5 May, Yasnaya Polyana Terrible to think, I haven’t written my diary since 6 November 1892, i.e. six months except for a day. All this time I’ve been strenuously occupied with my book: with the last chapter,1 and I still haven’t quite finished.
Yesterday, 4 May, we arrived at Yasnaya from Moscow, where I spent all winter, with a break. Owing to my strenuous work (I don’t think I missed a single day) I seem to have let myself go in my physical life – actually in physical work. But in many respects, especially in the demands on myself not to take part in the evil of the world, I’ve become more resolute. Much has become clear during this time in the course of work; the problem of free will: man is free in the spiritual world, in that which sets the physical world in motion.
We’ve been to Begichevka during this time. Indifference to the vulgar business of aid, and disgust with hypocrisy. The sympathy people expressed for my activity was joy at the transformation of the critic of hypocrisy into a party to it.
Events during this time: Lyova’s return from Petersburg and his illness.2 My relations with the other members of the family are just the same. The two boys, Andryusha and Misha, especially Misha, are in a very bad and aloof frame of mind. Masha has been infatuated, and has come to her senses again.3 Now Bulygin is here. He and Rayev have been on trial, and are waging a struggle.4 Generally speaking I think that in our country the struggle between Christianity and paganism is beginning, éclate [is breaking out]. One must know this and be prepared. Today is the first day that I haven’t got on with my book. I still don’t know what I shall write. I’ve had many thoughts during this time which have come to nothing. I remember:
(1) A work of dramatic art, which reveals most evidently the essence of any art, consists in presenting people of the most diverse characters and situations, putting before them and confronting them all with the need to solve a vital problem not previously solved by people, and making them act and observe in order to find out how this problem can be solved. It’s a laboratory experiment. I would like to do this in my next drama.5 […]
14 May, Yasnaya Polyana I’ve missed a week. I haven’t noticed how it passed. Sent it off yesterday and had done with it.6 If it’s bad, it’s bad. I was ill, and that particularly spurred me on to finish it: I’m free. I’m re-reading things begun earlier. I don’t know yet what to start on. I’ve been feeling very bad all this time. I’m dissatisfied with my situation, and suffer agonies. I want an outward change. But I oughtn’t to.
15 May and, I think, 16, Yasnaya Polyana […] Thought: it’s astounding: the plundering of land in our Kherson, Samara and other provinces7 – and the magnificence of Moscow, the arches to welcome the Tsar, and the illuminations.8 Or the Chicago exhibition,9 and the destruction of forests and the desecration of land. And science is going to put all this right for us by artificial rain produced by electricity. Terrible! 98 per cent will be destroyed and 2 per cent restored.
23 May, Begichevka10 […] Thought during this time: […]
(4) The first leaves have just appeared on the birch trees, and are rippling gaily in the warm wind. Evening. It’s growing dark after the storm. The horses have just been let out, and are nibbling the grass greedily and waving their tails.
(5) Tried to remember: what has marriage given me? It’s terrible to say. It’s probably the same for everybody.
(6) Two conventions are equally strong: for a man – putting up with a box on the ears without a duel; for a woman – being married without the Church’s blessing. […]
5 June, Yasnaya Polyana I’ve kept trying to write an afterword,11 tying it up with the definition of life as a movement from the unreasonable to the reasonable, but haven’t made any progress, whether from physical or mental causes, I don’t know. During this time I’ve tried to work – to chop wooden stakes – and have been to Bulygin’s. […]
I’m going to Tula now. Thought during this time:
(1) I was struck by the thought that one of the main causes of hostile feelings between husbands and wives is their rivalry over the business of managing the family. A wife mustn’t admit that her husband is reasonable and practical, because if she did, she would have to do his will, and vice versa. If I were writing The Kreutzer Sonata now I would introduce this idea. […]
(3) The Chicago exhibition, like all exhibitions, is a striking example of imprudence and hypocrisy: everything is done for profit and amusement – from boredom – but noble aims of love of the people are ascribed to it. Orgies are better. […]
(6) Read about an article by Max Nordau.12 He puts it very well that our belles lettres ought rather to become an amusement for women and children, like dancing.
(7) All this art and music is all right, but it obviously occupies an inappropriate place. […]
10 June, Yasnaya Polyana All this time I’ve done nothing definite. Began the afterword, then the articles on science and art,13 and now something on Zola’s letter and Dumas.14 Popov left, Posha came. My relations with people are just the same. Thought during this time: […]
(2) My childhood friend,15 a lost soul, a drunkard, a glutton, an unhappy, lazy and untruthful person, always, when the subject of children and upbringing is mentioned, brings up his own childhood and upbringing as an example, as though implying indisputably that the result of his upbringing is proof of its success. And he does it unintentionally, and doesn’t see how funny it is. So strong is the love and predilection which all people have for themselves. […]
(9) Religion is not what people believe in, and science is not what people study, but religion is what gives meaning to life, and science is what people need to know.
21 June, Yasnaya Polyana The day before yesterday I sent off with Kuzminsky an article about Zola’s and Dumas’ letters to the Revue de Families.16 All this time I’ve amused myself dividing my thoughts between On Art, the afterword and this article. Tried to work – I’ve grown too weak. Masha came. I was very glad to see her. Yesterday there was an unpleasant conversation with Sonya – something that hasn’t happened for a long time. ‘They are suffering, the poor people.’ ‘One ought to be sorry for them, but you get too excited.’ However, it was all so quiet that nobody noticed it. It just hurt me very much. […]
Today is 18 July, Begichevka Haven’t written my diary for a terribly long time. During this time I’ve been writing an article about the letters of Zola and Dumas. Still haven’t sent it off. Left for Begichevka on the 10th. We’ve passed the time well here. I’ve been winding up the business.17 Had many good thoughts and kept forgetting them. I’ll note down a few things: […]
(2) Mankind has always lived in such a way that woman has been ruled by man; suddenly it transpires that women ought not to be ruled, but are themselves the rulers.
(3) If robbers seize power and wealth, the people who will control that power and wealth are the ones who act basely and indulge the robbers, i.e. the basest people. That’s why power is in the hands of women. […]
(5) The form of the novel is not only not everlasting, but is already dying out. One is ashamed to write untruths, to say something happened that didn’t happen. If you want to say something, say it frankly.
19 July I continue:
(9) Millions of people have existed for thousands of years and have not lived on meat and have rested regularly on the 7th day. And now science has discovered on the first question that one can’t live on vegetable food without meat; but on the second, it has come to the conclusion, after making a series of experiments (putting a man in a cage and making him rotate a stone) that rest on the 7th day is necessary. If they hadn’t amassed money by robbery to buy meat with, and if they had had to work themselves, they would long since have come to the undoubtedly correct solution of the first problem, and would have discovered without experiments in cages how necessary it is to rest on the 7th day. […]
(10) Women, like Jews, pay for the slavery in which they have been kept by enslaving men. And serve us right. But we oughtn’t to submit, but ought to eliminate in ourselves that weakness by which they try to capture us. […]
(11) Art, they say, cannot abide mediocrity. Nor can it abide being too deliberate. I am a singer, I have greased my hair, put on a frock coat and necktie and am going to stand on a platform and sing to you. And I am quite cold and feel disgusted. But a wet-nurse and a nanny go for a walk in the garden and one sings a folk song in a quiet voice and the other echoes it. Besides, it’s terribly difficult to sing loudly and well.
Today is 16 August, Yasnaya Polyana Almost a month. And I’ve lived through a great deal. Firstly, I’ve finished my work with the famine victims. Secondly, Chertkov and Posha have been. I finished and sent off an article Non-action both in French and Russian;18 and thirdly, and most important, an excerpt from my book appeared abroad about the Oryol affair, and sparked off a lot of fuss and bother and reactions and misunderstandings and slanderous remarks.19 Yesterday Sonya and the Kuzminskys read it and pointed out to me some inaccuracies:
(1) people being hanged in the villages, (2) people being beaten all the time, (3) abuse of Zinovyev20 (Zinovyev read it in Stockholm and was very offended, distressed and angered). Telegrams were sent off today asking all the translators to stop publication.21 I think it’s too late. Woke up last night and began to have painful thoughts. Had the same painful thoughts in the evening too. And I felt worse and worse, and was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. […]
The most important event during this time was the business that started between Masha and Zander.22 She was very pitiable. Now she has recovered and, it seems, has refused him, but the unpleasantness and the tangle of lies over the whole business isn’t over yet. […]
Thought: (1) It sometimes happens that a man suddenly begins to defend angrily a position which in your view is most unimportant. You think it’s a brick, and it costs him no more than three copecks. But for him this brick is the keystone of the arch on which his whole life is built. […]
(5) A conversation with social democrats (young men and women). They say: ‘The capitalist system will pass into the hands of the workers, and then there won’t be any more oppression of the workers and unfair distribution of wages.’ ‘But who will set up the works and manage them?’ I asked. ‘That will come of its own accord, the workers will run things themselves.’ ‘But surely the capitalist system was only established because managers with authority are needed for any practical job. Once there is a job there will be leaders, there will be managers with authority. And once there is authority, there will be abuse of it, – the very thing you are fighting against now.’
(6) What is better for a man and a woman: to flirt and make friends at a ball, or over the bed of a typhus patient? The first is better.
(7) It is impossible to say not only whether the life a person leads is useful or useless, but even whether it is joyful or not. It will only be known subsequently, when it can be seen as a whole. It’s the same with work. Ask a ploughman while he’s working whether his life is joyful or not. He doesn’t know, and rather thinks that the idle life of a rich man is joyful, but ask him when he’s an old man and he will recall his own life.
(8) August 11, morning A blue haze; the dew seems to be sewn on to the grass, bushes and trees to a height of a sazhen. Apple trees are bowed beneath their weight. From a log cabin comes the fragrant smoke of fresh brushwood. And over there, in a bright-yellow field, the dew is already drying out on the fine oat stubble and work has begun, binding, carting, scything and, in a violet-coloured field, ploughing. Everywhere along the roads and caught in the branches of trees are torn off broken ears of corn. Gaily dressed young girls are weeding a dewy flowerbed and quietly singing, and man-servants in aprons are bustling about. A lap dog is warming itself in the sun. The gentlemen haven’t got up yet. […]
23 August, Yasnaya Polyana Missed five days. Strakhov and Salomon23 have been. My restlessness has subsided. But my idleness hasn’t ceased. I’m trying to write about religion,24 but it’s no good. […] An unpleasant conversation with Strakhov. He says he doesn’t see any necessary connection between the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor. Astonishing. […] Thought during this time:
(3) I imagined to myself a prosecutor or policeman demanding from me a signed undertaking not to write any more, or something similar, and saying ‘I am acting on the highest orders.’ There can’t be any highest orders, because mine are the highest – to defend my brothers and to denounce their persecutors. There are only two ways of forcing me to be silent: either to stop doing what I denounce, or else to kill me or imprison me for life; in actual fact only the first; and so tell the people who sent you to stop doing what they are doing. […]
[5 October] It’s terrible to look at the last date in my diary, so long is it since I last wrote: exactly a month. Today is 5 October, Yasnaya Polyana. What has happened during this time? Lyova is still not better. A struggle with Masha. I wrote to Zander; he wrote to me. Masha wrote him a bad letter. This grieved me very much. One mustn’t prevent them from living, prevent them from making mistakes, prevent them from suffering and repenting and so making progress. Tanya has gone to Moscow to take Sonya’s place. Sonya is now on her way here. Popov is here. He and I have been translating Lao-Tzu from Strauss’ German version.25 How good it is! I must make a book out of it. All the time I’ve been writing the article on religion. I think I’ve finished. Also wrote in rough an article about Maupassant.26 That’s all. Few thoughts and few notes. Here they are:
(1) A science – prisonology.27
(2) There are two sorts of minds: one mind is logical, egotistical, narrow and long, and the other is sensitive, sympathetic, broad and short.
(3) There are two methods of knowing the external world: one is the very crude and unavoidable method of knowing it through the five senses. We would be able to piece together a picture of the world that we know from this method of knowing, but the result would be chaos, affording us various sensations. The other method is to know yourself through love of yourself, and then to know other creatures through love of these creatures: to transfer oneself in thought into another person, animal, plant or even stone. By this method you will know from within and form a picture of the whole world as we know it. This method is what is called the poetic gift; it is in fact love. It is the restoration of the seemingly broken unity between creatures. You go out of yourself and enter into another person. And you can enter into everything. Everything – you can merge with God, with Everything. […]
(8) They say that one swallow doesn’t make a summer; but, because one swallow doesn’t make a summer, would that swallow which already senses summer not fly in, but wait? In that case every bud and blade of grass will have to wait, and there will be no summer. […]
(15) It is actually their wives that husbands hate, as Lessing said: there is only one bad woman, and that is my wife.28 Women themselves are to blame for this because of their deceitfulness and their play-acting. They all perform a comedy in front of others, but can’t go on performing it behind the scenes in front of their husbands, and so a husband knows that all women are reasonable and good, but he knows that his wife alone is not. That’s all. Other things that have happened are that the Revue des Revues printed a foul translation of Non-action and that distressed me, and also that for about three weeks now I’ve completely given up tea, coffee, sugar, and above all milk, and I only feel healthier for it. 10 o’clock at night.
[3 November] Haven’t written for almost a month. Today is 3 November, Yasnaya Polyana. Masha and I have been living on our own for two or three weeks now. It’s very good. She has calmed down completely. Lyova is going abroad. He’s not better. Le salut est en vous has come out.29 I’ve finished the article on religion. Got on with Toulon30 and am not sending it off. During this time I had few thoughts, and what I did think, I didn’t note down. […]
Today is 22 December, and I’ve been in Moscow more than a month. And I haven’t written my diary once. I’m depressed and disgusted. I can’t get the better of myself. I want to do something heroic. I want to devote the rest of my life to the service of God. But He doesn’t want me. Or doesn’t want me to go the way I want to. And I grumble. This luxury. This sale of books.31 This moral filth. This fuss and bother. I can’t overcome my melancholy. The main thing is I want to suffer, I want to shout out the truth which is burning me.
During this time a lot has happened. First, the fact that I’ve been dragged here. Sonya was suffering and pining so much, it was so obvious from her letters, that I came. Secondly, the fact that I wrote a foreword to Amiel. Thirdly – the hard and unending work on Toulon which I can’t give up. I’ve also written some fables32 – haven’t finished them. Some good letters from Lyova. A new joy. With the girls it’s neither one thing nor the other. Masha – medicine. Tanya – painting.33 The other day the musician Shor34 was here. I had a good talk with him about music, and for the first time the true importance of art, even dramatic art, became clear to me. That will be the first of my thoughts during this time.
Other things that have happened during this time: Sabatier’s book on St Francis.35 It awakened memories in me of my former passion for the good, for the full, active, living fulfilment of the truth. Then Amiel, whom I re-read, and now Williams’ new book True Son of Liberty.36 Excellent. Made me want to write a drama. I sometimes think that I’m finished, and am no longer able to write. And I’m sad, as though I could go on writing on my death bed or even after death. It was wrong of me to have written in my notebook soon after arriving in Moscow that I had forgotten God. How terrible it is to forget God. And it happens imperceptibly. Things done for God are replaced by things done for people, for fame, and then for oneself, for one’s own nasty self. And when you stumble over such nastiness, you want to pick yourself up again.
(1) The vagueness of the definition of art or music for example, arises from the fact that we want to ascribe to them an importance corresponding to the uncharacteristically high position we have placed them in. Their importance is: (1) their help in transmitting one’s feelings and thoughts by word; the summoning up of a mood appropriate to what is being transmitted, and (2) the fact that they are harmless, and even useful, in comparison with all other pleasures, and consequently are the most useful of all pleasures. […]
(7) Our Liberals are like sectarian Old Believers. Their principles have been crystallised and petrified by everything. And all they can understand is their attitude to the government, arguments about fingers, etc. Any other attitude to what they are fighting against seems to them not only alien, but inimical.
(8) I look at women students with their books and notebooks running from lecture to lecture. Women painters, women musicians. They can do everything. And, like apes, they have copied everything from men. The one thing women can’t do (girls still can) is to provide moral impetus. […]
1 Chapter 12 of The Kingdom of God is Within You.
2 Tolstoy’s son was suffering from neurasthenia.
3 By P. I. Rayevsky.
4 Bulygin and P. A. Rayev, a Tolstoyan sympathiser, had opened a school for local children on their farm without permission. They were sentenced to a fine or a month’s imprisonment, and the school was closed.
5 The Light Shineth in Darkness.
6 The last chapter of The Kingdom of God is Within You.
7 Land intended for settlement by the local landless population was being sold on very favourable terms to government officials.
8 To mark Alexander III’s recent arrival in Moscow.
9 To commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America.
10 Tolstoy and his daughter Tatyana spent a few days in the Begichevka area taking stock of the situation.
11 To The Kingdom of God is Within You, which was begun but never finished.
12 Tolstoy read an article by I. I. Ivanov in the Russian Gazette about the Hungarian-born German Jewish novelist, critic and publicist Max Nordau entitled A Writer’s Notes. Max Nordau. Entartung. Zweiter Band, Berlin, 1893.
13 The various manuscript drafts on science and art which Chertkov had just returned to Tolstoy.
14 More correctly, Zola’s speech at a Paris banquet calling on the young generation to discard outworn beliefs and put their faith in science and work, and Dumas fils’ letter to the journal Gaulois with its emphasis on the ideal of loving one another. The editor of Revue des Revues sent newspaper cuttings to Tolstoy about the different standpoints of Zola and Dumas, and as a result he began writing the article Non-action.
15 K. A. Islavin.
16 The article Non-action. The French journal did not publish it.
17 Of the famine relief. This was his last visit to Begichevka.
18 Non-action was published in Russian in the Northern Herald, 1893, No.9. It came out in Revue des Revues in October 1893 in a bad French translation, as Tolstoy complained later in his diary entry for 5 October.
19 Chapter 12 of The Kingdom of God is Within You with the episode of the punitive expedition to quell a peasant riot referred to in 1892, Note 12.
20 N. A. Zinovyev was head of the punitive expedition.
21 Tolstoy’s wife had insisted that the telegrams be sent to the translators in Paris, Berlin and Boston, followed by letters with amendments to the original text.
22 Masha had fallen in love with N. A. Zander, a young doctor temporarily engaged as a resident tutor to Tolstoy’s younger sons, but Tolstoy and his wife both opposed the match, and Zander left Yasnaya Polyana at the end of July.
23 Charles Salomon, a French industrialist who translated some of Tolstoy’s works into French and wrote several articles about him. They corresponded frequently and Salomon visited Yasnaya Polyana several times.
24 The article was eventually entitled Religion and Morality.
25 They used both German and French translations of Lao-Tzu. Tao-te-king, but never completed their Russian version.
26 A foreword to the Works of Guy de Maupassant.
27 Tolstoy’s coinage.
28 Lessing’s epigram Das böse Weib (Ein einzig böses Weib lebt höchstens in der Welt: Nur schlimm, dass jeder seins für dieses einz’ge hält).
29 A French translation by Halpérine [Galperinj-Kaminsky.
30 The original title of Christianity and Patriotism, so called because of the presence of a Russian naval squadron in Toulon in 1893 to mark the conclusion of a Franco-Russian alliance.
31 By Tolstoy’s wife, despite Tolstoy’s letter renouncing the copyright of his works.
32 Three Fables, not finished until 1895.
33 Masha had wanted to enrol as a medical student; Tanya had already qualified as an artist and had her own studio.
34 D. S. Shor, a pianist and professor at the Moscow Conservatoire.
35 Charles Paul-Marie Sabatier’s Vie de Saint François d’Assise. Tolstoy asked the author’s permission for the book to be translated into Russian. This was given and a Russian translation was published by The Intermediary in 1898.
36 A True Son of Liberty; or the Man who would not be a Patriot, New York, 1893, by Frank Purdy Williams, an American writer and follower of Henry George.