Source: https://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/bio/biryukov/biografiya-biryukov-3-17.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-17.md.
Lev Nikolaevich was spending the winter in Moscow and, as always, was struggling both in soul and in body against the torrent of city and social life that engulfed him. His large, young family, at that time entirely prosperous, lived a merry, bustling life, from time to time drawing him into their company.
If the entertainments did not involve any insane squandering of money or display of luxury, then L. N. himself took pleasure in them and rejoiced in the general good-natured merriment.
Such was the evening of the 1st of January 1894. During evening tea, at which Lev Nikolaevich too was present, as he was talking with the guests there came the sound of a bell, and soon the children joyfully announced that mummers had arrived. Over L. N.’s face there flitted a smile of displeasure. But the doors opened, and into the hall came several venerable persons, well known to Moscow — artists, men of letters, and scholars. All were somewhat surprised and rose from their places to greet those who had entered. But the surprise reached its highest pitch when, among those who had come in, they noticed L. N. himself in a dark-grey blouse belted with a strap, his fingers tucked behind it, who walked up to the real L. N. and, holding out his hand to him, said: “Good day, L. N.” The two L. N.’s greeted each other, and the real L. N., with perplexity, examined his double with his near-sighted eyes. This turned out to be his friend Lopatin, artfully made up to look like him. I remember that the same effect was produced by I. E. Repin, Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, A. G. Rubinstein, and others, similarly made up. The strained perplexity soon gave way to boisterous merriment, amid which could be heard Lev Nikolaevich’s loud laughter too.
But the year, begun so merrily, soon demanded a strong and serious effort of soul from L. N. and his friends, in order to bear all the agitations that fell to our lot.
The critical view of state violence which L. N. had expressed brightly and sincerely opened the eyes of many, called forth disobedience and repressions. The anti-church views of L. N. and his friends, on the other hand, raised alarm among those who had taken the keys of the kingdom of heaven, who themselves did not enter and did not let others enter into it.
We have already seen what a dreadful villainy was committed with the blessing of these people: the taking away of the Khilkovs’ children. L. N. tried the last means, to which he had recourse in extreme cases. He wrote a letter to the Emperor Alexander III, urging him to revoke this dreadful measure and to return the children.
Here is this letter:
“Sovereign!
Forgive me if the tone of this letter, and the very mode of addressing you, are not such as you are accustomed to; forgive me, and, for God’s sake, read this letter without a feeling of prejudice and, if possible, with that feeling of brotherly love which is proper to all men, and which alone has moved me to write to you.
Upon Prince Dmitry Alexandrovich Khilkov, a retired colonel, now living in the Transcaucasian region, whither he has been exiled for his religious convictions, and especially upon his wife, there was committed in October of the present year (now already the past year, ‘93) in your name one of the most cruel and outrageous crimes, contrary to all laws divine and human. From the enclosed letter, written not for you and therefore unprepared (in which I have purposely not altered or added a single word), you will learn in what this affair consists — unheard of in our time for its cruelty — which was carried out, as all who carried it out declared, by your, that is, the supreme, command. To the enclosed letter I think it necessary to add only a few particulars about the position, the character, and the life of Khilkov himself.
Khilkov is the only son of a wealthy family; he served first in the Life Hussars, then during the Turkish campaign he commanded, I believe, a Cossack regiment. During that war it happened to him in a hand-to-hand encounter to kill a Turkish officer with his own hands. This incident had such an effect upon him that he then and there declared to his superiors that he could no longer continue military service, and immediately after the campaign retired, having convinced himself that the Christianity which he professed required a quite different life from the one he had been leading, and settled in the country. In the country he tried to lead a life in keeping with the conception which, rightly or wrongly, he had formed of the Christian life. He gave away all his property — the rather large estate handed down to him by his mother — to the peasants, keeping nothing for himself, and on rented land, by his own labour, began to earn his bread, and so lived for about ten years.
All this I say in order to draw your attention to the sincerity of this man, who did not hesitate to throw up the brilliant career awaiting him and the great fortune awaiting him, only so as not to lie before his own conscience. About ten years ago he became attached to a girl, Wiener, the daughter of a retired colonel and Crimean landowner, married her, and had by her two children. The chief accusation against him consists in this: that he was not married to his wife by the rite of the church and did not have his children baptized; but he did not do this — as do not do it all the millions of Christians who do not acknowledge baptism and marriage as a sacrament — not because he wished to undermine the beliefs of the Orthodox Church, but because, as a truthful man, he could not perform a rite in which he did not believe. ‘I cannot do this,’ he said in my presence to those who urged him to be married to his wife and to baptize his children — ‘I cannot do this, because if I were to come to a priest, asking him to marry me or to christen my children, and he were to ask me whether I believe in the sacrament which I am asking to be performed over me and my children, I should have either to lie, which I cannot do, or to tell the priest the truth: that I do not believe in these rites and demand their performance only for the sake of propriety; and then any honest priest ought to drive me away.’
Living in the country by heavy agricultural labour, earning for himself and his family a scanty subsistence — he, a formerly wealthy and high-born man who had given away his whole fortune — he could not but draw upon himself the attention of the surrounding peasants, and they came to him, asking his protection in their wrongs, his advice in their difficulties, and his explanation in their religious doubts; and he helped them by word, by deed, by counsel, and by the resolving of their perplexities, not concealing from them what he held to be the divine truth, open for the good of all men.
His life was deemed harmful, and they dealt with him as, unfortunately, they have lately been dealing in your name with all the so-called sectarians, the Stundists — that is, without trial they sentenced him to six years’ exile and carried him off to the Caucasus, where they settled him in one of the worst localities there. Cruel as this exile was for him, a family man — this exile, which deprived him of all that had been built up by him over years of heavy personal labour in his former place of residence, and which transferred him into the alien, hard circumstances of an exile — he bore his position calmly, continuing in the Caucasus the same life he had led in the Kharkov Province, that is, earning by his labour the means for a most abstemious life and helping the surrounding population in their needs, to whom he proved necessary, having last year nursed the cholera patients. But to his persecutors this seemed too little. And they devised the most artful, cruel violence that can possibly be perpetrated upon a family man. They, as is described in the letter, entered his house, tore from his hands and the hands of his wife her children, at the age when the mutual attachment of children and parents is at its tenderest, and carried them off, knowing that he, bound by an exile from which they will not release him, and by the lack of money, which he had given away, can neither go for the children himself nor give his wife the means to go for them.
And all this was done, Sovereign, in your name.
It may be that this letter will anger you, and you will say: by what right does this man permit himself to write to me about this?
Sovereign! I have an inalienable right to this — a right which we too often forget, and the mention of which may, perhaps, surprise you: this right is the right of my brotherly love toward all men, and therefore toward you also, notwithstanding those imaginary partitions which divide you, the emperor of the greatest empire, and me, an insignificant private man. I consider that you have sinned in permitting the possibility of so villainous a deed being committed in your name. And in the Gospel it is said how men ought to act with regard to brethren who have sinned. And so I act: ‘Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother’ (Matt. 18:15).
Having received the last letter of Khilkov and his wife, evidently calling upon me to help them somehow, I was so indignant at what I had learned that I wished at once to send a description of this whole affair to the foreign newspapers. But, having asked myself before God whether I should be doing well in acting thus, I saw that to act thus would be, in the first place, unreasonable, because no articles in the newspapers can change the decision of the authorities if they choose to have their own way; and, in the second place — and this is the chief thing — that, in doing this, I should be acting not in an evangelical manner toward you, and therefore I resolved, come what may, according to the word of the Gospel, to write to you alone, one to one, hoping not to anger you, but to gain a brother in you.
(Of this letter no one knows except a single copyist, a modest man, whose assistance I could not avoid.)
I am afraid that this letter of mine will seem to you insolent, will at the first moment offend you and call forth in you — which would be very painful to me — an ill-disposed feeling toward me.
But what else was there for me to do? To keep silent I could not; my conscience would have tormented me. And to write to you with all those circumlocutions and flattering words with which it is customary to address sovereigns, I could not — and it would have been wrong, because in those conventional, artificial forms one cannot say all that is needful and reach the heart of the man to whom one writes. And it is this alone that I need, because I know that if my words reach your heart, then my cause will be won. And therefore I implore you, Sovereign, conquer within yourself the feeling of ill-will which the frankness of this letter, unusual to you, may perhaps call forth in you, and believe that I am guided only by love for you — brotherly, Christian love, which knows no difference of stations, but knows only the desire of good for him to whom it is directed.
You, I think, have become so accustomed to the fact that all addresses to you have a self-interested or in general a personal aim, that, on receiving a letter or a petition, you always think: what, precisely, does this petitioner want for himself? But I, you see, need nothing for myself. You can neither give me anything nor deprive me of anything; and that for which I permit myself to ask you is less needful, not only for me, but even for Khilkov and his family, than for you. They will bear their sufferings and privations easily, because they bear them in the name of Christ, and on their side will be even now all the best people, from the German colonist who was ready to drive his horses to death only to help innocently suffering people, and the policeman who breaks an order only to ease the lot of the wronged — all will be on their side, from these little-educated people to all the most highly educated people of the world, present and future, who shall ever come to know of this affair. But to you, Sovereign, it cannot but be agonizingly hard to know what a dreadful deed has been done in your name, and on your side will be no one except the worst people — those flatterers who are ready to justify and even to extol everything that is done not only by you, but also in your name.
And do not listen, for God’s sake, to all that they will tell you about there being supposedly some considerations of state and — what is especially false — considerations of the church, that is, Christian considerations, by reason of which it is necessary to commit such anti-Christian acts as the taking of children away from a mother.
Do not listen and do not believe those who will tell you this, because there can be no considerations for a man, in whatever position he may find himself — a tsar, like you, or a policeman, like that constable who tore the children from the mother — by which a man could be compelled to commit acts contrary to the divine law of love, revealed to us in the Scripture and in our conscience. This cannot be, in the first place, because all persecutions for the faith, like those which with especial cruelty are being carried on among us of late, not only do not attain their aim but, on the contrary, lower in the eyes of men that very church for the support of which the un-Christian deeds are committed. This cannot be, again, also because — and this is the chief thing — all general considerations of state and of church, however sure of them we may be, may prove to be unjust, as constantly turns out to be the case; whereas the fact that each of us may die at any minute, that is, return to Him who, having sent us into this world, gave us for fulfilment one eternal and indubitable law of love, by which none of us can or ought to be even the remotest participant — let alone the doer — of cruel, unkind, unmerciful deeds: as to this there can be for no one even the slightest doubt.
Believe, Sovereign, that all that I have written here, I wrote in view of that same hour of death which awaits us all, and me the more, who by my years already stand with one foot in the grave — I wrote before God, and wrote with sincere respect and with the compassion of a loving brother toward you, a man placed in one of the most temptation-filled, and therefore hard and agonizing, positions that ever fall to the lot of a man.
Loving you, Lev Tolstoy.”
January, 1894, Moscow.
I, for my part, had occasion to take part in the delivery of this letter to its addressee.
Wishing as little publicity as possible for this letter, L. N. asked me to copy it out in my own hand and take it to Petersburg. To deliver this letter to the Sovereign, L. N. decided to ask Count Vorontsov-Dashkov, the then Minister of the Court. With a letter of recommendation from L. N. I obtained an interview with Vorontsov, handed him L. N.’s letter, asking him to carry out his request. This was on the 5th of January. Vorontsov promised to do this the next day, at the Epiphany levee at the palace, on the 6th of January. I asked permission to call again, in order to learn whether the commission had been carried out. Vorontsov gave leave, and when, two days later, I again called on him, he summoned me into his study and said: “Tell Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy that his letter has been personally delivered by me to the Sovereign.” I, of course, wrote to Lev Nikolaevich both about the progress of the affair and about its conclusion; to this I received from him the following reply:
“Thank you, dear friend P., for keeping me informed. All that depended on you has been done admirably; and what comes of it will depend on him who reads the letter and on him who wrote it. With us all is as of old. Only I am unwell — there was a pain in the chest, and now a bad cough and a cold in the head. My wife wants to go on Friday for three days or so to Yasnaya, and as soon as she returns we shall go off, either to Yasnaya or to Plyushcha’s. It is all too bustling. The remnant of life is being squandered in vain. How is Ts. V.? Has her petition been redrafted? It is not good that she admits the possibility of the children being taken away and is reconciled to their being given to their aunt.”
Khilkov’s wife, Cecilia Vladimirovna, the mother of the children who had been taken away, was languishing at this time in Petersburg, employing all the means accessible to her to get the children back, but all was in vain: some stubborn malice had fastened upon them and would not let them out of its hands.
L. N.’s letter to the Sovereign remained without answer. L. N. wrote thus about it to Chertkov:
“You know, perhaps, that I wrote the Sovereign a letter about Madame Khilkova and her children. The letter is a poor one; nothing came of it. I did not speak of it, because in the letter itself I said that no one would know of this letter. Now the Sovereign has shown the letter to Richter, Richter has told others, and so it has become known. I was sorry that you were not there to take counsel with you. Into the secret only P. was let, and he delivered the letter through Vorontsov.”
And so the mother had to leave with nothing, to suffer through the dreadful torment of the loss of her children — taken away not by the elemental force of death, toward which, through one’s grief, one always feels a kind of trembling reverence, but by the coarse force of embittered, erring people.
The end of January L. N. spent on the estate of his second son Ilya, whither he had gone to stay with his elder daughter Tatyana Lvovna, and in the first days of February he moved to Yasnaya Polyana.
He left for the country from Moscow, as always escaping from the bustle, from the multitude of visitors. This weariness of “people” and a certain disenchantment with them are reflected in his diary, where on the 24th of January he records the following thought:
“One can never rid oneself of the illusion that acquaintance with new people will give new knowledge — that the more people there are, the more there is of intelligence, of kindness, just as, the more burning coals there are together, the more heat. With people there is nothing of the kind: they are all the same, always the same — both the former and the present, both in the city and among one’s own and among strangers, Russians, and Irishmen, and Chinese. And the more of them there are together, the sooner these coals burn out, the less there is in them of intelligence, of kindness.”
At the end of January an event occurred which struck L. N. with a fresh blow. On the 27th of January there died in the Voronezh prison, of consumption complicated by inflammation of the lungs, Evdokim Nikitich Drozhzhin, a former village schoolmaster, who had spent about three years in confinement for the refusal of military service.
This event deeply agitated L. N. Soon after this L. N. wrote to one of his friends:
“The death of Drozhzhin and the taking away of Khilkov’s children are two most important events, which call us all to a greater moral exactingness toward ourselves.”
And for a long time afterwards, in all his letters to his friends, he speaks of this with agitation.
Of course, amid such events there pass quite unnoticed — for him, and for his friends too — other events which under different conditions might have seemed significant. Thus, on the 24th of January, at a sitting of the Moscow Psychological Society, L. N. was elected an honorary member.
But here too is a new great event, which likewise gripped L. N. and shook him to the depths of his soul. This event was the new picture of his friend the artist, Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge.
As was his custom, N. N. had prepared the picture for the Travelling Exhibition, which was opening in Petersburg at the end of winter. He sent the picture straight to Moscow, and himself stopped at Yasnaya, where L. N. was then living with his daughters. I had the good fortune to be at Yasnaya then too; there too at that time lived Marya Alexandrovna Schmidt, and I cannot forget the wonderful spiritual atmosphere that bound together our intimate little circle. N. N. Ge burned with impatience “to sit his examination,” to show his friend his new work. He was wholly full of it, full of the fire of inspiration, and the stream of his speech poured forth irrepressibly, sparkling with wonderful artistic and psychological beauties.
L. N. too was extraordinarily animated, vigorous, and full of all manner of literary projects. He had finished “Toulon,” that is, the article entitled by him “Christianity and Patriotism” and devoted to a description of the Toulon festivities, which had sealed the Franco-Russian alliance founded at that time. All the orators, the royal personages, and the diplomats who took part in the celebrations strove to prove that this alliance would give peace to Europe. L. N., laying bare their secret thoughts, proved that this alliance would give war, and prophetically depicted that very thing to which this alliance led exactly twenty years later, that is, to the universal slaughter. And these same twenty years humanity spent an incalculable quantity of its forces upon armaments, that is, upon preparation for its own self-destruction.
Having dealt with this article and sent it off to the translators, L. N. felt an irresistible desire for artistic writing. In his head there were many projects. Among other things, in these days of his stay at Yasnaya Polyana L. N. for the first time told us the legend of the elder Fyodor Kuzmich, which long afterwards continued to occupy his thoughts and imagination. I managed to take down from his words this first sketch of his tale.
L. N.’s mood at this time is characterized by a diary entry made on the 2nd of February. Here is what he writes:
“The meaning of life for me has now come to consist in this: to serve God, saving people from sin and suffering.
The only frightening thing is that one will want to guess the path by which God wishes to do this, and one will err and hurry, and instead of furthering, one will hinder, delay.
The one means of not erring is not to undertake, but to wait for the call of God, for such a situation in which one cannot but act in one way or another: for God, and not against Him — and in such cases to strain all the forces of one’s soul to do the former.”
At last, on the 11th of February, our whole company set off for Moscow. There Ge’s new picture awaited us. Since it was intended for the public exhibition in Petersburg, it could not be exhibited publicly in Moscow, and N. N. placed it in a private studio, on Dolgorukovskaya Street. Having set up the picture properly, with good overhead light, N. N. Ge invited L. N. to come and look at it. I happened to be a witness of a solemn and touching scene. Two friends, two great artists, who had made it the aim of their lives to embody in art the new Christian ideal, were at that moment united by a single creation, through which, as through a good conductor, there was transmitted the mysterious current of artistic contemplation. Their agitation reached its highest pitch when L. N. went into the studio and stopped before the picture, fixing upon it his penetrating gaze. N. N. Ge could not endure this ordeal and fled from the studio into the entrance hall. After a few minutes L. N. went out to him, caught sight of him humbly awaiting his verdict, held out his arms to him, and they threw themselves into each other’s embrace. There were heard soft, restrained sobs. They both wept like children, and through the tears I heard the words spoken by Lev Nikolaevich: “How could you do it so!”
N. N. Ge was happy. The examination had been passed. But in this triumph there was already to be felt a new tragedy. The picture is so powerful that the authorities will not allow it to a public exhibition. And so it came about.
Many people passed through this little studio. At N. N. Ge’s request, I remained there on duty to receive the visitors. When the visitors left and I remained alone, I was seized by a kind of awesome, reverent feeling, as though I were guarding the body of a dear dead one.
N. N. soon carried the picture off to Petersburg and submitted it to the exhibition. The President of the Academy of Arts, the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, looked at the picture, turned away, and pronounced: “This is a slaughterhouse!” These words were enough for the picture to be taken down. A fresh agitation for N. N. Though he had expected it, hope had not abandoned him — the hope of showing it to the great public, to the mass of the middling sort of people who in their thousands visit the exhibition in Petersburg and in other cities to which it is taken — of showing how he understands the Crucifixion, with its merciless realism and its ideal conception of the mission of Christ. After the picture had been taken down from the exhibition, he managed to exhibit it in the apartment of his friend Alexander Nikolaevich Strannolyubsky. Thousands of people saw it there, but this was a select public, and not the one with which the artist wished to speak.
All these agitations deeply shook the old man and hastened the fatal end.
L. N., of course, hastened to comfort his friend, seeing in the prohibition of the picture a proof of its significance. He answered N. N. thus to his notification of the picture’s removal:
“It is long since I ought to have answered you, dear friend, but your letter did not stay on my table, and I answered other letters, but not yours — one of the dearest to my heart.
That the picture was taken down, and the things that were said about it, are very good and instructive. Especially the words: ‘This is a slaughterhouse!’ These words tell everything: what is required is that an execution should be represented — that very execution which is now being carried out — in such a way that it should be as pleasant to look upon as on little flowers. The astonishing fate of Christianity! They have made it domestic, pocket-sized, have rendered it harmless, and in that form people have accepted it. And, not content with accepting it, they have grown accustomed to it, have settled themselves upon it and grown easy. And suddenly it begins to unfold in all its enormous significance, terrifying to them, destroying their whole arrangement.
Not only the teaching (of that there is nothing even to say), but the very history of the life and death suddenly takes on its true significance, exposing people, and they are horrified and shy away. The removal from the exhibition is your triumph. When I saw it for the first time, I was sure that it would be taken down, and now, when I have vividly pictured to myself the usual exhibition, with their Majesties and Highnesses, with ladies and landscapes and nature mortes, it even seems laughable to me to think that it should stand there. I did not quite understand the words of Gos., something, it seems, to the effect that religion is all very well, but why paint it unpleasantly.
What do the artists say, and who says what? What are you doing? Will you be coming to us soon?”
At this time L. N. is overtaken by yet another trial. His third son, Lev Lvovich, falls ill with some strange, prolonged, exhausting stomach ailment, which yielded to no treatment.
He goes off with his elder sister Tatyana Lvovna to Paris, and between them and L. N. there is struck up an interesting correspondence. Here are some of the outstanding passages from it.
The first letter he writes while still at Grinevka, the estate of his second son Ilya, where he was staying at the end of January; in this letter he says, among other things:
“The great tempter is only Paris. Not in the coarse sense of the temptation of every lust — that goes without saying — but I am not speaking of that; rather, in the sense of the covering-over of the cruelty of life and of manners.
Here, having arrived at Grinevka and seen the puny little peasants, the size of a twelve-year-old boy, working the whole day for 20 kopecks for Ilyusha, the institution of slavery which the people of our class enjoy became so clear to me — especially clear, seeing these slaves in the power of Ilyusha, who only recently was a child, a boy — that this slavery, in consequence of which generations of people degenerate, revolts me, and I, an old man, seek how I might spend those last years or months which remain to me to live, in order to destroy this dreadful slavery; but in Paris there is the same slavery, of which you will be making use, on receiving your 500 roubles from Russia — the very same, only it is concealed.”
In this same letter he relates the following comic episode:
”...As I was travelling here, I fell into conversation with a gentleman. He began to talk about the congress of natural scientists. I said that I was particularly displeased by Danilevsky’s speech. It turned out that this was Danilevsky himself, a very clever and likeable man. His speech had acquired so sharp a sense because it had been cut down. We had a pleasant talk. And I confirmed to myself once again how one must not condemn.”
At the end of February he wrote, among other things:
”...I have not yet really begun anything. I have finished ‘Toulon,’ but I long for many things, and it seems to me that one ought not to write anything at all, but ought rather to occupy oneself more with that artistic work which constitutes the life of each of us, applying all attention and effort to seeing that there should be in it no errors of any kind — neither of colour, nor of perspective, nor, above all, an absence of content. And this I wish for you too, dear friends-children.”
In March he wrote to them about himself:
”...Of late I have let myself go very much. The city bustle, and with it the vanity that penetrates one — that demon which never falls behind me, though it never masters me — has begun to trouble me, and yesterday I resolved to mend my ways. Not in this one thing only, but in other sins as well.”
As we shall see below, this demon did not leave him until the last years of his life. The more precious, then, is that sincerity with which he confessed it before the people close to him.
Among the letters of that time let us note a letter to a certain person on the question of upbringing. It stands out both for its seriousness and sincerity in the framing of the question, and for the novelty of its solution, expressed for the first time by L. N. in this letter:
“You write that, notwithstanding the fact that your youthful ideal of service to the people was entirely sincere, you, having given yourself up to your family, your children — service to whom was and continues to be for you both joyful and natural — have departed from your former ideal of service to the people; the more so since, in your attempts at such service, you always experienced a sense of unnaturalness, and now you doubt whether you are acting rightly in having given yourself up to your family alone, and you begin to feel dissatisfaction. I think that this dissatisfaction cannot but exist, and that with the years it will keep growing stronger, and that, in order to be rid of this feeling, you need not to abandon your family or to weaken your care for it, but you need to bring into family life and care that ideal toward which you strove and which you did not realize, but which was undoubtedly true. You need to unite service to people and service to your family — not by mechanically apportioning your time between the one and the other, but chemically, by giving to the care of the family, to the upbringing of children, an ideal significance of service to people. Marriage, true marriage, manifesting itself in the birth of children, is in its true meaning only a mediate service to God, the service of God through children. And from this, marriage, conjugal love, is always experienced by us as a certain relief, a calming. It is the moment of the handing over of one’s work to another. ‘If, as it were, I have not done what I could and should have done, then here, to take my place, are my children — they will do it.’
But the whole point is just this: that they should do it; that they should be brought up in such a way that they should be not a hindrance to the work of God, but workers in it; that, if I could not — or could not, as a woman — serve the ideal that stood before me, I should at least do everything possible so that the children should serve it. And this gives a whole programme and the whole character of upbringing, gives to upbringing a religious meaning, and this it is that, as it were chemically, unites into one the best, self-denying aspirations of youth and the care for the family.
This, then, is what I advise you, and this I wish you with all my soul. I think that such a direction of upbringing is fairly definite, and that it is easy to show by examples what is, and what is not, in keeping with it. I wish you joyful success in this work.”
At this same time he writes to a certain American a brief but strong and weighty word:
“Dear Sir, I think, that the churches are the greatest enemies of good Christian life.”
(Dear Sir, I think that the churches are the greatest enemies of good Christian life.)
At this time, in the family of L. N.’s friend Chertkov, a grievous event was taking place: the severe illness of his wife Anna Konstantinovna, who suffered from acute neurasthenia with some kind of complications and was growing weaker with every day.
Already several times L. N. had received from Chertkov urgent requests to visit them at their farmstead, Rzhevsk, in the Voronezh Province. L. N. replied with a full desire to fulfil the request, and at the same time explained the impossibility of fulfilling it at once. He was awaiting the return of his daughter and son from their journey abroad.
The news of his son’s health was discouraging, and he needed to see him and to be with him for the first while after his return, in order to render himself an account of the real danger of his condition.
At last there came a time freer for L. N., and he resolved to go to Chertkov. This was at the end of March. In view of the fact that the news from Chertkov was becoming ever more and more alarming, I went to him before L. N., in order to help him in his affairs, which he had let fall into neglect on account of his wife’s illness.
On the 27th of March I drove from the farmstead with Chertkov’s horses to meet L. N. at the Olginskaya station, and brought them to the farmstead. From Moscow the route lay through Voronezh, and L. N. stayed there for one day, in order to visit another sick man, his best friend Gavrila Andreyevich Rusanov, who was struck down with paralysis.
At Rzhevsk, with Chertkov, L. N. spent a whole week. Needless to say how much joy his visit gave to the inhabitants of the farmstead. Into the sick Anna Konstantinovna he poured the energy of life, and she began to recover.
Here is how L. N. depicts the impression made by this visit, in a letter to Sofya Andreyevna:
“I am very glad that I came; and he, and, above all, they are so sincerely glad, and we are so close to them in soul, we have so many common interests, and we see one another so rarely, that it is good for us both. She is very pitiable and sweet and firm in spirit. I talked with her at once for half an hour, and I see that she is already tired. She cannot even raise herself in bed unaided. Just now Lizaveta Ivanovna has arrived; I have not yet seen her. I was embarrassed at first by the thought that too many of us had descended all at once, but here there are so many little houses that all have been accommodated, and to all, it seems, it is comfortable, while to us it is too good. The place here is very beautiful; the building is on a hillside, below runs a steep ravine which rises on the other side, overgrown with tall timber. Just now I went for a walk alone and gathered snowdrops.”
One of L. N.’s literary works at that time was the article on art, over which he laboured much, seeking new, clear forms for the expression of his new view of art. Thoughts about this swarmed constantly in L. N.’s head, and this condition was reflected in the entries of his diary. Here are some of them:
23 March.
“Art is true only when the inner striving coincides with the consciousness of the fulfilment of the work of God.
One may strive to express what occupies one, but what is not needful to God; and one may strive, by a work of art, to further the work of God, but without having toward it an inner striving — and it will not be art.”
“A work of art is one that infects people, brings them all to one and the same mood.
There is nothing equal in force of effect, and in the subordination of all people to one and the same mood, as the work of one’s life and, at the last, a whole human life.
If only people understood all the significance and all the force of this work of art that is their life! If only they fulfilled it as carefully, applied all their forces to not spoiling it by anything and to producing it in all its possible beauty!
But instead we cherish the reflection of life, while we neglect life itself. Yet, whether we wish it or not, it is a work of art, because it acts upon other people, is contemplated by them.”
Evidently this thought of life as a work of art strongly occupied him, since here he once again develops the same thought which he had already expressed in his letter to Lev Lvovich in Paris, and which we have quoted in its place.
At this time, first in Russia, and then in other countries too, a new social phenomenon began to come into being. At the end of the eighties Dr. Zamenhof of Vilna founded a new, greatly simplified international language, “Esperanto.” Several years later, when the number of Esperantists in various countries had considerably increased, they resolved to organize themselves and to publish their own organ. They turned to several world authorities with a request to express their opinion of the language Esperanto. Among others, the Esperantists turned also to L. N. He answered them with the following letter.
27 August 1894.
“Dear Sirs!
I have received your letters and will try, as best I can, to fulfil your wish, that is, to express my opinion of the idea of a universal language in general, and of how far the language Esperanto corresponds to this idea.
That men are moving toward the formation of one flock, with one shepherd of reason and love, and that one of the nearest preceding steps to this must be the mutual understanding of men by one another — of this there can be no doubt whatever. But in order that men should understand one another, it is necessary either that all languages should of themselves merge into one (which, if it ever happens, will happen only after a great length of time), or that the knowledge of all languages should be so widespread that not only should all works be translated into all languages, but that all people too should know so many languages that all might have the possibility of communicating with one another in this or that language; or that one language should be chosen by all, which all peoples should be obliged to learn; or, finally (as is supposed by the Volapükists and Esperantists), that all people of different nationalities should compose for themselves one international, simplified language, and that all should learn it. In this consists the idea of the Esperantists. It seems to me that this last supposition is the most reasonable and, above all, the most readily realizable.
So I answer the first question. To the second question — how far the language Esperanto satisfies the requirements of an international language — I cannot answer decisively. I am not a competent judge in this. The one thing I know is this: that Volapük seemed to me very complicated, whereas Esperanto, on the contrary, seemed very easy, as it must seem to any European. (I think that for universality, in the true sense of that word — that is, in order to unite the Chinese, the African peoples, and so on — another language will be needed; but for European humanity Esperanto is extraordinarily easy.) The ease of learning it is such that, having received, six years ago, an Esperanto grammar, dictionary, and articles written in this language, I was, after no more than two hours’ study, in a condition, if not to write, then to read freely in this language.
In any case, the sacrifices which a man of our European world will make in devoting some time to the study of this language are so insignificant, and the consequences that may follow from its being mastered by all — even if only by Europeans and Americans, by all Christians — are so enormous, that one cannot but make this attempt. I have always thought that there is no more Christian science than the knowledge of languages — that knowledge which gives the possibility of communion and of union with the greatest number of people.
I have more than once seen how people came into hostile relations with one another only from a mechanical hindrance to mutual understanding. And therefore the study of Esperanto and its spreading is undoubtedly a Christian work, furthering the establishment of the Kingdom of God — that work which constitutes the chief and sole vocation of humanity.”
This testimonial of L. N.’s gave a strong impetus to the spread of Esperanto. And one may say that the wide development of it at the present time is in large measure owing to L. N.
At the end of April L. N. and Marya Lvovna went off again to Yasnaya, now for the summer’s stay. To one of his friends he wrote thus about this departure: “I have gone off to rest from the agonizing bustle of Moscow.”
Soon after, he writes from there to his wife, delighting in the country spring:
“I have just now, after dinner, at 5 o’clock, driven to Sudakovo, and from there by the Zaseka to the apiary, the bathing-place, and home through the Zakaz. I went mostly on foot, rejoicing in the beauty of God’s world. The grass is already a quarter-arshin high, the rye is going into the stalk, the oats are green here and there; on the bird-cherry the blossom is ready, and the shoots are two vershoks long; the aspen and the early oak are putting on their leaves. It is warm, moist; nightingales, cuckoos.”
Of his literary works he was at this time occupied with the working-up of the article on Maupassant, which was soon printed in the Posrednik (“The Intermediary”) edition as a preface to the works of Maupassant translated by L. P. Nikiforov according to the selection of L. N. himself.
In May, too, L. N. was visited by his American like-minded friend Ernest Crosby. On this first visit he did not produce a particularly favourable impression on L. N. On the contrary, he wrote to his wife: “Crosby, like all Americans, is decent, not stupid, but superficial.”
About this meeting L. N. relates, with the sincere self-condemnation characteristic of him, in a letter to the editor of Posrednik, already after the premature death of Crosby; this letter was printed as a preface to a work of Crosby’s, published in Russian by Posrednik under the title: “Tolstoy and His Understanding of Life.” Here is what he wrote then:
“My first acquaintance with him was by letter. He sent me from Egypt, where he was a judge, a fairly large sum of money for those who had suffered from the failure of the harvest. I answered his letter, and soon after this he himself came.
To my shame, I remember that, notwithstanding Crosby’s attractive personality, I, in my judgement, did not distinguish him from the usual American visitors who are guided in their visits only by my celebrity. I remember, however, that his question, addressed directly to me, surprised me.
We were walking, as I remember now, out of the old oak wood. It was a summer evening. He said to me: ‘What do you advise me to do now, on returning to America?’ This was a question so far removed from the usual ways of visitors that I was surprised, and even so did not then understand his perfect sincerity, and that there was being accomplished in him at that time that great upheaval — great for a man’s life — which I too had lived through, and which I wish for all people: an upheaval consisting in this, that all the manifold aims in life are suddenly replaced by one — to do that which is proper to man, and that which is willed of me by the will that governs the world in which I live.
I had by no means supposed that this educated, handsome, wealthy man, enjoying a good social position, could seriously think of devoting his life, in disregard of all his past, to the service of God.
I remember we stopped, and I, though not fully trusting his sincerity, told him that there is in their America a remarkable man, George, and that to serve his cause is a cause to which it is worth directing all one’s powers.
And to my surprise and joy, I soon learned, both from Crosby’s letters and from other sources, that he not only fulfilled my advice and became an energetic fighter for George’s cause, but became a man who, in all his life and activity, pursues one and the same aim as I do. This I saw from his letters and from his fine book, in which he, from various sides — though, unfortunately, in verse — expressed with great force his religious world-view, entirely in agreement with mine.”
To this same period one ought to assign L. N.’s attempt to dispense, in his letters, with the customary epithets. Here is what he writes, among other things, to E. I. Popov in a letter which began thus, contrary to his usual practice:
“I have just now received your letter, brimful of interesting information...” — without any form of address. At the end of the letter he explains this innovation, fearing by this outward coldness to offend his friend:
“If I do not write the agreed-upon epithet ‘dear,’ it is not because I have changed in any degree toward you. I love and value you just the same; but I have resolved to throw off these conventional epithets, which are always disagreeable.”
The same explanation is met with in other letters of that time. But this innovation did not hold out for long — only some two months. In the August letters we already meet once more the epithet “dear,” and in one of the letters of that time he says that without these epithets he feels somehow awkward, cold.
At this time, that is, at the end of May, Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge was returning to his own place in the Chernigov Province, to his farmstead near the Pliski station, on the Kursk-Kiev railway.
The agitations he had undergone were making themselves felt, and he felt himself weak, weary. On the 1st of June he arrived at the farmstead, and when the carriage stopped at the porch of his house, he felt unwell, gave a death-rattle, and a few hours later expired.
Soon the news of his death reached L. N. and deeply shook his soul. In a whole series of letters of this time to his friends, and in his diary, there is reflected the impression which this death produced upon him. We give here the most interesting extracts.
On the 14th of June he wrote to Ivan Ivanovich Gorbunov:
“I cannot come to myself after the death of our friend, cannot grow used to it. What a doubtful, mysterious connection there is between death and love. Death, as it were, lays love bare, removing what concealed it, and one always grieves, regrets, marvels at how one could have loved so little, or rather have shown so little of that love which bound me to the dead one. And when he is no more, the one who has died, one feels all the force of the love that binds one to him. There grows stronger, increases tenfold, the very penetration of love, which one did not see before, or did see, but somehow was ashamed to express, as though this good thing were already something superfluous. This was an astonishing, pure, tender, brilliant old-man-child, full to the very brim of love toward all and toward everything — like those children, like whom one must become in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.
A childlike thing in him too was his vexation and hurt at the people who did not love him and his work. He, to whom the whole Christian world ought to bow down, was entirely happy and radiant if his works were appreciated by a schoolboy or a girl-student.
How many people there were who simply did not believe him only because he was too clear, simple, and loving with everyone. People are so corrupted that it seemed to them that behind his kindness and his caressingness there was something else — whereas behind it there was nothing except the God of love, who lived in his heart.
And we are so often so bad that it makes us ashamed, awkward, to see this God of love: he accuses us, and we turn away from him. I am speaking not of anyone else, but of myself. More than once I turned away from him. I simply loved too little. Well, but now I love more. And he has gone from me. I know where to find him — in God. Such a death, such a life, lifts one up.
From Petrusha, his son, there was a long letter, describing his last days and his death. He had just been preparing to work, was in full possession of his spiritual powers. He was cheerful, came home, got out of the carriage, gasped several times, and died.”
A similar impression L. N. expresses in a letter to Khilkov:
”...I cannot grow used to the death of Ge the elder, N. N. (you, surely, know of it). I know almost no particulars. There was only a letter from Kolechka, that he came home, said that he felt unwell, got down from the cab, began to gasp for breath, and died. Rarely does a death so strike me. He was so very alive, and was so very good — simply good, so that his goodness was not noticed, but was taken as something most natural. And then it seemed to me that he could and should yet do so much. Evidently, we shall never understand what a man needs and ought to do, and we suppose that what is needed is what is not needed at all, and, above all, we do not see why and when it is needful to die. You, surely, likewise loved and love him much. He loved and loves you much. From Kolechka there was received today a letter, that he is sending all his pictures to us. Were you ever at his place? No, I think not. Pictures act little upon me, but his Crucifixion of this year is an astonishing picture. For the first time everyone saw that the Crucifixion is an execution, and a dreadful execution.”
At the same time he wrote to Leonida Fominichna Annenkova:
“I do not remember any death affecting me so strongly. As always at the nearness of the death of a dear person, life has become very serious, my weaknesses, sins, light-mindedness, the lack of love — the one thing that does not die — have become clearer, and I simply felt sorry that in this world there is one friend, helper, worker the fewer.”
Later, already in August, he wrote thus to Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov:
“Of Ge I think without ceasing, feel him without ceasing, to which it contributes that his two pictures, The Judgement and The Crucifixion, stand with us, and I often look at them, and the more I look, the more I understand and love.
It would be well if you would write about him. Probably I too shall write. He was so great a man that we all, if we write about him from different sides — we shall scarcely meet, that is, shall scarcely repeat one another.”
The same reflection of the impression of a friend’s death we find also in the diary of that time. At first he expresses a thought similar to that which he had expressed in the letter to Gorbunov.
On the 13th of June he records:
“Some kind of connection between death and love.
Love is the essence of life, and death, removing the cover of life, lays bare, as the essence, love.
When a man has died, only then does one learn how much one loved him.”
And, having begun to speak of love, he goes on to develop his thought:
“All that I see — flowers, trees, the sky, the earth — all this is my sensations. And my sensations are nothing other than the consciousness of the limits of my ‘I.’ The ‘I’ strives to expand and, in striving, collides with its limits in space, and the consciousness of these limits gives it sensations, and the sensations it objectifies into colour, trees, earth, sky.
Then I thought: what, then, is love? Why is there love, when life consists in these collisions with one’s limits? The collision with these limits is necessary, and in these collisions is the play of life. What has love to do with it? I do not remember how, but this conception of life abolished love, made it needless. And a doubt and a despondency came upon me. Is not all that I think and say of love an invention? True, it is not I alone who speak of it; it is not I who invented it. But it has been spoken of long since, and by all. And although this gives a probability that there is something in it, still — is it not self-deception?
I went further and thought: but how do I know that I am I, and that all that I see is only the limit of me? Besides the consciousness of the limit there is also the consciousness of oneself — of that which is conscious of the limits. What, then, is this consciousness? If it feels the limits, then by its essence it is limitless and strives to come out of these limits. By what, then, can I come out of these limits? By what can I penetrate beyond them?
Only by this: by loving that which is beyond the limits. So that love annihilates the limits, the union of him who loves with that which is beyond the limits, with God, with love.
By means of love a man destroys the limits that confine him, can become limitless, become God. At first a man annihilates these limits between himself and the beings nearest to him, the most comprehensible; then between the more remote, harder to grasp.
But how is one to nourish oneself without killing plants, without crushing grass, insects, that is, without destroying love? Consequently, however much one may enlarge the limits in this world, it is unthinkable to realize complete love, that is, the annihilation of the limits between oneself and the world.
Complete realization is impossible, but an infinite approach is possible.
But this world is not the only one; there are other worlds, in which this realization is, probably, possible. A man, on the one hand, brings nearer in this world the realization of the Kingdom of God, that is, of love; on the other, prepares himself for that life in which this is possible.”
This briefly recorded thought, with the corresponding working-up, might have created a whole system of philosophy. But “system” was not proper to his soul. Throughout all his numerous writings these pearls of wisdom are scattered. He left it to the succeeding generation to gather these precious pearls and, threading them upon a single string, to create one harmonious whole. In this lies the task of those to whom the work of life is dear, the work of Lev Nikolaevich’s service to the world.
At the beginning of June L. N. wrote to I. B. Feinerman:
“Whether they hinder you or do not hinder you, what you have managed to do is good. So in our time too, only in a more enlarged sense, it is true that the disciples of Christ must go to another place when they are driven out of one. So it is done, and was done, and cannot but be done, because there is nothing else to do. The day before yesterday Chertkov and I were at Krapivna at Bulygin’s, who is sitting there in prison for the refusal to provide horses for the military levy. He is in the firmest and most joyful spirit, and calmly and involuntarily preaches in the prison. Tomorrow I want to go to him again.
Have you heard that Kudryavtsev has been taken by the gendarmes and is sitting somewhere in confinement? It is hard for me to be at liberty...”
And in the middle of June the gendarmes descended with a search upon my farmstead in the Kostroma Province, where I was spending the summer, and upon my Moscow apartment, where at that time my friend E. I. Popov was living. They sought from him and from me, apparently, documents about the life of the recently deceased Drozhzhin, whose life was at that time being described by Evgeny Ivanovich Popov.
Without entering into the particulars of this affair, which concerns us personally, I will give L. N.’s letters, which testify to his attitude toward this event. After my notification of the search I received from him the following letter:
“I received your letter to Lyova, dear P., and rejoiced and suffered for you. I rejoiced, because you acted as one ought, as a Christian cannot but act if he is free from temptations; but I suffered for you, because one is always afraid for others, especially when there are close ones: wives, mothers, children, who do not share the same understanding of life. The other day Bulygin was sitting in prison by the decision of the rural superintendent, for the refusal to supply horses for the military levy, and I was with him and found him both times in the most joyful state of spirit, into which, as he said, he was brought chiefly by the fact that his wife not only did not reproach him, but sympathized with him. For that examination, as you call it, which is brought about by these onslaughts, a certain concentration and tension is needed, and therefore, if at the given moment the discontent, the irritation, the reproaches, even the grief of those close to you distract you, then it becomes very agonizing — rather as when a man is preparing to make a decisive leap, and he is, even if only slightly, tugged by the sleeve. The reverse, on the other hand: the expression of sympathy gives one wings, as I saw in Bulygin. So this is the thing I suffered for you in: that for you too, perhaps, it is hard that they should put you in prison. I have not got your letter now, it is with Chertkov, who took it yesterday; but I seem to remember there is something superfluous in it, something you said to them about violence, or something that seemed superfluous to me. But what I rejoiced at chiefly was that you and Zh. acted in exactly the same way, and in exactly the way that each of us holds it best to act, that is: not only not to offend these people, but to be useful to them, and at the same time, by one’s assistance, participation, agreement, obedience, not to strengthen their delusion that they are doing something good and proper; on the contrary, by one’s non-assistance, non-agreement, non-approval of their work, to make them see, or at least feel, the whole vileness of it.”
Evgeny Ivanovich too, of course, did not delay to communicate the violence done to him, and received from L. N. the following reply:
“With my whole soul I was with you, Evgeny Ivanovich, in both affairs, in the ordeal which you have had to live through. Ivan Ivanovich told me so well of your attitude to the search that I felt as though I had been present at it. Knowing you, I vividly picture your spiritual condition and your attitude to people, and how well I understand also what you said: that everything you said that had been prepared (I too sometimes prepare) came out ‘wrong,’ and the reverse. You did well to refuse to take part in the search. Nothing so confirms a delusion and the deluded as assistance to them. God grant you strength — I was going to say, to bear the persecution, even the confinement, which you will have to bear; and so I thought that one must ask God for strength no less in order to bear those conditions of a free life which we all always bear.”
Often there is heard, both in L. N.’s letters and in his diaries, this sad note of regret over his freedom, and a kind of light complaint that he is not deemed worthy of persecution.
But we, his friends, did not grieve over this freedom of his and did not complain of it. It was too dear to us, and I do not know what price I should have been ready to pay so that this freedom should not be taken from him. With him himself this sadness gave way to a rapturous contemplation of that eternal world which even then was opening to him. On the 14th of June he records in his diary:
“Approaching Ovsyannikovo, I looked at a lovely sunny sunset. In the heaped-up clouds a break, and there, like a red irregular angle, the sun. All this above the wood. The rye. Joyful.
And I thought: No, this world is not a jest, not a vale of trial only and of passage into a better, eternal world, but is one of the eternal worlds, which is beautiful, joyful, and which we not only can but must make more beautiful and more joyful for those who live with us and for those who shall live in it after us.”
On the 17th of June L. N. dictated to Marya Lvovna a new play in five acts. This was a sketch of the dramatic work “Peter the Bread-Giver.”
L. N.’s relations with like-minded people abroad continue to be struck up. About this time there was struck up a correspondence between him and a certain former English pastor of the rationalist persuasion, John Kenworthy, who had founded a new Christian religious community. He asked L. N.’s advice, and L. N. answered him. In L. N.’s diary at this time, that is, in the middle of July, the following thought is recorded:
“To add to the letter to Kenworthy:
One of the signs of the fulfilment of the Christian law is union. But we are all broken up into parties, estates, peoples, faiths, sects; political, economic, literary parties; the estates of the rich, the poor, the intellectual, the common, the aristocrats, vulgo; peoples, tribes of different colours — white, black, yellow... various governments; faiths, sects: Christian, Mohammedan, Jewish, Buddhist, and a heap of others, and yet within each, sects.
How, then, is one here to found sects of ‘communion,’ not to fear this, not to fear to increase the disunion?
On the contrary, our chief work is to break down all the barriers that separate us, to hold only to that which unites us not only with Christians, but with Buddhists, Mohammedans, savages. In this is Christianity.”
In August L. N. was visited by a new like-minded man from among the Slavs, Dr. Dušan Petrovich Makovický, who afterwards became one of the people closest to L. N. L. N. reports thus of this visit to Chertkov:
“Makovický was very interesting to me. They, the Slavs, are oppressed, and use all their spiritual energy in the struggle with this oppression; but they struggle with the weapons of oppression, defend their nationality against an alien nationality, their confession, their language, their conclusions. And all this they do through disputes, journalism, through intrigues, circles, societies, elections in the Diet, and the like. And there, right beside them, in their country, among the people, there is spreading more and more the sect of the ‘Nazarenes’ (in 1876 there were five thousand of them, now thirty thousand), who do not acknowledge any power higher than the law of Christ, do not go to law, do not take the oath, do not take up arms. They are thrown into prisons by the hundred; some have been sitting ten years. And the intelligentsia do not see that liberation from all bonds and from all oppressions lies in this faith, and look past them, seeking salvation for themselves in that which destroys them. We talked much with him about this. And he understands.”
Toward autumn all began to gather in Moscow, to take up their usual occupations. L. N. remained at Yasnaya until November, and a part of the family was always with him.
He was at that time intensely occupied with writing an exposition of his Christian understanding of the world. At first this was conceived by him in the catechetical form of questions and answers, but afterwards he abandoned this form and began to write simply in the form of a systematic exposition.
An interesting event at this time was the beginning of a new periodical organ under L. N.’s editorship, the so-called “Archive of L. N. Tolstoy.”
It was begun on the initiative of Ivan Ivanovich Gorbunov, and for a long time was called simply Ivan Ivanovich’s journal. But afterwards, out of precaution, it came to be called the “Archive of L. N. Tolstoy.” Its contents were made up of those of the best articles and letters sent to L. N. which, in his opinion, might with profit be circulated, but which, by the conditions of censorship, could not be printed in Russia. This journal was published in manuscript, copied out in several copies on a Remington typewriter.
It went around in a quantity of about 25 copies among L. N.’s friends. In all, about 15 numbers came out. Here are the contents of the first number:
I. The Reformation, which must begin with a change of the heart.
II. What does Christ now require? By J. Kenworthy.
III. The polemic called forth by this article in the pages of the journal “The Young Methodist.”
IV. A New Era.
V. Thoreau (from the journal “The Labour Prophet”).
In a similar manner the other numbers too were composed. A complete copy of this journal can be obtained only with difficulty. The most complete, apparently, is in the Tolstoy museums.
L. N. writes about this undertaking to Sofya Andreyevna on the 12th of September:
“With Ivan Ivanovich I have thought up something good — that is, he thought up the collecting of all those splendid articles, books, and even letters which I and we receive, and the making, as it were, of a manuscript journal, excluding everything provocative, censorious. I do not know whether it will succeed, but it is always a pity to me that there should be lost, unknown to many, the splendid and interesting and instructive and soul-profiting things which I receive.”
This “Archive” existed for two years, up to our exile over the Doukhobor affair.
In October there occurred an event which had its reflection on the fates of Russia and, probably, of the whole world. On the 20th of October the Emperor Alexander III died. He was long and agonizingly dying of an incurable disease, and, in proportion as the disease worsened, there rose in many people — even in those who had regarded his reign very negatively — an unfeigned pity for him.
I remember the awesome feeling which I experienced, being by chance in Petersburg at that time, when bulletins about the state of the tsar’s health were being posted up along the streets. And, at last, there appeared, in a black border, the announcement: “The Sovereign Emperor has fallen asleep in God”; groups of strollers gathered on the Nevsky, talking in undertones, some crossing themselves, some weeping, but on all there lay the imprint of an agitation lived through, and of something dreadfully serious that had been accomplished at that moment. I remember how, having come to Yasnaya, I told L. N. my impressions of this event, and met in him a full spiritual response and a similar experience. There came involuntarily to my mind now the phrase he had, only recently then, written in his diary: “Death lays love bare.” Such a love had been laid bare in many sincere people toward the departed monarch as well.
Still earlier, during the Sovereign’s illness, L. N. had written to Chertkov:
“The Sovereign’s illness touches me very much. I am very sorry for him. I am afraid that it is hard for him to die, and I hope that God will find him, and he will find the path to God, notwithstanding all those barriers which the conditions of his life have set between him and God.”
Here, then, are three deaths in this year, 1894. Drozhzhin, a poor schoolmaster, tormented to death by the authorities because he could not act against his own conscience; the free, independent artist Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge, burned out by the fire of a great genius; and the head of the Russian state, the ruler of peoples. Death made them equal.
And L. N.’s attitude toward them was, if not identical, then of one kind. Their death aroused in him a feeling of love and called forth a reminder to people of their eternal, spiritual nature.
Of his literary occupations at the end of October L. N. reports briefly and expressively in a letter to Sofya Andreyevna:
“These days I have been writing one letter to the English newspapers, to the effect that Christianity has not as its aim the destruction of the existing order and its replacement by another, but only the personal salvation of people; and a letter to Baroness Rosen as to whether it is needful or not to bring to clear consciousness and to express in words one’s religious convictions. Both I have finished. My exposition I shall, no doubt, put off still further. I keep wanting to begin from the beginning and differently. I have received no letters for some three days, probably they are being read.”
The last phrase refers to the supposition, very probable, that L. N. was at that time under surveillance, and that his letters were being opened.
To his daughter Marya Lvovna he writes at about the same time:
“I worked well yesterday, but today badly; on the other hand I noted down something interesting to me in my diary, and this evening I resolved upon, thought out, something very interesting to me, namely, that I cannot write with enthusiasm for the gentry — there is no getting through to them by anything: they have philosophy, and theology, and aesthetics, by which, as by a coat of mail, they are protected against any truth that requires being followed. This I feel instinctively when I write things like Master and Man and now Resurrection. But if I think that I am writing for the Afanasys and even for the Danilas and Ignats and their children, then a vigour comes upon me, and I want to write.”
At this same time, under L. N.’s direction, the Buddhist tale “Karma” was translated; sending it off to the editor of Severny Vestnik (The Northern Herald) to be printed (it appeared in December of that same year), Lev Nikolaevich wrote:
“I am sending you the Buddhist little tale, translated by me from the American journal Open Court, under the title ‘Karma.’ This little tale pleased me very much, both by its naïveté and by its profundity. Especially good in it is the elucidation of that truth, often of late obscured from various sides, that deliverance from evil and the acquisition of good are gained only by one’s own effort, that there is not and cannot be any such contrivance by means of which, apart from one’s own personal participation, one’s own or the common good could be attained. This elucidation is especially good in that it shows, at the same time, that the good of a separate man is only then a true good, when it is the common good. As soon as the robber climbing out of hell wished good for himself alone, his good ceased to be a good, and he broke off. This little tale, as it were, illumines from a new side two fundamental truths disclosed by Christianity: that life is only in the renunciation of personality — whosoever shall lose his life shall find it; and that the good of people is only in union with God, and through God among themselves. ‘As Thou art in me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us’ (John XVIII, 21).
I read this little tale to the children, and it pleased them. Among the grown-ups, too, after the reading of it, there always arose conversations about the most important questions of life. And it seems to me that this is a very good recommendation.”
In a letter to his daughter Marya Lvovna, L. N. gives the following little picture of the autumn of 1894:
”...Today, after a cold night, the sky is overcast with light clouds, it is still, warm, but the freshness of the night is felt; the grass is bright green, and the leaf too. In the wood there is stillness, only the hawks shriek. In the fields it is empty. The winter crops have come up on the tillage, clear of grass, in a thick green brush, here with a tinge of colour, here quite green. The gossamers are beginning. Underfoot are leaves, mushrooms, and such a stillness that every sound startles. I went for saffron-milk-caps, found nothing, but rejoiced all the time. Now thoughts will come flooding in, clear, connected, good (at one time the whole — the present work, the catechism — appeared to me), now there are none at all, but only a joyful gratitude.”
In the middle of November L. N. returned to Moscow.
We have already mentioned in this chapter the anxiety which the administration displayed with regard to L. N. and his like-minded friends. Of course, there were good reasons for it. L. N.’s views had begun to penetrate among the people. Of the paths of penetration of these views there were chiefly two: the first was the personal propaganda by the lives of L. N.’s like-minded friends, the vast majority of whom lived in the country, in living communion with the people; the other path was the publications of Posrednik, directed by L. N. The booklets of Posrednik, notwithstanding the strictness of the then censorship, gave so much living material to the mind and heart of the Russian peasant, and that in so accessible a form, that there, where they appeared, there began both a conscious, critical attitude toward the existing order and attempts to change it, always beginning with oneself.
And so, at the beginning of the nineties, the little booklets of Posrednik penetrate into the Caucasus, into the midst of the Doukhobor sect. The seeds fall upon good soil and bring forth fruit. The Doukhobor sect, itself a living one, makes use, in the person of its best representatives, of the booklets of Posrednik for the renewal of its world-view, and in the Caucasus there begins a new religious movement among the Doukhobors. The first stage of this movement ends with the exile of the Doukhobor leader P. V. Verigin, first to the Archangel Province, and then to Berezov, in the Tobolsk Province. During his transfer by stages from the Archangel Province to the Tobolsk, he ends up for a few days in the Moscow Butyrki transit prison, where he becomes acquainted with a certain criminal convict, D., whom we, the participants in Posrednik, used to visit on reception days, maintaining through him communication with a friend of ours imprisoned in the same prison for the refusal of military service and kept in the tower with the political prisoners. In this way we managed to establish a connection with Verigin too, of whom until then we had known only from the newspapers. Of course, L. N. too became interested in this visit of Verigin to Moscow. I give an extract from the reminiscences, written down by me long ago, of our meeting with the Doukhobors who were in Moscow at that time and had come to visit and see off their leader:
“On one of the reception days E. P. Popov went to the prison for a visit. Coming home, he related that he had seen in the prison P. V. Verigin behind the grating with the convicts, and that before the grating, among those who had come for the visit, he had seen three Doukhobors, with whom he had become acquainted.
Of course, we all resolved on the next reception day to go to the prison for a visit, but Evgeny Ivanovich announced that the Doukhobors who had come to visit Verigin had told him that Verigin was to be sent off the very next evening by a special convoy to Siberia, so that it was no longer possible to see him. The only thing that remained possible was to see Verigin’s friends; this we did. On the evening of that same day, at about three or four o’clock, we set off to the hotel by the Krasnye Vorota. With us went L. N. Tolstoy too, who likewise knew little of the Doukhobors, but took an interest in them, because he had heard of a new religious movement that had begun in their midst.
We entered a large, spacious hotel room and saw three grown men in peculiar, handsome, half-peasant, half-Cossack garments, who greeted us amiably, with a certain solemnity. These were Doukhobors: the brother of Peter Verigin, Vasily Vasilyevich Verigin; Vasily Gavrilovich Vereshchagin, who died on the way to Siberia; and Vasily Ivanovich Obyedkov. We were all struck by the modest but dignified bearing of these people, which presented not merely a local, but, as it were, a racial, or at least a national, distinctiveness; none of us had ever, before or after, happened to meet such people outside the Doukhobor milieu.
We, and pre-eminently L. N. Tolstoy, began to question them about their life and views. The short time of the visit and the slight acquaintance with their past did not permit us to enter into particulars, and we could exchange only general positions. To the greater part of Lev Nikolaevich’s questions concerning violence, property, the church, vegetarianism, they answered with agreement with his views, and to the question of how, then, they apply this to life, they answered with a kind of mysteriousness, that all this is only beginning among them, that now a few think and live so, but that soon all will openly join them.
From them we received some information about P. V. Verigin; we learned that he was already in his seventh year of exile, that his sojourn at Shenkursk had been found dangerous, and that he was now being transferred to live in Siberia. One of the three Doukhobors, namely Vasily Obyedkov, was travelling with him to Siberia in the capacity of escort, while the other two, Verigin and Vereshchagin, were setting off for the Caucasus, carrying to their spiritual brethren the precepts of their leader concerning the Christian life.
Having conversed with them for about an hour and handed over to them some books and manuscripts which, as it seemed to us, might interest them, we began to make ready for home. As we took leave of them, Lev Nikolaevich asked them to write about the course of affairs. Verigin took out a notebook and, turning to Lev Nikolaevich, said: ‘Please write down who you are and how to write to you.’ Lev Nikolaevich wrote down his address, and to me — who have often observed Lev Nikolaevich’s meeting with other people and noticed the agitation which his name produces upon people — it seemed strange that upon the Doukhobor it produced no visible impression. Evidently he, even if he had heard of Tolstoy before, here treated him as a perfectly ordinary man, as he did each of us, that is, as a man who had expressed sympathy with them.
We did not see them again.”
But, of course, by this meeting strong threads of communion with the Doukhobors were drawn, which from that time on was not interrupted and gave unforeseen results in the future.
We shall conclude the description of this year of L. N.’s life, so full of agitations, with an extract from his diary of the 25th of December:
“Formerly I saw the phenomena of life without thinking about whence these phenomena come and why I see them.
Then I understood that all that I see proceeds from light, which is reason. And I so rejoiced that I had reduced all to one, that I was entirely satisfied with the recognition of one reason as the beginning of all.
But afterwards I saw that reason is light, reaching me through some kind of frosted glass. The light I see, but what gives this light I do not know. But I know that it is.
This, which is the source of the light that illumines me, which I do not know, but the existence of which I know, is God.
One knows God not so much by reason, not even by the heart, but by the felt complete dependence upon Him, rather like the feeling that a nursing infant experiences in its mother’s arms. It does not know who holds it, who warms it, who feeds it, but it knows that there is this someone, and, more than that — it knows — it loves him.
For the first time I felt the possibility of loving God.
In order to be saved, that is, not to be unhappy, not to suffer, one must forget oneself.
The only forgetting of oneself is the forgetting of love; but the majority of people, yielding to temptations, do not love and do not wish to forget themselves in love, and exert themselves to forget themselves in tobacco, wine, opium, the arts.”
About this time he wrote, among other things, to his daughter Marya Lvovna:
“The chief thing is that the true work, the true life, is so unbrilliant, so unloud, so unsolemn, while the temptations are all — like that regiment of hussars which has just gone past the windows with music — brilliant, loud, conspicuous; but one must not be caught by this, at least in one’s consciousness. Temptations are surrounded with brilliance for the very reason that they are empty, otherwise no one would even glance at them. And the true life is deprived of brilliance for the very reason that it is joyful and full of content even without it, or rather, full of content and therefore quietly attractive.”
We may consider this moment of L. N.’s life a certain stage of his spiritual development, and with this we conclude the 3rd part of Volume III of the biography of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy.