The Journal of Leo Tolstoi First. Volume—1895-1899

To-day February 27. Nicholskoe.

Am writing the drama, it moves very stiffly. Indeed I don’t even know if I am progressing or not… I am very comfortable here; the important thing – it is quiet.

Read Trilby– poor. Wrote letters to Chertkov, Schmidt,[57 - Eugene Heinrich Schmidt, a German-Hungarian writer, resembling in some respects the philosophy of Tolstoi. In the Nineties he issued a magazine in Budapest: Die Religion des Geistes, and a newspaper with a Christian anarchical tendency: Ohne Staat. In 1901 he printed a book in Leipzig, Tolstoi, His Meaning to Our Civilization (see also his article on the cultural significance of the works of Leo Tolstoi, printed in the International Tolstoi Almanac by P. A. Sergienko, published by Kniga, 1909.)] Kenworthy. Read Corneille – instructive.

Have been thinking:

1) I made a note that there are two arts. Now thinking it over, I don’t find a clear expression of my thought. Then I thought that there was an art, as they rightly characterise it, which grew from play, from the need of every creature to play. The play of the calf is jumping, the play of man is a symphony, a picture, a poem, a novel.

This is one kind of art, the art of play, of thinking out new plays, producing old ones and inventing new. That is a good thing, useful and valuable because it increases man’s joys. But it is clear that it is possible to occupy oneself with play only when sated. Thus society can only occupy itself with art, when all its members are sated. But as long as all its members are not sated, there can not be real art, there will be an art of the overfed, a deformed one, and an art of the hungry ones – rough and poor, just as it is now. And therefore, in the first kind of art – of play – only that part is of value which is attainable to all, which increases the joys of all.

If it is like this, then it is not a bad thing, especially if it does not demand an increase of toil on the part of the oppressed, as happens now.

(This could and should be expressed better.)

But there is yet another art which calls forth in man better and higher feelings. I wrote this just now – something I have said many times – and I think it isn’t true. Art is only one and consists in this: to increase the sinless general joys accessible to all – the good of man. A nice building, a gay picture, a song, a story give a little good; the awakening of religious feelings, of the love of good brought forth by a drama, a picture, a song – give great good.

The 2nd thing that I have been thinking about art, is that nowhere is conservatism so harmful as in art. Art is one of the manifestations of the spiritual life of man, and therefore, as when an animal is alive, it breathes and discharges the products of its breathing, so when humanity is alive, it manifests activity in art. And therefore, at every given moment it must be contemporaneous – the art of our time. One ought only to know where it is (not in the decadence of music, poetry, or the novel); and one must seek it not in the past, but in the present. People who wish to show themselves connoisseurs of art and who therefore praise the past classic art and insult the present, only show by this, that they have no feeling for art.

3) Rachinsky[58 - Sergei Alexandrovich Rachinsky (1836–1902), a celebrated worker for popular education, who sacrificed his lectures in the Moscow University for his favourite occupation of teaching the peasant children in the village schools to write and read. A relative to Tolstoi on account of the first wife of his son, Sergei Lvovich, and personally acquainted with Tolstoi as early as the beginning of the Sixties.] says: “Notice that contemporaneous with the spread of the use of narcotics, since the 17th century, the astounding progress of science began, and especially of the natural ones.” Is it not because of this, I say to him, that the false direction of science has come, the studying of that which is not necessary to man, but is only an object for idle curiosity, or when useful, is not the only thing really necessary? Is it not because of this that from that time on there was neglected the one thing that was necessary, i.e. the settling of moral questions and their application to life?

4) What is the good? I only know a word in Russian which defines this idea. The good is the real good, the good for all, le veritable bien, le bien de tous, what is good for everybody.[59 - Written originally in English.]

5) Men, in struggling with untruth and superstition, often console themselves with the quantity of superstition they have destroyed. This is not right. It is not right to calm oneself until all that is contradictory to reason and demands credulence is destroyed. Superstition is like a cancer. Everything must be cleaned out if one undertakes an operation. But if a little bit is left, everything will grow from it again.

6) The historic knowledge of how different myths and beliefs arose among peoples in different places and in different times ought to, it seems, destroy the faith that these myths and beliefs which have been inoculated in us from our infancy, constitute the absolute truth; but nevertheless, so-called educated people believe in them. How superficial then, is the education of so-called educated people!

7) To-day at dinner there was talk about a boy with vicious inclinations who was expelled from school, and about how good it would be to give him over to a reformatory.

It is exactly what a man does who lives a bad life, harmful to his health, and who, when he becomes ill, turns to the doctor so that the latter may cure him, but has no idea that the illness was given to him as a beneficial indicator that his whole life is bad and that he ought to change it. The same thing is true with the illnesses in our society; every ill member of society does not remind us that the whole life of our society is irregular and that we ought to change it. But we think that for every such ill member, there is or ought to be, an institution freeing us from this member or even bettering him.

Nothing hampers the progress of humanity so much as this false conviction. The more ill the society, the more institutions there are for the healing of symptoms and the less anxiety for changing the entire life.

It is now 10 o’clock in the evening. I am going to supper. I want to work very much, but am without intellectual energy; a great weakness, yet I want to work terribly. If God would only give it to-morrow.

Feb. 28. Nicholskoe. If I live.

To-day March 6. Nicholskoe.

All this time I have felt weakness and intellectual apathy. I am working on the drama very slowly. Much has become clear. But there isn’t one scene with which I am fully satisfied.

To-day I was about to plan something silly: to write out an outline of the Declaration of Faith. Of course it didn’t go. In the same way I began and dropped a letter to the Italians.[60 - The letter was called forth by the Italian-Abyssinian war, which was then going on. The rather extensive beginning of this letter has been preserved, but up to now has not been published anywhere.]

During this time I jotted down:

1) Corneille writes in his Préface to Menteur on art, that its aim is a diversion, “divertir,” but that it must not be harmful, and if possible, it ought to be educationally enlightening.

2) At supper there was a discussion on heredity: they say vicious people are born from an alcoholic … (I can’t clearly express my thought and will put it by.)

3) Something very important. I lay and was almost asleep, suddenly something seemed to tear in my heart. It occurred to me: that is the way death comes from heart failure; and I remained calm – I felt neither grief nor joy, but blessedly calm – whether here or there, I know that it is well with me, that things are as they ought to be, just like a child, tossed in the arms of its mother, does not stop smiling from joy for it knows that it is in her loving arms.

And the thought came to me: why is it so now and was not so before? Because before, I did not live the whole of life, but lived only an earthly life. In order to believe in immortality, one must live an immortal life here. One can walk with one’s feet and not see the precipice before one, over which it is impossible to cross, and one can rise on one’s wings…[61 - Here follow words that have been crossed out. Note made by Prince N. L. Obolensky in the copy in possession of the editors.]

(It isn’t going and I don’t feel like thinking.)

March 7, 1896. Nicholskoe. If I live.

To-day May 2. Yasnaya Polyana.

It is almost two months since I have made an entry. All this time I lived in Moscow. Of important events there were: a getting closer to the scribe Novikov[62 - Michail Petrovich Novikov, a peasant of the Province of Tula, who served a year as an army scribe in one of the regiments stationed in Moscow. After his acquaintance with Tolstoi he suffered much because of his endeavour to realise his beliefs in his life. A gifted writer.] who changed his life on account of my books which his brother, a lackey, received from his mistress abroad. A hot-blooded youth. Also his brother, a working man, asked for “What is my Faith?” and Tania[63 - Countess Tatiana Lvovna Tolstoi (born 1864), the eldest daughter of Tolstoi. In the year 1899 she married M. S. Sukhotin.] sent him to Mme. Kholevinsky.[64 - Maria Michailovna Kholevinsky, a woman doctor, living in Tula. By Administrative order, after the event mentioned in the Journal, she was exiled to Orenburg.] They took Mme. Kholevinsky to prison. The prosecuting attorney said that they ought to go after me. All this together made me write a letter to the ministers of Justice and the Interior in which I begged them to transfer their prosecution to me.[65 - This letter, sent to both ministers (I. L. Goremykin and N. V. Muraviev) and to the same publishing house, was printed at first abroad in the paper The Free Press, No. 2, in 1902 (England), afterwards in Russia. (See Full Collected Works of Tolstoi, published by Sytin, 1913 – popular edition, Volume XXII. It is known that the request of Tolstoi in this letter: To direct all the prosecutions for the spreading of his forbidden books in Russia to himself and not to his followers and friends, as well as a whole series of subsequent similar petitions to Governmental officials – was not granted.)]

All this time I wrote on the Declaration of Faith. I made little progress. Chertkov, Posha Biriukov were here and went away. My relations with people are good. I have stopped riding the bicycle. I wonder how I could have been so infatuated.

I heard Wagner’s Siegfried.[66 - The second act of Wagner’s opera, Siegfried. For the impression produced on Tolstoi, see What Is Art? chapter XIII – in the letter to his brother, Count S. N. Tolstoi, on April 20, 1896, Tolstoi under the fresh impression of this opera wrote the following: “Last night I was at the theatre and heard the celebrated new music of Wagner’s opera, Siegfried. I could not sit through a single act and I fled from the place like mad, and now I cannot talk calmly about it. It is stupid, unfit for children above seven years of age, a Punch and Judy show, pretentious, feigned, entirely false and without any music whatever. And several thousand sat and pretended to be fascinated.”] I have many thoughts in connection with this and other things. In all I have jotted down 20 thoughts in my notebook.

Still another important event – the work of African Spier.[67 - Aphrikan Alexandrovich Spier (1837–1890), a remarkable Russian philosopher, who lived many years in Germany and who wrote his works in German: Thinking and Reality, Morality and Religious, etc. Tolstoi was then reading his principal work, Denken und Wirklichkeit (Thinking and Reality) – in a letter of 1896 to Countess S. A. Tolstoi, Tolstoi wrote: “I am reading a newly discovered philosopher, Spier, and am rejoicing… A very useful book, destroying many superstitions, especially the superstition of materialism.” (The Letters of Count L. N. Tolstoi to his Wife, Moscow, 1913, page 510.)] I just read through what I wrote in the beginning of this notebook. At bottom, it is nothing else than a short summary of all of Spier’s philosophy which I not only had not read at that time, but about which I had not the slightest idea. This work clarified my ideas on the meaning of life remarkably, and in some ways strengthened them. The essence of his doctrine is that things do not exist, but only our impressions which appear to us in our conception as objects. Conception (Vorstellung) has the quality of believing in the existence of objects. This comes from the fact that the quality of thinking consists in attributing an objectivity to impressions, a substance, and a projecting of them into space.

May 3. Y. P.

Let me write down anything. Am indisposed. Weakness and physical apathy. But think and feel keenly. Yesterday at least, I wrote a few letters: to Spier,[68 - The philosopher’s daughter, Elena Aphrikanovna Spier, who sent her father’s works to Tolstoi.] Shkarvan, Myasoyedov,[69 - Grigori Grigorevich Myasoyedov (1835–1912). A celebrated artist, the painter of the picture, “The Reading of the Ordinance, of February 19th” and others; one of the principal initiators and founders of the Society of Travelling Expositions.] Perer, Sverbeev.[70 - Dmitri Dmitrievich Sverbeev, the Governor of Courland, an acquaintance of the Tolstois’.]

I am reading Spier all the time, and the reading provokes a mass of thoughts.

Let me write out something at least from my 21 notes.

To-day I worked on the Declaration of Faith.

1) “Come and dwell in us and cleanse us of all evil” … On the contrary: Cleanse thy soul of evil thyself and He will come and dwell in thee. He only waits for this. Like water he flows into thee in the measure as room is freed. “Dwell in us.” How agonisingly lonely it is without Thee – this I experienced these days and how peaceful, firm and joyous, needing nothing and no one when with Thee. Do not leave me!

I can not pray. His tongue is different from that which I speak, but He will understand and translate it into His own when I say: “Help me, come to me, do not leave me!”

And here I have fallen into a contradiction. I say you have to cleanse yourself, then He will come. But I, not yet having cleansed myself, call upon Him.

May 4. If I still live here, Y. P.

May 5. Y. P.

The same general despair. And I am sad. There is one cause; the higher moral requirement that I put forward. In its name I have rejected everything that is beneath it. But it was not followed. Fifteen years ago I proposed giving away the greater part of the property and to live in four rooms. Then they would have an ideal…

To-day I rode past Gill.[71 - The cement factory, Gill, within 7 versts of Yasnaya Polyana.] I thought: no undertaking is profitable with a small amount of capital. The more capital, the more profits; the less expenses. But from this it in no way follows that, as Marx says, capitalism will lead to socialism. Perhaps it will lead to it, but to one with force. The workingmen will be compelled to work together, and they will work less and the pay will be more, but there will be the same slavery. It is necessary that people work freely in common, that they learn to work for each other, but capitalism doesn’t teach them that; on the contrary, it teaches them envy, greed, selfishness. Therefore, through a forced uniting brought about by capitalism, the material condition of the workers can be bettered, but their contentment can in no way be established. Contentment can only be established through the free union of the workers. And for this it is necessary to learn how to unite, to perfect oneself morally, to willingly serve others without being hurt when not receiving a return. And this can’t in any way be learned under the capitalistic, competitive system, but under an entirely different one.

I sleep alone downstairs.

To-morrow, May 6th, Y. P.

To-day, May 9, Y. P.

Up to now, I haven’t yet written out all that I had to. Have been continually indisposed. Notwithstanding this, I work in the mornings. To-day, it seemed to me I advanced very much. Our people have gone away, some to the coronation, others to Sweden.[72 - To the Coronation in Moscow there went: Countess S. A. Tolstoi and Countess A. L. Tolstoi; while Countess T. L. Tolstoi went to Sweden for the coming marriage in Stockholm of Count L. L. Tolstoi and D. Ph. Westerlund.] I am alone with Masha; she has a sore throat. I am well.