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

To-day, lying on the bed, I thought about love towards God … I wish I could say, the love of God, i.e., divine love – that the first and principal commandment is divine love, but that the other resembling it and flowing from it, especially flowing from it, is the love for neighbour.

Yesterday I wrote 18 pages of introduction to Art.¹⁴³

It is wrong to say of a work of art, “You don’t yet understand it.” If I don’t understand it, that means that the work of art is poor, because its task is in making understandable that which is not understandable.

November 6. Y. P. If I live.

November 6. Y. P.

Am alive. It is the third day that I continue to write on art. It seems to me it is good. At least I am writing willingly and easily.

… Have received a good letter from Vanderveer. Wrote another letter to the commander of the battalion in the Caucasus. Chertkov sent me his copy of a similar letter.

To-day I rode horseback to Tula. A marvellous day and night. I am just now going to take a walk to meet the girls.

Have been thinking.

1) Natural sciences, when they wish to determine the very essence of things, fall into a crude materialism, i.e., ignorance. Such, besides Descartes’ whirlwinds, are atoms and ether and the origin of species. All that I can say, is that it appears to me so, just as the heavenly vault appears round to me, while I know that it is not round and that it appears to me so, only because my sight for all directions extends on only one radius.

2) The highest perfection of art is its cosmopolitanism. But on the contrary, with us at present it is becoming more and more specialised, if not according to nations, then according to classes.

3) The refinement of art and its strength are always in inverse proportion.

4) “Conservatism lies in this” … That is the way I have it noted, but further I can’t remember now.

5) Why is it pleasant to ride? Because it is the very emblem of life. Life – you ride.

I wanted to take a walk…

November 7. Y. P. If I live.

To-day November 12. Y. P.

I haven’t noted down anything during this time. I was writing the essay on Art. To-day a little on the Declaration of Faith. A weakness of thought and I am sad. One must learn to be satisfied with stupidity. If I do not love, at least not not to love. That, thank the Lord, I have attained.

November 16. Y. P. Morning.

I still work just as badly and am therefore depressed. The day after to-morrow I am going to Moscow, if God commands.¹⁴⁴

… In the meantime I received a strange letter from the Spaniard Zanini, with an offer of 22,000 francs for good works. I answered that I would like to use them for the Dukhobors. What is going to happen?¹⁴⁵ I wrote to Kuzminsky on Witte and Dragomirov¹⁴⁶ and the day before yesterday I wrote diligently all morning on War.¹⁴⁷ Something will come of it.

I am thinking continually about art and about the temptations or seductions which becloud the mind, and I see that art belongs to this class, but I do not know how to make it clear. This occupies me very, very much. I fall asleep and wake up with this thought, but up to now I have come to no conclusion.

The notes during this time about God and the future life are:

1) They say that God must be understood as a personality. In this lies great misunderstanding; personality is limitation. Man feels himself a personality, only because he comes in contact with other personalities. If man were only one, he would not be a personality. These two conceptions are mutually determined; the outer world, other beings, and the personality. If there were not a world of other beings, man would not feel himself, would not recognise himself as a personality; if man were not a personality he would not recognise the existence of other beings. And therefore man within this Universe is inconceivable otherwise than as a personality. But how can it be said of God, that He is a personality, that God is personal? In this lies the root of anthropomorphism.

Of God it only can be said what Moses and Mohammed said, that he is one, and one, not in that sense that there is no other or other gods (in relation to God there can be no notion of number and therefore it is even impossible to say of God that he is one (1 in the sense of a number), but in that sense that he is monocentric, that he is not a conception, but a being, that which the Greek Orthodox call a living God in opposition to a pantheistic God, i.e., a superior spiritual being living in everything. He is one in that sense that He is, like a being to whom one can address oneself, i.e., not exactly to pray, but that there is a relationship between me, something which is limited, a personality, and God – something inconceivable but existing.

The most inconceivable thing about God for us consists exactly in this, that we know Him as a one being, can know him in no other way, and at the same time it is impossible for us to understand a one being who fills up everything with himself. If God is not one, then He is scattered and He does not exist. If He is one, then we involuntarily represent him to ourselves in the shape of a personality and then He is no longer a higher being, no longer everything. But, however, in order to know God and to lean on Him one must understand Him as filling everything and at the same time as one.

2) I have been thinking how obviously mistaken is our conception of the future life in bodies either more or less similar to ours. Our bodies as we know them are nothing but the products of our outer six senses. How then can there be life for that spiritual being who is separated from his body – how can it be in that form which is determined and produced by that body through its senses?

November 17. Y. P. If I live.

November 17. Y. P.

Yesterday I hardly wrote anything.

… There is a fight in the papers over Repine’s¹⁴⁸ definition of art as amusement. How it fits into my work. The full significance of Art has still not been made clear. It is clear to me, and I can write and prove it, but not briefly and simply. I cannot bring it up to that point.

Yesterday there was a letter from Ivan Michailovich¹⁴⁹ and from the Dukhobors.

Amusement is all right, if the amusement is not corrupted, is honest, and if people do not suffer from that amusement. I have been thinking just now; the æsthetic is the expression of the ethical, i.e., in plain language; art expresses those feelings which the artist feels. If the feelings are good, lofty, then art will be good, lofty, and the reverse. If the artist is a moral man, then his art will be moral, and the reverse. (Nothing has come of this.)

I thought last night:

We rejoice over our technical achievements – steam, … phonographs. We are so pleased with these achievements that if any one were to tell us that these achievements are being attained by the loss of human lives we would shrug our shoulders and say, “We must try not to have this so; an 8-hour day, labour insurance, and so forth; but because several people perish, is no reason to renounce those achievements which we have attained.” I. e., Fiat mirrors, phonographs, etc., pereat several people.

It is but sufficient to admit this principle – and there will be no limit to cruelty, and it will be very easy to attain every kind of technical improvement. I had an acquaintance in Kazan who used to ride to his estate in Viatka, 130 versts away, in this fashion: he would buy a pair of horses at the market for 20 roubles (horses were very cheap) and would hitch them up and drive 130 versts to the place. Sometimes they would reach the place, and he would have the horses plus the cost of the journey. Sometimes they would not cover a part of the road and he would hire. But nevertheless it used to cost him cheaper than hiring stage horses. Even Swift proposed eating children. And that would have been very convenient. In New York, the railroad companies in the city crush several passers-by every year and do not change the crossings to make the disasters impossible, because the change would cost dearer than paying to the families of those crushed yearly. The same thing happens also in the technical improvements of our age. They are accomplished by human lives. But one has to value every human life – not to value it, but to place it above any value and to make improvements in a way that lives should not be lost and spoilt, and to stop every improvement if it harms human life.

November 18. If I live, then Moscow.

November 22. Moscow.

The fourth day in Moscow. Dissatisfied with myself. No work. Got tangled up in the article on art and have not moved forward.

… There were here; the Gorbunovs,¹⁵⁰ Boulanger,¹⁵¹ Dunaev. I called on Rusanov myself.¹⁵² Received a very good impression.

Read Plato; embryos of idealism.

I recalled two subjects which were very good:

1) A wife’s deception of her passionate, jealous husband; his suffering, his struggle and the enjoyment of forgiveness, and

2) A description of the oppression of the serfs and later the very same kind of oppression by land property, or rather by being deprived of it.

Just now Goldenweiser¹⁵³ played. One thing – a fantasy fugue:¹⁵⁴ an artificiality; studied, cold, pretentious; another – “Bigarrure” by Arensky;¹⁵⁵ sensual, artificial; and a third – a ballad by Chopin; sickly, nervous, not one or the other or the third can be of any use to the people.

The devil who has been sent to me is still with me, and tortures me.

November 23. Moscow. If I live.

To-day November 25. Moscow.

Am very weak. My stomach isn’t working. I am trying to write on art – but it doesn’t go. One thing is good; have found myself, my heart… A letter from Zanini with an offer of 31,500 francs.¹⁵⁶ Tischenko, a good novel on poverty.¹⁵⁷ It is now past two, am going for a walk.

To-day November 27. Moscow.

Very weak, poor in all respects. And feel as if I had only just now awakened. Have been thinking:

1) We are all in this life – workers placed at the work of saving our souls. It can be compared to keeping up the fire given from heaven and lighted on the hearth of my body. My work lies in this, to keep up and feed this fire in myself (not to spend the material of this fire as I have done lately, except in burning it) and not to think how and what gets lighted from this fire. It is not a difficult matter to thresh with several flails, but to keep in order, not to get confused (and not only to thresh, but not to interfere with the others), one has only to remember oneself, one’s own tempo while beating. But as soon as you have begun to think of others, to look at them, you get confused.

The same thing happens in life. Remember only yourself, your own work – and this work is one: to love, to enlarge love in yourself – not to think of others, of the consequences of your labour and the work of life will go on fruitfully, joyously. Just as soon as you begin to think of that which you are producing, about the results of your labour, just as soon as you begin to modify it in accordance with its results – your work becomes confused and ceases, and there comes the consciousness of the vanity of life. The master of life gave to each one of us separately such a labour, that the fulfilment of that labour is the most fruitful work. And He himself will use and guide this work, give it a place and a meaning. But as soon as I try to find and fix a place for it, and in accordance with this, to modify it then I become confused, see the vanity of labour and I despair. My task is to work and He already knows for what it is needed and will make use of it. “Man walks, God leads.” And the work is one; to enlarge love in oneself.

I am a self-moving saw or a living spade and its life consists in this, to keep its edge clean and sharp. And it will work well enough, and its work will be useful. To keep it sharp, and to sharpen and sharpen it all the time, that is to make oneself always kinder and kinder.

2) Once more I wrote to N that she is wrong in thinking that it is possible for one to renounce oneself from the exploit of living. Life is an exploit. And the principal thing is, that that very thing that pains us and seems to us to hinder us from fulfilling our work in life – is our very work in life. There is some circumstance, a condition in life which tortures you; poverty, illness, faithlessness of a husband, calumny, humiliation, – it suffices only to pity yourself and you become the unhappiest among the unhappy. And it suffices only to understand that this is the very work of life which you are called to do; to live in poverty, in illness, to forgive faithlessness, calumny, humiliation – and instead of depression and pain there is energy and joy.

3) Art becoming all the time more and more exclusive, satisfying continually a smaller and smaller circle of people, becoming more and more selfish, has gone crazy, since insanity is only selfishness reaching to its last degree. Art has reached the last degree of selfishness – and has gone out of its mind.

I have felt very badly and depressed these days. Father, help me to live with Thee, not to wander from Thy will.

November 28. Moscow. If I live.

To-day December 2. Moscow.

Five days have passed and very torturing ones. Everything is still the same.

… My feeling; I have discovered on myself a terrible putrefying sore. They had promised me to heal it and have bound it. The sore was so disgusting to me, it was so depressing for me to think that it was there, that I tried to forget it, to convince myself that it was not there. But some time has passed – they unbound the sore and though it was healing, nevertheless it was there. And it was torturingly painful to me and I began to reproach the doctor – and unjustly. That is my condition. The principal thing is the devil that has been sent me. Oh, this luxury, this richness, this absence of care about the material life! Like an over-fertilised soil. If they do not cultivate good plants on it, weeding it, cleaning everything around them, – it will become overgrown with horrible ugliness and will become terrible. But it is difficult – I am old and am almost unable to do it. Yesterday I walked, thought, suffered and prayed and it seems to me not in vain.

Yesterday I went to Princess Helen Sergeievna.¹⁵⁸ It was very pleasant. I still cannot work. I shall try to in a minute. I have written nothing in the note book. Letters from Koni,¹⁵⁹ from Mme. Kudriavtsev.¹⁶⁰ Yesterday the factory hands came and a new one, Medusov, I think.

Dec. 12. Moscow.

I have suffered much during these days and it seems I have advanced towards peace, towards the good – towards God. Am reading much on art. It is becoming clear. I am not even sitting down to write. Masha went away. The Chertkovs came.

To-day I wrote the appendix to The Appeal.¹⁶¹

Dec. 15. Moscow.

Now 2 o’clock in the morning. Have done nothing. My stomach ached. Am calm; have no desire to write.

… I have made some notes. I don’t write out everything. Something struck me forcibly – it is my clear consciousness of the weight of the oppressiveness from my personality, from the fact that I am I. This gives me joy because it means that I understood, that I recognised as myself, at least partly, a “self” that was not personal.

December 16, Moscow. If I live.

To-day December 19 or 20.

Five days have passed and I feel the oppressiveness, the weight of my body and therefore the consciousness of the existence of that which is not the body has strengthened terribly. I want to throw off this weight, free myself from these chains and nevertheless I feel them. I am sick of my body.

All this time I have not worked at all and I feel heavy melancholy. I am fighting against it by seeking in my life a task which is beyond this life. There is only one such: an approach to the perfection of God, to love. Yesterday it became so clear to me that life here is nothing else than a manifestation in these forms of the greatest perfection of God. “To live an age and unto the night” – that is in terms of time. To live for a universal life and for this one – that is in terms of space.

I have done nothing during this time and am unable to. I am living badly.

I have noted a few trifles on Art:

1) They bring as a proof that art is good, the fact that it produces a great impression on you. Yes, but who are you? On the decadents, their works produce a great impression on them. You say that they are spoilt. But Beethoven, who does not produce an impression on the working man, produces such an impression on you, only because you are spoilt. Who then is right? What music is beyond question as to its value? That kind which produces as impression on a decadent and on you and on the working man; simple, understandable, popular music.

2) What relief all would feel who are locked up in a concert-room listening to Beethoven’s last works, if a jig or a cherdash or something similar would be played for them.

3) N. was here and said that he recognised only sensation, that man himself, the “self” was only a sensation. Sensation receives sensation. He reached this nonsense because of the scientific method; the limiting of the field of research, the non-recognition of anything else than sensation, is very good and profitable for the practical ends of the science of experimental psychology, but it is good-for-nothing as far as a living universal point of view is concerned. And this error is often made by people; they transfer to life the method which is suitable to science.

4) Nothing so confuses the conception of art as the acceptance of authorities. Instead of determining by a clear concise conception of art whether the works of Sophocles, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven, Bach, Raphael, Michael-Angelo, come up to the conception of good art and exactly how they do so, they determine by the existing works of the recognised great artists, art itself and its laws. But, however, there are many works of noted artists which are below every criticism and there are many false reputations, accidentally won fame; Dante, Shakespeare.

5) I am reading the history of music:¹⁶² out of sixteen chapters on artificial music there is one short chapter on popular music. And they know almost nothing about it. So that the history of music is not the history of how real music was born and spread and developed; the music of melodies – but the history of artificial music, i.e., how real melodious music was distorted.

6) Artificial, master-class music, the music of parasites, feeling its own impotence, its own hollowness, takes recourse, in order to replace real interest by artificiality, now to counterpoint, to the fugue, now to opera, to illustration.

7) Church music is good, therefore, because it is understood by the masses. The undeniably good is only that which is understood by all. And therefore it is true, that the more understandable it is, the better.

8) The various characters expressed by art touch us only because in each one of us is the possibility of every possible character. (Forgot)

9) The history of music, like all history, is written on the plan to show how it has gradually reached that condition in which the thing is found about which the history is now being written. The present condition of music, or that about which the history is written, is supposed to be the highest. But what if it is not only a lower thing, but something entirely distorted, an accidental deviation towards distortion.

10) Belief in authorities causes the errors of authorities to be accepted as models.

11) They say that music strengthens the impression of words – in arias, songs. It isn’t true. Music gets ahead of impressions made by words, by heaven knows how far. An aria of Bach; what words can rival it at the time when it is being rendered? It is a different thing – the words by themselves. To whatever music you would place the Sermon on the Mount, the music would remain far behind, once you penetrated the words. “Crucifix” by Faure,¹⁶³ the music is pitiable compared to the words. They are two entirely different and incompatible feelings. In song they go along together only because the words give tone.

(Not exact. About this in another place.)

12) So vividly have I recalled Vasili Perfileev¹⁶⁴ and others, whom I saw in Moscow, and so clear did it become that, although they are dead, they still are.

13) The Scylla and Charybdis of artists; either understandable, but shallow, vulgar; or pseudo-lofty, original and incomprehensible.

14) The poetry of the people always reflected and not only reflected, predicted, prepared, popular movements; the Crusades, the Reformation. What could the poetry of our parasitical circle predict and prepare? – Love, debauchery; debauchery, love.

15) Popular poetry, music, art in general is exhausted, because all the talented have been won over by bribes to be buffoons to the rich and the titled; chamber music, opera, odes and¹⁶⁵ …

16) In all art, there exists the struggle between the Christian and the pagan. The Christian begins to conquer and the new wave of the 15th Century overflows, the Renaissance, and only now at the end of the 19th, the Christian rises again, and paganism in the shape of decadence having reached the highest degree of nonsense, is being destroyed.

17) Besides the fact that the most gifted of the people were won over by bribes into the camp of the parasites, the cause of the destruction of popular poetry and music were: at first the serfdom of the people and later the most important one – printing.

18) Chertkov said that around us there are four walls of the unknown; in front, the wall of the future, in back the wall of the past, to the right the wall of ignorance, of that which is taking place there where we are not, and the fourth wall, he says, is the ignorance of that which is going on in the soul of another. In my mind this is not so. The first three walls are as he says. One should not look through them. The less we look beyond them the better. But as to the fourth wall of the ignorance of that which is going on in the souls of other people, this wall we ought to break down with all our strength, striving for a fusion with the souls of other people. And the less we will look beyond those three other walls, the closer we will get to others in this respect.

19) After death in importance, and before death in time, there is nothing more important, more irrevocable, than marriage. And just as death is only good then when it is unavoidable, but every death on purpose is bad, so it is with marriage. Only then is marriage not evil, when it is not to be conquered.

20) Apostasy comes from a man professing what he professes not for himself, not for God, but for people. He betrays his professions, either because he has become convinced that more people, or better people according to his mind, do not profess the same thing as he, or because that which he did before, he did for human fame and now he wants to live for himself, before God.

21) If I believed in a personal God to whom one could turn to with questions, I would say, Why, for what has God made it so, that some, knowing the undoubted truth, burn wholly with its fire, while others do not want it, cannot understand or accept it, and even hate it.

It is now past one. The same weakness, but keen in spirit, when I remember the significance of the whole of life, and not only this one which I have lived through as Leo Nicholaievich (Tolstoi). Help me, Lord, to do always, everywhere Thy will, to be with Thee. But not my will, but Thine, be done.

December 21, Moscow, if I live.

I am still writing December the 20th, Moscow.

Still the same depression. Father, help me. Relieve me. Strengthen Thyself in me, vanquish, drive forth, destroy, the foul flesh and all that I feel through it.

… Father, help me. Moreover, I feel better already. What is especially calming is the task, the test of humility, of humiliation, an entirely unexpected, exceptional humiliation. In chains, in a prison, one can pride oneself on one’s humiliation, but here it is only painful, unless one accepts it as a trial sent by God. Yes, learn to bear calmly, joyfully and to love.

December 21. Moscow.

I am learning badly. I continually suffer, helplessly, weakly. Only in rare moments do I rise to the consciousness of the whole of my life (not only this one) and my duties in it.

I thought (and felt): There are people lacking both in æsthetic feeling and in the ethical (especially the ethical), to whom it is impossible to instil that which is good – the less so when they do and love that which is bad, and think that the bad is good …

December 22, Moscow, if I live, which is getting to be very doubtful; my heart does not stop aching. Almost nothing gives me rest. To-day Posha alone refreshed me. It is so disgusting I want to cry over myself, over the remnant of my life which is being futilely ruined. But perhaps it must be so, yes, in fact, it must be so …

December 25, Moscow.

9 o’c. at night. Spiritually I feel better. But I have no intellectual, artistic work, and I am melancholy. Just now I felt that particular Christmas softening and gentleness, and poetical impulse. My hands are cold, I want to cry and to love …

December 26, Moscow.

I am still not writing anything, but I feel my thoughts revive. The devil still does not leave me.

I thought to-day about The Diary of a Mad Man.¹⁶⁶ The principal thing is that I have understood my filial relation to God, brotherhood, – and my attitude to the whole world has changed.