upon it by the deeds of others, even those deeds stick fast, then how should they — my sins — not stick fast in all the surrounding world?
This is one meaning; but the other meaning is this — that if I could forgive everything, then this very state of mine, of forgiveness, of reconciliation with all the world, would wipe out also all the traces of my sins in the world. I recall my sins: that which is not forgiven me in them — my present bad, rich position, my relations to people. I have only to forgive everything to everyone, to forgive the wrong judgments about me called forth by my position, to forgive people, to wipe out everything, to relate to them at the outset with love — and the relation toward them changes. Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. And the truth is love.”
21 November.
“I pray ever as joyfully. The constant prayer now is: not to people, but to Thee, and before Thee I labour, and I wish to live not by this life, but by all that immortal truth.”
26 December.
“Today, praying about the temptation of human glory — about how the despising of us by people ought to be joyful for us — I thought about holy folly, trying it on myself, and felt the danger of holy folly for so weak a man as I. If one were to detach oneself completely from people’s opinion of oneself, were to seek condemnation, then one would deprive oneself of the restraining force of people’s opinion, which is still needful for a weak man.
I think that this is the Achilles’ heel of holy folly. One begins to act so that people may condemn one, and afterwards gives oneself up to the temptation.”
Among his friends, who developed under his guidance, there often arose simultaneously thoughts similar to his thoughts, and L. N. always met joyfully these manifestations of spiritual movement and gave counsels of his aged experience, correcting the infatuations and errors of the young.
Thus, in this same year I applied to L. N. with a question, namely “about prayer,” communicating to him my definition of prayer, which had taken in me this form: “Prayer is the restoration of the interrupted communion with God.” Perhaps I did not express my thought quite clearly; besides, I fully realize that it was narrow, one-sided, and here L. N., in his answering letter to me, corrects my definition, gives his own, and sets forth the content of his prayer of that time.
“This is so, I think. Prayer is needful.
I began thus. I wished to agree with you, but, having asked myself more deeply, I saw that no. For me it is not so. Prayer is not only the smoothing-over of one’s rupture with God; prayer for me is, on the one hand, the consciousness of my relation to God, and on the other hand, the increase of my spiritual force — it is, as it were, the getting-up of steam, which will work, the swinging of the wheel, the gathering of force. (I speak here only of what I know from experience.) I pray often — that is, two or three times a day — and always the ‘Our Father.’ I have tried composing my own prayers — of late I composed a prayer expressing the consciousness that I am an instrument, an organ of God, and that I desire one thing: to fulfil my destiny without negligence and without strain, constantly conscious that through me there acts the power of God; and sometimes I recall this. But somehow the prayer ‘Our Father’ remains for me not exactly irreplaceable, but replacing and fulfilling all the demands of the heart. The ‘Our Father’ is now expressed for me in five propositions, which are so clear, so necessary, so connected among themselves, and so joyful, that they arise freely in the soul and each time say, as it were, something new, proceeding from me. 1) Holy is Thy essence — love. Therefore all must be measured and guided only by it — by love. And at once it becomes firmer and easier, and all difficulties are unravelled. 2) The indication of what one must do, guided by love, is to do that which furthers the establishment of Thy Kingdom — free, joyful — on earth as in heaven. This gives the content of loving activity, when one does not know what to do in general, or which of two things to do. 3) And this work of the loving establishment of the Kingdom of God I wish, and will, to do now, this minute, here, where and with whom I now am. And this further strengthens the swing and gives a terrible firmness, if only one merge with this thought. 4) If there are obstacles to this, then only in my past, in sins — I wish to free myself from them (the sins of lust, the sin of self-love, the sins of unlovingness). And I simply say, and love to say: forgive me, as I have said before people, repenting. I say this, recall the sins of others, the most repugnant to me, and Thou forgivest — not only forgivest, but Thou dost not understand how one can be angry, can not forgive. And 5) I am afraid of the temptations of lust, of self-love, of malice, and I flee from them; but the chief, chief evil is in the heart — it is that which hinders. Let it not be. And so I pray sometimes even in difficult moments and while among people, and I know, just as a locomotive-driver knows, having cut through half a snowdrift, but stuck fast all the same, that if he passed half a great snowdrift, and got entirely across a small one, it was only because he had got up steam. So I too know that, had I not prayed, it would have been incomparably worse. And I know, too, that if I attained that, the possibility of which I seem to see when I pray, then there would be no reason to live. I know that one must be perfect, as the Father. Well, there. I write what I experience, and as it comes. You will understand. The chief error is in making prayer obligatory. To me it is useful, but there may be people who establish their relation to God otherwise. As for faith, for me there is but one, and in one thing I believe: in this, that the Father who sent me hither is good — is love. And I throw myself upon Him, and let Him do what He will, and all will be not merely good, but divine.
As far as I know you, I think that you need prayer as an expressed consciousness of your relation to God. I have always sought, and seek, my own. Into the ‘Our Father’ I fall involuntarily.
Prayer — this is the symbol of faith (such is the ‘Our Father’), and to repeat to oneself, clearly, concisely, forcibly, the whole essence of one’s relation to God gives strength.”
Of the external events that took place at this time around L. N., one may point to the dreadful fire that destroyed several houses at Yasnaya Polyana. L. N., of course, was at the fire, took an active part in extinguishing it, ran into the already burning huts, seeking the children who sometimes, from fright, crawl under the benches and, unnoticed, are burnt up. Out of the fund he had for the poor he gave the burned-out families a relief of 15 roubles per household.
Visitors came to Yasnaya in this year no less often than before; of the more interesting we shall point to the writer N. S. Leskov, who at this time had drawn extraordinarily close to L. N. both by his writings and by his religious consciousness.
Then L. N. was visited by the German writer and director of the Schiller Theatre in Berlin, Raphael Löwenfeld, who gathered on his journey much biographical material and wrote an excellent and the fullest, for that time, biographical sketch of L. N., published by him in Berlin in German and afterwards appearing in two Russian editions. This sketch embraces the first period of L. N.’s life, down to Anna Karenina.
For a second time L. N. was visited by Professor Masaryk from Prague, who related toward L. N. with the same love as before. There came Molokans from Nizhny Novgorod Province; then, of the more frequent ordinary visitors: Chertkov, Grot, Strakhov, who with his true intuition so excellently expressed, in a few words in a letter to L. N., the significance of his work. Strakhov wrote, among other things: “Such is the position of Russia: between revolutionism and retrogradism there is no passage. These two currents stifle everything. Therefore what you have done, your declaration of an original religious thought, I consider a great work.”
Finally, toward the end of August, N. N. Ge came to stay, having finished the troubles with his picture. This sojourn of N. N. Ge was marked by an important event. N. N. modelled a fine bust of L. N. At this same time N. N. painted a portrait of Marya Lvovna, which, like all his things, was distinguished by great heartfelt sincerity.
In this same year there appeared in print the usual most-loyal report of the Over-Procurator of the Holy Synod on the condition of the Orthodox Church. In the enumeration of the various dangers threatening the tranquillity of the Church, there was, of course, mentioned also L. N. Tolstoy. At the same time a reservation was made — that the harm done by L. N. is paralyzed by the trustworthy state of L. N.’s family, which the Countess conducts in the spirit of Orthodoxy and which does not allow L. N. to carry on his secret propaganda. At the same time it was mentioned that L. N.’s sons “had begun to restrain his prodigality.” In the newspaper Novoye Vremya (New Time) there was printed a note about Tolstoy’s heresy, and precisely these expressions were quoted. Sergei Lvovich Tolstoy, who was at this time in Petersburg, read this note and was indignant at the falsehood contained in it. His brothers joined in his protest, and Suvorin printed, at the request of Sergei Lvovich, the following protest:
“Dear Sir, Mr. Editor!
In Novoye Vremya of 8 May there was placed an extract from the most-loyal report of the Over-Procurator of the Holy Synod for 1890 concerning ‘the spread in the Kochaki parish of the world-outlook and moral convictions of Count L. N. Tolstoy.’ In this extract we read, among other things, that Count Tolstoy ‘no longer had the possibility of rendering the peasants help, on the former scale, out of his estate, since his elder sons had begun to restrain his prodigality and to prosecute offences against his property, and no longer permit predatory mismanagement on his estate.’
As the elder sons of Count L. N. Tolstoy, we consider it our duty to declare in print:
First, that our father, as is known from his writings, acknowledges as real only help by personal labour, which is affirmed also by the report of the Over-Procurator, where it is said that Count Tolstoy ‘on occasion renders help to the poor by his labours.’ With such a view there is no place for prodigality.
Second, that we not only would never allow ourselves to restrain our father’s prodigality, to which we have no right whatever, but that we should consider disrespectful and impermissible any interference whatsoever on our part in his actions.
We hope that the newspapers which placed the extract from the most-loyal report of the Over-Procurator will not refuse to reprint the present letter.
Accept, etc.
The elder sons of Count L. N. Tolstoy: Sergei, Ilya, Lev Tolstoy.”
Of the literary works begun by L. N. in this so fruitful a year, besides those already mentioned, one ought to point to Resurrection, which then was still called simply “The Koni Story” — that is, the story whose subject had been communicated to L. N. by Anatoly Fyodorovich Koni out of his criminal practice. At this same time he was revising the story written earlier, Walk in the Light While Ye Have the Light. At that same time L. N. began the large work The Kingdom of God Is Within You. It arose out of a simple preface to two American articles, which struck L. N. by the clarity of their thought and by the closeness to him of their understanding of the teaching of Christ; these articles were the “Catechism of Non-Resistance” of Adin Ballou and the “Declaration of the Non-Resistance Society” of Lloyd Garrison. At first L. N. thought to issue them separately, with only a small preface, in which he drew the reader’s attention to the fact that the question of “non-resistance,” which had so surprised the Russian and European public in the 1880s, had been freely treated in America fifty years before, and had been professed by considerable groups of intelligent people and by prominent public figures.
At the same time the increasing instances of the refusal of military service drew the particular attention of L. N., and he began to write a composition in which he set himself the aim of analyzing the causes of the existing evil of militarism and of indicating the means of struggle with it.
In one of the letters of that time he wrote to me, among other things:
“I am now writing about resistance to evil, about the Church, and about the universal military conscription. All this is in connection, and all this is very important. I feel that I am bound — not to write it (that depends on God), but to write at it.”
The diary and letters of that time show us how full he was of thoughts about these questions and how comprehensively he discussed them. In November he records in his diary:
“Thought, toward the article on non-resistance:
The lower working classes always hate, and only await the possibility of venting all that has boiled up, but at the top now are the ruling classes. They lie upon the workers and cannot let go: if they let go, it is the end of them. All the rest is play, comedy: the essence of the matter is a struggle for life and death. They, like robbers, keep watch over the booty and defend the booty from others.”
At this time the question of non-resistance had taken with him already a definite, not a negative but a positive form. He expressed this excellently in a letter to one of his friends:
“Why, all this seemingly complex proposition about non-resistance to evil, and the objection against it, comes down to this: that instead of understanding what is said — by evil or violence do not resist evil or violence — it is understood (it even seems to me, on purpose) that what is said is: do not resist evil, that is, abet evil, be indifferent to it; whereas to resist evil, to struggle with it, is the sole outward task of Christianity, and the rule about non-resistance to evil is stated as a rule of how to struggle with evil in the most successful manner. It is said: you are accustomed to struggle with evil by violence, by retaliation. This is a poor, bad means. The best means is not retaliation, but good. It is something like this: as if someone struggled to open a door outward, when it opens inward, and one who knows should say: do not push there, but pull here.”
His negative relation toward the Church teaching, which he so definitely set in close connection with the violent ordering of the world, is characteristically expressed by him in a letter to Khilkov:
“What you write is very, very interesting and has greatly occupied me — namely, our relation toward the Church faith. I have come to the following: why do I not get agitated, do not enter into arguments on the occasion of the orders of the Minister of Finance about conversions, or of the Minister of War about mobilization, and the like? Because all conversions and mobilizations are alien to me: I know that this takes place in the sphere of error, of sin. Why do the orders, the sermons of a bishop, and the healing of [Father] John, as it were call forth in me a protest, a wish to say that this is bad, that this is a deception? This is because, deceived by the word ‘Christian,’ I suppose that this is an activity kindred to me, in one direction, only deviating. If you notice a deviation in me, or I in you, why, we shall at once begin with heat to speak to one another. Although the Church Christians and the priest John seem to us much more remote from us, still we acknowledge them as occupied with the same thing as ourselves, and from this comes our wish to correct their errors. But this is an error. Between us and them — that is, between their activity and ours (people will always remain brothers, and poor John is our brother) — there is nothing in common. Less than between the activity of the Minister of War and ours. The word leads us into error. This I have learned with pain, with suffering. One throws oneself at the word ‘Christian’ — and suddenly it turns out that there is nothing here resembling it, and that you are in everything a hindrance. I am trying to work out, and in part attain, and wish for you, such a relation toward these matters — that is, to listen to the account of how this one went to take communion, and that one went to the priest John, just as one listens to the account of how this one went paying calls, and that one hunted down a hare.
Your account of John is wonderful; I laughed the whole time while I read it aloud. The dreadful thing here is what has been done, in the course of nine hundred years of Christianity, with the Russian people. They — especially the women — are utterly wild idol-worshippers. That Christian spirit which expresses itself in alms, in mercy generally, has been brought in apart from, malgré, the Church.”
L. N. had a right to look thus upon worldly life, since he, in the first place, mercilessly reproved himself too, when he gave himself up to worldly passions, and, in the second place, this reproof called forth in him no malice toward people. On the contrary, in parallel with this reproof there went on in him an intense labour upon the working-out of a general benevolence toward people.
Reproving his own former life, he recorded in his diary of this year:
“I remembered how I played at cards, won money, and how I looked upon it as a natural, lawful means of enjoyment. And so far there were no doubts. And I loved it. Money was for me then something fundamental. Behind it there was nothing. So many people look now.”
And these thoughts supported and strengthened in him a tolerant relation toward the defects of other people and freed his feeling of benevolence toward people.
And at the same time he wrote:
“How good is the 15th verse of the 3rd chapter of the Epistle of John: ‘a murderer hath not eternal life abiding in him.’ Not the man enters into eternal life, but eternal life comes to be in the man. And it comes to be, and is, in the man, when there is in him love. God, love toward all, joyful and tender.”
One of the last acts of love in this year was L. N.’s intercession for criminal offenders. On 26 November he went to the court and, partly by his presence, partly by a conversation with the prosecutor, softened the lot of the condemned. To all the punishment was reduced, and some were acquitted altogether, which they had not even expected.
In concluding the description of L. N.’s life in the 1880s, let us give the data we have on those world literary works which, by his own words, had a preponderant influence upon him during the time of his spiritual crisis and during the time that followed it.
Title of works: Degree of influence:
The Gospels, all, in Greek. Enormous.
The Book of Genesis, in Hebrew. Very great.
Henry George, Progress and Poverty (*). Very great.
Parker, Discourse on Religious Subjects (**). Great.
Robertson’s sermons (***). Great.
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity. Great.
Pascal, Pensées (****). Enormous.
Epictetus. Enormous.
Confucius and Mencius. Very great.
On Buddha, by Édouard Schuré and Eugène Burnouf. Enormous.
Lao-Tzu, by Julien. Enormous.
( Henry George, Progress and Poverty. )
( Parker, Discourses on Religious Themes. )
( Robertson, Sermons*. *)
(* Pascal, Thoughts*. **)
We now draw near to that period of L. N.’s life in which it fell to him to come forward not only as an artist-thinker, but also as a public figure, in the narrow sense of the word, in the great organizational work of feeding the famine-stricken, and likewise in other spheres of life. This activity gave L. N. much anxiety and at the same time raised his popularity to an extraordinary height.