Source: https://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/bio/biryukov/biografiya-biryukov-3-16.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 (2026-05-26), from the continuous Russian capture in ../ru/chapter-16.md.
In 1893 the relief of the famine-stricken continued. By the spring we already had about 100 dining-stations.
L. N. came to Begichevka to visit us, who were working there, and of course his arrival heartened us and poured fresh energy into us for the continuation of this far from easy task.
For the first time that year he came in February. He came with his daughters, Tatyana and Marya Lvovna, and was uncommonly clear and cheerful. His gaiety ran to pranks. Thus, one evening he began to leap about in the common room, where all the workers of the time had gathered around him. Suddenly, going up to a small, round, old table, he proposed a wager — who could jump from a standing start onto the table with both feet and keep his balance, standing upright. One of the young men present took the wager. Lev Nik. resolved to begin first; he went right up to the table, crouched, pushed off, and leapt onto the table. But the table’s legs were probably already rotten — they did not hold and gave way, and L. N. did not manage to stand: he toppled to the floor together with the table. His good-natured roar of laughter, with which he picked himself up, soon calmed those who had rushed to help him, and his merriment infected everyone. L. N. only very much regretted that he had caused the hosts a loss, and apologized to them profusely.
Here are two passages from his letters to Sofya Andreyevna, pointing to his cheerful mood and giving some notion of his activity at the time:
“I shall write the report here and, if I have time, the story that I promised for the collection for the migrant settlers. Yesterday I wrote many letters. I read a good Russian book about Rousseau, interesting to me. Now I am reading a wretched tale by Potapenko. I greatly long for good weather and good roads. Then we shall soon get round everything and return.
Pyotr Vasil. sleeps near me and snores in the night. And I, in order to stop his snoring, whistle. Today Marya Kirillovna heard the whistling and surely thought it was the house-spirit. We all live the same way: we dine at one, sup at eight. The food is excellent.
It is very vexing that one cannot help with firewood, of which there is a terrible need. Today I shall write to Pisarev, asking him to let us have some of his surplus stores. Two assistants have come to Sopotsko. The Filosofovs’ helper has arrived — a businesslike girl, it seems. Yesterday Ivan Tsinger came and offers his services. I should very much like him to stay for the spring (in Posha’s place), chiefly because he is one of the Raevskys’ own people; but I am afraid he is too young.
Yesterday I read ‘The Pardon’ — Coppée’s ‘Pater’ — and Tanya began to incite everyone to play it for the peasants, and they read it aloud, having divided up the parts: Sharapova, her friend, Tanya, Posha, Tsinger. But it seems nothing will come of it.
I rise early, at seven; at eight I drink coffee, and from nine until one and later I work diligently; then I dine, then I drive wherever I must, and return by six. At eight we sup; often the girls get up an extra tea. Tanya draws, we read, we write letters, sometimes we talk. I feel very well.”
Our theatricals, indeed, did not come off. But we were glad to hear L. N.’s opinion of Coppée’s piece “Our Father,” in the fine translation by Barykova. Its meaning is the forgiveness of an enemy. L. N. greatly valued this thing.
But through this gaiety and cheerfulness of L. N.’s there often showed an awareness of the dreadful condition in which the working, peasant folk around him found themselves. This heavy awareness often manifested itself in L. N.’s letters to his friends. Thus, he wrote from Begichevka to the young Ge:
“The condition of the people is very heavy, but, like a consumptive at whom it is frightening to look from the outside, who does not himself see his own wasting away, so it is with the people. The same thing I experienced at Sevastopol, in the war. Everyone said: horrors, horrors. But we arrived, and there are no horrors — people live, walk about, talk, laugh, eat. The only difference is that they are being killed. The same here. Only the difference is that they die more often. And this is not seen.”
Of course, at the same time he kept up relations with his numerous correspondents, heartening and directing their lives by his counsels.
There were around him then many young forces, inspired with a desire for activity, and many of them remained without an application for it. Here is what L. N. wrote, among other things, to one of these friends who thirsted for an application of their powers:
“Your question as to how and to what end better to employ your powers would be very difficult, were one required to give it a single, infallible answer; but its answers may be as many as there are suppositions, and all may be — and even surely will be — mistaken, like everything that men do.
Yes! to break off one fetter and to tighten another, and so on to the grave, and to die with that. And I will tell you what I think, fully: such is life — the beautiful, single life granted to us. And just so have lived and do live all the best men, and so lived Christ, and so He bequeathed us to live.
This life is beautiful in that, first, by breaking off one fetter — the more binding and the stronger — you thereby go forward toward freedom; and in this is joy.
But the whole matter is not in this, and to look back upon it is not good and must not be done. The chief thing is that, together with this breaking off of fetters and the slow retarding of movement, you feel that by this very thing, by your own personal mind, you are doing another work — the work of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth. And a better life than this I desire nothing and can contrive to desire nothing.”
L. N. stayed in Begichevka some ten days. It is evident from his letters that his intention to drive somewhere to inspect the dining-stations was often hindered by snowstorms, uncommonly fierce that winter. There were tales of people who had frozen, buried in the snow. These snowstorms and these tales led L. N. to the idea of writing the story Master and Man, which he finished the following year.
He came for a week to Yasnaya, and at the beginning of March was already in Moscow.
From there he writes Chertkov a letter in which he gives a new and interesting summary of Christianity, about which his friend had asked him.
“In the briefest form, the meaning of Christ’s teaching is this:
My life is not mine — it cannot have as its aim my good, but the good of Him who sent me; and its aim is the fulfilment of His work. And only through the fulfilment of His work can I obtain good.
You know this; but for me it is so important, so joyful, that I am glad of every occasion to repeat it.”
The whole of March and April L. N. spent in Moscow, occupied chiefly with the completion of his book The Kingdom of God Is Within You. He was so absorbed in this work that for this period there are very few of his letters. He wrote his book with such enthusiasm and passion that during this time he let slip his work in other domains of his life, especially in the domain of family obligations and in the domain of moral work upon himself. And so, when he had sent off the last sheets of this book to the translators, when in place of this all-engrossing literary labour an empty space remained, the awareness of his neglect in other domains of his life rose up before him in all its force, and he was horrified. This horror at being, by his life, so far from the ideal that he illuminates so vividly in his writings, and the thought that the very act of writing hinders his movement toward the ideal, are admirably expressed in a letter to his young friend Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge, the son of the artist, from which we make a rather considerable extract. This letter was written in the middle of May 1893. L. N. was then in Moscow, while the young Ge was living at that time near his father, on a farmstead in Chernigov Province, and was occupied with peasant labour.
“I have finished my Conclusion and sent it off; and, like a man who has buried himself in a single point and has seen nothing around him, I looked about me, and was dismayed, and grew despondent. How many mistakes I have made — irreparable ones, harmful to the children, leading them into temptation. And how bad — how weak — I have been and still am. Treasure your position, dear friend; prize it. If it sometimes seems to you that you are standing still, this is because you flow too evenly toward where you should go. What trace your life will leave, and when, and where — I do not know. But a good life will leave a great, good trace, and the less perceptible it is to you, the surer it is that it exists. Whereas I know that my life is bad; I see the harmful trace it will leave, and I suffer without cease. Perhaps the suffering will leave a trace. God grant it; for this I do not complain of it. Already too much is required of me now, after all the mistakes I have made: it is required that I live constantly contrary to my conscience, set examples of a bad life, of lying, and hear and read praises for my good life. The sole consolation, the sole joy of life for me now is only in knowing that, living as I live, I fulfil the will of Him who sent me. But this is easy to say and hard to do.”
In May L. N. again visited Begichevka. Here is how he explains his visit in a letter to Chertkov, on the eve of his departure:
“You know, probably, that Misha and Lyova have gone off to Samara. Tanya and I are setting off tomorrow, the 21st, for Begichevka, where we shall stay about a week. Everyone there has dispersed, but the relief continues, and I am afraid there is confusion there. One must be there and try to bring this tormenting and tempting affair to a conclusion.”
I and some of the workers were indeed not in Begichevka at the time. I had left it for a while, partly on my own personal affairs, partly in order to convey to hospital Pavla Nikolaevna Sharapova, who had fallen ill with typhus — afterwards she became my wife, and at that time she was nursing the typhus patients in Begichevka. In the second hungry winter the epidemic took on threatening dimensions. P. N. Sharapova soon recovered, and in the course of the summer was again in charge of the typhus ward.
L. N. stayed in Begichevka not long and returned to Yasnaya. From there he writes an interesting letter to his friend Evg. Iv. Popov, who was helping him in the copying of his latest composition. In the letter to him L. N. expresses his attitude toward the illegal propagation of his works, which had been banned by the Russian censorship. He expresses this on the occasion of the fact that a certain D. R. Kudryavtsev was publishing these works at his own expense by hectograph and distributing them free of charge among his friends. Having learned that L. N. had finished a new composition, he at once turned to him, asking him to send a copy for publication. His answer L. N. set forth in a letter to E. I. Popov in the following terms:
“…I unseal the letter in order to complete my answer to your question: may the article be handed over to Kudryavtsev? I seem to be evading a direct answer, saying that I have nothing against the circulation of this writing. The essence of my thought is this: that I have written and do write in order to communicate my thoughts to people, and therefore I desire the greatest possible circulation of them, and therefore I never refuse anyone the communication of what I have written (I do not even know whether we did well in not communicating, during the writing, to all who wished to know); but I desire to act in this respect openly — that is, to read, to speak, to give for copying, to print openly in Russian printing-houses, as I did with ‘The K. of G. I. Y.’ (if I do not do this now, it is only because it is evidently a completely unproductive waste of labour), and to print abroad in the original and in translations — but I do not wish to do anything in concealment, so as to be compelled to tell an untruth. So that, if I were interrogated and considered it needful to answer, I might be able to tell the full truth — namely, that I wrote in order to communicate my thoughts to people, and that, just as I have never hidden my thoughts in conversation, so I have not hindered, and do not hinder, their circulation in copies or in books, but, on the contrary, further it when I have the opportunity. And I consider myself obliged to act thus, and so I always shall act.”
That same day he makes a remarkable entry in his diary, which we give in an extract of the most significant thoughts:
“They say: that which exists is rational. On the contrary, all that exists is always irrational. Rational is only that which is not — what reasoners call fantasy.
If that which is were rational, there would be no life; and just as little would there be life if that which is not (that is, the ideal) were not rational.
Life is only the eternal movement from the irrational to the rational.”
“They say: all that exists is rational.
It is not true. On the contrary: all that exists, if by ‘that which exists’ one understand the visible and tangible world, is not rational.
If the existing were rational, we should not recognize it as existing: we should not be conscious of our life, were we not conscious of its discrepancy with the ideal of reason and did we not work for the destruction of this discrepancy. Neither were we conscious of life in the mother’s womb, in sleep, in a swoon.
The manifestation of consciousness, coinciding with the manifestation of life, is the sign of a task set us for the performing of a work. If the canal has been dug through, there can be no work and no workers for the digging of the canal. If there are workers — that is, working people — then evidently there is a task which needs to be done. Just so, if there is life, then there is a work of life which must be done. And those who live do this work. And if in the world there is a work which needs to be done, then evidently the world is imperfect, but there is a conception of the possibility of its greater perfection.
One may say that it is rational to dig a well or a pond where there is no water, or to plant a forest, or to remove filth, or to manure a field, or to teach children, and so on; but one cannot say that it is rational to live without water, without a forest, amid filth and ignorant children. Just so, one may say that it is rational to perfect oneself and the world, but one cannot say that we and the world are rational.”
“Man brings rationality into the world of nature, destroying irrational struggle and waste. But this activity is outside himself, distant, only reflected. Man sees this irrationality only with his reason.
But the irrationality of his own life he not only sees with his reason, but feels with his heart, as something contrary to love, and with his whole being. And in this application of the irrational in his life to the rational consists his life.
Very important here is the fact that the irrational in nature is known by the reason, the irrational in human life itself — by the heart (by love) and by the reason. Man’s life lies in bringing the irrational in his life to the rational, and therefore for this two works are needful:
1) to see in all its significance the irrationality of life and not to turn one’s attention away from it;
2) to be conscious in all its purity of the rationality of a possible life.
Being conscious of all the irrationality and the calamitousness always issuing from it, man involuntarily turns away from it; and, on the other hand, clearly conscious of the rationality of a possible life, man involuntarily strives toward it. Not to hide, therefore, the evil of irrationality, and to set forth in all its clearness the good of a rational life — this ought to constitute the task of all the teachers of mankind.
But here it is precisely that there always seat themselves in the chair of Moses those who do not go to the light, because their deeds are evil; and therefore men who set themselves up as teachers always not only do not strive to make clear the irrationality of life and the rationality of the ideal, but, on the contrary, hide the irrationality of life and undermine confidence in the rationality of the ideal.”
The month of June L. N. spent quietly at Yasnaya, writing an article about Zola and Dumas. He reports of this to the artist N. N. Ge:
“I have finished my own work; now I throw myself first on one thing, then on another: the article on art I have not finished, and I have also written an article on the letters of Zola and Dumas, on the present mood of minds. It seemed to me very interesting: the stupidity of Zola and the prophetic, artistic, poetic voice of Dumas. I shall send it to Severny Vestnik and to Jules Simon’s Paris journal Revue de famille.”
Probably in connection with this article, interesting entries appear in L. N.’s diary. Here are some of them:
“5 June. Only the Christian sets his life in the knowledge and fulfilment of the truth, and therefore only the Christian alone is free, because nothing can hinder the confession of the truth.
10 June. Religion is not that which people believe, and science is not that which people study; but religion is that which gives meaning to life, and science is that which it is needful for people to know.”
But the most remarkable entry of this time was made by him on 24 June. This entry was, with L. N.’s permission, copied out by Chertkov and published by him in the form of an article, entitled by him “The Demands of Love.” I find this title not quite exact. I should have called it thus: “The Boundlessness of Love.”
This entry expresses precisely this thought. L. N. supposes that a man and a woman, husband and wife, brother and sister, and so on, have moved from the town to the country, throwing off all their urban privileges, and, with the most modest means earned by themselves, have resolved to help the people around them by every means possible, recognizing in them their brothers and sisters. Drawn ever further into this helping, they, not seeing a limit to the sacrifice, themselves become this sacrifice, and there awaits them ruin from want, filth, and infection, which they had not the strength to drive off from themselves. What had prompted them to take up this life was a sincere love for their fellow men — for their brothers. And this love brings them to ruin. Such cases are not rare. And many people take fright at this and turn back, replacing active love with a love of the reason — with the activity of enlightenment, with struggle against the violence that produces inequality — and sometimes withdraw so far from the path first chosen that they violate the very principle of love, and begin to combat violence with violence too, thus replacing one evil with another like it. Having enlightenment in view, they sow darkness. In reality the activity of love is not so terrible, and if death is met with on its path, then no oftener than on any other path of man, who is subject to every kind of external influence. But the activity of love can be fruitful only when it is fearless.
“Only that love is Love for which there is no end to sacrifices, even unto death” — so L. N. concludes his entry.
At the beginning of July L. N. comes again to Begichevka, this time already for the final winding-up of the affair. The harvest was expected to be middling; there was hope of the recovery of the peasant economy, of earnings. On the other hand, the last funds were being exhausted, and no further inflow of them was foreseen.
L. N. arrived in Begichevka on the evening of 11 July. From the very next day he begins the round of all the dining-stations, distributing the remaining funds.
Having stayed in Begichevka some eight days, he writes to Sofya Andreyevna:
“And so our ten days are past. There remain two days; and I have not noticed how they went by. In the morning I write, I correct the article on Zola and Dumas in Russian and in French, and in the evening I drive about. Only yesterday I did not manage it — guests got in the way. Samarin was taking photographs, and I read him the article. Then came Pisareva, Lidia Dolgorukova, and Bobrinskaya. I had set off for Osinovaya Hill — that is thirteen versts — but did not get there; I turned back. Today the same. It is very hot: I do not even bathe, for it brings a rush to the head. In the evening I rode on horseback to Osinovaya Hill and Prudki. Everywhere there is need — both for the people, scarcely surviving until the new harvest, and for the pitiful, stunted children. It seemed there was much money, but it will scarcely suffice — not only to distribute it all, but barely to make it stretch.”
The article on Zola and Dumas, of which we have already spoken, and which he entitled “Non-Acting,” was remarkable in that L. N. wrote it at once in two languages, in Russian and in French.
The article “Non-Acting” was written on the occasion of a speech by Zola, who preached “labour” without giving the meaning of life and the aim of labour, and of a letter by Dumas, in which he asserts the necessity of a religious consciousness of brotherhood and love among all men. In this article L. N. points out that labour cannot be an aim, that it is only an inevitable condition of life. But if a man does not know the true meaning of life, does not know whither he is to go and what to do, then it is better for him, while in “non-acting,” to ponder his life, to seek out its meaning — and then all his labour will be productive and holy.
At this same time L. N. was pondering a new artistic work. At the beginning of July he writes to Chertkov:
“I have on no account taken to writing. I scribbled a little at the article on art and got entangled. And now my mind is more occupied with artistic matters, namely ‘Who Is Right?’ Children of the rich amid the famine-stricken. I like it very much. But I do not write. For the third day I have been mowing, and with great pleasure.”
On his last visit to Begichevka L. N. recorded much of interest in his diary. We give here the most significant:
“There are four (it seems, four) different views of the world.
1) That a man comes into the world as a man might come into a factory in which he, paying no heed to what is done in the factory and to what end, stopping, spoiling, and breaking everything that has been arranged in the factory, arranges for himself the most agreeable life in this factory.
This is what all children, and naive, egoistic people, always do. There are many such people: they seek happiness to the detriment of the factory and, having broken and spoiled much, very soon see that there is no happiness. These are the most ordinary people, and almost all of them pass through this view of the world.
2) That a man begins to see that the factory is a factory in which something definite is being made — that everything in this factory is well arranged, only that for him there is no place in the factory. The shining wheels turn, the belts run, something is being pressed, joined together. But all this only hinders him, and he begins to think that if the master who sent him here has arranged everything so well and has not given him a place here (as it seems to him), then probably this is done because his appointment is in another place and in another establishment.
These are the people who recognize this present life as a preparation, a trial for another life, or as a corrupted life, a fall, a sin, as the church people understand it. Everything here is well. ‘And indifferent nature shines with eternal beauty’; but man’s appointment is not here, but there, in the au delà.
3) The view of the world according to which people, seeing this incessant labour, useless to them and not giving them happiness, recognize all this life as evil and consider the most rational and desirable thing for themselves to be liberation from it, the annihilation of any and all life of theirs (pessimism, Buddhism).
4) That in which a man, having seen himself in the midst of this work that is being wrought on all sides, understands that if everything and everyone is at work, then he too must take part in it and find himself his own place for work.
And as soon as a man understands this, it will at once become clear to him what to do and how. And, having begun to do it, he will attain both that which the first sought — that is, the greatest personal happiness — and the knowledge that this happiness is not there, in the au delà, as the second think, but here, in the fulfilment of the appointed work. And he will see that life is not evil, as the third think, but a good — and not only a personal good, that is, one limited by space and time, like that which the first seek, but an infinite and eternal good; and this good he will feel more or less according as he does the master’s work unwillingly, like a slave, or willingly, like a sharer in the master’s affair.”
In August L. N. received a letter from his friend N. N. Strakhov, who was taking a cure abroad, at Ems. Unfortunately, we have not L. N.’s letter, to which it serves as an answer, but from this letter of reply one may picture in what mood the former was written, and therefore we extract that part of the letter which bears directly upon L. N.:
“Your letter, priceless Lev Nikolaevich, received by me at Ems, gives me no peace. I think of it incessantly (and what is there to do here but think?), and many times I have set about answering; yesterday I started a long letter, began it and gave it up: too lofty a tone, to which, it seems, I have no right. I was struck by the fact that you are in low spirits, as you write. A man upon whom so much love is turned from all sides! Why do you call your work at Begichevka stupid? Why do you not believe in the effect of your book? I believe that it will have a great effect. Sooner or later people will cease to count it an honour to prepare for murder. The State has striven to ennoble military service; it has turned it into a civic obligation which all must bear alike. This must not be, and will not be!
But there throng in me too many thoughts, all of which I should like to express to you: about Rozanov, and about the Slavophiles, and about the sciences and the arts — about everything I should like to talk. In your thoughts there is always for me instruction, and especially when they go against my own thoughts. At Ems I was much occupied with you. There I bought, and even had bound, two little books of yours: The Kreutzer Sonata and A Critique of Dogmatic Theology. I read and reread them; in the Critique, which I scarcely remembered, I found astonishing things. First, I understood the direction — the truly philosophical demands addressed to Makary, that pitiful and typical representative of our theological wisdom. Second, there are separate passages and expressions — incomparable. One of them is straight from my heart: ‘I have crept,’ you write, ‘into some sort of stinking bog, calling forth in me only those very feelings which I fear most of all: disgust, malice, and indignation’ (p. 103). How forcefully and clearly said! Yes, I truly fear these feelings, and therefore, like your Platon Karataev, I strive to seek out seemliness everywhere; I strive with all my might to find at least a drop of seemliness in what is being done and what exists around me. I strive to understand, to forgive, and, above all — I strive not to overlook the good which is mingled with the evil.”
The diary entry of that time gives us a wondrous picture of autumn:
“14 August. A blue haze, dew like gossamer (?) on the grass, on the bushes, and on the trees up to a sazhen high. The apple-trees droop with their burden. From the shelter comes the fragrant smoke of fresh brushwood. And there, in the bright-yellow field, the dew is already drying on the yellow oat-harvest, and there is work — they bind, they cart, they mow, and on a lilac strip they plough. Everywhere along the roads and on the boughs of trees are ears of grain, caught, pulled out, broken off. In the dewy flower-garden, brightly-clad girls, softly singing, are weeding. Footmen bustle about in aprons. A lap-dog warms itself in the sun. ‘The masters are not yet up.’”
About the same time L. N. received from the German philosopher Gizycki, editor of the journal Ethische Kultur, an inquiry, to which L. N. replied with the article “On Religion and Morality.” At the beginning of September he writes to Chertkov’s wife:
“I had begun to answer the letter of the editor and member of the German society for ethical culture upon the questions sent me, and very well put: 1) what is religion? and 2) is a morality possible that is independent of religion, as I understand it? — and the answer seemed to me important and clear; but I cannot write.”
In this same letter L. N. tells Chertkov’s wife that he is occupied with his usual autumn work: the sawing of firewood. The whole of September and October L. N. spent at Yasnaya Polyana and was occupied with the article “On Religion and Morality” and with an article about the Toulon festivities on the occasion of the conclusion of the Franco-Russian alliance. He wrote many letters, and on 11 November they moved to Moscow.
Of his correspondence during this time, exceedingly interesting is the exchange of several letters with Strakhov on the occasion of an opinion of L. N. by the well-known German historian of philosophy Kuno Fischer. Here is Strakhov’s letter:
“…I write to you on the occasion of the remarkable opinions of you given by Kuno Fischer in his new book, Artur Schopenhauer. Judge for yourself what he writes:
P. 110. ‘It is remarkable that two famous and incontestably great men of the last third of our century took to heart the cause of Schopenhauer and raised his creations from under the curse upon them; these were the celebrated musician of our time (Richard Wagner) and the most celebrated Russian writer, who, in his religious character and activity, is even more interesting and astonishing than in his artistic works. Count Lev Tolstoy, having done with his military career, at the beginning of his literary activity wrote to his friend Fet, the translator of our philosopher: “A never-ceasing rapture before Schopenhauer and a series of spiritual delights such as I have never experienced. I do not know whether I shall ever change my opinion, but now I am sure that Schopenhauer is the most brilliant of men. It is the whole world in an incredibly clear and beautiful reflection.” As late as 1890, the portrait of Schopenhauer was the only portrait that hung in his study.’
But still more important is the following passage:
P. 123. (Having shown that Schopenhauer in no way carried out those teachings which he himself preached, Kuno Fischer says:)
‘To preach morality is easy. To found it is hard. But far harder still is to embody it. That is why truly religious works are so rare — especially works for the founding of a religion; even works of geniuses in this field are infrequent. Every morality and religion that is taught, be it preaching or foundation, without its being personified in one’s own life and one’s own body, so as to show it to people in a clear image, in the end turns into idle verbiage. And this is the very thing that the man now living, Lev Tolstoy, has realized. From the pessimistic teaching he came to the true Saviour and began to act as the Sermon on the Mount demands.’
Here I am delighted both by your fame (K. Fischer is a classic and very considered writer) and by the true direction which it has received. You are set up as a model, and you are indeed a model of the right attitude toward morality and religion. What is most astonishing of all — Kuno Fischer, in order to explain the contradiction between Schopenhauer’s life and his teaching, sets forth in detail the thought that this was a man with an artistic nature, having much of the actor in him. It is strange that K. F. did not recall that you too are a great master in art, and that, consequently, his explanation is good for nothing. Among the Germans it is met with at every turn that, in his thoughts, a man is very exalted, but in his (nature) life — a pitiful philistine. Among Russians this is not so, as you yourself prove.
Well, forgive me. I know that you do not much love such tidings. I remember how once I brought you a whole packet of newspaper clippings in which your name was mentioned and glorified, and you, without reading them, threw the whole packet into the fire. Meanwhile Schopenhauer, to the last day of his life, read greedily everything that was written about him, and was forever complaining that his friends did not send him everything in which his name was mentioned. Kuno Fischer on this occasion says: ‘Die Ruhmbegierde, soll Plato gesagt haben, ist das letzte Kleid, das man ablegt. Dieses Kleid hat Schopenhauer nie abgelegt, in und mit ihm ist er gestorben’ (p. 119) (*).
(* The desire for fame, said Plato, is the last garment a man casts off. This garment Schopenhauer never cast off; in it and with it he died.)
Of course, Kuno Fischer’s words about you require various corrections, but I look to the main thing. But perhaps with these tidings, too, I am again too late?
I have one more request of you. Will you not send me your ‘Report,’ as it was printed in Russkie Vedomosti? Strangely did your voice ring out about sufferings and grief and the love of one’s neighbour, when all were exulting over the reception of our sailors in France. I was much touched by ten lines of yours, reprinted from the ‘Report’; probably they touched many others too. Your book The Kingdom of God was met quietly, but very hostilely, as was to be expected. The censorship has declared that it is the most harmful book of all that it has ever had to ban. Oh, you work wonders, priceless Lev Nikolaevich! You awaken the sleeping spirit. You alone speak living words, and they act irresistibly. On the occasion of ‘Non-Acting’ all started up and responded. Half the responses pleased me — not by their content, but by their very respectful tone: this tone is still an unaccustomed novelty.
I myself continue to be in good health, and now I have somehow been shaken up, or come to life again. I write diligently on the History of Philosophy and am preparing to write about Schopenhauer. (You see, I obey you!) God grant you health and strength, and a bright spirit!”
L. N. answered him thus:
“I thank you for your ever-kind feelings toward me, dear Nikolai Nikolaevich. Of course this is pleasant to me, but harmful, and I know how harmful. Kuno Fischer rightly says that this is the last garment to be cast off. It is dreadfully hard to cast off. And it weighs upon one dreadfully. It terribly hinders free spiritual movements, free service of God. Just together with your letter I received from Stasov, with his usual exaggerations, a description of Grigorovich’s jubilee, at which the reading of my letter to him supposedly produced some particular effect. And, I confess, even this letter of his quite enfeebled me. The good thing was that there, at the same time, was a third letter, anonymous, filled with the most cruel denunciations of my pharisaism and the like.
Today I read the account by Tchaikovsky’s brother of the illness and death of his famous brother. There, that is reading useful to us: sufferings, cruel physical sufferings, fear — ‘is it not death?’ — doubts, hopes, the inner conviction that it is, and nevertheless, and along with this, the never-ceasing sufferings and exhaustion, the dulling of the sentient faculty and an almost reconciliation and oblivion, and just before the very end some inner vision, the making clear of everything — ‘so that is it’ — and… the end. There, that is the needful, the good reading for us. Not so as only to think of this and not to live, but to live and work, yet constantly with one eye seeing and remembering it — that promptress of all that is firm, true, and good.
We are living at Yasnaya alone with Masha, and it is so good for me, so quiet, so joyfully-dull, that I should not wish to change it; but probably I shall soon go to Moscow. I have written the answer to the German on the questions about religion and morality, and I constantly thought of you, wishing to read it to you and to ask your opinion.”
Having received this letter, Strakhov wrote, among other things, to L. N.:
“Your words about fame and death greatly touched me, and, it seems, I fully understand them. Your fame always delights me as the victory of those principles which I consider the best and the highest. At Grigorovich’s jubilee the reading of your letter was indeed the one living moment of rapture amid all sorts of ‘formal and artificial honourings.’”
L. N.’s letter at Grigorovich’s jubilee, which, in the words of Vl. Vas. Stasov, indeed produced an uncommonly strong impression, is as follows:
“With all my soul I congratulate you, dear Dmitry Vasilyevich. You are dear to me both by the memories of nearly forty years of friendly relations, upon which during all this time nothing has cast the slightest shadow, and especially by those unforgettable impressions which your first tales, together with Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, produced upon me.
I remember the tender emotion and rapture produced upon me — a boy of sixteen who dared not believe in himself — by Anton-Goremyka, which was for me a joyful discovery of the fact that the Russian peasant, our breadwinner and — one would like to say — teacher, can and must be described not in mockery and not for the enlivening of the landscape, but that he can and must be portrayed at his full height, not only with love, but with respect and even with awe.
It is for this beneficial influence of your works upon me that you are especially dear to me, and — after forty years — with all my heart I thank you for it.
With all my soul I wish you that which is always needful for all, but which to us old men is the most needful of anything in the world: more love from people and toward people, without which one can still somehow get along in youth, but without which life in old age is one torment.
I hope that the celebration of your jubilee will further the fulfilment of my wish. Sincerely loving you, Lev Tolstoy.”
At this same time interesting relations are formed between L. N. and the American sectarians — the Shakers. L. N. characterizes these people thus, in a letter to I. B. Feinerman:
“Very joyful are my relations with the Shakers, more and more establishing themselves. Today I shall answer the eighty-two-year-old elder Evans, who recently sent me his autobiography and other works. But for the spiritualism and the spirit-seeing, this would be the highest manifested realization of the teaching of Christ. 1) Non-resistance by violence. 2) The absence of private property. 3) The denial of the priesthood. 4) The equality of the sexes. 5) The striving for purity in the sexual relation.
To my question, how they keep their common property from outsiders, he answered that in this respect they are far from the ideal, but try to come as near to it as possible. I shall by all means translate some of his writings. They are mingled with the superstition of spiritualism, but of the very highest spirit.”
From America, too, he learns of a new and interesting movement and writes about it to Chertkov:
“The other day I received Stockham’s book Koradine Letters. These are thoughts on the destiny of woman and on spiritual healing, and in the book there is a supplement which I liked very much, ‘Creative Life.’ The thought of this pamphlet, addressed to women, to girls — but it relates also to men — is that at a certain period there manifests itself in a man as it were a more-than-ordinary energy. She calls this ‘creative power,’ and man strives to apply it. The sexual application is the lowest. A man, having felt this power, must know what he needs, and that he can create, and must at once apply this creative power to a work: build a house, plant a garden, a forest, teach, write, do something new, that has not been before. I think that this is true; I have even partly experienced it. The difficulty here for us lies only in turning this creative power off the path to which it has grown accustomed, and setting it onto a new one.”
In general during this time — partly from the popularity of L. N.’s activity during the famine, partly from the influence of his latest book, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, the translations of which had already begun to be circulated — L. N.’s renown grew uncommonly beyond the bounds of Russia.
At this same time L. N. was elected an honorary member of the Russo-English Literary Society. Having received notice of this, L. N. answered them thus:
“Dear Sir. I thank you very much for the wish you have expressed to elect me a member of your society. I sympathize with all my soul with every means of the union of people, independently of political parties, and especially with the conscious spiritual union of people of different nationalities and states, which is now being accomplished with such rapidity and energy throughout the whole world. Your society has such an idea, and therefore I wish it the greatest success. I shall be very glad to receive more detailed information about its activity.”
These joys came from without; while one’s own, Russian life gave little that was gladdening and much grief.
In the Voronezh disciplinary battalion there suffered and was dying Drozhzhin, a young village teacher who had refused to serve his military service. This case gave L. N. the opportunity to look into these dreadful institutions, the disciplinary battalions, the aim of which is, it seems, but one — the mockery of the human personality. We shall yet return to Drozhzhin and to Lev Nikolaevich’s attitude toward him.
On 23 October of that year a monstrous villainy was perpetrated by the Russian ecclesiastical and secular authorities: upon Prince Dmitry Alexandrovich Khilkov, who was living in exile in the Caucasus with his wife and children, an assault was made, and by supreme command his children — a girl and a boy — were taken away, carried off by their grandmother to Petersburg, forcibly, against the parents’ will, baptized into the Orthodox faith, with the assistance of John of Kronstadt, and made Princes Khilkov.
To the report to L. N. of this dreadful affair he answered Khilkov with the following letter:
“I have just received your letter, Dmitry Alexandrovich, and cannot recover from my astonishment. Your mother’s act is incomprehensible to me, especially after the information I had had of her supposedly softened feelings toward you and your wife. I decidedly cannot understand by what she is guided in acting thus, on what basis she so acts, and what she expects from her acts. I write this in order to express to you how hard, almost impossible, it is for me to write to her, decidedly not knowing what to lean upon. I shall nevertheless attempt to carry out your wish, but I greatly doubt whether I shall succeed in it.
‘They have persecuted me, and they will persecute you.’ I cannot but repeat this to myself, and although it pains me that I repeat it of others, I still cannot but see the truth and inevitability of it. For your position — confessing in word and deed the teaching of Christ in a world that hates this teaching in its true significance — is just like the position of a man who would go to meet a crowd running toward him. He cannot but be crushed. This is a sign that he is going where he should. But it is dreadfully grievous and painful, especially for the mother, for Cecilia Vladimirovna. I comfort myself with the thought that God gives a trial according to one’s strength, and that this will not break, but will strengthen her. Besides, I am sure that this cannot continue, that they will come to their senses and give back the children. What are their ages? The elder, I think, is five or six.
What does this mean? Does she wish them to be recognized as Princes Khilkov and that there should be someone to whom to give the fortune? or is it simply a wish to cause pain? Write, please. Your position is very, very near my heart, especially the position of C. V.
One thing I think — that the heavier and more difficult the position in which you are placed, the more necessary it is not to hurry, not to grow heated, not to give oneself up to feeling, but to act by those very foundations of love, of forgiveness, of the turning of the other cheek, in the name of which your life was changed and all that has befallen you has befallen.
‘He that shall endure unto the end shall be saved.’ How many times has it befallen me to repent that I did not quite hold out and betrayed what I had begun. There it is precisely that faith is needed — not faith in some metaphysical essence, but faith in that law of love which is mightier than all and conquers all. God help you, you and C. V., to have this faith, and her grief will surely turn to joy. How, I do not know, but I am sure that so it will be.”
At this same time L. N. writes to Khilkov’s mother, the grandmother of these children, at whose request these children had been taken away from those whom they loved and who loved them, and given over to her:
“Princess Yulia Petrovna! I have just received a letter from your son, who writes me that you, having come to him, took and carried off his children, and asks me to write to you. I so love and respect your son that I cannot leave his request unfulfilled; and meanwhile I fear that by this letter — which is especially hard for me — I shall draw upon myself your just reproaches for permitting myself to write to you of an affair so tormenting for him and his wife, and equally tormenting, I am sure, for you. It would be senseless on my part to write to you, a mother, of the sufferings of a mother forcibly parted from her children, and of the other hard circumstances of this whole affair, because I am sure that you know and have weighed all this better than I, and that, if you acted thus, then you had for it some special, unknown reasons; and therefore the only thing I permit myself to ask of you is this: that you, if you find it worth the while, should inform me why you did this, by what you were compelled to act thus, and what desirable consequences you foresee from it. Please do not be angry with me, Princess, if by this letter I have acted disagreeably upon you, and forgive me, and either do not answer me at all, or answer with the same feeling of respect and goodwill with which I address you. Between such people as you and your son and his wife — who, so far as I know, fully shares all her husband’s thoughts and feelings — there could be, it would seem, not only no enmity, but not even misunderstanding; and how happy I should be if, with your consent, I could contribute, if only ever so little, to the clearing-up of these misunderstandings. In expectation of a kind answer, I remain, with perfect respect and devotion, L. T.”
Much strength was spent on stopping this villainy, on softening the heart of the Princess — nothing helped; the children remained with their grandmother and perished, both physically and morally. This whole tragedy will probably some day be described in detail, and then many dark sides of the life of high Petersburg society will be laid open.
The autumnal and final winding-up of the famine-relief affair aroused in L. N. a wish to write a report, in which he wanted to express several thoughts on the occasion of his activity over these two years. A financial report was drawn up, and an article of L. N.’s was to serve as its conclusion; but by the censorship conditions of the time it proved impossible to place it in the newspapers. It was replaced by several enormous concluding lines. The article itself was circulated in manuscript and was printed abroad. Only in the posthumous edition of L. N.’s works, made by Sofya Andreyevna, did it prove possible to print this article.
L. N. strives to show in it that the causes of the famine that had been lived through were not exceptional, temporary, but constant — the disunion of the privileged, exploiting class and the working, exploited one. The relief of the famine-stricken had temporarily brought near and clearly disclosed to us the whole social ulcer of poverty and oppression. Even if the acuteness of the bad harvest had passed, this disunion remained, and poverty and oppression also remained, although we had withdrawn from them. Speaking of the fact that we Russians can more easily see the ruin of our brothers, since we have no distant colonies supporting, by the expenditure of their lives, the luxury of the rich oppressors, L. N. makes the following conclusion:
“Before the ruling, non-working, rich classes there are only two ways out: one — not only to renounce Christianity in its true significance, but every semblance of it as well — to renounce humanity, justice, and to say: I possess these advantages and privileges and shall, at whatever cost, retain them. Whoever wishes to take them from me will have me to deal with. I have force in my hands: soldiers, gallows, prisons, knouts, and executions.
The other way out is to recognize one’s own wrong, to cease lying, to repent, and — not in words, not with the pennies, those very pennies that have been taken from the people with suffering and pain, to come to their aid, as has been done these last two years, but — to break down that artificial barrier which stands between us and the working people; not in word but in deed to recognize them as our brothers, and for this to change our life, to renounce those advantages and privileges which we have, and, having renounced them, to stand on equal terms with the people, and together with it then to attain those goods of government, of science, of civilization, which we now from outside, and without asking its will, would supposedly hand over to it.
We stand at the crossroads, and a choice is inevitable.
The first way out means dooming oneself to constant lying, to a constant fear that this lie will be discovered, and nevertheless to the awareness that inevitably, sooner or later, we shall lose that position which we so stubbornly hold to.
The second way out means the voluntary recognition and carrying-out, in life, of that which we ourselves profess, which our heart and our reason demand, and which sooner or later, if not by us then by others, will be fulfilled, because only in this renunciation by the powerful of their power lies the one possible way out from those torments with which our false-Christian humanity is sick. The way out is only in the renunciation of false and the recognition of true Christianity.”
The work of the reform and improvement of popular literature, begun by L. N., despite a whole series of important affairs that distracted him, continued to interest him. Of course, these two hungry years lived through took much strength from L. N. and his friends, and the publishing business went through a time of lull. The centre of the editorial activity had been transferred to Chertkov’s estate, Rzhevsk, in Voronezh Province. V. G. Chertkov was helped at this time by Iv. Iv. Gorbunov. A whole series of censorship obstacles and other considerations compelled V. G. to give up the direction of this affair. When I had freed myself from the work at Begichevka, V. G. Chertkov proposed that I take the management of this affair into my own hands. Since the question was so put that, if I did not take it up, the affair would cease, then I — fully aware of the weakness of my powers — nevertheless agreed to continue it; and so, in the autumn of 1893, the centre of the activity of Posrednik (The Intermediary) was transferred to Moscow. The chief direction of this affair was shared with me by Iv. Iv. Gorbunov. V. G. Chertkov, having stepped aside from this affair, devoted his powers specially to the collecting, working-up, and circulation of L. N.’s works.
We were happy in that L. N.’s participation in the affairs of Posrednik in no way diminished. On the contrary, the technical convenience, the nearness of our place of residence first to Yasnaya Polyana and then to the Khamovniki house, where L. N. spent the winter, made L. N.’s collaboration almost uninterrupted.
Besides the continuation of the section of popular editions, during this time the section of Posrednik begun by V. G. Chertkov “for the intelligent reader” received a particular development, and especially its philosophical series.
Under L. N.’s editorship, and with the close participation of his friend Professor N. Ya. Grot, we published a whole series of books of philosophical content: On Plato by Prof. N. Grot; Plato’s Phaedo; The Fundamental Moments in the Development of Philosophy by Prof. N. Ya. Grot; Descartes by Alfred Fouillée, translated from the French; On Compromise by John Morley, translated from the English; From the Diary of Amiel, translated from the French (Fragments d’un journal intime) by Marya Lvovna Tolstaya. L. N. worked very much over this last translation and wrote a preface to it. This translation and the preface were printed in the journal Severny Vestnik and at the same time published separately by Posrednik.
In the diary of that time the traces of this work are noticeable. Here is what he recorded, among other things:
“The chief calamity of very cultivated people, like Amiel, is the ballast of their many-sided and especially aesthetic education. This more than anything hinders them from knowing what they know, as Lao-Tzu says (their disease). They are loath to throw out this ballast, and with this ballast they cannot find room in the boat of Christian consciousness. And they cannot believe that for so simple a thing as Christian salvation it should be possible to sacrifice anything so complex and refined.”
Interesting too is the series of biographies of remarkable men, begun by Posrednik under L. N.’s direction. One of the first to be published was The Life of Francis of Assisi. Here is what L. N. says of this book in a letter to Chertkov:
“I have also received a charming book on Francis of Assisi, Paul Sabatier. A book just out, large, beautifully written. This will be a charming book for Posrednik, if only the censorship does not get in the way. For three days I read it and was horrified at my own vileness and weakness, and even by this became better.”
Besides this, L. N. writes a whole series of prefaces, bringing out in them the especially important significance of the books being published. Such are his prefaces to the works of Maupassant, to the tales of S. T. Semyonov, to Dr. Alekseyev’s book On Drunkenness, and so on. All this was printed by Posrednik, which was L. N.’s publishing organ.
However valuable was L. N.’s literary collaboration in Posrednik, a still greater warmth and cordiality breathed from him in his personal relations with the circle of people who had gathered around the Posrednik editorial office. As in the time of our Petersburg activity, we did not close the doors of our editorial office to the people who came to us toward the little light of truth and love, the rays of which we, so far as we could, strove to reflect and to spread around us.
The same day as in Petersburg — Thursday — was again appointed for the gathering of friends.
If these gatherings did not burn with such an ardour of youth as the gatherings in Petersburg in the middle of the eighties, their value was high in that at them there sometimes was present L. N. himself.
Of course, the ranks then closed in around him, and the more daring put questions to him. Lev Nikolaevich answered them, and we eagerly drank in his words.
The unpardonable light-mindedness of youth prevented us from writing down all these precious conversations, which were sometimes carried, in a closer, more intimate circle, into the Khamovniki house as well.
But, notwithstanding this light-mindedness, something has nevertheless been preserved. Thus — running a little ahead, since I am now speaking of a whole two-to-three-year period of the Moscow activity of Posrednik — I recall one such Thursday. There were not particularly many people then. We were sitting at tea and conversing. Suddenly the bell rings, and in at the open door comes L. N. in his old sheepskin coat, with his beard rimed with frost, with his little stick, smiling good-naturedly and pressing the hands of the friends who had rushed to meet him.
He comes in without taking off his coat (he had dropped in on his way, for a short while) and sits down in the armchair set out for him. We sit down around him and exchange with him greetings of every kind. After a few trifling questions, one of those present, Mikhail Arkadyevich Sopotsko — who later became famous for various Black-Hundred deeds, having been earlier a revolutionary and, at the parting of the ways between the revolution and the Black Hundred, having attached himself to Posrednik, always more than daring in conversation — puts to L. N. a question about his attitude toward the terrorists, martyrs for their idea, false though it may be.
I wrote down that same evening L. N.’s answer, and I now convey this record in the original form which bears the traces of an immediate impression, fearing to correct it now, by a weakened memory, after twenty years.
“We speak of active love, of the laying down of one’s soul for one’s friends. And here there appear such people as Zhelyabov, Kibalchich, and others, preaching the common good and dying a martyr’s death for the fact that they strove by all the means accessible to them to bring about this good. How is one to regard such people — to consider them the ideal embodiment of Christ’s precepts, to imitate their actions and deeds? Unfortunately, no — one cannot.
A man’s act, and even his whole life, must satisfy two conditions at once: 1) the building-up of the Kingdom of God among men, or the common good, and 2) the salvation of one’s own soul, or the demand for personal perfection, for a righteous life. This may be expressed by such a mathematical comparison. A point on a plane is determined by two coordinates. These coordinates are precisely the conditions which a man’s acts must satisfy.
The worth of an act depends on the harmony, the agreement, of these coordinates. The ideal act will be when they are equal. Their magnitude determines also the magnitude of the acts, so that the true acts lie on the middle line, bisecting the angle formed by the axes of the coordinates.
But if one of these conditions, or coordinates, predominates over the other, the act or the life comes out false.
Acts deviating from the middle line in the direction of personal righteousness may lead a man, in the complete absence of the demand for the common good, to pillar-sitting. A man will be saving his own soul and will be of use to no one, and his life will be false. A man striving for the common good and neglecting personal morality will, by personal immoral acts, destroy the common good which he himself builds up, and his life — in this neglect of moral foundations — will the more depart, the more diverge, from the true life, the stronger is the striving for the common good.
This deviation may be called the sin of socialism (of revolution).
Thus, the acts of Zhelyabov, Kibalchich, and others cannot be called true, because in their striving for the common good they neglected the demands of personal morality, the demand of their own conscience, because they committed, or prepared to commit, murder — an act which cannot be justified by a conscience or a consciousness striving for the common good.
But if one is to judge of them from the general point of view of sympathy or non-sympathy toward them, then, of course, these state criminals and regicides, the very names of whom the government would wish to annihilate, these people deserve far more sympathy than the beneficent landowner who has built hospitals on money taken from peasants beaten down by want, and who continues to take it for the satiation of his own belly and that of his family, or the editor of a liberal newspaper who takes money from his subscribers and deceives them with lofty words, and himself lives a low animal life.”
Another time — I do not remember, before or after this — we were speaking with L. N. of man’s destructive and creative activity, and he uttered a thought-parable, which I again managed to write down at the time.
“Life consists of two constantly alternating, and even simultaneously proceeding, activities: the creative, constructive one, and, as a consequence of it, the destructive one. This destructive activity is lawful only when it is the inevitable consequence of the first, as in a sprouting grain: the sprout awakens to a new life, begins to grow, breaks and bursts the surrounding husk, which falls away and rots, while the sprout goes on living a new life. The bursting of the shell by the sprout is not violence, but only a consequence of the creative force, and is therefore a good both for the plant itself and for the whole world.
But if we ourselves burst the chaff of the grain, then we commit violence, destroy the plant, and disturb the harmony of the world.
And the positive struggle that gives good to the man waging it and to the whole world is nothing other than the unceasing, by no one heard, development of this creative force.
Unfortunately, people often, having noticed the more comprehensible destructive consequence of the creative force, mistakenly take this for the very essence of the struggle, and begin strenuously and with fury to destroy, to burst the husk of the grain, and give up their whole life to a struggle of this kind, and the consequences of such a struggle are dreadful.”
There comes back to me yet another thought, expressed by L. N. in one of our conversations on the relation between a man’s intellectual level and his moral condition. L. N., while not denying the significance of a man’s intellectual level of development, attached the greatest importance to his moral condition. And in explanation of their interrelation he used the following geometrical image. The moral man occupies a central position in the circle of life, looks at everything along the radii, and everything is presented to him at the correct angle of vision. The immoral man, on the contrary, is not at the centre, and his angles of vision of the phenomena in the circle of life are incorrect, and therefore his judgments are wrong. Intellectual development has no influence on this correctness or incorrectness. It may be compared to the height at which a man stands. If his position is central — that is, moral — then a man with a greater intellectual development possesses a wider horizon, a greater circle of life is accessible to his observation. If his intellectual development is less, then his horizon too is more limited. On the contrary, the immoral man — that is, the one not at the centre — however high he may rise intellectually, will never have the correct angle of vision, and his judgments will always be wrong.
There comes back to me, too, the following parable, told by L. N. in one of our conversations.
“Where is one to put money, if one has it and wishes to live, ridding oneself of it? Money is the chaff; a man’s life, his conduct, his deeds — these are the clean grain. When a peasant winnows rye with a shovel, he cares only that the clean grain should fall where it is needed, while the chaff is winnowed off of itself by the wind and lies down in its own place. If the peasant were to care about where the chaff would lie, then he would scatter both chaff and grain in all directions, and still would not have cleaned the grain. So too in life. One must care about the true deeds of good, and then money and the rest of one’s property will take their proper place and receive their true use. But if one cares about what to do with money, then the money too will be lost, and there will be no deeds of good.”
Finally, the third kind of L. N.’s relations to Posrednik was communion through his numerous visitors, some of whom — those in need, in his opinion, of support — he directed to us. These visitors were of the most varied kinds.
To L. N. there came both young people, torn away from life, hopelessly seeking the meaning of life, and, not finding it anywhere, greedily listening to his words. Some of them found peace and joy of soul, while others, unsatisfied, broke into hysterical sobbing. Some of them L. N. sent on to us, to Posrednik, and with us they either expressed the rapture of a new life, or wept out their grief.
Old men came too. I remember a remarkable old man, of about seventy, who had come from the Siberian taiga, where he lived in a secret hermitage of the Old Believers of the wandering persuasion. I no longer remember by what means he had learned of L. N.’s activity. But it was evident that the rumour had reached even this secret hermitage of the appearance of a “new faith,” and the old man, with an inquiring mind, had set off on foot from Siberia to seek out “Tolstov.” Touchingly tender were the conversations of the two old men, made wise by life. L. N. brought him to us, and he stayed with us several days, reading those works of L. N.’s which it was not yet possible then to print. Having come to know the “new faith” and having received it sympathetically, the old man set off on the return road, into the Siberian taiga, to ponder, in the quiet of solitude, all that he had heard out and felt through.
One evening I was sitting with L. N. in his Khamovniki study and conversing with him about our common affairs. The household servant came and announced that some soldier wished to see the Count. L. N. asked him to come in. Presently the soldier came in, with all a soldier’s bearing, with an intelligent, sympathetic face, in a greatcoat, with a hood crossed over his chest and the ends tucked into his belt, on which dangled some sort of weapon. With agitation he introduced himself in response to L. N.’s greeting. This was Mikhail Petrovich Novikov. He was a clerk on the district staff. He had read several of L. N.’s foreign editions and could not refrain from coming, from expressing to L. N. his sympathy; besides, he needed further explanations and advice as to what to do next, so little did the external setting of his life correspond with that inner enlightened consciousness which had been born in him. We talked a little, the three of us; then, at L. N.’s request, I took this soldier-clerk along with me to Posrednik, to furnish him with the material he lacked. Much did this man afterward have to endure for his convictions. He remained faithful to them and faithful to his great friend. Now he farms, supporting a large family by stubborn labour.
Characteristic are the details of how this soldier obtained L. N.’s works. His brother served as a footman to an important gentleman, some prince, and travelled abroad with him. The prince had acquired abroad the banned works of Tolstoy, and before departing for Russia ordered his servant to burn them all. But the servant had already read them and could not bring himself to burn them. He prevailed upon the princess’s chambermaid to pack these books at the bottom of a trunk with the princess’s wardrobe, and so they came to Russia and reached the other brother.
Sectarians came too — Molokans, in whole families — expressing their full sympathy with L. N. and carrying away with them broadened and strengthened Christian religious views. They too dropped in at Posrednik, took books, and carried them away with them, into the people, the seeds of the new teaching.
Such was L. N.’s connection with the circle of his Moscow friends.
We shall conclude this chapter with extracts from two letters written by L. N. at the end of 1893.
On 10 December he wrote to Neplyuev, the well-known organizer of an Orthodox-Christian school-community on his estate in Chernigov Province; having received from him a letter expressing sympathy, L. N. answered him:
“Much-respected Nikolai Nikolaevich. I was very glad of your letter and of the kind disposition which you express toward me in it. Believe me that, although I have seen you only once, I know so much that is good about you that this feeling is fully mutual! But for the old man to lie is as for the rich man to steal. I love this proverb very much: it so clearly expresses a feeling I often experience in old age. Little time remains to live, so how is one to hide that which one considers truth before God — such truth as one lives by and with which one will stand before the judgment of Him who sent us hither? I should not have begun to tell you that which I consider truth, had you not — for which I am very grateful to you — considered it needful to express to me that in which you disagree with me. But once you have expressed this, it would be a lie on my part to keep silent. I think that the teaching of Christ is first of all a teaching of truth, as he himself said this, and that therefore all that estranges us from the truth, complicates and confuses the understanding of it — all this hinders us from uniting with Christ, with God, and therefore with one another as well. But in your confession there is much that is superfluous, hindering you yourselves, such as you can with difficulty clothe in an understandable, easily-grasped, rational form. And this is dangerous. I know, and have suffered through, that dreadful dilemma which arises before every man who has awakened to the religious feeling and is beginning to establish his relation to God: to separate from people, but to take on nothing superfluous; or to remain with people, but to encumber one’s understanding of God with complex, needless beliefs that veil God, striving to give them an artificial meaning. The choice of the second way out is dangerous. In the matter of faith one cannot be satisfied with an à peu près. The truth is always clear and simple. And I chose the first way out: at first I remained alone, but, as I believe, with God; yet afterward it turned out that I was not only not alone, but with all those people, both of the past and of the present, with whom I most of all desired union. But I fear for you that you, wishing to remain with people and having made concessions for their sake, will feel yourselves alone, because the drawing-together, the union of people, is only in the truth, in the one love, in the one God — not in Christ, nor in Mohammed, nor in Buddha, but in God. Please take my words meekly and cordially; above all, do not forget that I do not defend myself, do not attack you, have at this no personal feeling whatever, but one thought only — that, having entered into communion, and loving communion, with a sincere man such as you, I should act badly were I not to say what I think and feel. If all that I have said should seem to you unjust, forgive me; but if anything of this should be of use to you, I shall be very glad.
Give my greetings to the dear technologists, whom I truly came to love.
Your work I sympathize with with all my soul, and wish it continuation and success.”
One of the technologists whom L. N. mentions, who had visited him that autumn, was Ivan Stepanovich Prokhanov, at the present time the head and director of the Petersburg community of Baptists; the other was his comrade.
Finally, let us give a letter written by L. N. to his friend, the artist N. N. Ge. He wrote to him, among other things, the following:
“I await you with the picture. I am struggling over the article on Toulon — that is, on the cruelty of godless patriotism and the insolence of the deception of the people by a patriotism which has long since ceased to be and cannot be. It always seems to me that the time of the end of this age is approaching and a new one is setting in; and, in connection with the fact that my own age here too is ending and a new one setting in, I keep wanting to hasten this coming, to do at least all that depends on me for this coming. And for all of us, all people on earth, this alone is the real work. And it is comforting and heartening to do it: you do what you can, and no one knows whether it is you or another who does that which moves. And no one can ascribe anything to himself, and everyone may think that it is from his own efforts that all moves.”
At the end of this year, during the Christmas holidays, there took place in Moscow the first congress of natural scientists. L. N. found his way to it too and caused a great commotion. Here is how N. A. Sergeyenko relates this in his book How L. N. Tolstoy Lives and Works.
“L. N. Tolstoy was at the lecture of his old acquaintance, Professor Ts. Someone of those present, having noticed Lev Nikolaevich, uttered in a beckoning whisper: ‘Lev Nikolaevich is here!’ These words flashed like lightning through the hall. All began to look round, in order to see the famous writer. Lev Nikolaevich felt that one of those hypnotizing scenes was beginning which he always avoided, and wished to slip away unnoticed, but it was too late.
The huge crowd that filled the university hall came into motion and roared: ‘Lev Nikolaevich! Lev Nikolaevich!’ In the end the stewards were compelled to ask Lev Nikolaevich to take a place of honour on the dais. The walls shook with the applause with which the natural scientists greeted the great Russian writer. This scene greatly upset L. N., and he recalls it unwillingly. But every simple, artless expression of sympathy touches him very much.”