Begichevka. Alive. A month has gone by. Today is 30 January, 1892. To remember each day in turn is impossible. I’ve been to Moscow, where I spent three weeks, and it’s now a week since I’ve been back here. The main features and events of this month: dissatisfaction with Lyova and a depressing feeling of uncharitableness towards him. The hustle and bustle, idleness and luxury, vanity and sensuality of Moscow life. Went to the theatre. Fruits of Enlightenment. I’m still writing chapter 8.1 And I still haven’t finished. Saw Solovyov, Alyokhin and Orlov – depressed by all of them – and enjoyed seeing Chertkov, Gorbunov and Tregubov. Returned here and found disorder and confusion. The distribution of materials and firewood has caused greediness. I’ve felt ill nearly all the time – my stomach – and I feel weak generally. I think more and more often of death and free myself more and more from desire for worldly fame. But I’m still very far from complete freedom. Wanted to copy out my notes into my notebooks – I’ve lost them, and am sad and jaded, and don’t feel like thinking or doing anything. Father, help me to love always.
3 February, Begichevka Sonya left today.2 I’m sorry for her. Relations with the people are very bad. I realised today that all this begging, envy, deceit, dissatisfaction and the poverty that lies behind it all, is an indication of an exceptional situation and of the fact that we are in the middle of it. […]
Today is 24 February, Begichevka Tanya left for Moscow today, feeling unwell.3 […] Repin has been, and left today.4 …
Today is 29 February, Begichevka There has been a terrible snow-storm these past days. Set off again yesterday for Rozhnya, and didn’t get there again. I’ve been to Kolodezi and Karatayevo, about firewood and children’s soup kitchens. Visits from (1) Bobrinsky, (2) the Swede Stadling, (3) Vysotsky and four ‘dark people’.5 They depress me. I’m very tired. Wasn’t well during the day. Better now – quite well. I’m still writing and can’t stop.
The day before yesterday an astonishing thing happened: I was going out of doors in the morning with my chamberpot, and there was a big, healthy-looking, agile peasant geeting on for fifty with a twelve-year-old boy with beautiful, wavy fair hair curling up at the ends. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Zatvornoye.’ That’s a village where the peasants live by begging. ‘What do you want?’ As always the tedious answer, ‘Help us, your Honour.’ ‘What do you need?’ ‘Don’t let us die of hunger. We haven’t eaten for two days.’ I was depressed. All familiar words and all learned by heart. ‘Just a moment.’ And I went in to fetch five copecks to get rid of them. The peasant went on talking and describing his situation. No heat, no bread. They go begging, nobody gives them anything. Outside, the snow and the cold. I went in to get rid of them. I looked round at the boy. His beautiful eyes were full of tears, and big glistening tear-drops were running down from one eye.
Yes, this wretched officialdom and the money make you hardened.
Today is 3 April Haven’t written my diary for more than a month. I’m in Moscow. We arrived here, I think, on the 14th. […]
Don’t remember whether I noted down: […]
(2) I am alone, and there is such a terrible, infinite number of people, and all these people are so different, and it’s impossible for me to get to know them all – all these Indians, Malayans, Japanese, even the people who are always with me – my children, my wife … In the midst of all these people I am alone, quite alone and isolated. And the awareness of this isolation and the need for communion with all these people, and the impossibility of such communion is enough to drive me mad. The only salvation is the awareness of an inner communion with all of them through God. When you find this communion, the need for external communion will cease to worry you. […]
Today is 26 May, Yasnaya Polyana The day before yesterday I came back from Begichevka.6 The time there passed like a single day. Everything is just the same. More depressing relations than ever with the ‘dark people’, Alyokhin, Novosyolov, Skorokhodov. The childishness and vanity of Christianity, the lack of sincerity. The work is just the same. Just as depressing and just as impossible to escape. I’d just begun to live freely there when Yevdokim7 arrived and brought chapter 8 which was in a hideous condition. Began to revise it and worked every day for a month, continued revising it and am still revising it now. I think I’ve almost reached the end. […]
Today is 5 July, Yasnaya Polyana I’ve hardly written anything for a month and a half. I’ve been to Begichevka during this time and come back again, and now I’ve been at Yasnaya for more than two weeks. I’m staying on for the division of the property.8 It’s, depressing, terribly painful. I pray that God will rescue me. But how? Not as I will, but as He wills. If only He could suppress the uncharitableness in me. Yesterday there was an astonishing conversation among the children. Tanya and Lyova were suggesting to Masha that she was playing a mean trick by refusing her property. Her conduct makes them feel the wrongness of their own, but they must be in the right themselves and so they are trying to invent reasons why her conduct is bad and a mean trick. It’s terrible. I can’t write. I wept, and I could weep again. They say: ‘We would like to do it ourselves, but it would be wrong.’ My wife says to them: ‘Leave it to me.’ They don’t say anything. It’s terrible! I’ve never seen lies and the motives for them so palpably obvious. I’m sad, sad, and sorely depressed. […]
When leaving Begichevka I was struck, as I’m often struck now, by pictures of nature. 5 o’clock in the morning. Mist, people washing in the river. Everything shrouded in mist. Wet leaves glistening nearby.
(2) When you have lived a long time – as I’ve lived forty-five years of conscious life – you understand how false and impossible are all attempts to adapt yourself to life. There is nothing stable9 in life. It’s like trying to adapt yourself to running water. Everything – individuals, families, societies – everything changes, melts away and reshapes itself, as clouds do. And there’s no time to get used to one state of society before it no longer exists and has changed into another. […]
6 August Terrible to think: a month has passed. Today is 6 August. I’ve been to Begichevka again. Finished things there. I’ll carry on from here. Apathy; great weakness. Chapter 8 is finished, but I’m still toiling away on chapters 9 and 10. And I’m beginning to think I’m thrashing about on the spot. The division of the property is finished. Sent for Popov. He’s living with us, copying and writing. Strakhov came again. I’ve let myself go very much morally. That’s because of my writing, and the thought that I’m doing an important thing – a work which, although it doesn’t release me from the obligations of life, is one which is more important than the others. Prayer has become a formality. […]
Thought: (1) I remembered just now sitting in a steam bath and a shepherd boy coming into the anteroom. I asked: ‘Who’s there?’ ‘Me.’ ‘Who’s me?’ ‘It’s me.’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’ve said, me.’ For him, the only person living in the world, it was so incomprehensible that anyone could fail to know the only thing that exists. And everyone is the same. […]
Today is 9 August, Yasnaya Polyana Wrote a bit better yesterday. I’m still as dissatisfied with myself: no love for anything. Least of all for myself, it’s true, but still – no love. At dinner yesterday a trivial episode about mushrooms and a prohibition on picking them grieved me very sorely. I ought to be ashamed of it. Thought a lot, but didn’t write anything down and don’t remember anything. Yesterday I read Boborykin’s Corpse;10 very good. Lyova arrived. Got on all right with him. Wrote better today, but didn’t write much. Went mushrooming with Sasha. Very pleasant. Yesterday I wrote a letter to Dillon apropos of Leskov’s letter.11 Popov and Butkevich came. In the evening Tanya arrived with a mass of people as well. They’re now playing the violin upstairs. Read a story by some young lady – a bad one. […]
Today is 21 August, Yasnaya Polyana Feel just as jaded as ever, entirely immersed in my article which I still haven’t finished. […] Thought during this time:
(1) A talk about upbringing. Sonya said that she saw that she had brought the children up badly, and that they were ruined physically and morally. But what was she to do? It’s as if everyone were to say: ‘It doesn’t matter what’s good or bad somewhere else, but I have only one life, and the children have only one life. And I’ll ruin this one life, I can’t avoid it! […]
(5) This isn’t a thought, but on 13 August I made a note that it had become clear to me – not in a moment of anger but in a very peaceful moment – that I might, and probably will have to leave home.
(6) Spoke about music. I said again that this pleasure is only a little superior in its kind to eating. I don’t want to offend music, but I do want clarity. And I can’t accept what people say with such obscurity and vagueness, namely that music somehow elevates the soul. The point is that it isn’t a moral thing. It’s not immoral, any more than eating – it’s neutral, but not moral. I stand by that. And if it isn’t a moral thing, one’s attitude to it is quite different.
Today is 15 September, Yasnaya Polyana It’s two days since I returned from Begichevka, where I spent three good days. Wrote a draft report and conclusion. A depressingly painful impression made on me by a train full of officials and soldiers, going to put down a riot.12 All this time when I haven’t been writing my diary, I’ve been living in just the same way. As far as my strength allowed I worked on chapters 8, 9 and 10, and finished the first two. But I only made a mess of the 10th. There’s still no real conclusion. But I think it’s getting clearer. […] Noted down during this time. […]
(3) The conditions of life, clothing and habits which remain with a man after he has changed his way of life are like the clothing worn by an actor who, because of a fire in the middle of a play, runs out into the street in his costume and greasepaint. […]
1 October, Yasnaya Polyana Everything the same: the same persistent work, the same slow progress and the same dissatisfaction with myself. However, things are a bit better. Went to Kozlovka today and thought for the first time: however terrible it is to think so and say so, but the purpose of life is just as little the reproduction of the likes of us, the continuation of the species, as it is the service of other people or even the service of God. The reproduction of the likes of us. Why? To serve people. But what are they to do, the people we serve? To serve God? But surely He can do what He needs to without us. And anyway He can’t need anything. If he bids us serve Him, it’s only for our own good. Life can’t have any other purpose except good, except joy. Only this purpose – joy – is fully worthy of life. Renunciation, the cross, giving up life – it’s all for the sake of joy. And joy exists, and can be permanent and indestructible. And death is a transition to a new, unknown, completely new, different and greater joy. And there are sources of joy which never dry up: the beauty of nature, animals and human beings which is never absent. In prison – the beauty of a sunbeam, of a fly, or of sounds. And the main source is love – my love for people and their love for me. How good it would be if this were true. Am I discovering something new? Beauty, joy – simply as joy, independently of good – is disgusting. I found this out and gave it up. Good without beauty is painful. It’s only the combination of the two; and not the combination, but beauty as the crown of good. I think that’s something like the truth. I’m reading Amiel13 – not bad.
Today is 7 October, Yasnaya Polyana Everything the same. The same persistent work and slow progress. During this time my elder sons came. It was nice and good to be with them. But they’re very weak. A talk with Lyova. He’s closer to me than the others. The main thing is, he is good and loves the good (God). Amiel is very good. […]
(2) I’d like to write a foreword to Amiel,14 in which I could express what he says in many places about what a new Christianity should consist of, what religion should be like in future. And meanwhile he himself lives partly by Stoicism, partly by Buddhism, partly – mainly – by Christianity as he understands it – and will die with it. Like the bourgeois gentilhomme, he fait de la religion sans le savoir [practises religion without knowing it].15 That’s probably the best religion. He isn’t tempted to hold it up for admiration.
(3) If I were given the choice whether to people the earth with the best saints imaginable, but with no children, or with people as they are now, but with children constantly arriving fresh from God, I would choose the latter.
(4) Turgenev’s Enough and Hamlet and Don Quixote are the negation of a worldly life and the affirmation of a Christian one.16 One could write a good article about that. […]
6 November Haven’t written my diary for almost a month. Today is 6 November. […] Made the following notes: […]
(5) A letter from Strakhov about the decadents.17 It’s art for art’s sake again. Narrow hose and breeches again after wide ones, but with a touch of modern times. Today’s decadents like Baudelaire say that poetry needs extremes of good and extremes of evil. That without them there is no poetry. That striving towards good alone destroys contrasts and therefore poetry. They’ve no need to worry. Evil is so strong – it’s the background to everything – that it’s always there for contrast. But if you accept it, it will cover everything up; there will be only evil and there will be no contrast. In fact there won’t even be evil – there won’t be anything. For there to be a contrast and for there to be evil, we must strive with all our power towards good.
During this time a student from the medical academy, Sobolevsky, has been to try and reform me and to suggest to me that the concept of God is a vestige of barbarism. I got shamefully worked up over his stupidity, and said a lot of rude things and distressed him.
1 Of The Kingdom of God is Within You.
2 She had been at Begichevka since 24 January.
3 Tanya Kuzminskaya had been at Begichevka since 28 October, helping with the famine relief.
4 Repin spent three days in Begichevka and did some drawings of Tolstoy talking to the peasants.
5 (1) Count V. A. Bobrinsky, a big landowner in the Bogoroditsk province. (2) Jonas Stadling, an American of Swedish extraction, author of several books on Russia including In the Land of Tolstoi; Experiences of Famine and Misrule in Russia, 1897 and an article in the Century – With Tolstoi in the Russian Famine, 1893, No.46. He spent some time in Begichevka and travelled with Tolstoy to the Samara province. (3) K. A. Vysotsky owned a farm in the area and worked for several months at Begichevka. The ‘dark people’ referred to included the Alyokhin brothers.
6 During the previous two months he had been to Moscow, Yasnaya Polyana, Begichevka and back again to Yasnaya Polyana.
7 Y. P. Sokolov, a peasant who worked for Chertkov as a copyist.
8 The legal document dividing all Tolstoy’s property between his wife and children had been signed on 7 June.
9 In English in the diary.
10 A story published in 1892 by the prolific novelist, short story writer and critic P. D. Boborykin, whose candidature for election to the Academy of Sciences was supported by Tolstoy and who wrote about him in an article At Tolstoy’s House in Moscow (Letters, I, 196).
11 Leskov asked Tolstoy to support Dillon who had been attacked for his translation in the Daily Telegraph of Tolstoy’s article.
12 A riot caused by peasants resisting the felling of a wood belonging to them by Count Bobrinsky – an episode which Tolstoy wrote about in Chapter 12 of The Kingdom of God is Within You.
13 Henri-Frédéric Amiel, diarist and critic who spent most of his life as a professor at Geneva University. Tolstoy was reading his Fragments d’un journal intime, published posthumously, 1883–7.
14 In December 1893 Tolstoy wrote a foreword to his daughter Masha’s Russian translation of Amiel’s diary, which was published the following year.
15 A reference to M. Jourdain in Molière’s play, who spoke prose without realising it.
16 See Tolstoy’s further comments on these works in his letter to A. N. Pypin of 10 January 1884 (Letters, II, 364–5).
17 Apparently prompted by a lecture of Merezhkovsky’s on decadent trends in modern Russian literature (although Strakhov’s letter has not survived).