The Journal of Leo Tolstoi First. Volume—1895-1899. Лев Толстой
fire which burns?”
It is this way: you get the wood ready, and then you are sorry to use it; in the same way you get yourself ready and then you are sorry. But the comparison is not good, because fire comes to an end. A better comparison would be with food; do you imagine your life in food or in that which is being fed? Is not that the meaning of the words of St. John about “my body”, which ought to be food? Man is food for God if he gives himself to God.
(Unclear; nonsense.)
20) The principal aim of art, if there is art, and if it has an aim, is to manifest and to express the truth about man’s soul, to express those mysteries which it is impossible to express simply by speech. From this springs art. Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the mysteries of his soul and shows to people those mysteries which are common to all.
21) Love, enclosed in man and freed by reason, manifests itself in two ways: 1, by its expansion, and 2, by the establishment of the Kingdom of God. It is steam which, in spreading, works.
22) Lately, I have begun to feel such firmness and strength, not my own, but that of that God’s work which I wish to serve, that the irritation, the reproaches, the mocking people hostile to the work of God, is strange to me; they are pitiable, touching.
23) The world, living unconsciously, and man, in the period of his childhood, performed unconsciously the work of God. Having awakened to consciousness, he does it consciously. In the collision between the two methods of serving, man ought to know that the unconscious passes and will pass into the conscious and not the opposite and that therefore it is necessary to give oneself over to the future and not to the past. (Stupid.)
24) The delusion of man who has awakened to consciousness and who continues to consider his own separate being as himself, is that he considers a tool as himself. If you feel pain at the disturbing of the good of your separate being, it is as if you felt on your hand the blows on the tool with which you work. The tool has to be taken care of, ground, but not to be considered as oneself.
25) God Himself is economical. He has to penetrate all with love. He has fired man alone with love and has placed him in the necessity of firing all the rest.
26) Nothing affects the religious outlook so much as the way we look upon the world; whether with a beginning and an end, as it was looked upon in antiquity, or infinite as it is looked upon now. In a finite world, one can construct a reasonable rôle for separate mortal man, but in an infinite world the life of such a being has no meaning.
27) (For Konevsky) It happens to Katiusha after her resurrection, that she has certain periods in which she smiles slyly and lazily as if she had forgotten all which she considered true before; she is merely joyous and wants to live.
28) To him who lives a spiritual life entirely, life here becomes so uninteresting and burdensome that he can part with it easily.
29) Natasha Strakhov83 asks her father, when he speaks of something which happened when she was not yet born: “Where was I then?” I would have answered: “You were asleep and had not yet waked up here.” Conception, birth, childhood are only a preparation to an awakening, which we see, but not the sleeping ones.
30) The error in which we find ourselves when we consider our separate beings as ourselves is the same as when a traveller counts only one stage as the whole road, or a man, one day as his whole life.
31) Read about … and was horrified at the conscious deception of men …
32) “An eraser.” I have forgotten. I shall recall it.
Have written up to dinner. It is now 2 o’clock and I am going to dine.
May 28, Ysn. Pol. 12 o’c. noon.
It is already several days that I am struggling with my work84 and am making no progress. I sleep. I wanted to scribble it somehow to the very end, but I can’t possibly do it. Am in a wretched mood, aggravated by the emptiness, by the poor, self-satisfied, cold emptiness of my surrounding life.
In the meantime I have been to Pirogovo.85 I have a most joyous impression; my brother Sergei86 has undoubtedly had a spiritual transformation. He himself has formulated the essence of my faith (and he evidently recognises it as true for himself); to raise in oneself the spiritual essence and to subject to it the animal element. He has a miraculous ikon and he was tortured by his undefined attitude to it. The little girls87 are very good and live seriously. Masha has been infected by them. Later there were at our house: Salamon,88 Tanyee.89…
A terrible event in Moscow – the death of three thousand90– I somehow can not express myself as I ought to. I am indisposed all the time, getting weaker. In Pirogovo, there was the harnessmaker, an intelligent man. Yesterday a working-man came from Tula, intelligent. I think a revolutionist. To-day a seminary student, a touching case.
I am advancing very, very badly in my work. Rather boring letters because they demand polite answers. I have written to Bondarev,91 Posha, and to some one else. O yes; Officer N. was here too. I think I was useful to him. Splendid notes by Shkarvan.92
Yesterday there was a letter from poor N.93, whom they have driven off to the Persian frontier, hoping to kill him. God help him. And don’t forget me. Give me life, life, i. e. a conscious, joyful serving of Thee.
In the meantime, I thought,
1) It is remarkable how many people see some insoluble problem in evil. I have never seen any problem in it. For me it is now altogether clear that that which we call evil is that good, the action of which we don’t yet see.
2) The poetry of Mallarmé,94 and others. We who don’t understand it, say boldly that it is humbug, that it is poetry striking an impasse. Why is it that when we hear music which we don’t understand and which is just as nonsensical, we don’t say that boldly, but say timidly: yes, perhaps one ought to understand it or prepare oneself for it, etc. That is silly. Every work of art is only a work of art when it is understandable, I do not say for all, but for people standing on a certain level of education, on the same level as the man who reads poetry and who judges it.
This reasoning leads me to an absolutely certain conclusion that music before any other art (decadence in poetry and symbolism and other things in painting) has lost its way and struck an impasse. And he who has turned it from the road was that musical genius Beethoven. The principal factors are the authorities and people deprived of æsthetic feeling who judge art.
Goethe? Shakespeare?95 Everything that goes under their names is supposed to be good and on se bât les flancs in order to find something beautiful in the stupid and the unsuccessful, and taste is entirely perverted. And all these great talents – Goethe, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Michael-Angelo – side by side with exquisite things, produced not only mediocre ones, but disgusting ones. The mediocre artists produce a mediocrity as regards value and never anything very bad. But recognised geniuses create either really great works or absolute stuff and nonsense; Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven, Bach, and others.
3) To place before myself the most complex and confused thing which demands my participation. On all sides it seems there exist insoluble dilemmas; it is bad one way and worse the other. And it is only necessary to carry over the problem from the outer realm into the inner, into one’s own life, to understand that this is only an arena for my inner perfection, that it is a test, a measure of my moral development, an experiment as to how much I can and want to do the work of God, the enlargement of love, and everything resolves itself so easily, simply, joyously.
4) A mistake (sin) is the
Five-year-old daughter of F. A. Strakhov.
The estate of Tolstoi’s brother, S. N. Tolstoi, in the district of Krapivensk, in the Government of Tula, 35 versts from Yasnaya Polyana.
Count Sergei Nicholaievich Tolstoi (1826–1904). See for him in
The daughters of Count S. N. Tolstoi: Vera, Varvara and Maria Sergievna.
Charles Salomon, the translator of some of Tolstoi’s works into French, and a professor of the Russian language in the higher institutions in Paris.
Sergei Ivanovich Tanyeev (1856–1915), composer, at one time director at the Moscow Conservatory, an acquaintance of the Tolstoi family, who lived three summers (1894–1896) in Yasnaya Polyana.
On the Khodinka field at the time of the coronation celebration of May 18, 1896. In the beginning of the year 1910, Tolstoi wrote a little story called
Timofei Nicholaievich Bondarev (1820–1898), a peasant of the district of the Don. In 1867 he was exiled to Siberia for conversion to the Jewish faith and lived in the district of Minusinsk, in the Province of Yeniseisk, to the end of his life. Wrote a work called
See Note 29.
Stephane Mallarmé (1842–1898), French poet, considered one of the most prominent Symbolists. For a more detailed opinion of him by Tolstoi, see his book,
Goethe (1749–1832), the German poet. See for Tolstoi’s opinion of him in his Journal, September 13, 1906. Earlier in 1891, in his letter to Countess A. A. Tolstoi, Tolstoi wrote: “As to Goethe, I do not like him at all. I don’t like his conceited paganism.”
Shakespeare (1564–1616). See Tolstoi’s article about him “On Shakespeare” and “On The Drama” and the opinion in his journal March 15, 1897.