Source: https://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/bio/biryukov/biografiya-biryukov-3-12.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-12.md.
This year was in many respects a significant one for L. N., both in his personal life and in his participation in public life.
The winter of 1890–1891 Lev Nikolaevich spent with his family at Yasnaya Polyana.
In the family life the most significant matter was the division of the property and the renunciation of his literary rights. Both the one and the other had been preparing gradually. From the time of L. N.’s entry upon the new path of life, he had not ceased to be burdened by the surroundings about him, and sought a way out, and waged a quiet, stubborn, loving struggle. At times his nerves did not hold out, and stormy outbursts occurred; but afterwards he again submitted, endured, and waited. At each new assertion by his family of the rights of property — as, for example, at a new profitable edition of his works, or at the forcible safeguarding of his land rights — L. N. would make a reminder that he considered property a sin, and after this there not infrequently followed a painful family scene.
Such a scene occurred at the end of 1890.
In the autumn of 1890 the steward of Yasnaya Polyana caught some peasants stealing wood; they were tried and sentenced to six weeks in jail. They came to S. A. to beg that they might be pardoned, and S. A. said that she neither wished nor was able to do anything for them.
L. N., having learned of this, became dreadfully gloomy, and on the night of 15 December he had a serious talk with S. A., and he again urged her to give everything away, and said that she would be sorry after his death that she had not done this for the happiness of themselves and of all the children. He said that he saw only two ways out for his own peace of mind: one was to leave home, of which he had thought and was thinking; the other was to give all the land to the peasants and the right of publishing his works into common ownership. He said to S. A. that, had she possessed faith, she would have done this out of conviction. Had she possessed love for him, she would have done it for the sake of that love; and, finally, had she possessed respect for him, she would have endeavoured — leaving everything as it was — not to cause him such unpleasantnesses as this.
This incident showed all the family once more that, one way or another, the question of family property must be settled, and that responsibility for the disposal of it must be lifted from L. N.
L. N.’s family, with few exceptions, was far from sharing his views on property, and so, at last, the moment ripened for the resolution of this protracted conflict. The thought arose in many members of the family of asking L. N. to sign a paper on the division of the property.
Hard as this new assertion of property was for him, he consented to it, seeing no other possibility of untying the knot.
The formal conference about the division took place in Holy Week. All the members of the family had gathered.
L. N.’s attitude toward this matter is clearly visible from his letter to one of his friends, dated 17 April 1891.
“Now all the children have gathered… and have decided to divide the estate… I shall have to sign a deed of gift, which will rid me of property, but the signing of which will be a departure from principle. Still I shall sign, because, by not acting thus, I should call forth evil.”
Despite the calm tone of these lines, it appears from the further part of the letter that he was inwardly agitated.
In the same letter he writes:
“I write in a poor hand, because I have come from Yasenki and my hands are chilled; and it is poor in content, because I am not quite in a good frame of mind. But I want to write soon.”
On that day L. N. did indeed sign the act of division; but the procedure itself dragged on still longer and was concluded only in June of the following year, 1892.
L. N.’s constant, clear awareness of that appalling contradiction which lies between the two classes — those who labour and those who are idle — poured itself out not infrequently in his diary in sorrowful words full of profound meaning. Such is the following entry of L. N.’s in the diary of that time, touching upon the question of the struggle against this inequality and contradiction:
“I dropped in on Vasily, who had broken teeth — the dirtiness of the shirts and of the air, and the cold; but above all the stench struck me, though I have long known of it.
Yes, to the words of the liberal who will say that science, freedom, culture will set all this right, one can answer only one thing: ‘Set it right, then; but until it is set right, it is harder for me to live with those who live in superfluity than with those who live in privation. Set it right, and the sooner the better; I will wait below.
Ah, ah. The lie — how the lie has eaten its way in. For what is needed to remove this? They think it is needed that there should be plenty of everything — bread, and tobacco, and schools. But this is too little. Konstantin is lazy. To set things right, it is too little to change and increase everything materially; one must remake the soul of men, make them good and moral. And that you will not soon set right by increasing material goods.
There is one arrangement only — to make all men good. And in order at least not to do this, but to further it, hardly any better means can be found than to go away from the brothers who feast and live by the sweat and blood of others, and to go to those tormented brothers.
Not ‘hardly,’ but assuredly.”
L. N.’s literary work at this time consisted of two chief things: the article on art and science, and the article on “non-resistance to evil,” as he at first called his future work The Kingdom of God Is Within You.
The beginning of the article on art had long since been sketched out by L. N. at the request of Goltsev. Afterwards L. N. came to a halt in this work, and the drafts of it were kept by V. G. Chertkov. Probably at the request of one of the editors, L. N. took it up again, having asked Chertkov to send him the beginning.
On 2 January 1891 L. N. writes to him, among other things:
“Today I received the manuscript on art and looked it over, without touching it. It would seem that, by refraining from attempts to go deeper and to ride off to the side, one might bring it into order, which I shall try to do as quickly as possible.”
But soon he gives up this thought and writes:
“I received ‘on art’ and began to work on it. Everything goes deeper and grows. I do not give it free rein, and hope to limit it and to finish. But in such a form it is impossible.”
And this work is again put off; in February he already writes, among other things, to Chertkov:
“I am sending also my writing on science and art. I want for a time not to be distracted, and to give all my failing powers to the article on non-resistance to evil. I keep thinking that it is needed, needed more than anything else. On science and art I wrote rather for myself, though sometimes it seems — for God.”
To this writing of his he attached, indeed, a foremost significance. About the same time he wrote to his friend Marya Alexandrovna Schmidt, who was then living in the Caucasus:
“I am occupied very much with writing. I write very slowly, recast it a countless number of times, and do not know whether this comes about because the mental powers have weakened — in which there is nothing bad (if only the capacity for love should grow) — or because the subject of which I write is very important. The subject is still the same: the necessity for the people of our time to accept in deed the teaching of Christ, and what will come of this.”
At times a passionate desire for artistic work would seize him, and he hastened to share this feeling with Sofya Andreyevna, knowing that he would thereby give her great joy. Thus he wrote to her in January of that same year:
“…How good it would be to write a novel, lighting it up with the present-day views…
…And I grew so merry and cheerful (from the thought of artistic writing); but I came home, took up science and art, and stuck fast.”
Work upon these two articles moved on slowly. At first L. N. did not succeed in finding the form; this troubled him, and the very disquiet pointed out to him a sign of vanity, and in his diary he recorded such penitent lines:
“Just now, and today, as on all the days, I sat over the notebooks of the begun works on science and art and on non-resistance, and I cannot set about them; and I have become convinced that this is a sin. It is because I want there to be what I want, and as I want it, and not what He, and as He, wills. The physical idleness comes of my being simply not strong enough; the mental idleness comes chiefly of my wanting things in my own way. Well, fragments; well, without connection; well, unclearly — well, let there be what He wills and prompts in me.”
Thoughts about literary works, his own and others’, led him on to thoughts about the condition of contemporary criticism, and in his diary of that time we find such a stern judgement upon it:
“Just now I was thinking about the critics.
The business of the critics is to interpret the creations of great writers; above all, to single out from the great quantity of trash written by us all — to single out the very best.
And instead of this, what do they do? They squeeze out of themselves, or, for the most part, fish out of some poor but popular writer, a flat little thought, and begin, upon this little thought — distorting, perverting the writers — to string their ideas together, so that under their hands the great writers become little, the profound become shallow, and the wise become foolish.
This is called criticism. And in part this answers the demand of the mass: it is glad that, by something at least, by some stupidity even, a great writer is pinned down and made noticeable, memorable to it. But this is not criticism — that is, the elucidation of a writer’s thought — but the obscuring of it.”
In February L. N. was gladdened by a visit from the elder Ge — N. N. and his wife Anna Petrovna. N. N. was travelling, as usual, to the Itinerant Exhibition, and was taking there his new picture, entitled The Conscience.
Here is what L. N. wrote to me about this picture:
“The picture represents Judas: a moonlit night (in the manner of Kuindzhi). Judas stands in the foreground and looks ahead at a little knot of people, already far off, leading Christ away with torches. It is good, heartfelt, but not so powerful and important as What Is Truth“
On 25 February the 13th volume of the complete collected works of L. N. Tolstoy, published separately by Sofya Andreyevna, was placed under arrest; the object of the arrest was The Kreutzer Sonata, printed therein, which had already in the preceding year been forbidden to be printed in the Yuryev miscellany and in Gaideburov’s journal.
S. A., who regretted that L. N.’s new artistic work would not see the light, and who suffered, besides, in consequence of this prohibition a great material loss, could not reconcile herself to this ruling.
She turned first for advice to Countess Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya, as to whether this could not be brought to the knowledge of the Sovereign. Alexandra Andreyevna answered her that one must petition the minister. S. A. followed this advice and wrote to the Minister of Internal Affairs, Durnovo, asking him to lift the prohibition. To this she soon received a letter from Feoktistov, the then head of the Chief Administration for Press Affairs, of the following content:
“The Minister of Internal Affairs has received the letter of Your Ladyship and has charged me to convey to you that, with all his desire to render you a service, His High Excellency is not in a position to permit the publication of the story The Kreutzer Sonata, for the ground of its prohibition was not solely, as you are pleased to suppose, the unsuitable expressions occurring in it.”
Not satisfied with this answer, Sofya Andreyevna herself went to Petersburg to petition the Sovereign. She set out for Petersburg on 29 March.
Having obtained an audience with the Sovereign, S. A. received from him personally permission for the publication of The Kreutzer Sonata in the complete collected works. From there this story passed also into a separate edition and was reprinted by many publishers.
The Sovereign Alexander III proved in this respect more liberal than the American censorship. The failure to understand this highly moral story went to such a length that in one of the American states it was confiscated for pornographic content. And one German publisher took advantage of the “indecent,” as it seemed to him, content, in order to make of it an advertisement, and published The Kreutzer Sonata with a naked woman depicted on the cover to attract the public.
For L. N. this journey of S. A.’s, despite its success — or perhaps precisely because of its success — was not a joyful one. He wrote of this to his friend thus:
“My wife came back yesterday from Petersburg, where she saw the Sovereign and spoke with him about me and my writings — quite needlessly. He promised her to permit The Kreutzer Sonata, at which I am not at all glad. There was something nasty in The Kreutzer Sonata. It has grown terribly repugnant to me, every recollection of it. There was something bad in the motives that guided me in the writing of it. Such malice did it call forth. I even see this bad thing. I shall try that henceforth this should not be, if I happen to finish anything.”
Final permission to sell The Kreutzer Sonata came from the Minister of Internal Affairs only in May.
To the already-mentioned literary works of L. N. yet another is added. Chertkov sent L. N. an interesting book on vegetarianism, entitled Ethic of diet (The Ethics of Diet, or The Ethics of Food, as it was called in the translation). L. N. became very much interested in this book and wrote a preface to it.
The content of this well-known article embraces a question wider than vegetarianism. It is devoted to questions of abstinence in general. Since L. N. was fully convinced that without abstinence there can be no moral life, he accordingly called this article The First Step. This article laid the foundation of the vegetarian movement in Russia, which has at the present time already attained considerable development.
In order to depict more vividly all the horror of the slaughter of cattle for eating, L. N. visited the Tula slaughterhouses; in The First Step this visit to the slaughterhouses is described. The same impression he set down also in his diary. This entry is interesting for its immediacy, and therefore we give it here.
“I was at the slaughterhouse. They drag the beast by the horns, twist its tail so that the cartilages crackle; they do not strike home at once, and when they do strike home, it struggles, while they cut its throat, letting the blood out into basins, then strip the skin from the head. The head is laid bare of skin, with the tongue bitten through, turned upward, while the belly and the legs are still twitching. The butchers are angry with them for not dying quickly enough. The cattle-dealers, the butchers, bustle about with preoccupied faces, busied with their own reckonings.”
In L. N.’s diary of that time we find a whole series of interesting and important thoughts about food, abstinence, and in general about the diminishing of needs. We give some of them.
“There are two means of not feeling material want: one is to moderate one’s needs, the other to increase one’s income. The first is in itself always moral, the second in itself always immoral; from righteous labours you will not build yourself stone halls.
‘I do not do this (for example, do not avoid having servants), because it is a trifle, not worth the trouble.’ Everything good is a trifle. A great vileness one may commit, but a good deed is always small, unnoticeable. Good is accomplished not by the volcanic, but by the Neptunian theory.
‘I shall not do this, because it is unnatural.’ Natural? Why, if we live in a corrupted milieu, then, living in it naturally and shocking nothing, you will assuredly not come out of it. Living in such a milieu, all the good that we do will inevitably be unnatural. One can do what is natural and not good; but, living in a corrupted milieu, one can do nothing good without its being unnatural.
The chief care of men and the chief occupation of men is not to nourish themselves — nourishing oneself does not require superfluous labour — but gluttony. Men talk of their interests, their lofty aims, women of high feelings; but of food they do not talk; yet their chief activity is directed upon food. Among the rich it is so arranged that this should have the appearance of our not caring about it, but that it comes about of itself.
Everyone in general, on the average, eats, I think, three times more than is needed in quantity, and in value, in the labour of acquisition, ten times more than is needed.
This is one of the chief changes that lie before men.
To be in want as regards food and clothing and lodging is the most advantageous position for a man: he will not over-eat, not over-drink, not over-rest himself.
Especially the first: one ought to eat as though there were not enough for all, and to leave some for others.”
In July there were many guests at Yasnaya.
There came again, and spent some two weeks with her old friend, Countess Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya. Their tender, delicate relations, founded upon mutual respect and friendship, clearly stand out from the description of this meeting which Alexandra Andreyevna gives in her reminiscences of L. N. We give from them one characteristic little page, relating precisely to the time of her stay at Yasnaya in 1891.
“Our conversation dragged on rather long and in a new form. This time it seemed that Lev was drawing me out to be frank; but, seeing him in a depressed state of spirit, I did not wish to disturb him, so that I uttered only the very smallest part of what had accumulated in my soul.
Yet the most important thing remained, and I resolved to conclude our talk with it.
— Encore un mot, mon cher Léon; au lieu de regretter le fantastique, l’impossible, je dirai même l’inutile, avez-vous jamais pensé sérieusement à votre responsabilité vis-à-vis de vos enfants? Ils me font tous l’effet d’errer dans le vague. Que leur donnerez-vous en place des croyances que vous leur avez probablement ôtées? — car ils vous aiment trop, pour ne pas chercher à vous suivre” (*).
( One more word, dear Lev; instead of lamenting the fantastic, the impossible, and even the useless, have you ever thought seriously about your responsibility toward your children? They all produce on me the impression of wandering amid doubts. What will you give them in place of the beliefs you have probably taken from them? They love you too much not to try to follow in your footsteps. )
“I never attributed much power to my words, but this time I felt that the arrow had struck the mark and had touched upon something sore or long fallen asleep.
The whole physiognomy of Lev changed and darkened. I made haste to leave the room. He had once confessed to me that he had made his peace with prayer and himself prayed daily. I want to believe that on that evening he had recourse with especial fervour to the help of God.
Over tea I tried to divert him, made fun of certain hymns of praise that had been newly presented to him, and made him admit that the proportion between his detractors and his adorers was the same as that between an elephant and a gnat. To crown it, I even let fall to him a small compliment:
— Depuis que je vois ce que je vois, je suis vraiment fort étonnée, mon cher ami, de ce que vous ayez conservé un certain équilibre dans votre esprit, car j’avoue franchement, que si j’avais été l’objet de la millionième partie des ovations et des adorations qui vous entourent, mon cerveau eût culbuté sur-le-champ” (*).
( Ever since I have seen what is before me, I am, truly, very much astonished that you have still preserved an equilibrium in your soul. I confess frankly that, had even a millionth part of the ovations and adorations with which they surround you fallen to my lot, my head would at once have been turned. )
“On this occasion I recalled to myself the charming saying of Turgenev:
“Tolstoy, — a-t-il dit un jour, comme un éléphant, qu’on aurait laissé courir dans un parterre et qui écraserait à chaque pas les belles fleurs du monde sans s’en douter” (*).
( Tolstoy, he said one day, is like an elephant which, were it let into a flower-garden, would, without thinking about it, trample the finest flowers. )
“As I have already said, after dinner we usually gathered in the glass gallery, where Repin and Ginzburg were modelling the bust of L. N., each from his own side.
To shorten the tedium of the sittings, the children would usually read something aloud to their father; but out of excessive modesty they refused to read in my presence, assuring me that they did not read well enough. I gladly undertook the task, the more so as I felt myself in a merry frame of mind, and asked Lev to point out to me exactly which book he wished to hear. By good luck or by ill, he chose the very one that was most apt to call forth mes esprits moqueurs (). Sent not long before from Paris, dédié au Maître (*), it was distinguished by a flat adulation and by bombastic aphorisms, empty as a sounding brass. I do not know what came over me that day, but at almost every word of the author unknown to me there showered from me satires and a caustic, humorous response. The children roared with laughter, the artists laughed, and at last he himself deigned to be amused, which flattered my self-love beyond measure.
( My inclination to mockery. )
( Dedicated to the Master. )
“After tea Lev, in his turn, read to us aloud some Norwegian tales in a Russian translation, with which he was greatly delighted, and he read beautifully, though he was slightly embarrassed when there came up dangerous — that is, not quite decent — passages.”
At this same time, as is evident from Alexandra Andreyevna’s account, there were staying at Yasnaya Polyana I. E. Repin and the sculptor Ilya Yakovlevich Ginzburg.
Ilya Yefimovich Repin, on this visit of his, painted one of his most outstanding works — L. N. in his study. This picture is well known by its numerous copies and photographs. The original of it belongs to M. A. Stakhovich and is exhibited by him for the public’s viewing in the Tolstoy Museum in Petersburg.
On this same visit I. Ye. made several drawings — among others he depicted L. N. reading, lying under a tree, sitting in an armchair — and, finally, modelled a superb bust of life size.
While Repin was painting the picture in the study, Ginzburg was modelling his remarkable statuette, one of the best representations of L. N., in which his characteristic pose at his writing-work is caught with extraordinary fidelity.
While Repin was modelling his bust, Ginzburg was doing the same, only on an enlarged scale; a bust recalling the Olympian Zeus. I. Ya. Ginzburg told of his visit to L. N. in print, and we borrow from his account a few characteristic lines.
Tired from the road, and agitated by the meeting with L. N., Ginzburg felt himself at first very constrained. From this awkward position he was extricated by the arrival of Repin.
“I. E. Repin came in, and I was very glad,” relates Ginzburg, “to see here an old, good acquaintance. He showed me the bust of L. N. that he had begun and was working on of an evening.
‘And here, just now, I am going to paint L. N. in his working-room; let us go together. You will begin a statuette of him — will you?’
‘I am tired from the road and my head aches,’ I tried to decline.
‘Mind you do not put it off,’ I. E. Repin insisted, ‘you know where we are now — why, we are on the fourth bastion.’
I obeyed I. E. and went after him.
L. N. was sitting in his working-room, writing. I was struck by the surroundings in which L. N. worked. An ancient underground cellar recalled the medieval cell of a hermit-monk. The vaulted ceiling, the iron gratings on the windows, the rings on the ceiling, a scythe, a saw — all this had a certain mysterious air. L. N. himself, in a white blouse, sits, with one leg tucked under him, on a low box covered with a little rug — recalling some fairy-tale wizard. He looked at us in surprise and said:
‘Have you come to work? — excellent. Am I sitting properly?’
We set about getting ready; I seated myself beside I. E., who was already finishing his work; this work delighted me: the surroundings of the room, the light falling from the window, and the very figure of L. N. were painted with astonishing truthfulness and artistry.
I must confess, it was very hard for me to work; the fear of making a noise made me sit in one place and not stir, whereas for a statuette in the round it is necessary to move about and to observe the model from different sides. It seemed to me that our presence constrained L. N.; from time to time, it would happen, L. N. tore himself away from his work: he looked at us questioningly, probably forgetting why we were sitting beside him.
‘I am hindering you,’ he says, on seeing our work.
‘Oh no,’ answers I. E., ‘it is we who are hindering you.’
‘No, you are not hindering,’ answers L. N., ‘only I forget that you are painting me, and so, it seems, I change my pose; I have such a feeling, just as though I were being sheared.’”
On a walk they carried on with L. N. a conversation about art, about the academy. Adapting himself to the interest of his hearer, L. N. uttered to him several interesting thoughts about sculpture:
“You will excuse me,” said L. N., “I do not love sculptors, and I do not love them because they have done much harm to art and to men: they occupy themselves with what is harmful. They have set up all over Europe monuments, laudatory memorials to men who were unworthy and harmful to mankind. All these generals, commanders, rulers, and the rest did the people nothing but evil, and the sculptors extolled them as benefactors and left them to posterity for worship — those whom it would have been fitting to put to shame. But the chief untruth is this: that, in perpetuating these men of violence and despots, they represented them not in the aspect in which they actually were. Men weak, degenerate, and cowardly they always represented as heroes, mighty and great, which is at variance with reality itself; a man of small stature, rickety, they represented as a giant with a thrust-out chest and quick eyes — all this is a lie and an untruth. The sculptors were in the pay of the mighty of this world and curried favour with them. Such disgrace, in such a degree, we do not see in any other art.”
In August, guests again. Professor N. Grot with the French scholar Charles Richet.
This panorama of ever new and new faces, passing before L. N. with a very small proportion of such as his soul might rest upon, made L. N. set down such a note in his diary:
“Yet another man, and yet another, and another. And all of them new, peculiar; and it always seems that this one, now, will be the new, the peculiar one, who knows what others do not know, who lives better than others… And it is all the same, all the same weaknesses, all the same lower level of thought.
Can it be that men who now live upon the necks of others will not understand of themselves that this must not and ought not to be — voluntarily — but will wait until they are thrown off and crushed?”
At this same time he records:
“I was talking with N. He began to praise John of Kronstadt. I objected. Then I recalled: ‘bless them that hate you,’ and began to seek the good in him, and began to praise him. And I grew so merry and glad.
Yes, to bless, to do good to one’s enemies, to love them, is a great delight — precisely a delight, gripping, like love, like being in love. To love enemies. Why, it is only on enemies that one can come to know true love. This is the delight of love.”
In L. N.’s letters to his friends and like-minded companions of 1891 there occur interesting thoughts to the effect that, in the circle of his friends — for the most part young — he observes a certain crisis, a turn, a transition to a new stage of the understanding of life and of the practice of life. This transition coincided with the cessation of the activity of the agricultural communes and was in part connected with it. The failure of this premature experiment made many of its participants look more deeply into their own souls, see many shortcomings, and busy themselves with mending and preparing those tools with which they had purposed to build the new edifice. This very process of renewal was reflected in L. N.’s correspondence with his friends.
He wrote, among other things, to E. I. Popov:
“Do you know what I have lately been observing — that our path (the path of us all who go by one and the same road) is becoming, or rather is beginning to seem, especially difficult? The rapture, the carrying-away of novelty, the joy of enlightenment have passed. The possibility of realization becomes harder and harder; disappointments in the possibility of realization, more and more frequent. Men’s ill-will and their gladness at the sight of our errors grow stronger and stronger. More and more men fall away.
It seems to me that now is such a time. And I am glad that I know it. All these phenomena do not grieve me. But the chief thing is, I am glad that the inner feeling — the consciousness of the path and of the truth — does not weaken by a single hair. On the contrary, it gathers strength.
One weakness. I long for trial, for sacrifice. I know that it is a sin, but I long for it.”
In a letter to Feinerman of the same time (spring 1891) he expresses similar thoughts.
“You are very severe toward your past experience, or do not quite exactly define what proved to be the error. Principles — understanding by this word that which ought to guide one’s whole life — are not at fault in anything, and without principles it is bad to live. The error is only that there is raised to a principle that which cannot be a principle, such as taking a hard sweat in the bathhouse and the like. Even the working of bread-labour, as Bondarev says, cannot be a principle.
Our principle is one, common, fundamental — love not in word only and with the tongue, but in deed and in truth — that is, in the expending, in the sacrifice of one’s life for God and one’s neighbour.
From this general principle there flows the particular principle of humility, meekness, non-resistance to evil.
The consequence of this particular principle will, in all probability (I say in all probability, and not always, for a man may, after all, be put in prison and the like), be agricultural, handicraft, or even factory labour — but only, in any case, that labour for which there are fewest competitors and the recompense for which is the smallest.
Out of all the spheres where competition is great, a man who holds the teaching of Christ not in word but in deed will always be squeezed out, and will involuntarily find himself among the workers. So that the working position of a Christian is a consequence of the application of the principle, and not a principle. And if men take for the fundamental principle the being a worker, without having fulfilled that which leads to this, then evidently confusion will result.”
In a letter to me, L. N. comments on the first part of Feinerman’s letter, on the question of rational activity and of immediate feeling.
“I received your letter, dear friend P., and was very glad of it, though it seemed to me somewhat cold, somewhat severe. Perhaps this came of my own mood. With me — I think, with everyone too it is the same — it always happens that when I think, more than think, when some thought takes possession of me, then from all sides I hear echoes of that same thought. Feinerman wrote me his last letter but one (in the last, of a few days ago, he only informs me that he is moving from Poltava to Yekaterinoslav Province) about the perniciousness of life ‘according to principles,’ which he opposes to faith; he says very truly that principles say, ‘come, let me do it,’ while faith says, ‘one cannot but do it’; principles catch hold, drag along, while faith pushes, presses from behind. You write of the same thing. And in my own writing I am thinking of the same thing: of how man and mankind move forward. And I understand the denial of rational, programmatic activity, but I do not share it. Rational activity does indeed run on ahead of the strivings, but this is not only no misfortune, but a necessary condition of moving forward: one must first carry one foot forward, without yet transferring upon it the weight of the whole body. Without this there is no motion. And to reproach oneself for living, or trying to live, by rules determined in advance is just the same as to reproach oneself for carrying one foot forward instead of hopping always on one.”
Analysing the causes of this turn in the spiritual life of certain friends, L. N. writes to Chertkov — agreeing with him as to the word “fall away,” wrongly used by him — and corrects and distinguishes, as it appears to him, this moment in the spiritual movement of certain men:
“You correct me rightly about the word ‘fall away,’ and, above all, you write especially truly and well about M. N. and the spiritual process taking place in him and in very good men like him.
Difficult is the transition from the realm of carnal, animal life into the realm of life for the sake of human glory; but especially difficult is the transition from life for the sake of human glory to life for God. Or is this only how it seems, because that transition we have lived through, while this one lies before us? Indeed, just as to the savage it seems incomprehensible, impossible, to sacrifice not only his life but his appetites for the sake of human glory (while to us, with our point d’honneur, it seems that it cannot be otherwise), so to us now it often seems incomprehensible, impossible, to sacrifice human glory for the fulfilment of the will of God, while to the holy man it seems that it cannot be otherwise.”
To N. N. Ge the younger he briefly communicates the same thing:
“I receive good letters, among others from Rakhmanov, from Feinerman. All have stepped over that first step upon which they at first entered, and are going further, and this is joyful.”
This life of L. N.’s, which passed in communion, by word and by letter, with all manner of men, was complicated for him by the fact that the surroundings of his family life were out of harmony with the thoughts he expressed, and this burdened him exceedingly.
The chief question, on account of which discord occurred in the family, was the question of property.
The question of the real estate had been settled; L. N. had signed the deed of division. But there still remained to him a vast property — this was his works. They belonged to him, but his wife disposed of them by the power of attorney for their publication which he had given her.
And so there ripened in L. N. the thought of the necessity of renouncing the rights of literary property. He spoke of this to S. A., asking her to announce his renunciation. This was in July. A stormy family scene took place. Upon S. A. this scene produced so strong an impression that she resolved to make an end of herself. She went out alone to the Kozlovka-Zaseka railway station, in order to lie down under a train. By her own account, her state of mind was such that she would not have stopped before carrying out this intention. A simple chance saved her from destruction. She was walking along the high road past a government plantation; Al. M. Kuzminsky, her sister’s husband, was returning from a walk to the station. But he was walking through the wood, and they ought not to have met. But the mosquitoes bit Kuzminsky in the wood, and he came out onto the road to escape them, and met S. A. Her appearance struck him, and he got from her a confession of her intention and managed to dissuade her from carrying out the mad act.
Of course, on this occasion the matter could not be settled. But L. N. did not retreat from his resolve and continued to insist. He even composed the text of this renunciation and sent it to S. A. when she was in Moscow, proposing that this declaration be given to the newspapers; but S. A. did not consent. Thus the matter dragged on until September. At last, on 16 September, L. N. resolved irrevocably to carry out his intention; he wrote and sent to the newspapers his renunciation in the following form:
“Dear Sir.
In consequence of the inquiries frequently received by me concerning permission to publish, translate, and put upon the stage my works, I ask you to place in the newspaper published by you the following declaration of mine:
I grant to all who so desire the right, free of charge, to publish in Russia and abroad, in Russian and in translations, and likewise to put upon the stage, all those of my works which have been printed in the XIIth volume of the 1886 edition, and in the XIIIth volume which has come out in the present year, 1891, as well as all my works not printed in Russia and which may hereafter, that is, after the present day, appear.”
Thus was accomplished a great act, unexampled in history — the renunciation by an author of the literary rights to his works. True, this renunciation was not complete; he reserved to his family the right to dispose of the large novels, the tales of the early period, and the pedagogical works; but what he had written afterwards already exceeded in quantity what had been written before, and this was for L. N. the sole way out of the circumstances of life that burdened him.
The summer of 1891 passed in great alarm for many millions of Russian working people, chiefly of the peasant class. Twenty provinces of central and south-eastern Russia were overtaken by a complete crop failure. This impending calamity could not, of course, remain unnoticed by L. N. either.
And so, from the month of July onward, talk of the famine begins to be heard at Yasnaya. At first L. N., who always stood in opposition to mass movements, seemed to express a lack of sympathy with the appeals for help that reached him.
Countess Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya, who was a guest of L. N.’s that summer, mentions this opposition in her reminiscences:
“One of these pleasant evenings was interrupted by the arrival of the Tula marshal of the nobility, Rayevsky. This was the time of the famine that was setting in in 1891; deeply absorbed in thoughts about this disaster, Rayevsky could speak of nothing else, and this irritated Lev, I do not know why; he contradicted every word of Rayevsky’s and muttered to himself that all this was dreadful nonsense, and that, even if the famine should come, one need only submit to the will of God, and so on and so forth. Rayevsky, not listening to him, went on communicating to the Countess all his apprehensions, while Lev did not cease to spin out à la sourdine his rigmarole, which produced upon the listeners a most strange effect.”
And L. N.’s diary too records thoughts that arose, probably, in consequence of the talk about the famine. Thus, at the end of June he records:
“Children sometimes give the poor bread, sugar, money, and are themselves pleased with themselves, are moved at themselves, thinking that they are doing something good. Children do not know, cannot know, whence comes the bread, the money. But grown-up people ought to know this and to understand that there can be nothing good in taking from one and giving to another. Yet many grown-up people do not understand this.
The saving of life, the material saving of perishing children, the curing of the sick, the sustaining of the life of the old and the weak, is not good, but is only one of the signs of it — just as the laying of colours upon canvas is not painting, although all painting is the laying of colours upon canvas. The material saving, the sustaining of human lives, is the customary consequence of good, but is not good. The sustaining of the life of a slave tormented by labour, driven through the gauntlet, in order to give him his 5,000 — is not good, although it is the sustaining of life.
Good is the service of God, accompanied always only by sacrifice, by the expending of one’s animal life, just as light is accompanied always by the expending of combustible material.
It is very important to make this clear. So inveterate is the error — to take the consequence for the essence.”
In July these notes take on a still more definite character:
“All are talking of the famine, all are concerned about the starving, want to help them, to save them. And how repulsive this is. Men who never thought of others, of the people, suddenly, for some reason, take fire with the desire to serve it. Here there is either vanity — to show oneself off — or fear; but good there is none.
The famine is always (the poor ye have always with you) — that is, there is always someone, and something, to sacrifice for; nor can my sacrifice or service be more needed at one time than at another, because the very greatest material deed will be — that is, nothing, whereas the spiritual is always a definite magnitude.
One cannot, on a given occasion, begin to do good today if one did not do it yesterday. Good is done not because there is a famine, but because it is good to do it.”
At last, in September, when there began to be more loud talk in the press and in society of the impending calamity, Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov turned to L. N. for advice. And L. N. answered him with the following interesting letter, still, as it were, evading direct participation in this matter.
L. N. wrote to Leskov:
“…To the question which you put to me about the famine, I should very much like to be able to express clearly what I think and feel with regard to it. And I think and feel something very definite about this subject, namely: famine in certain places — not with us, but near us — in certain districts, the Yepifan, the Yefremov, the Bogoroditsk — there is, and there will be, still more severe; but famine — that is, a greater than usual shortage of bread among those people who need it, although it exists in abundance among those who do not need it — can in no way be averted by collecting and borrowing money and buying bread and distributing it to those who need it, because the whole matter lies in the dividing of the bread that the people had. If this bread, which there was and is now — if the land, if the money that there is — has been so divided that there have remained people who are hungry, then it is hard to think that the bread or the money which they will give now would be divided any better; the only thing is that the money which they will now collect and distribute will present a new temptation. If, when hens and chicks are fed, the old hens and cocks do harm — snatch up the food more quickly and drive off the weak — then there is little likelihood that, by giving more feed, the hungry will be sated. Here one must picture to oneself the hens and cocks that drive the others off as insatiable. The thing is not — since one cannot kill the hens and cocks that drive the others off — the thing is to teach them to share with the weak. And until this is done, there will always be famine. It always has been and never ceased: the famine of the body, the famine of the mind, the famine of the soul. I think that one ought to apply all one’s powers to counteracting, beginning of course with oneself, that which produces this famine. But to take from the government or to call forth donations — that is, to gather a greater quantity of the mammon of unrighteousness and, without altering the apportionment, to increase the quantity of feed — that, I think, is not needed and will produce nothing but sin. Of doing deeds of this kind there is a host of willing hands — men who live always without caring about the people, often even hating and despising it, who suddenly take fire with cares about their lesser brother — and let them do it. Their motives are vanity, and ambition, and fear lest the people grow embittered. But I think that good deeds cannot be done all at once on the occasion of a famine, and that if anyone does good, he did it yesterday too, and the day before, and will do it tomorrow too, and the day after, and in the time of famine, and not in the time of famine. And therefore against famine one thing is needed — that men should do as many good deeds as possible; so come, let us, since we are men, try to do this to the end, both yesterday, and today, and always. And a good deed is not the feeding of the hungry with bread, but the loving both of the hungry and of the full. And to love is more important than to feed, because one can feed and not love — that is, do evil to men — but one cannot love and not feed.
I write this not so much to you as to those people with whom I have incessantly to talk, and who maintain that to collect money, or to get it and distribute it, is a good deed, not understanding that a good deed is only the deed of love, and the deed of love is always a deed of sacrifice. And therefore, if you ask: what exactly are you to do? — I shall answer: call forth, if you can (and you can), in men love for one another, and love not on the occasion of a famine, but love always and everywhere; but, it seems, the most effectual means against the famine would be to write something that should touch the hearts of the rich. As God shall put it into your heart — write; and I should be glad if God too commanded me to write such a thing.”
So wrote L. N. in September; but in October, under the influence of his awareness of the popular calamity growing up beside him and of the feeling of compassion for men, L. N. plunges into it head first, and the activity displayed by him at this time forms one of the finest pages both of his personal life and of that of his family and of all Russian society.
The description of this activity of L. N.’s will form the subject of a separate chapter; here, however, we shall give yet further examples of L. N.’s written communion with his friends during this time. Many of his letters are full of profound interest. Very significant is L. N.’s letter to Doctor Rakhmanov. He had been in the communes, had left them, had taken up a solitary life, and yet, unsatisfied by it, ever full of the most rigorous moral demands upon himself, he communicates his doubts to L. N. and asks for advice.
L. N. answers him thus:
“…Your question is not clear to me. You somehow connect the consciousness that you make use of violence with compassion for tormented and tormenting men. This connection I do not see. That is the first thing; and the second is that I do not agree that you live by violence. I judge by myself: I live in conditions far worse than yours, and yet I do not consider that I live by violence. And in general I do not quite understand what is to be meant by these words. I do not live by violence in that sense, but I know that every time the question presents itself to me whether to use violence or not, I shall not desire violence and shall not consciously use it. (An example which I always use for myself: if I am told that Pugachev is coming, killing and outraging everyone, I shall not only not prepare powder and a gun, but shall drown them, to rid myself of the temptation.) But to say that I never use violence, or shall not, unnoticed by myself, make use of it — that I cannot, because to say this would be to say that I am holy. And to waver and to doubt as to whether I really do not take part in violence, that I cannot, because I know very well how it was when I did take part in it, I know that my whole world-outlook and my whole life are different, and that I do not deceive myself when I think that I hate violence and strive with all the powers of my soul to live without it — that is, to live by the law of God, by love.
Now the question of the sufferings of men, produced by violence. I know that they exist. I hate violence and renounce it only because I know that they exist, that these sufferings exist. My striving away from violence will not, I know, save men from suffering. I did not even expect it to. Men will be saved from sufferings by the establishment of the Kingdom of God, and it is being established, by me too. The means of its establishment is love. And love guides those acts which must be performed. And what these acts are which must be performed out of love, that is known to him who has to act. Whether to go into the mines and work together with the men, or to exhort the masters to change the position of the workers, or their own life, so that the men should not need to go there? Or something else still — that everyone knows in his own position. And if he hearkens to the voice of love and not of egoism, then he will do what he ought, and, having done it or doing it, he will not so much be at peace as not be uneasy. And the teaching of Christ will show him what he ought not to do — not to anger, not to be angry, not to divide men.
But the chief thing, the chief thing — which is very clear to me now, and which I should so much like to convey with the same clearness to others — is this: that, just as the ideal of inner perfection is infinite, not infinite, but attainable only by infinite approximation (like the polygon inscribed in the circle), so too the ideal of the outer perfection of the Kingdom of God (the lion with the lamb, and so on…) is attainable only in infinity; and that therefore a man must seek the verification of his acts not in an outward comparison of himself, of his merits, with the ideal of inner perfection (be ye perfect, as your Father), nor with the outward ideal of the Kingdom of God, but in the inner consciousness of the greatest possible fulfilment, in his position, of the will of Him who sent him. Somewhat as a workman who has been bidden by his master to strike with a hammer, and who need not care that his blows do not at once shatter what he is shattering; nor that the works at which he labours will not finish the whole task by the holiday; but who has only to do, in that to which he is set, all that he can, firmly believing that what he does is needful and reasonable.”
To his friend N. N. Ge he complains of the temporary weakening of his participation in the peasant labours:
“This year I am very weak physically, busied with my writing, which is not finished but is moving on, and, besides this, overwhelmed with guests of every sort. And you cannot imagine how now, at harvest-time, it is wretched, shameful, sad for me to live in those base, vile conditions in which I live. Especially when I recall the former years.”
The question of visitors evidently agitated L. N. strongly that summer. In the following letter to N. N. Ge he returns to it again and speaks thus:
“We have very many visitors, and in regard to them I always try to hold to your rule, that ‘a man is more precious than canvas.’ And there come from this both heaviness and tedium, but there come rewards too. To rid oneself of this there is one means: work, when one lives by it and feeds others; but for us it is not only impossible to refuse — we ought rather to rejoice that we have proved of use for something. But still better is it if from work too one can tear off time for a man, for a chat with him. Extremes always meet: a chat is the emptiest and the greatest thing.”
L. N. was often troubled by petitioners for money, and he writes to one of them thus:
“I much regret that I cannot fulfil your wishes, dear Alexander — excuse me, I do not know your patronymic. Money (*) I have for very long now had none of any kind, and I use it for nothing. I confess, it is always even offensive to me when money is asked of me. If I consider money an evil, then either I have none, or, if I have it, then I am a liar, and one ought not to apply to me.”
( A. I.: I had asked Lev Nikolaevich for monetary help toward the organization of a temperance society. )
A significant event of this year was the appearance in the Russian language of the book by Baroness Suttner, her novel Lay Down Your Arms. Lev Nikolaevich received this book from the translator and answered the author with the following letter:
“I have read your novel Lay Down Your Arms, sent to me by its translator, Mr. Bulgakov. I value your work very highly and think that the appearance of your novel is a happy augury. The abolition of slavery was preceded by the famous book of a woman — Mrs. Beecher Stowe; God grant that your book may precede the abolition of war. I do not think that arbitration is an effectual means for the abolition of war. I am at this very moment finishing a work upon this subject, in which I speak of the sole means which, in my opinion, could render wars impossible. None the less, all efforts dictated by a sincere love of mankind will bring forth fruits, and I am convinced that the Roman international congress (of the parliamentary partisans of peace), as well as last year’s London one, will contribute very much to the popularization of the idea of the sharp contradiction between the military condition of peoples and the foundations of Christianity and humanity professed by these same peoples.”
L. N.’s influence at this time began to penetrate into the broad masses. A sign of this may be the appearance of articles about L. N. in the moderate, even the conservative, press. Such an article — one that endeavoured to reconcile L. N. with moderate, well-disposed people — must be considered the article that appeared in this year by N. N. Strakhov, a humble and rapturous admirer of L. N. and at the same time one who had not broken off his connection with such conservative organs as the Russky Vestnik (The Russian Herald). His article on L. N., under the title “Talk About Tolstoy,” appeared this time in the moderately liberal journal Voprosy psikhologii i filosofii (Questions of Psychology and Philosophy).
The substance of this article consists in this: that Strakhov demonstrates that the dissemination of L. N.’s works is useful, since they are full of the true Christian spirit. Of course this was a very bold assertion, and only thanks to Strakhov’s former reputation did this article see the light.
Upon L. N. this article produced a good impression. He wrote to Strakhov upon reading it:
“I have read your article, dear Nikolai Nikolaevich, and, I confess, did not expect it to be such. You understand that it is awkward for me to speak about it, and it is not from false modesty that I say so — it was unpleasant for me to read about that exaggerated significance which you ascribe to my activity. It would be unjust were I to say that I myself, in my own thoughts — unclear, indefinite, breaking out without my consent to it — do not sometimes raise myself to that same height; but, on the other hand, in my thoughts I also let myself down often, and always with pleasure, to the very lowest baseness, so that this is balanced out into something middling, and therefore it is unpleasant to read this. But, setting this aside, your article struck me by its heartfelt sincerity, by its love and by its profound understanding of that Christian spirit which you ascribe to me. Besides this, when one takes into account the conditions of censorship under which you wrote, one is struck by the mastery of the exposition. Yet still, forgive me, I shall be very glad if it is forbidden.
In any case, this article of yours has drawn me still closer to you by its very foundations.”
At the same time he wrote to his wife, who was then in Petersburg:
“Yesterday I received Strakhov’s article. I agree with you that it exaggerates my significance to the point of indecency, but it seems that, independently of the fact that he so flatters me, I shall not be mistaken in saying that it is remarkably good — not only well written, but clever, heartfelt, cordial. To understand the essence of Christianity thus is possible only for a Christian, or rather, a disciple of Christ. Tell this to Nikolai Nikolaevich. I shall write to him.”
It is remarkable that this article reached even the Sovereign Alexander III. Here is how Strakhov writes of this to L. N.:
“…I must tell you about my conversation with Countess Alexandra Andreyevna. I had not yet had time to come up to her when she began: ‘I hope you will not be angry with me for what I did without asking you: I presented your article to the Sovereign.’ Such an unexpected opening fairly struck me. She went on to say that my article had made her change her view of your activity. ‘You know that I have long known L. N., am very fond of him, disagree with him very much, have argued much with him and thought about him, but I did not know how to look at him from the side from which you have looked. Now I have become much more tolerant. When the talk turned upon L. N., I said to the Sovereign: I have an acquaintance, a writer, Strakhov. — I know him, says he. — And he has written about L. N. an article that will hardly pass the present censorship, but that explains his activity beautifully. And I gave your article to the Sovereign.’ I was much agitated by such an honour, and thanked the Countess, but what gladdened me most of all was that she really seemed to be beginning to give up her intolerance. She is so clever and kind that for her this is possible. But in general, how difficult this is! From conversations with various people — for instance, even with Suvorin — I see that the current notion about religion sits extraordinarily firmly in men’s minds. Almost the first word about you is: ‘How dares he preach!’ They take away the most inalienable and the simplest and most innocent right of every man.”
And this significance of L. N.’s only grew, broadened, and deepened under the influence of subsequent events.