The Journal of Leo Tolstoi First. Volume—1895-1899. Лев Толстой
not an important matter to which one could consciously devote his strength.
And so it was always understood and is understood by the working, unspoiled people and every man who has not gone away from labour, from life, can not look upon it in any other way. It is necessary, one must, say it out loud – how much evil has come from this importance attributed by the parasites of society to their plays!
8) The whole outer world is formed by us, by our senses. We know nothing and can know nothing about it. All that we can know, in studying the outer world is the relation of our senses (sens) among themselves and the laws of these relations. There is no question but that this is very interesting, and from the study of these relations are opened many new situations which we can make use of and which increase the comforts of our life, but this is not only not everything, not all of science as people busying themselves with this study are now asserting, but it is only one minute particle of science.
Science is the study of the relation of our spiritual “self” – that which masters the outer senses and uses them – to our outer senses or to the outer world, which is the same thing. This relation has to be studied, because in this relation is accomplished the movement of humanity as a whole to perfection and the good, and the movement of each individual man to the same goal. This relation is the object of every science; but to-day the study of this relation is called Ethics by our present-day scholars, and is considered as a science by itself, and a very unimportant one from out the great mass of other sciences. It is all topsy-turvy; the whole of science is considered as a small part and a small part is considered as the whole. From this comes the brutalisation of men.
This arises out of the astonishing ignorance of most of the so-called learned. They are naïvely convinced that the outer world is an actual reality, just in the same way as the peasants are convinced that the sun and the stars move around the earth. Just as the peasants know nothing of the work of Galileo, Copernicus and Newton, or if they have heard of it – do not believe – so the materialist scholars have never heard, do not know or do not believe what has been done as to criticism of knowledge by Descartes, Kant, Berkeley and even before, by the Hindus and by all religious doctrines.
9) When you suffer, you must enter into yourself – not seek matches, but put out that light which is there, and which interferes with the seeing of your true “self.” You must turn upside down the toy which stood on the cork and place it on the lead and then everything will become clear and the greatest part of your suffering will cease – all that part which is not physical.
10) When you suffer from passion, here are some palliative prescriptions:
(a) Remember how many times you have suffered before because in your consciousness you have connected yourself to your passion; lust, greed, desire, vanity, and remember how everything passed away and you have still not found that “self” which suffered then. And so it is now. It is not you who are suffering, but that passion which you wrongly joined to yourself.
(b) Again, when you suffer, remember that the suffering is not something disagreeable which you can wish to get rid of, but it is the very work of life, that very task which you have been designated to do. In wanting to get rid of it, you are doing that which a man would do who lifts the plough there where the earth is hard, just where, in fact, it has to be ploughed up.
(c) Then remember, at the moment when you suffer, that if there is anger in the feelings you have, the suffering is in you. Replace the anger with love, and the suffering will end.
(d) Also this is possible; love towards enemies, which is indeed the one real love. You must struggle for it, struggle with toil, with the consciousness that in it is life. But when you have attained it, what relief!
(e) The principal thing is to turn the toy upside down, find your true “self” which is only visible without matches, and then anger will vanish by itself. That “self” is incapable of, cannot, and has no one to be angry with – loving, it can only pity.
During these latter days I didn’t feel like writing. I merely wrote letters to every one and sent to Schmidt an addition to the letter about the incompatibility … with Christianity.133 I have begun the Declaration of Faith anew. I am going to continue.
Went to Pirogovo with Masha. Serezha134 is very good…
October 21. Y. P. If I live.
To-day probably October 23. Y. P.
All these days I have been out of tune with my work. Wrote a letter yesterday to the commander of the disciplinary battalion in Irkutsk about Olkhovik.135
It is evening now, I am sitting down to write because I feel the special importance and seriousness of the hours of life which are left to me. And I do not know what I have to do, but I feel that there has ripened in me an expression of God’s will which asks to be let out.
Have re-read Hadji Murad– it isn’t what I want to say. As to Resurrection I can’t even get hold of it. The drama interests me.
A splendid article by Carpenter on science.136 All of us walk near the truth and uncover it from various sides.
October 26. Y. P.
I am still just as indisposed and don’t feel like writing. My head aches. Serezha came yesterday.137 Wrote a letter to Sonya and to Andrusha.
But it seems to me that during this time of doubt, I arrived at two very important conclusions:
1) That, which I also thought before and wrote down; that art is an invention, is a temptation for amusement with dolls, with pictures, with songs, with play, with stories – and nothing more. But to place art as they do (and they do the same with science), on the same level with the good is a horrible sacrilège. The proof that it is not so, is that about truth also (the right) I can say that truth is a good (as God said, great good, teib, i.e., good), and about beauty one can say that it is good; but it is impossible to say about good that it is beautiful (at times it is homely), or that it is true (it is always true).
There is only one good; good and bad; but truth and beauty are good qualities of certain objects.
The other very important thing, is that reason is the only means of manifesting, and freeing love. It seems to me that this is an important thought, omitted in my Declaration of Faith.
To-day November 1. Y. P.
All this time I have felt neither well nor like working. I have written letters only, among the number was one to the Caucasian disciplinary battalion.138 Yesterday, walking at night on the snow, in the blizzard, I tired my heart and it aches. I think I am going to die very soon. That is why I am writing out the notes. I think I am going to die without fear and without resistance.
Just now I sat alone and thought how strange it was that people live alone. People; I thought of Stasov;139 how is he living now, what is he thinking, feeling. Of Kolichka,140 too. And so strange and new became the knowledge that they, all of them, people – are living, and I do not live in them; that they are closed to me.
November 2. Y. P. If I live.
November 2nd. Y. P.
Am alive. Am a little better. Have written on the Declaration of Faith. I think it is true that it is cold because it endeavours to be infallible.141 A blizzard. Sent off the letters to Schmidt and Chertkov. Did not send the letter to Mme. Kalmikov.
To-day I thought about art. It is play. And when it is the play of working, normal people it is good, but when it is the play of corrupted parasites, then it is bad – and here now it has reached to decadence.
November 3. Y. P. If I live.
To-day November 5. Y. P. Morning.
Yesterday
This letter was printed at first in an issue of
Brother of Tolstoi, Count S. N. Tolstoi.
A peasant of the province of Kharkov in the district of Sumsk, Peter Vasilevich Olkhovik. Refused military service October 15, 1895, at recruiting, in the city of Bielopolie, province of Kharkov. Was sentenced by the Vladivostok military court to three years in a disciplinary battalion. The letters of Olkhovik to his relatives and acquaintances about his refusal were published by
Edward Carpenter, a noted contemporary English thinker, some of whose works Tolstoi valued highly. Carpenter’s article, “Contemporary Science,” was later translated into Russian by Countess Tolstoi and printed with a preface by Tolstoi in the magazine
Count Sergei Lvovich Tolstoi (born, 1863), eldest son of Tolstoi.
To the Ekaterinograd disciplinary battalion were sentenced the Dukhobors (41 in number) who had refused military service, while being in actual military service … See
Vladimir Vasilevich Stasov (1824–1906), a critic of art and music and the librarian of the Imperial Public Library in Petrograd, a friend of the Tolstoi family. When, after Stasov’s death, his friend, the sculptor, I. Y. Ginzburg, asked Tolstoi to write his recollections of him, in the compilation, “To The Memory of V. V. Stasov,” Tolstoi in his letter of November 7, 1907, replied that it was difficult for him to write about Stasov on account of “the misunderstanding” which had taken place between them: “the misunderstanding consisted in that Vladimir Vasilevich Stasov loved and valued prejudicially in me that which I did not value and could not value in myself, and in his goodness forgave me that which I valued and value in myself above everything else, – that by which I lived and live. With every other man such a misunderstanding would lead, if not to hostility then to a coolness, but the gentle, kind, spontaneous, warm nature of Vladimir Vasilevich and at the same time, his childlike clarity, was such, that I could not help succumbing to his influence and loving him without any thought of the difference of our points of view. I shall always remember our good friendly relationship with emotion.”
Nicholai Nicholaievich Gay, the son of the old friend of Tolstoi, N. N. Gay.
These thoughts were called forth in Tolstoi by a letter received on October, 1896, from V. V. Rakhmanov, who, being acquainted with this work of Tolstoi, found it written in a cold and didactic tone and advised Tolstoi to abandon it.