The Journal of Leo Tolstoi First. Volume—1895-1899. Лев Толстой
in the love for everything which exists, in acquiring the good for my separate being. As long as man lived without a reasoning consciousness, he fulfilled the will of God in acquiring the good for himself and in struggling for it and there was no sin; but as soon as reason had awakened, then there was sin.
5) The harness-maker, Mikhailo, says to me that he does not believe in a future life, that he thinks that when a man dies, his spirit will leave him and will go away. But I say to him: “Well, go off then with this spirit; then you won’t die.”
May 29, Ysn. Pol. If I live.
It seems to me, June 6, Ysn. Pol.
The principal thing is that during this time I have advanced in my work,96 and am advancing. I write on sins and the whole work is clear to the end.
Finished Spier – splendid.
The economic movement of humanity by three means: the destruction of ownership of land according to Henry George97; the inheritance which would give over accumulated wealth to society, if not in the first generation, then in the second; and a similar tax on wealth on an excess of over 1000 rubles income for a family or 200 for each man.
To-day the Chertkovs arrived. Galia98 is very good.
The day before yesterday a gendarme came, a spy, who confessed that he was sent after me. It was both pleasant and nasty.99
During this time have thought principally the following:
1) When a man lives an animal life, he does not know that God lives through him. When reason awakens in him, then he knows it. And knowing it, he becomes united with God.
2) Man in his animal life has to be guided by instinct; reason directed to that which is not subject to it, will spoil everything.
3) Is not luxury a preparing for something better, when there is already a sufficiency?
Yesterday was not the 6th, but the 8th. To-day, June 9, Y. P.
I have written little and not very well. It seems to me that it is getting clearer. In the morning I had a conversation with the workingmen who came for books. I remembered the woman who asked to write to John of Kronstad.100
The religion of the people is this: there is a God and there are gods and saints. (Christ came on earth, as a peasant told me to-day, to teach people how and to whom to pray.) The gods and the saints perform miracles, have power over the flesh and perform heroic deeds and good works, and the people have only to pray, to know how and to whom to pray. But people can not perform good works, they can only pray. Here is their whole faith.
I bathed and don’t feel well.
June 19, Y. P.
Have been feeling weak all this time and sleep badly. Posha came yesterday. He spoke about the Khodinka accident well, but wrote it badly. Our very idle, luxurious life oppresses me. N. came. A stranger. He is young and he does not understand in the same way as I do, that which he understands, although he agrees with everything. Finished the first draft101 on the 13th of June. Now I am revising it, but am working very little.
… Struggled with myself twice and successfully. Oh, if it were always so!
Once I passed beyond Zakaz102 at night and wept for joy, being grateful for life. The pictures of life in Samara stand out very clearly before me; the steppes, the fight of the nomadic, patriarchic principle with the agricultural civilised one.103 It draws me very much. Konefsky was not born in me; that is why it moves so awkwardly.
Have been thinking:
1) Something very important about art: what is beauty? Beauty is that which we love. “He is not dear because he is good, but good because he is dear.” Here is the problem; why dear? Why do we love? And to say that we love, because a thing is beautiful, is just the same as saying that we breathe because the air is pleasant. We find the air pleasant, because we have to breathe; and in the same way we discover beauty, because we have to love. And he who hasn’t the power to see spiritual beauty, sees at least a bodily one and loves it.
June 26, Y. P. Morning.
All night I did not sleep. My heart aches without stopping. I continue to suffer and can not subject myself to God… I have not mastered pride and rebellion and the pain in my heart does not stop. One thing consoles me; I am not alone but with God, and therefore no matter how painful it is, yet I feel that something is taking place within me. Help me, Father.
Yesterday I walked to Baburino104 and unwillingly (I rather would have avoided than sought it), I met the 80-year-old Akime ploughing, the woman Yaremichov who hasn’t a coat to her household and only one jacket, then Maria whose husband was frozen and who has no one to gather her rye and who is starving her child, and Trophime and Khaliavka, and the husband and wife were dying as well as the children. And we study Beethoven. And I pray that He release me from this life. And again I pray and cry from pain. I am entrapped, sinking, I cannot alone, only I hate myself and my life.
June 30, Ysn. Pol.
Continued to suffer and struggle much, and have conquered neither one nor the other. But it is better. Mme. Annenkov105 was here and put it very well …106 They have spoiled for me even my diary which I write with the point of view of the possibility of its being read by the living107 …
Just now upstairs they began to speak about the New Testament and N. en ricanant proved that Christ advised castration. I became angry, – shameful.
Two days ago I went to those who had been burned out; had not dined, was tired and felt well… Yesterday I visited the lawyer who wanted to snatch a hundred rubles from a beggar-woman to decorate his own house with. It is the same everywhere.
During this time I have been in Pirogovo. My brother Serezha has entirely come over to us. The journey with Tania and Chertkov was joyous. To-day in Demenka108 I gave the last words for his journey to a dying peasant.
I am advancing much on the work.109 I will try to write out now what I have jotted down in the book.
To-day, July 19. 110
I am in Pirogovo. I arrived the day before yesterday with Tania and Chertkov. In Serezha111 there has certainly taken place a spiritual change; he admits it himself saying that he was born several months ago. I am very happy with him.
At home, during this time, I lived through much difficulty. Lord, Father, release me from my base body. Cleanse me and do not let your spirit perish in me and become overgrown. I prayed twice beseechingly; once that He let me be His tool; and second that He save me from my animal “self.”
During this time I progressed on the Declaration of Faith. It is far from what has to be said and from what I want to say. It is entirely inaccessible to the plain man and the child, but, nevertheless I have said all that I know coherently and logically.
In this time also I wrote the preface to the reading of the Gospels112 and annotated the Gospels. Had visitors. Englishmen, Americans – no one of importance.
I will write out all that I jotted down:
1) Yesterday I walked through a twice ploughed, black-earth fallow field. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but black earth – not one green blade of grass, and there on the edge of the dusty grey road there grew a bush of burdock.
Declaration of Faith.
Henry George (1839–1897), noted American social worker and writer on economic questions. In his numerous works, chiefly on agrarian questions, he was a warm defender of the destitute and the oppressed. George considered the existence of private land ownership as the principal cause of the existence of poverty; appearing as its opponent, he suggested the abolition of all existing taxes, substituting for them a
Tolstoi sympathised very much with George’s scheme and wrote much about it (
Anna Constantinovna Chertkov.
In the letter to Count L. L. Tolstoi of June 7, 1896, Tolstoi related the incident as follows: “Yesterday a remarkable event happened to me. Two or three times there came to me a young civilian from Tula asking me to give him books. I gave him some of my articles and spoke with him. He was, according to his convictions, a Nihilist and an Atheist. I told him from the bottom of my heart all that I thought. Yesterday he came and gave me a note: ‘Read it,’ he said, ‘then tell me what you think of me.’ In the note it was written that he was a junior officer in the gendarmerie, a spy, sent to me to find out what is going on here, and that he became unbearably conscience-stricken and that is why he disclosed himself to me. I felt pity and disgust and pleasure.”
The priest, John Ilich Sergiev (of Kronstadt) (1829–1908), who enjoyed great fame as “The supplicator for the sick.” In his preaching and his books he many times made sharp attacks against Tolstoi and his views.
Declaration of Faith.
Zakaz, a piece of Yasnaya Polyana forest, not far from the house. Tolstoi was afterwards buried there.
Tolstoi had the opportunity to closely observe the nomadic life of the Bashkirs in the province of Samara, where he went in the Sixties to drink kumyss, and in the Seventies and Eighties to his own estates (see
A village within four versts from Yasnaya Polyana.
Leonilla Fominishna Annenkov (1845–1914), an old friend of Tolstoi’s and an adherent of his philosophy, the wife of a Kursk landlord, the well-known scholarly lawyer, K. N. Annenkov (1842–1910). She made the acquaintance of Tolstoi in 1886 and from that time on corresponded very much with him. Completely sharing the opinions of Tolstoi, she applied them with a rare sequence to life and she was noted for her remarkable abundance of love which attracted every one who met her. Tolstoi valued her highly, considering that she had “a clear mind and a loving heart.”
It weighed upon him that certain persons to whom he did not want to show his Journal had read it nevertheless. In the last years of his life he was compelled to hide the current Journal somewhere in his rooms, and the finished note-books he gave away in safe keeping.
A village four versts from Yasnaya Polyana, where the Chertkovs lived in summer.
Declaration of Faith.
The note of July 19, 1896, he evidently originally inserted in a note-book from which he later wrote it out in his Journal.
Tolstoi’s brother, Count S. N. Tolstoi.
This article under the title of “How to Read The Gospels and What Is Its Essence” was printed at first in the edition of