The Journal of Leo Tolstoi First. Volume—1895-1899. Лев Толстой
31, Y. P.
I am alive. It is evening now. It is past four. I am lying down and can not fall asleep. My heart aches. I am tired out. I hear through the window – they play tennis and are laughing. S. went away to the Shenshins.119 Every one is well, but I am sad and can not master myself. It is like the feeling I had when St. Thomas120 locked me in and I heard through my prison how every one was gay and was laughing. But I don’t want to. One must suffer humiliation and be good. I can do it.
I continue to copy:
1) The disbelief in reason is the source of all evil. This disbelief is reached by the teaching of a distorted faith from childhood. Believe in one miracle and the trust in reason is destroyed.
2) …
3) Christianity does not give happiness but safety; it lets you down to the bottom from which there is no place to fall.
4) I rode horseback from Tula and thought about this; that I am a part of Him, separated in a certain way from other such parts, and He is everything, the Father, and I felt love, just love, for Him. Now, especially now, I not only can not reproduce this feeling, but not even recall it. But I was so joyful that I said to myself: Here I was thinking that I can not learn anything new and suddenly I acquired a wonderful blessed new feeling, a real feeling.
5) What humbug121– beauty, truth, goodness! Beauty is one of those attributes of outer objects, like health, an attribute of the living body. Truth is not the ideal of science. The ideal of science is knowledge, not truth. The good can not be placed on the plane with either of these, because it is the goal of life.
(It is unclear, but it was clear and will be.)
6) I do not remember good works, because they are outside of the material man – of memory.
August 1, Ysn. Pol. If I live.– which is doubtful. My heart aches very much…
It is dreadful to think how much time has elapsed; a month and a half. To-day, Sept. 14, Y. P.
During this time I took a trip to the monastery with Sonya.122… I wrote on Hadji-Murad123 very poorly, a first draft. I have continued my work on the Declaration of Faith. The Chertkovs have gone away… All three sons are here now with their wives.124
There was a letter from the Hollander who has refused to serve.125 I wrote a preface to the letter.126 I wrote a letter also to Mme. Kalmikov127 with very sharp statements about the Government. The whole month and a half has been condensed in this. Oh, yes; I have also been ill from my usual sickness and my stomach is still not strong.
One thing more. During this time there was a letter from the Hindu Tod and an exquisite book of Hindu wisdom, Ioga’s Philosophy.128
In the meantime I thought:
1) There are many people, especially Europeans and especially women, who not only talk but who write things that appear intelligent, in the same way as dumb people speak; as a matter of fact, it isn’t any more natural for them to think than for a dumb person to speak, but both one and the other, both the stupid and the dumb, have been taught.
2) To love an individual man, one has to be blinded. Without being blinded one can love only God, but people can be pitied, which means to love in a Godly way.
3) To get rid of an enemy, one must love him, as it is also said in the “Teaching of the twelve apostles.”129 But to love one has to put to oneself the task for all one’s life of love towards an enemy, to do him good through love and to perfect oneself in love for him.
4) At first, one is surprised that stupid people should have within them such an assertive convincing intonation. But it is as it should be. Otherwise no one would listen to them.
5) I find this note: “A decoration for peasants, our happiness” – I can not remember what that means, but it is something that pleased me. I think it means that to a poor man looking on the life of the rich, it appears as happiness. But this happiness is as much happiness, as cardboard made into a tree or a castle – is a tree or a castle.
6) We are all attracted to the Whole and one to another, like particles of one body. Only our roughness, the lack of smoothness, our angles, interfere with our uniting. There is already an attraction, there is no need of making it, but one must plane oneself, wipe out one’s angles.
7) One of the strongest means of hypnotism, of exterior action on the spiritual state of man, is his dress. People know that very well; that is why there is a monastic garb in monasteries and a uniform in the army.
8) I was trying to recall two excellent subjects for novels, the suicide of old Persianninov and the substitution of a child in an orphan asylum.
9) When my weakness tortured me, I sought means of salvation, and I found one in the thought that there is nothing stationary, that everything flows, changes, that all this is for a while, and that it is only necessary to suffer the while while we live – I and the others. And some one of us will go away first. (The while does not mean to live in any way, but means, not to despair, to suffer it through to the end.)
10) I wanted to say that I was grateful, so as to make the other one well disposed, and later to tell the truth. No, I thought, that is not permitted. He will ascribe it to his virtues and the truth will be accepted even less. Man, not acknowledging his sins, is a vessel hermetically closed with a cover which lets nothing enter. To humble oneself, to repent, that means to take off the cover and to make oneself capable of perfection, of the good.
11) Barbarism interferes with the union of people, but the same thing is done by a too great refinement without a religious basis. In the other, the physical disunites, and in this, the spiritual.
12) Man is a tool of God. At first I thought that it was a tool with which man himself was called to work; now I have understood that it is not man who works, but God. The business of man is only to keep himself in order. Like an axe, which would have to keep itself always clean and sharp.
13) Why is it that scoundrels stand for despotism? Because under an ideal order which pays according to merit, they are badly off. Under despotism everything can happen.
14) I often meet people who recognise no God except one which we ourselves recognise in ourselves. And I am astonished; God in me. But God is an infinite principle; how then, why then, should He happen to be in me? It is impossible not to question oneself about this. And as soon as you question yourself, you have to acknowledge an exterior cause. Why do people not feel themselves in need of answering this question? Because for them, the answer to this question is in the reality of the existing world, whether according to Moses or to Darwin – it is all the same. And therefore, to have a conception of an exterior God, one has to understand that that which is actually real, is only the impression of our senses, i. e. it is we ourselves, our spiritual “self.”
15) In moments of passion, infatuation, in order to conquer, one thing is necessary, to destroy the illusion that it is the “self” who suffers, who desires, and to separate one’s true “self” from the troubled waters of passion.
Sept. 15. Y. P. If I live.
To-day October 10. Y. P.
It is almost a month that I have made no entries and it seemed to me it was only yesterday. During this time, though in very poor form, I finished the Declaration of Faith. During this time there were some Japanese with a letter from Konissi.130 They, the Japanese, are undoubtedly nearer Christianity than our church Christians. I have learned to love them very much…
I
The Shenshins – Tula landlords who lived on their estate, Sudakovo, five versts from Yasnaya Polyana.
Prosper St. Thomas, tutor of Tolstoi and his brothers. The incident mentioned in the Journal produced a tremendous impression on Tolstoi. “It may have been that this incident was the cause of all the horror and aversion to all kinds of violence which I experienced throughout life,” Tolstoi wrote afterwards in his recollections. (See P. Biriukov:
Written in English in the original.
Tolstoi, together with Countess S. A. Tolstoi, visited his sister, Countess Maria Nicholaievna, living in the convent of Shamordino near the Optina Desert. In his letter to her of September 13, 1896, Tolstoi wrote, “With great pleasure and emotion I recall my stay with you.”
The story,
Count Sergei Lvovich, with his wife, Countess Maria Constantinovna (born Rachinsky, who died in 1899); Count Ilya Lvovich, with his wife, Countess Sophia Nicholaievna, and Count Leo Lvovich, with his wife, the Countess Dora Fedorovna.
The Dutchman, Van-der-Veer, refused military service, as he declared in his letter to the Commander of the National Guard, on the grounds that he hated every kind of murder of men as well as of animals, especially murder at the order of other people. The military authorities sentenced him to three months’ solitary confinement. Later Van-der-Veer for several years published a magazine with a Christian tendency called
Van-der-Veer’s letter, with the appendix by Tolstoi under the title “The Beginning of the End” was printed in the edition of
Alexandra Mikhailovna Kalmikov, a noted worker for popular education, who turned to Tolstoi with the request that he express himself in regard to the order then given by the Minister of the Interior to close the committees on illiteracy. In answer to her letter, Tolstoi expressed his opinion about the activity of the Russian Government in general and about the methods of resisting it used by the Liberals. His answer, under the title of “A Letter to the Liberals,” in revised form was printed in full in the publication of
“The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” discovered in 1883. A document of the Christian literature of the First Centuries. Tolstoi translated it from the Greek and twice wrote a preface to it: in 1885 and twenty years later, in 1905. The passage mentioned in the Journal reads this way: “It is not good to love only those who love you. Heathens do the same. They love their own and hate their enemies and therefore they have enemies, but you should love those who hate you and then you will have no enemies.”
Daniel Pavlovich Konissi, a Japanese, converted to the Greek Church, who studied in the Kiev Theological Academy, then came to Moscow and here made the acquaintance of Tolstoi. Later he became professor in the University in Kioto. Translated
About the Japanese who visited him, Tolstoi wrote to Countess S. A. Tolstoi, September 26th: “This morning the Japanese arrived. Very interesting, fully educated, original and intelligent and free-thinking. One an editor of a paper, evidently a very rich man and an aristocrat there, no longer young; the other one, a little man, young, his assistant, also a literary man” (