FROM TOLSTOY’S DIARIES [1900–1910]

Today is 27 October [1900], Kochety*

Thought:

(1) Life is continual creation, i.e. the formation of new, higher forms. When this formation comes to a stop in our view or even goes backwards, i.e. when existing forms are destroyed, this only means a new form is taking shape, invisible to us. We see what is outside us, but we don’t see what is within us, we only feel it (if we haven’t lost our consciousness, and don’t take what is visible and external to be the whole of our life). A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.

(2) Memory destroys time: it unites things that seem to have taken place separately.

(3) I’ve just been for a walk and thought: there is a religion, a philosophy, a science, a poetry, an art of the great majority of the people; a religion, although covered over with superstitions, a belief in God as the origin of things, in the indestructibility of life; an unconscious philosophy: of fatalism, of the material nature and the reasonableness of all that exists; a poetry of fairy tales, of true happenings in life, of legends; and an art of the beauty of animals, of the products of labour, of carved shutters and weather-vanes, of songs and dances. And there is a religion of true Christianity: philosophy from Socrates to Amiel; poetry: Tyutchev, Maupassant; art (I can’t find any examples from painting) – Chopin in certain works, Haydn. And there is also a religion, a philosophy, a poetry, an art of the cultured masses: religion – the Evangelicals, the Salvation Army; philosophy – Hegel, Darwin, Spencer; poetry – Shakespeare, Dante, Ibsen; art – Raphael, the Decadents, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner. […]

(10) Thought that if I’m to serve people by my writing, the one thing I’m entitled and obliged to do is to expose the lies of the rich, and reveal to the poor the delusion practised on them.

Today is 29 December [1900], Moscow Grief always has its spiritual reward and enormous profit. Grief calls – God has visited you and remembered you… Tanya gave birth to a stillborn baby, and is very good and sensible. Sonya is at Yasnaya. Ilya is here. He’s astonishingly childish. […]

Must note down the following:

(1) Read about some amazing machines which are a substitute for human toil and suffering. But it’s just like inventing a complete apparatus, by means of which one can flog and kill without toil and effort. It’s simpler not to flog and not to kill. It’s the same with machines which make beer, wine, velvet, mirrors, etc. The whole complexity of our urban life lies in the fact that people think up and accustom themselves to harmful requirements, and then use all their mental energies to satisfy them or reduce the harm caused by satisfying them: all medicine, hygiene, artificial lighting, and all our harmful urban life. Before speaking about the goodness of satisfying one’s requirements, one ought to decide what requirements constitute goodness. That’s very important.

(2) Read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and his sister’s note about how he wrote it, and am absolutely convinced that he was completely mad when he wrote it, and mad not in a metaphorical sense, but in the straightforward and most exact sense: incoherence, jumping from one idea to another, comparisons with no indication of what is being compared, beginnings of ideas with no endings, leaping from one idea to another for contrast or consonance, and all against the background of the pointe of his madness, his idée fixe, that by denying all the higher principles of human life and thought he is proving his own superhuman genius. What will society be like if such a madman, and an evil madman, is acknowledged as a teacher? […]

(5) It’s amusing, the opinion people have that non-resistance to evil by force or paying back good for evil are very good rules for individuals, but can’t be applied to the state. As though the state isn’t a combination of people, but something separate from people. Oxygen has such and such properties. But they are only the properties of the atoms and molecules of oxygen. But oxygen in big compounds acquires quite different, opposite properties. This opinion alone that states have properties which are the opposite of human ones is the most obvious proof of the obsolete nature of the state as a form of government.

(6) People talk about the equality of men and women. There is complete equality in an immaterial sense, but not in a sexual one. In a sexual (animal) sense, the difference is enormous: the male is always ready for any female, because sexual intercourse doesn’t disturb his activity: deer, wolves, hares, drones. There are always a lot of males running after one female. But the female isn’t always ready. But when she is ready, she gives herself up entirely, and is fit for nothing else when she is producing offspring. There are many conclusions to be drawn from this.

10 October [1901, Gaspra]

Noted during this time:

(1) It’s difficult to live for God by oneself in the midst of people who don’t even understand the idea, and live only for themselves. How glad one is in such a situation to have the help of people of the same belief. […]

(10) One of the most common and serious mistakes people make in their judgements is that they consider to be good the things that they like. […]

(13) Life is a serious business! Oh, if only one could always remember that, especially in moments of decision! […]

(16) Entrepreneurs (capitalists) rob the people in that they are intermediaries between the workers and the suppliers of the instruments and means of labour, and merchants likewise rob the people in that they are intermediaries between consumers and vendors. Similarly state robbery is organized under the pretext of mediation between wrongdoers and the wrongly done by. But the most terrible deceit of all is the deceit of the intermediaries between God and men.

13 December [1902, Yasnaya Polyana]

(1) Critics are wrong to think that the intelligentsia as a movement can guide the popular masses (Milyukov). It would be still more wrong for a writer to think that he can consciously guide the masses by his works. […]

(2) If in answer to the question: ‘Can you play the violin?’ you reply: ‘I don’t know, I haven’t tried yet’, we would understand at once that it was a joke. But when in answer to the question: ‘Can you write books?’ we reply: ‘Perhaps I can, I haven’t tried’, we not only do not take this for a joke, but we continually see people acting on the basis of such reasoning. This only goes to prove that anyone can pass judgement on the ugliness of meaningless sounds made by an untrained violinist (absurd people will be found who will find even such music beautiful), but that refined sensibility and intellectual maturity are needed to distinguish between a collection of words and phrases and a true literary work of art.

(3) The whole first half of the nineteenth century is full of attempts to destroy despotic state regimes by revolutionary violence. All attempts ended in reaction, and the power of the ruling classes only increased. Obviously revolution cannot now overcome the power of the state. There is only one thing left: a change of outlook on life by the people, whereby they would cease to minister to the violent acts of governments. Only religion, and actually the Christian religion, can produce such a change. But this religion is so perverted that it might as well not exist. And what is worst of all is that its place is occupied. And so not just the main, but the sole means in our time of serving mankind is by destroying perverted Christianity and establishing the true Christian religion. That is the very thing that everyone considers most insignificant; and not only does nobody do it, but the smartest, quasi-intellectual people are busy doing just the opposite: making perverted Christianity even more confused and obscure.

January 1903 [Yasnaya Polyana]

At present I suffer the torments of hell itself. I remember vividly the horrors, the sins, of my earlier life, and these recollections do not just fade; they circulate as poison in my blood. I hear that people often feel sorry about the fact that, after death, all sense of individual consciousness dies as well. I’m delighted that it does not! It would anguish me if I could recall after death all the evil I’d done in my earlier life, all that remains painful to my conscience. What a good thing that death obliterates these recollections, that what survives is consciousness alone.

[Translation by Jay Parini]

24 November [1903, Yasnaya Polyana]

Normally people (myself included) who recognize the spiritual life as the basis of life deny the reality, the necessity, the importance of studying the physical life, which evidently cannot lead to any conclusive results. In just the same way, those who only recognize the physical life completely deny the spiritual life and all deductions based on it – deny, as they say, metaphysics. But it is now absolutely clear to me that both are wrong, and both forms of knowledge – the materialistic and the metaphysical – have their own great importance, if only one doesn’t wish to make inappropriate deductions from the one or the other. From materialistic knowledge based on the observation of external phenomena one can deduce scientific data, i.e. generalizations about phenomena, but one should not deduce any guiding principles for people’s lives, as the materialists – Darwinists for example – have often tried to do. From metaphysical knowledge based on inner consciousness one can and should deduce the laws of human life – how should we live? why are we living? – the very thing that all religious teachings do; but one should not deduce, as many people have tried to do, the laws of phenomena and generalizations about them.

Each of these two kinds of knowledge has its own purpose and its own field of activity.

7 May [1904], Yasnaya Polyana The day before yesterday I met a beggar in the street, in rags. I got talking to him: he was an ex-pupil of the Pedagogical Institute. A Nietzschean sans le savoir [without knowing it]. And what a convinced one. ‘Service to God and one’s neighbours, the suppression of one’s passions is narrow-mindedness, the violation of the laws of nature. One must follow one’s passions, they give us strength and greatness.’ It’s astonishing how Nietzsche’s teaching, egoism, is a necessary consequence of the whole aggregate of quasi-scientific, artistic and, above all, quasi-philosophical and popularizing activity. We are not surprised and we don’t doubt that, if seeds fall on well-cultivated land and if moreover there is warmth and moisture and nothing tramples down the crops, certain plants will grow. Likewise it is possible to determine accurately what the spiritual consequences of certain intellectual, artistic and scientific influences will be.

20 January [1905], Yasnaya Polyana Haven’t written my diary for a long time. […]

(2) Music is the stenography of the feelings. What I mean is: the quick or slow succession of sounds, their pitch, their volume – all this, in speech, embellishes words and their meaning, indicating those shades of feelings which are associated with our parts of speech. Music without speech takes these expressions of feelings and shades of feelings and combines them, and we get a play of feelings without the things that gave rise to them. For this reason music has such a particularly strong effect, and for this reason the combination of music with words is an adulteration of the music, a retrogression, a writing out in letters of stenographic signs.

18 January [1906], Yasnaya Polyana Still unwell. I’m working a little on the Cycle of Reading.

Thought today about what I, an old man, should do. I haven’t much strength, and it’s getting noticeably weaker. Several times in my life I’ve considered myself close to death. And – how foolishly! – I would forget, or try to forget it – forget what? That I would die, and that in any case – whether in five, ten, twenty or thirty years – death is still very close. And now, because of my years, I naturally consider myself close to death, and there’s no point in trying to forget it, and I can’t forget it. But what should I, an old feeble person do? I asked myself. And it seemed that there was nothing to do, that I had no strength for anything. But today I realized so clearly the clear and joyful answer. What should I do? It’s already been revealed – I must die. This is my task now, as it always has been. And I must perform this task as well as possible: die, and die well. The task is before you, a noble and inevitable task, and you are searching for one. This made me very glad. I’m beginning to get used to regarding death and dying not as the end of my task, but as the task itself.

2 April [1906], Yasnaya Polyana Easter. All the time recently (two weeks) I’ve felt poorly. I’ve hardly written anything. Weakness and physical depression. But it’s a strange thing. In those rare moments of clarity of thought which came to me, my thoughts worked more clearly and profoundly than in periods of constant mental activity. It’s bound to occur to one that the revelation of life goes on all the time at a steady pace. If it seems to me that life is standing still within me, it isn’t standing still but going on underground, and later on reveals itself all the more forcibly the longer it has been held in check. Whether this is true will be seen from what I’ve noted down and am now entering in my diary for these two weeks. Note:

(1) It has become absolutely clear recently that an agricultural way of life is not merely one of various ways of life, just as a book – the Bible – is not one of various books, but is life, life itself, the only human life which alone makes possible the manifestation of all the highest human qualities. The chief mistake in the organization of human societies and one which eliminates the possibility of any reasonable organization of life is that people want to organize society without agricultural life, or with the sort of organization in which agricultural life is only one form, and the most insignificant form, of life.

16 April [1906], Yasnaya Polyana Five days have passed and I’m in quite a different mood today. I can’t overcome my dissatisfaction with those close to me. I feel melancholy and want to cry. Everything seems depressing. Just now after dinner and a lesson with the children – only two came – I sat alone and thought that only now was I fully and completely entrusting myself to the will of God. Come what may. There was no point in wanting to perform any task – writing a scripture for children or whatever it may be; I had to surrender myself entirely to Him, retaining only my love for Him, privately and publicly… and suddenly Sonya came in and we started talking about the wood, about people stealing, and about the children selling things at half price, and I couldn’t suppress my anger. As if it wasn’t all the same to me. Lord, help me. Help me. I’m sorry for myself and feel disgusted with myself.

31 January [1908], Yasnaya Polyana I’ve been reading Shaw. His triviality amazes me. Not only does he not have a single thought of his own rising above the triviality of the urban masses, but he doesn’t understand a single great thought of the thinkers of the past. The only special thing about him is that he can express the most banal trivialities in a very elegantly distorted, new manner, as though he were saying something new and original. His main characteristic is his terrifying self-assurance, only equalled by his complete philosophical ignorance.

10 March [1908], Yasnaya Polyana This is how I live: I get up, my head is clear, good thoughts occur to me as I sit on the pot and I note them down. I get dressed and I empty the contents of the pot with an effort but with pleasure. I go for a walk. On my walk I wait for the post from force of habit, although I don’t need it. I often guess to myself how many steps it will take to get to such and such a place, and I count them, dividing each one into four, six and eight breaths: one and a and a and a; and two and a and a and a… Sometimes, from force of habit, I’m disposed to guess that if there are as many steps as I suppose, all will be well. But now I ask myself: what is ‘well’? and I know that everything is very well as it is, and there’s no need to try and guess. Then when I meet someone I try to remember – though for the most part I forget that I wanted to remember – that he and I are one. It’s particularly difficult to remember during a conversation. Then my dog Belka barks and prevents me from thinking, and I get angry and reproach myself for getting angry. I reproach myself for getting angry with a stick I stumble over. Yes, I forget to say that as I wash and dress I remember the poverty of the village and feel bad about the luxury of my clothes, but cleanliness is a habit. When I get back from my walk I start on the letters. Begging letters irritate me. I remember that they are all my brothers and sisters, but always too late. Praise is irksome. I am only glad when there are expressions of unity. I read the newspaper Rus. I’m horrified at the executions, and to my shame, my eyes look out for T. and L. N., but when I find them it’s rather unpleasant.* I drink coffee. Always too much – I can’t restrain myself – and settle down to my letters.

17 August [1908], Yasnaya Polyana (For a work of fiction.)

(1) The child of a wealthy, atheistic, liberal-scientific bourgeois family devotes himself to religion. Fifteen years later he is a revolutionary and an anarchist.

(2) The gentle, sincere son of a priest does well at school and theological college, and is married and ordained. The daughter of a neighbour in his parish gives his mother, a vain intellectual woman, a book to read. He reads Tolstoy and questions begin to arise.

(3) A young boy, the sixth son of a blind beggar, arouses the sympathy of the wife of a leading liberal atheist. He is taken from home and sent to school, shows brilliant ability and gets a science degree. He goes abroad, meets some of his comrades, is shocked, thinks everything out again, renounces science and sees the one truth and salvation in belief in God.

(4) One of his comrades had started up in business and made a million, and now lives on the labours of his workers, while playing the liberal.

(5) The son of an aristocratic family introduces clients to a procuress; then philanthropy; then the renunciation of everything.

(6) One son of a ruined half-aristocrat, a vain man, makes a career through marriage; another son, a reserved man, makes a career as a hangman. The second used to pander to the first, now he gives himself airs.

(7) A similar sort of aristocratic writer, the son of a bourgeois, lives by journalism, feels the vileness of it and can’t go on.

9 July [1908, Yasnaya Polyana] I’m thinking of writing her a letter. I’ve no unkind feelings, thank God. Only one thing is more and more agonizing to me: the injustice of this insane luxury amid the unwarranted poverty and need amid which I live. Everything is becoming worse and worse, more and more depressing. I can’t forget it and I can’t fail to see it.

They’re all writing my biography – and it’s the same with all biographies – there won’t be anything about my attitude to the seventh commandment. There won’t be any of that terrible filth of masturbation and worse, from thirteen or fourteen to fifteen or sixteen (I don’t remember when my debauchery in brothels began). And it will be the same up to the time of my liaison with the peasant woman Aksinya – she’s still alive. Then my marriage in which again, although I have never once been unfaithful to my wife, I experienced a loathsome, criminal desire for her. Nothing of this appears or will appear in the biographies. And this is very important – very important as the vice of which I at least am most conscious, and which more than any others is forcing me to come to my senses.

10 January [1909], Yasnaya Polyana Yesterday I almost wrote with enthusiasm, but badly. It’s not worth making the effort. I’ve no enthusiasm at all today, and yesterday’s writing seems weak, or simply bad. The day before yesterday I had a conversation with Andrey, a very edifying one for me. It began with the fact that the brothers, all of them, are short of money.

I: How is that?

He: Well everything has got more expensive, and we live in a particular milieu.

I: You should live better, more abstemiously.

He: May I object?

I: Go on.

He: You say that people should live as follows: not eat meat, refuse military service. But what is one to think about the millions who live like everybody else?

I: Don’t think about them at all, think about yourself.

And it became clear to me that there is no other guiding principle for him in life except what everybody else does. It became clear that that is all that matters, that with minute exceptions everybody lives like that, and can’t help living like that, because they have no other guiding principle. And therefore to reproach them and advise them differently is useless and harmful to oneself, since it causes ill feelings. For thousands of years mankind has progressed by the century, and you want to see this progress by the year. It progresses because people of advanced views change the environment little by little, pointing the way to an eternally remote state of perfection, pointing the way there (Christ, Buddha, yes, and Kant and Emerson and others), and little by little the environment changes. And these people do like everybody else again, only in a different way than before.

Intellectuals are people who do the same as ‘everybody else’ – as other intellectuals.

I’ve done nothing today and have no wish to. I’m writing this in the evening, at 6 o’clock. I woke up, and two things became especially and absolutely clear to me: (1) that I am a very worthless man. I say this absolutely sincerely, and (2) that it would be good for me to die, and that I would like to do so.

I’m very bad-tempered today. Perhaps I go on living in order to become just a little less vile. Very likely that is the reason. And I will try. Help me, Lord.

20 April [1909, Yasnaya Polyana] I’ve just been out on to the balcony and was besieged by petitioners, and I couldn’t sustain my good feelings towards everyone. Some astonishing words yesterday from Sergey: ‘I feel and know,’ he said, ‘that I now have such powers of reasoning that I can discuss and resolve everything correctly… It would be good if I could apply these powers of reasoning to my own life,’ he added, with astonishing naiveté. The whole family – but especially the men – have a self-assurance that knows no limits. But I think it is greater in him than in all the others. Hence his incorrigible narrow-mindedness.

20 June [1909, Yasnaya Polyana] […] Yes, yesterday I read Engels on Marx… Today I woke up from a dream about a clear, simple refutation of materialism comprehensible to all. When I was awake it wasn’t so clear as when I was asleep, but something remained – namely that materialists must grant the absurdity of a creator in order to explain how matter took shape in such a way that out of it were formed individual creatures, first of all ‘I’, and with such properties as feelings and reason.

But for the non-materialist it is clear that everything that I call the material world is the product of my own spiritual ‘I’. The chief mystery for him is my own and other creatures’ separate identity.

21 July [1909, Yasnaya Polyana] In the evening Sofya Andreyevna was weak and irritable. I couldn’t get to sleep till 2 or later. I woke up feeling weak. Somebody had woken me up. Sofya Andreyevna hadn’t slept all night. I went to see her. It was something quite mad. Dusan had poisoned her, etc. A letter from Stakhovich which I ought to have told her about because the thought I was hiding something from her made her condition still worse. I’m tired and I can’t do any more and I feel quite ill. I feel the impossibility, the absolute impossibility of a reasonable and loving relationship. At present I only want to withdraw and take no part in anything. I can’t do anything else, and I’ve already thought seriously of running away as it is. Well then, show your Christianity. C’est le moment ou jamais [It’s now or never]. But I terribly want to go away. My presence here is hardly of use to anybody. A sorry victim, and harmful to everyone. Help me, my God, teach me. The only thing I want is to do not my will, but Thine. I write this and ask myself – is it true? Am I not putting on an act for myself? Help, help, help.

22 July [1909, Yasnaya Polyana] Yesterday I didn’t eat or sleep at all, as usual. Was very depressed. I’m still depressed, but feel good at heart. Yes, love them that do us evil, you say. Well, try it. I do try, but badly. I’m thinking more and more about going away and disposing of my property.

23 July [1909, Yasnaya Polyana] Decided to give up the land. Talked yesterday to Ivan Vasilevich. How difficult to be rid of this nasty, sinful property. Help, help, help.

9, 10 November [1909, Yasnaya Polyana] In the evening I read Gorky. A knowledge of the lowest strata of the people, and wonderful language, i.e. the idiom of the people. But a completely arbitrary and quite unjustified psychology – i.e. the attribution of feelings and thoughts to his characters – which gets more and more heroic, and then an exclusively immoral milieu. And on top of that a slavish respect for science.

16 January [1910, Yasnaya Polyana] Woke up in good spirits and decided to go to the court in Tula. Read my letters and answered a few. Then set off. First came the trial of some peasants: lawyers, judges, soldiers, witnesses. All very new to me. Then came the trial of a political prisoner. The charge was that he had read and, at cost to himself, disseminated ideas for a more just and sane organization of life than the one which now exists. Felt very sorry for him. People gathered to look at me, but not many, thank goodness. The oath upset me. I could hardly refrain from saying it was a mockery of Christ.

3 April [1910, Yasnaya Polyana] […] This morning I meant to write about my funeral and what should be read at it. I’m sorry I didn’t write anything down. I feel death approaching nearer and nearer. There’s no doubt that my life, and probably that of all people, becomes more spiritual with the years. The same happens to the life of mankind as a whole. In this lies the essence and meaning of all and every life, and so the meaning of my life lies only in this spiritualization of it. If you are aware of this and act accordingly, you know you are doing the task assigned to you: you become more spiritual yourself, and by your life contribute at least to some extent to the general spiritualization – to becoming better.

1 May [1910, Yasnaya Polyana] Alive. Note:

(1) One of the main causes of suicides in the European world is the false teaching of the Christian Church about heaven and hell. People don’t believe in heaven and hell, but all the same the idea that life should be either heaven or hell is so firmly fixed in their heads that it doesn’t permit of a rational understanding of life as it is – namely neither heaven nor hell, but struggle, unceasing struggle, unceasing because life consists only of struggle; only not a Darwinian struggle of creatures and individuals against other creatures and individuals, but a struggle of spiritual forces against their bodily restrictions. Life is the struggle of the soul against the body. If life is understood in this way, suicide is impossible, unnecessary and senseless. The good is only to be found in life. I seek the good; how then can I leave this life in order to attain the good? I seek mushrooms. Mushrooms are only to be found in the forest. How then can I leave the forest in order to find mushrooms?

29 September [1910], Yasnaya Polyana

What terrible mental poison modern literature is, especially for young folk from the people. First of all they stuff their minds with the obscure, self-assured, empty chatter of writers who are writing for the modern reader. The chief peculiarity and harmfulness of such chatter is that it all consists of allusions to, and quotations from the most various of writers, the most modern as well as the most ancient. Phrases are quoted from Plato, Hegel and Darwin, about whom the writers themselves haven’t the least conception, and alongside them are phrases from people like Gorky, Andreyev, Artsybashev and others, about whom it isn’t worth while having any conception. Secondly, this chatter is harmful because, by filling their heads in this way, it leaves no room or leisure for them to get to know the old writers who have stood the test of time not only for decades, but for hundreds and thousands of years.

29 October [1910] Optina Monastery Everything is the same; worse even. If only I don’t sin. And don’t bear malice. I don’t at present.

[Translated by R. F. Christian]