The Journal of Leo Tolstoi First. Volume—1895-1899

7) To pray? They say that prayer is necessary, that it is necessary to have the sweet feeling of prayer which is called forth by service, singing, reading, exclamations, ikons. But what is prayer? A communion with God, a recognition of one’s relation to God, the highest state of the soul. Is it possible that this state of the soul can be attained by an action upon the outer senses… Is it not more probable that the prayerful state might be reached only in rare exceptional moments and necessarily in isolation, as even Christ said and as Elijah saw God, not in a storm but in a tender breeze?

8) Yesterday I looked through the romances, novels, and poems of Fet.¹¹⁵ I recalled our incessant music on 4 grand-pianos in Yasnaya Polyana and it became clear to me that all this – the romances, the poems, the music – was not art, something important and necessary to people in general, but a self-indulgence of robbers, parasites, who have nothing in common with life; romances, novels about how one falls in love disgustingly, poetry about this or about how one languishes from boredom. And music about the same theme. But life, all life, seethes with its own problems of food, distribution, labour, about faith, about the relations of men … It is shameful, nasty. Help me, Father, to serve Thee by showing up this lie.

9) I was going from the Chertkovs on the 5th of July. It was evening, and beauty, happiness, blessedness, lay on everything. But in the world of men? There was greed, malice, envy, cruelty, lust, debauchery. When will it be among men as it is in Nature? Here there is a struggle, but it is honest, simple, beautiful. But there it is base. I know it and I hate it, because I myself am a man.

(I have not succeeded.)

10) When I suffered in my soul, I tried to calm myself with the consciousness of serving. And that used to calm me, but only then when there happened to be an obvious instance of serving, i. e. when it was unquestionably required and I was drawn to it. But what is to be done when it happens neither one way nor the other? Give myself to God, negate myself. Do as Thou wilt, I consent.

(Again, not what I want to say.)

I am going to dinner.

11) Kant,¹¹⁶ they tell us, made a revolution in the thought of men. He was the first to show that a thing in itself is inaccessible to knowledge, that the source of knowledge and life is spiritual. But is not that the same which Christ said two thousand years ago, only in a way understandable to men? Bow in spirit and in truth; the spirit is life creating, the letter, the flesh, is beneficial in no way.

12) Balls, feasts, spectacles, parades, pleasure-gardens, etc., are a dreadful tool in the hands of the organisers. They can have a terrible influence. And if anything has to be subjected to control, it is this.

13) I walked along the road and thought, looking at the forests, the earth, the grass, what a funny mistake it is to think that the world is such as it appears to me. To think that the world is such as it appears to me, means to think that there can be no other being capable of knowledge except myself with my six senses.¹¹⁷ I stopped and was writing that down. Sergei Ivanovich¹¹⁸ approached me. I told him what I was thinking. He said:

“Yes, one thing is true, that the world is not such as we see it and we don’t know anything as it is.”

I said:

“Yes, we know something exactly as it is.”

“What is it?”

“That which knows. It is exactly such as we know it.”

14) One is often surprised that people are ungrateful. One ought to be surprised at how they could be grateful for good done them. However little good people do, they know with certainty that the doing of good is the greatest happiness. How then can people be grateful to others that these others have drunk themselves full, when that is the greatest enjoyment?

15) Only he is free whom nothing and nobody can hinder from doing what he wants. There is only one such work to do – to love.

16) Prayer is directed to a personal God, not because God is personal (I even know as a matter of fact that He is not personal, because the personal is finite and God is infinite), but because I am a personal being. I have a little green glass in my eye and I see everything green. I can not help but see the world green, although I know that it is not like that.

17) The æsthetic pleasure is a pleasure of a lower order. And therefore the highest æsthetic pleasure leaves one unsatisfied. In fact, the higher the æsthetic pleasure, the more unsatisfied it leaves one. It always makes one want something more and more. And so without end. Only moral good gives full satisfaction. Here there is full satisfaction. Nothing further is wished for or needed.

18) A lie to others is by far neither as important nor as harmful as a lie to oneself. A lie to others is often an innocent play, a satisfying of vanity. A lie to oneself is always a perversion of the truth, a turning aside from the demands of life.

19) Although seldom, yet it has happened to me that I have done good from pity, a real good. In that case you never remember what you really have done and under what circumstances. You remember only that you were with God (this occurred to me in regard to my favourite boots which I remember I gave away out of pity and for a long time I could not remember where they had gone). It is the same way with all those moments when I was with God, whether in prayer or in the business of life. Memory is a fleshly affair, but here, the thing is spiritual.

20) Man can not live a fleshly life, if he does not consider himself in the right and he can not live a spiritual life if he does not consider himself sinful.

21) …

I am going to sleep. It is 12:30 in the morning, July 30th.

July 31, Y. P. If I live.

July 31, Y. P.

I am alive. It is evening now. It is past four. I am lying down and can not fall asleep. My heart aches. I am tired out. I hear through the window – they play tennis and are laughing. S. went away to the Shenshins.¹¹⁹ Every one is well, but I am sad and can not master myself. It is like the feeling I had when St. Thomas¹²⁰ locked me in and I heard through my prison how every one was gay and was laughing. But I don’t want to. One must suffer humiliation and be good. I can do it.

I continue to copy:

1) The disbelief in reason is the source of all evil. This disbelief is reached by the teaching of a distorted faith from childhood. Believe in one miracle and the trust in reason is destroyed.

2) …

3) Christianity does not give happiness but safety; it lets you down to the bottom from which there is no place to fall.

4) I rode horseback from Tula and thought about this; that I am a part of Him, separated in a certain way from other such parts, and He is everything, the Father, and I felt love, just love, for Him. Now, especially now, I not only can not reproduce this feeling, but not even recall it. But I was so joyful that I said to myself: Here I was thinking that I can not learn anything new and suddenly I acquired a wonderful blessed new feeling, a real feeling.

5) What humbug¹²¹– beauty, truth, goodness! Beauty is one of those attributes of outer objects, like health, an attribute of the living body. Truth is not the ideal of science. The ideal of science is knowledge, not truth. The good can not be placed on the plane with either of these, because it is the goal of life.

(It is unclear, but it was clear and will be.)

6) I do not remember good works, because they are outside of the material man – of memory.

August 1, Ysn. Pol. If I live.– which is doubtful. My heart aches very much…

It is dreadful to think how much time has elapsed; a month and a half. To-day, Sept. 14, Y. P.

During this time I took a trip to the monastery with Sonya.¹²²… I wrote on Hadji-Murad¹²³ very poorly, a first draft. I have continued my work on the Declaration of Faith. The Chertkovs have gone away… All three sons are here now with their wives.¹²⁴

There was a letter from the Hollander who has refused to serve.¹²⁵ I wrote a preface to the letter.¹²⁶ I wrote a letter also to Mme. Kalmikov¹²⁷ with very sharp statements about the Government. The whole month and a half has been condensed in this. Oh, yes; I have also been ill from my usual sickness and my stomach is still not strong.

One thing more. During this time there was a letter from the Hindu Tod and an exquisite book of Hindu wisdom, Ioga’s Philosophy.¹²⁸

In the meantime I thought:

1) There are many people, especially Europeans and especially women, who not only talk but who write things that appear intelligent, in the same way as dumb people speak; as a matter of fact, it isn’t any more natural for them to think than for a dumb person to speak, but both one and the other, both the stupid and the dumb, have been taught.

2) To love an individual man, one has to be blinded. Without being blinded one can love only God, but people can be pitied, which means to love in a Godly way.

3) To get rid of an enemy, one must love him, as it is also said in the “Teaching of the twelve apostles.”¹²⁹ But to love one has to put to oneself the task for all one’s life of love towards an enemy, to do him good through love and to perfect oneself in love for him.

4) At first, one is surprised that stupid people should have within them such an assertive convincing intonation. But it is as it should be. Otherwise no one would listen to them.

5) I find this note: “A decoration for peasants, our happiness” – I can not remember what that means, but it is something that pleased me. I think it means that to a poor man looking on the life of the rich, it appears as happiness. But this happiness is as much happiness, as cardboard made into a tree or a castle – is a tree or a castle.

6) We are all attracted to the Whole and one to another, like particles of one body. Only our roughness, the lack of smoothness, our angles, interfere with our uniting. There is already an attraction, there is no need of making it, but one must plane oneself, wipe out one’s angles.

7) One of the strongest means of hypnotism, of exterior action on the spiritual state of man, is his dress. People know that very well; that is why there is a monastic garb in monasteries and a uniform in the army.

8) I was trying to recall two excellent subjects for novels, the suicide of old Persianninov and the substitution of a child in an orphan asylum.

9) When my weakness tortured me, I sought means of salvation, and I found one in the thought that there is nothing stationary, that everything flows, changes, that all this is for a while, and that it is only necessary to suffer the while while we live – I and the others. And some one of us will go away first. (The while does not mean to live in any way, but means, not to despair, to suffer it through to the end.)

10) I wanted to say that I was grateful, so as to make the other one well disposed, and later to tell the truth. No, I thought, that is not permitted. He will ascribe it to his virtues and the truth will be accepted even less. Man, not acknowledging his sins, is a vessel hermetically closed with a cover which lets nothing enter. To humble oneself, to repent, that means to take off the cover and to make oneself capable of perfection, of the good.

11) Barbarism interferes with the union of people, but the same thing is done by a too great refinement without a religious basis. In the other, the physical disunites, and in this, the spiritual.

12) Man is a tool of God. At first I thought that it was a tool with which man himself was called to work; now I have understood that it is not man who works, but God. The business of man is only to keep himself in order. Like an axe, which would have to keep itself always clean and sharp.

13) Why is it that scoundrels stand for despotism? Because under an ideal order which pays according to merit, they are badly off. Under despotism everything can happen.

14) I often meet people who recognise no God except one which we ourselves recognise in ourselves. And I am astonished; God in me. But God is an infinite principle; how then, why then, should He happen to be in me? It is impossible not to question oneself about this. And as soon as you question yourself, you have to acknowledge an exterior cause. Why do people not feel themselves in need of answering this question? Because for them, the answer to this question is in the reality of the existing world, whether according to Moses or to Darwin – it is all the same. And therefore, to have a conception of an exterior God, one has to understand that that which is actually real, is only the impression of our senses, i. e. it is we ourselves, our spiritual “self.”

15) In moments of passion, infatuation, in order to conquer, one thing is necessary, to destroy the illusion that it is the “self” who suffers, who desires, and to separate one’s true “self” from the troubled waters of passion.

Sept. 15. Y. P. If I live.

To-day October 10. Y. P.

It is almost a month that I have made no entries and it seemed to me it was only yesterday. During this time, though in very poor form, I finished the Declaration of Faith. During this time there were some Japanese with a letter from Konissi.¹³⁰ They, the Japanese, are undoubtedly nearer Christianity than our church Christians. I have learned to love them very much…

I want to write out the whole Declaration of Faith from the beginning again. Yesterday there was a good letter from Verigin, Peter.¹³¹

All last night I thought about the meaning of life and though there are other things to note down, I want to note down this:

The whole world is nothing else than an infinite space filled with infinitely small, colourless, silently moving particles of matter. At bottom, even this is not so; I know that they are particles of matter only through their impenetrability, but the impenetrability I know only through my sense of touch and my muscle sense. If I did not have this sense, I would not know about impenetrability or about matter. As to motion, also, I, strictly speaking, have no right to speak, because if I did not have the sense of sight or again muscle sense, I would not know anything about motion either.

So that all that I have the right to assert about the outer world is that something exists, something entirely unknown to me, as it was said long ago both by the Brahmins and by Kant and by Berkeley. There is some kind of occasion, some kind of grain of sand which causes irritation in the shell of the snail and produces a pearl (sécrétion, secretion in the snail). This is our whole outside world.

What is there then? There is myself with my representations of myself, of the sun, trees, animals, stones. But what then is it that I call myself? Is it something arbitrary depending on myself? No, it is something independent of myself, predetermined. I can not not be myself, and not have that representation which I have, namely, that I include in myself a small part of these moving atoms and call them myself. And all the other remaining atoms I see in the form of beings more or less like myself. The world appears to me to consist entirely of beings which are like me or resemble me.¹³²

(I have become confused, yet have something to say. I am going to try when I have the strength.)

I am continuing to write out what I had to say and what I dreamt of all night, namely:

People think that their life is in the body, that from that which takes place in the body; from breathing, nutrition, circulation of the blood, etc., life flows. And this seems unquestionable; let nutrition, breathing, circulation of the blood cease and life will end. But what ends is the life of the body, life in this body…

And in fact if you consider that life comes from the process of the body and only in the body then as soon as the processes of the body are ended, then life ought to be ended. But certainly this is an arbitrary assertion. No one has proven and can prove that life is only in the body and can not be without the body. To assert this, is all the same as asserting that when the sun has set then the sun has come to an end. One must first decide what is life. Is it that which I see in the others as it begins and stops, or is it what I know in myself? If it is what I know in myself, then it is the only thing that is and therefore it can not be destroyed. And the fact that in bodies before me processes end which are connected with life in me and in other beings, shows me only this, that life goes away somewhere from my sensual eyes. To go away entirely, to be destroyed, it absolutely can not be, because outside of it there is nothing in the world. The problem, then, might be this: Will my life be destroyed, can it be destroyed? And the destruction of the body of a man, is that a sign of the destruction of his life? In order to answer this question one must first decide what is life?

Life is the consciousness of my separateness from other beings, of the existence of other beings and of those limits which separate me from them. My life is not bound up with my body. There may be a body, but no consciousness of separateness like for a sleeping one, an idiot, an embryo or for those who have fits.

It is true that there can be no life without the consciousness of the body; but that is because life is the consciousness of one’s own separateness and of one’s own boundaries. But the consciousness of one’s own separateness and of one’s own boundaries happens in our life in time and space, but it can happen in any other way and therefore the destruction of the body is not the sign of the destruction of life.

(Not clear and not what I want to say.)

Oct. 11. Y. P. If I live.

To-day October 20. Y. P. Morning.

I feel like writing down three things.

1) In a work of art the principal thing is the soul of the author. Therefore among medium productions the feminine ones are the better, the more interesting. A woman will push herself through now and then, speak out the most inner mysteries of her soul; and that is what is needed. You see what she really loves, although she pretends that she loves something else. When an author writes, we the readers place our ears to his breast and we listen and say, “Breathe. If you have rumblings, they will appear.” And women haven’t the capacity of hiding. Men have learned literary methods and you can no longer see him behind his manner, except that you know he is stupid. But what is in his soul, you don’t see.

(Not good; malicious.)

The 2nd thing I wanted to write was that yesterday, in blowing out my candle, I began to feel for matches and did not find them, and an uneasiness came over me. “And you are getting ready to die! What, then, are you also going to die with matches?” I said to myself. And I at once saw in the dark my real life and became calm.

What is this fear of the dark? Besides the fear at the incapability of meeting whatever accident might happen, it is the fear at the absence of the delusion of our most important sense, that of sight. It is fear before the contemplation of our true life. I now no longer have that fear – on the contrary, that which had been fear is now peace; there only has remained the habit of fear; but to the majority of people the fear is exactly of that which alone can give them peace.

The 3rd thing I wanted to write was that when a man is put in the necessity of choosing between an act which is clearly beneficial to others, but with the thwarting of the demands of conscience (the will of God), then the problem is only one of short-sightedness, because the man sees in the immediate future the good which will arise from his act, if he thwarts the will of God, but he does not see in the more remote future the other good, which is an infinite number of times greater, which will come from the abstention of this act and the fulfilment of the will of God. It is the same kind of thing that children do, destroying the general order of a house which is necessary for their own happiness, for the sake of the immediate pleasure of play.

The fact is that for the work of God and for man accomplishing the work of God, time does not exist. Man can not but represent to himself everything in time, and therefore in order to correctly judge of the importance of the work of God, he has to represent it to himself in the very remote future, even in infinite time. The fact, that I will not kill the murderer and will forgive him, that I shall die unseen by any one, fulfilling the will of God, will bear its own fruit … if I insist upon thinking in terms of time – in infinite time. But it will bear its fruit surely.

I have to finish the former:

4) Refinement and power in art are almost always diametrically opposed.

5) Is it true that works of art are obtained by assiduous work? That which we call a work of art – yes. But is it real art?

6) The Japanese sang and we could not restrain ourselves from laughter. If we had sung before the Japanese they would have laughed. The more so had Beethoven been played for them. Indian and Greek temples are understood by all. And Greek statues are understood by all. And our best painting is also understandable. So that architecture, sculpture, painting, having reached their perfection, have reached also cosmopolitanism, accessibility to all. To the same point in some of its manifestations has the art of speech reached; in the teaching of Buddha, of Christ, in the poetry of Sakia-Muni, Jacob, Joseph. In dramatic art; Sophocles, Aristophanes did not reach it. It is being reached in the new ones. But in music they have been lagging behind entirely. The ideal of all art to which it should strive is accessibility to all – but it, especially music to-day, noses its way into refinement.

7) The principal thing which I wanted to say about art, is that it does not exist in the sense of some great manifestation of the human spirit as it is understood now. There is play, consisting in the beauty of construction, in sculpting figures, or in representing objects, in dancing, in singing, in playing on various instruments, in poetry, in fables, in stories, but all this is only play and 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 was a terrible day.

… At night I hardly slept and was depressed. I just now found the prescriptions¹⁴² in my diary, looked them over and began to feel better; to separate one’s true “self” from that which is offended and vexed, to remember that this is no hindrance, no accidental unpleasantness, but the very work predestined me, and above all to know that if I have a dislike for any one, then as long as there is that dislike in me – then I am the guilty one. And as soon as you know you are guilty, you feel better.