17 April, Yasnaya Polyana After thirteen years1 I want to continue my diary. Went to matins yesterday (Easter). In the morning, read Venevitinov’s notes.2 Went for a walk with Vasily Ivanovich. We talked about his case.3 In the evening we all went shooting with the children to the Zakaz wood. Read Bolotov.4 Bocharov’s diary.5 I think everything is clear for the beginning. Got up at 10 today, read and began to write – but had a cold and felt mentally and physically weak. Went out for a walk, but it was cold and I came back. Sonya talked to Lizaveta Alexandrovna6 and is glad to have been of use to her. They are rolling Easter eggs. I’ll write some letters.
5 May Yesterday I didn’t help an old lady from Telyatino. Gossiped with Vasily Ivanovich. Boasted about an idea of mine and quarrelled with Sonya. Was angry today with Alexey7 and the headman for digging round the apple trees badly. In the morning, read Fonvizina’s8 memoirs. Devotion to God is right and dangerous.
22 May Had some important and painful thoughts and feelings as a result of a conversation with Vasily Ivanovich about Seryozha.9 [3 words deleted] All the loathsome things of my youth made my heart burn with horror and the pain of remorse. I suffered agonies for a long time. Went to Tula with Seryozha and had a talk with him. Have started to get up early and am trying to write, but without success. Without success, the more so because I’m not well. But I think my head is full to the brim, and full of good things. Finished Bolotov. Read Parfeny.10 The Schism suggests to me more and more the importance of the idea that a sign of the truthfulness of the Church is its unity (its all-embracing unity), but that this unity cannot be achieved by me, or A or B, converting everybody else to our own views about faith (this is what has happened up to now, and all schisms, papism, Lutheranism, etc. are the fruit of this), but only by everybody who encounters dissenters discarding from within himself all the causes of disagreement, and trying to find in other people the basic things on which they are agreed. The cross with eight ends or with four, the transubstantiation of the wine or the act of remembrance – isn’t it really all one and the same?
Went to mass on Sunday. I can find an explanation which satisfies me for everything in the church service. But prayers for a long life and the subjugation of one’s enemies is blasphemy. A Christian should pray for his enemies, not against them.
Read the Gospels. Christ says everywhere that everything temporal is false, and that only the abstract is real. ‘The birds of the air’, etc. The children: Ilya and Tanya have been telling secrets: they are in love. How terrible, nasty and sweet they are.
Started to write ‘my life’.11
1 June Summer guests: Mashenka, Varenka, Tanya, the Sverbeyevs, Islenyev, Islavin, Bobrinsky, Urusov – they are all swarming about and upsetting me. Apart from that, Andryusha12 is ill. I’m building a hut in the Chepyzh wood. All this time I haven’t touched a pen. True, I’ve written some letters. I’m reading Parfeny.
3 June Bobrinsky was here.13 He tormented me with his talk about religion and the Word. He has a passion for talking! His self-deception is astonishing. For me he was important, in that the delusion of basing faith on the word and the word alone was terribly obviously apparent in him. Yesterday I wrote quite a lot in my little book – I don’t know why – about faith.
1 The last entry in the diary proper was 10 April 1865.
2 On the history of the Decembrist movement. Tolstoy was working at the time on his novel The Decembrists.
3 V. I. Alexeyev, a teacher in the Tolstoy household, who wished to settle on some land Tolstoy had bought in the Samara province.
4 The Life and Adventures of Andrey Bolotov, an agronomist, writer and translator of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. His memoirs were published in four volumes in 1871-3.
5 A diary kept by a Yasnaya Polyana peasant, Alexey Bocharov, and used by Tolstoy in connection with the new novel he was planning to write.
6 V. I. Alexeyev’s wife.
7 A. S. Orekhov, a former valet of Tolstoy’s and now an estate manager at Yasnaya Polyana.
8 The wife of the Decembrist who accompanied him into exile.
9 Tolstoy’s eldest son.
10 The abbot of a monastery, who wrote about the Old Believers. The reference is to his book The Story of the Pilgrimage through Russia, Moldavia, Turkey and the Holy Land of the monk Parfeny of Mt Athos, 1855.
11 Some unfinished autobiographical reminiscences of his childhood.
12 Tolstoy’s son.
13 A disciple of the English evangelist Lord Radstock.