THE JOURNAL OF
LEO TOLSTOI
(First
Volume—1895–1899)
THE NEWEST BORZOI BOOKS
ASPHALT
By Orrick Johns
BACKWATER
By Dorothy Richardson
DANDELIONS
By Coulson T. Cade
CENTRAL EUROPE
By Friedrich Naumann
CRIMES OF CHARITY
By Konrad Bercovici
RUSSIA’S MESSAGE
By William English Walling
THE BOOK OF SELF
By James Oppenheim
THE BOOK OF CAMPING
By A. Hyatt Verrill
MODERN RUSSIAN HISTORY
By Alexander Kornilov
THE RUSSIAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING
By Alexandre Benois
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP
By William H. Davies
With a Preface by Bernard Shaw
THE JOURNAL OF
LEO TOLSTOI
(First
Volume—1895–1899)
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN
By ROSE STRUNSKY
ALFRED A. KNOPF
NEW YORK · MCMXVII
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The ultimate meaning of the Russian Revolution which took place
in March, 1917, can be best understood through the pages of the
Journal of Leo Tolstoi which is here printed. The spiritual qualities
which make up the mind and personality of Tolstoi are the spiritual
qualities which make up the new era among men which is being waged
so painfully and so uncompromisingly at the present moment on the
soil of Russia. One holds the key to the other, for no land but
Russia could have produced a Tolstoi, and in no land but Russia
could Tolstoi have been so embraced and so absorbed.
They are both flesh of each other’s flesh, and I place them equally
in greatness against each other. Great and wonderful as is the
Russian people, so Tolstoi was as great and wonderful as the Russian
people. I say this knowing well the pain and impatience both felt
for each other in the long eighty-two years of Tolstoi’s life here,
but it was the pain and the impatience of great love and infinite
understanding, of feeling and knowing each other’s pulse-beats,
and not the misunderstanding of strangers. It was the wise father
doubting
the impatient methods of his children; it was the ardent
children desiring and struggling to accomplish the wishes of the
father and being lost in the maelstrom of an insistent reality.
The youth went faster than the father, and yet so infinite and
universal were the words of the latter that when the last summings-up
are made both stand together in total harmony and agreement. Tolstoi
at thirty took no part in the great educational agrarian movement of
the latter Fifties, and even had a fine scorn for their exponents
which did not leave him in his later years—witness the phrase against
Herzen and Chernishevsky, “raised to great men,” he said, “and who
ought to be grateful to the government and the censorship, without
which they would have been the most unnoticed of sketch-writers.”
And yet it was Herzen and Chernishevsky and Dobrolubov, these
“sketch-writers,” who kept up the fire of agrarian reform and who
practically forced the issue upon Alexander II. Tolstoi ignored the
whole revolutionary movement of that time; even more than ignored it;
threw himself seemingly into the opposite camp, leading the life of
a gay fêted hero returned from the Crimean War. But his Morning of
a Landed Proprietor shows that he was thinking deeply even at that
time of the social problems around him, only he was thinking more
slowly than the rest. He was just
waking
up to the fact that the
peasant conditions needed improvement, at the time when all around
him the youth had passed to the idea that it was not an improvement
that they needed, but an absolute change in the fundamental ideas of
property. It took him forty years to say, that you might as well ask
him how to make use of the ownership, or the labour or the rent of
a bonded slave as to ask him for advice as to the problem of owning
of land. Here was no reformer speaking, but one who was united with
the revolutionary thought around him.
But when the men of the Sixties were making that answer for
themselves, and had won the first great step toward the change—the
abolition of serfdom—Tolstoi was away altogether from his native
land writing that great epoch of the War of 1812—War and Peace.
It was because this great soul was undogmatic, and reached out into
the world not by mass thinking, but marvellously enough entirely
by himself, laying his roots far and deep, that he seemed so slow
moving. Yet it was the direction and the end that counted, and the
end finds him, like the race between the tortoise and the hare—that
he is still ahead.
Even Russia will have far and long to travel to come to that kingdom
of God on earth, to that conception of the manifestation of the
will of God on earth, which is the spiritual ideal of
Tolstoi, and
toward which, express it in any materialistic or naturalistic terms
it may, the Russian nation has with one mind been working with such
marvellous self-consciousness.
Again, after the emancipation of the serfs, Tolstoi seemed to fail
the New Russia, interesting himself only at this moment with the
education of the youth and the need of reform—ever the need of
reform, when already for over a decade the cry of Russia was for new
forms entirely, new land arrangements, new relations between man
and man, and man and his property. The time had come, they said,
for the Will of the People to be made manifest.
But before Tolstoi could decide on that, he had to decide on a more
fundamental problem of what his relation was to God, as well as what
his relation was to man. In other words, what were the true spiritual
relations between man and man, not only the economic, political and
social ones. And it is this attempt to solve the real fundamental
meaning to all relationship, the very reason for the youth’s outbursts
against the economic, political and social injustices that existed,
that kept him moving forward so slowly. For he moved whole worlds
at a step.
The only reason for life, he said, is the universal desire for well
being, which in man, whose reason has awakened, is expanded into
a desire
for universal welfare; in other words, for love. For he
knows that he is not a separate being, but a part of a whole, and
therefore it is meaningless to think that he can obtain anything
for himself alone. It is only in struggling and attaining for the
Whole that he can find his true life.
The Russian youth agreed with him entirely. To their logic, the
struggle for universal welfare led to terrorism; to Tolstoi, to the
absolute non-resistance to evil by violence. The youth said the will
of God is being thwarted by a band of oppressors. If we do away with
the oppressors we can get together in mutual love. Tolstoi said that
he who thinks he can violate the will of God for an immediate good
is only short-sighted. Never at any moment can the will of God be
thwarted and the good attained.
For a while the Russian Government rather approved of the Tolstoyan
attitude of non-resistance to evil. The one who used the greatest
amount of violence and evil of all, was pleased to meet the philosophy
which advised non-resistance to it. But Tolstoi grew and travelled
in his long years and he had to change his conclusions, so that
his logic led him to that most self-conscious and difficult of
all revolutionary movements, passive-resistance. Take no part in
violence, he said; therefore, pay no taxes that support a government
which violates, and do not serve in the
army
which is an act of
violence in itself. It was then that Tolstoi was looked upon with
askance by the Russian authorities and formerly anathematised from
the church. It was to his followers that the more drastic punishment
of imprisonment and exile was meted out.
Toward the latter years of his life, his great human heart could
not remain quite closed to the violence around him, and religious
thinker that he was, he had to stop his meditations to cry out
against the Kishineff massacres of the Jews and against the raising
of the scaffolds and the tying of the “Stolypine’s neck-ties,” that
most telling nick-name of the Russian people for the noose, which
was tied even for school children on the crossroads of Russia after
the bitter failure of the revolution of 1905.
It was only in What Is Art? that the Russian people and Tolstoi
were unanimously at one. Art is to serve the people, to be of the
people, to be something understandable by all people. There were to
be no dogmas for art, no German metaphysics for art. It was merely
the means of expressing to his neighbour the mysteries that went on
in the soul of the artist. There was no quarrel here between his
fellow countrymen and the great thinker. Everything was to be for
the people; the spiritual manifestations of life as well as the
material.
How to make clear that for all this seeming lack of harmony, there
existed the greatest bond of all between this teacher and his
children. Thousands in Russia took his life as an example and left
the vainglories of the city with all its false standards and went
to live among the people. They went not only to serve them but to
be one of them, to live by the sweat of their brow as the masses
did, because it was the only moral thing to do, and because the
greatest happiness lay in the spiritual values of life, and because,
as Tolstoi himself says, “It is good with them, but with us it is
shameful.”
I remember so well the deep-set eyes and the long shaggy eyebrows
of that all-knowing seer, as he sat on the veranda of his home in
Yasnaya Polyana one May afternoon in 1906, and told us that he was a
religious thinker and not a political one but that to his mind the
revolution in Russia would take fifty years to develop. And with
that fine scorn for parliamentarism which would have rejoiced the
heart of any syndicalist, he added that that which we were witnessing
now, the assembling of the first Duma, was only the first scene of
the first act of a five act drama and it was high comedy!
The second scene followed soon and turned out to be bitter tragedy,
and before it was quite over Tolstoi wandered off on that last
pilgrimage which ended in the little railway station of
Ostopova.
He succumbed at last to that “temptation” he speaks of so freely in
his Journal, to leave his home conditions, negate himself entirely,
and find himself again, merged and at one with the Whole. And the
Great Deliverer came and offered him even a greater fusion with all,
giving him that “other post,” the “new appointment” he so ardently
prayed for in life. When that happened he became at once clear and
lucid even to those nearest him—who had criticised him the most.
The Russian youth was disconsolate. Our spiritual guide is gone,
they cried. Who will hold up the candle for us now? What black night
is there in the world, and how to grope our way in it alone!
How lonely it was without that spiritual guide!
The first act of the March Revolution was to redecorate the grave
of Tolstoi in the forest of Zakaz, to make the sacred pilgrimage to
his resting place and tell the father of the good news—the will of
God is being established, reason is awakened in man. Love toward
neighbour; nay, the greatest of all, love toward enemies, is being
accomplished.
It is with a feeling of reverence that I bring this gift of the inner
soul of Tolstoi to the English-speaking public. The very formlessness
of the phrases of this Journal helps toward a sincerity of thought
which shows itself pure by
its
nakedness. Tolstoi himself knew the
value of these documents, for one man was to him as another, and
the sincere gropings of a man’s reason toward the understanding of
the meaning of life was of value even if they were his own, and
especially if they were of one who had lived much and thought much
as he did. “It is especially disagreeable to me,” he writes, “when
people who have lived little and thought little do not believe me,
and, not understanding me, argue with me about moral problems. It
would be the same for which a veterinary surgeon would be hurt if
people who were not familiar with his art would argue with him.”
And Tolstoi knew that he knew his art, he knew consciously, since
the spiritual awakening that came to him in the Eighties, the great
mission to which he dedicated his life—to find a moral justification
of living—and it is therefore that he laid special stress in the
disposal of these documents for the public after his death. The
volume here printed is only four years of over sixty years of Journal
which he kept since his early twenties. They are published first,
because it is only with the Journal beginning 1890 that his editor
and friend, V. G. Chertkov, has the copied manuscripts in their
entirety—from that date up to Tolstoi’s death in 1910.
Over and over again in his life, Tolstoi attempted to make special
and legal provision for
his journals and notebooks, as he calls
them, that they be given and spread free to the public, and he
designated his friend and follower, who has edited and published
this volume in Russian, as the practical inheritor and executor of
these manuscripts. He was to publish them in their entirety, except
for certain revisions so that there should be preserved, as Tolstoi
expressed it, that which ought to be preserved and there should be
thrown out that which ought to be thrown out.
“I know,” he wrote to Chertkov, February 8, 1900, “that no one
bears such an esteem, respect and love for my spiritual life and
its expression as you do. I always said it and now I write it in my
notes which express my wishes after my death, asking you especially,
and only you, to undertake the revision of my papers.”
This Chertkov has done exceedingly well in the original Russian
edition, giving in double brackets the number of the words he left
out, which seemed to him necessary on account of their too intimate
character. These places I have merely indicated by three points.
Unfortunately the Russian volume was printed under the old régime and
deletions had to be made on account of the censor, which, because of
the difficulty of communication during the war, it was impossible
to fill in. These places are also designated in this volume by
three points, but in the Russian
edition they are given in double
parenthesis, also enclosing the number of the words left out. So
that a record of all omissions have been kept.
The problem of disposing of these documents after his death according
to his principles against copyrights, occupied Tolstoi for many
years. The Russian law nullified any such disposal of property,
for legally the inheritor had to be a fixed person “and works to
be disposed of free to all” meant nothing. He therefore wrote many
wills, defining and modifying his position in all possible ways so
that his ideas might be carried out, and in such a form that they
could not be frustrated by any one.
His plans were threefold:
1. That all his works written after 1881 as well as all his writings
written before that year (the year that marks his spiritual
regeneration) but not published until later or not published at all
up to his death, should be no one’s property, but be given free to
the public for printing and translation.
2. That all his manuscripts and documents (among that number the
journals, first drafts of books, letters, etc.,) which would remain
after his death should be given over to V. G. Chertkov, who was to
revise them and arrange them in suitable form for publication.
3. That the estate of Yasnaya Polyana should be given over to the
peasants.
Tolstoi’s first idea was that Chertkov should be one of the legal
inheritors, together with the Countess Tolstoi, his wife. But
Chertkov refused for various personal reasons, he says, but mainly
because he thought that the arrangement for the transfer of property
could be best facilitated and could be more delicately managed if
some one member of the Tolstoi family was designated instead of an
outsider. Tolstoi, therefore, designated as his legal inheritor his
youngest daughter Alexandra, who stood in close sympathy with him
in his spiritual ideas, and, in case of her death before his own,
his eldest daughter Tatiana. He hoped that his daughters, together
with the Countess Tolstoi, would fulfil his requests concerning the
disposal of his posthumous documents and the gift of the estate
according to his wishes.
After Tolstoi’s death the estate was given to the peasants by means
of the sale of most of the posthumous documents which enabled his
daughter Alexandra to buy back the estate from the family and give
it to the peasants as directed by Tolstoi, but in the matter of
the journals it was more difficult to arrange from the fact that
the Countess Tolstoi placed all these journals and notebooks in
the Moscow Historical Museum on the ground that they were a gift
of Tolstoi to
her during his lifetime and that therefore she had
a right to dispose of them as she thought best. The matter would
have taken only a legal process in the court to disentangle, a thing
which the Countess Alexandra Tolstoi did not wish to undertake as
being against the spirit of her father to use legal force to come
to an agreement.
Chertkov, therefore, was forced to use only such copies of the
original journals and notebooks which he happened to have in his
possession. The present volume is made from a copy done by the hands
of the Prince and Princess Obolensky, the son-in-law and daughter
of Tolstoi, who also stood very near to Tolstoi spiritually, were
conscientious in their fulfilment of such tasks for him, and who
knew his handwriting very well. The original documents are still in
the Moscow Historical Museum, but Chertkov has promised to publish
the volumes and journals which he has from the years 1900 to 1910,
and has already brought out a second volume of this series, which
dates from Tolstoi’s early years in the twenties.
Whatever value this volume has as a historical and exact transcript
of Tolstoi’s original jottings-down as they came to him, it has much
more value as a transcript of the thoughts of a great Russian which
have so permeated his people that they are now being rewritten on the
pages of Russian
history. It is because the blood of his brother
calls to him from under the ground, that the Russian has undertaken
to advance one step nearer to the fulfilment of the great law—to
live together in harmony, to serve his brother and to do the one
work—which is the one work for all, to love.
The hundred-years readiness for sacrifice for the common good, the
willingness to go to exile and death of four generations of men and
women, the red flag now flying over the Winter Palace in Petrograd
with the letters of gold, “Proletarians of all Nation Unite,” the
insistent call to the peoples of the world to overthrow all oppressors
and live together in mutual harmony, the trumpet calls of a democracy
whose tones are so strange and new, that we across the borders seem
not to hear or understand them, all have their spiritual counterpart
in the pages of this book. It is Russia that speaks here.
I must give my thanks to Mr. Alexander
Gourevich who so carefully
compared the original text and English translation, and to Mr. Joseph
Peroshnikoff who patiently
revised the notes and assisted in the
compilation of the index.
Rose Strunsky.
New York, May, 1917.
- Introduction—Rose Strunsky,
v
- Journal, 3
- 1896, January,
19
- “
February,
21
- “
March,
29
- “
May,
31
- “
June,
56
- “
July,
61
- “
September,
70
- “
October,
74
- “
November,
87
- “
December,
99
- 1897, January,
113
- “
February,
117
- “
March,
134
- “
April,
137
- “
May,
139
- “
July,
140
- “
August,
144
- “
September,
148
- “
October,
150
- “
November,
163
- “
December,
177
- 1898, January,
193
- “
February,
199
- “
March,
210
- “
April,
219
- “
May,
226
- “
June,
232
- “
July,
243
- “
August,
246
- “
November,
256
- Explanatory Notes to Text,
by V. G. Chertkov, 299
- A short Sketch of the Life of Tolstoi
at the End of the Nineties, by C. Shokor-Trotsky, 387
- Index, 409
THE JOURNAL OF
LEO TOLSTOI
October–December 1895
THE JOURNAL OF
LEO TOLSTOI
I
continue[1][A] October 28. Yasnaya Polyana.
Have been thinking:
Have been thinking one thing: that this life which we see around us
is a movement of matter according to fixed, well-known laws; but
that in us we feel the presence of an altogether different law,
having nothing in common with the others and requiring from us the
fulfilment of its demands. It can be said that we see and recognise
all the other laws only because we have in us this law. If we did
not recognise this law, we would not recognise the others.
This law is different from all the rest, principally in this, that
those other laws are outside of us and forces us to obey them; but
this law is in us—and more than in us; it is our very selves and
therefore it does not force us when we obey it, but on the contrary
frees us, because in following it we become ourselves. And for this
reason we are
drawn to fulfil this law and we sooner or later will
inevitably fulfil it. In this then consists the freedom of the will.
This freedom consists in this, that we should recognise that which
is—namely that this inner law is ourselves.
This inner law is what we call reason, conscience, love, the good,
God. These words have different meanings, but all from different
angles mean one and the same thing. In our understanding of this inner
law, the son of God, consists indeed the essence of the Christian
doctrine.
The world can be looked upon in this way: a world exists governed by
certain, well-known laws, and within this world are beings subject to
the same laws, but who at the same time bear in themselves another
law not in accord with the former laws of the world, a higher law,
and this law must inevitably triumph within these beings and defeat
the lower law. And in this struggle and in the gradual victory of
the higher law over the lower, in this only is life for man and the
whole world.
Oct. 29. Yasnaya Polyana.
If I live.[2]
Nov. 5.
Y. P.
I have skipped 6 days. It seems to me, I thought little during this
time: I wrote a little, chopped wood and was indisposed—but lived
through much. I lived through much, because
in fulfilling a promise
to S.[3], I read through all my journals for the past seven years.
It seems to me, I am approaching a simple and clear expression of that
by which I live. How good that I didn’t finish the Catechism![4] I
think I shall write it differently and better, if the Father wishes
it. I understand why it is impossible to say it quickly. If it could
be said all at once, by what then would we live in the realm of
thought? It will never be given me to go farther than this task.
I just took a walk and understood clearly why I can’t make
Resurrection go better: it was begun falsely. I understood this in
thinking over again the story: Who is Right?[5]
(about children).
I understood that one must begin with the life of the peasants, that
they are the subject, they are positive, but that the other thing
is shadow, the other thing is negative. And I understood the same
thing about Resurrection. One must begin with her.[6] I want to
begin immediately.
During this time there were letters: from Kenworthy,[7]
a beautiful
one from Shkarvan,[8] and from a Dukhobor in Tiflis.[9]
Have written to no one for a long time. General indisposition and no
energy. The stage manager and the decorator[10]
were here, students
from Kharkov against whom I think I did not sin, Ivan Ivanovich
Bochkarev,[11] Kolasha.[12]...
Nov. 6. Y. P. If I live.
November 7. Y. P.
I wrote a little these two days on the new Resurrection. My
conscience hurts when I remember how trivially I began it. So far,
I rejoice when I think of the work as I am beginning it.
I chopped a little. I went to Ovsiannikovo, had a good talk with
Maria Alexandrovna[13] and Ivan
Ivanovich.[14] Waltz’s assistant
was here and a Frenchman with a poem....
November 8, 9. Y. P.
Have written little on Resurrection. I was not disappointed, but
I was weak.
Yesterday Dunaev[15]
came. Chopped much yesterday, overtired myself.
To-day I walked. I went to Constantine
Bieli’s.[16] He is very much
to be pitied. Then I walked in the village. It is good with them,
but with us it is shameful. Wrote letters. Wrote to Bazhenov[17]
and three others. Thought:
1) The confirmation of the fact, that reason liberates the latent love
in man for justice is the proverb, “Comprendre
c’est tout pardoner.”
If you forgive a man, you will love him. To forgive means to cease
to condemn and to hate.
2) If a man believes something at the word of another, he will lose
his belief in that which
he would have inevitably believed in, had
he not trusted the other one. He who believes in ... etc., ceases
to believe in reason. They even say straight out, one ought not to
believe in reason.
3) ...
A very interesting letter from Holland, about what a youth is to do
who is called to military service, when he is the sole supporter of
his mother.[18]
November 10. Y. P.
Slept with difficulty. Weakness both physical and intellectual
and—for which I am at fault—also moral. Rode horseback. Posha[19]
arrived.... A wonderful French pamphlet about war.[20]
Yes, 20 years
are needed for that thought to become a general one. My head aches
and seems to crackle and rumble. Father, help me when I am most weak
that I may not fall morally. It is possible.
Nov. 11. Y. P. If I live.
I write and think: it is possible that I won’t be. Every day I make
attempts, and I get more accustomed to it.
To-day November 15.
I have been so weak all the time I could write nothing except a
few letters. A letter to Shkarvan.
There have been here, Dunaiev,
Posha, Maria Vasilievna.[21] They left yesterday. Yesterday also I
went to see Maria Alexandrovna; she is ill. To-day Aunt Tanya[22]
and Sonya came.
I didn’t sleep at night and therefore didn’t work. But I wrote on
the girl Konefsky[23]
and a little in my journal. I am reading
Schopenhauer’s[24] “Aphorisms.” Very good. Only put “The service
of God” instead of “The recognition of the vanity of life,” and we
agree.
Now 2 o’clock, I shall write out later what I have noted
down.[25]
December 7. Moscow.
Almost a month since I have made any entries. During this time
we moved to Moscow. The weakness has passed a little, and I am
working earnestly, though with little success, on the Declaration
of Faith.[26] Yesterday I wrote a little article on
whipping.[27] I
lay down to sleep in the day and had just dozed off—I felt as if
some one jerked me; I got up, began to think about whipping, and
wrote it out.
During this time, I went to the theatre[28] for the rehearsals of
the Power of Darkness. Art, beginning as a game, has continued to
be the toy of adults. This is also proved by music, of which I have
heard much. It is ineffectual. On the contrary, it detracts when
there is ascribed to it
the unsuitable meaning which is ascribed
to it. Realism, moreover, weakens its significance ...
N. refused to serve in the military. I called on him.[29]
Philosophov[30] died.... Wrote several worthless letters.
I have thought during this time much—in meaning. Much of it I could
not understand and have forgotten.
1) I have often wanted to suffer, wanted persecution. That means
that I was lazy and didn’t want to work, so that others should work
for me, torturing me, and I should only suffer.
2) It is terrible, the perversions ... of the mind to which men
expose children for their own purposes during the time of their
education. The rule of conscious materialism is only explained by
this. The child is instilled with such nonsense that afterwards the
materialistic, limited, false conception, which is not developed
to the conclusions which would show its falsity, appears like an
enormous conquest of the intellect.
3) I made a note, “Violence frees,” and it was something very clear
and important, and now I don’t remember what it was at all.
I have remembered. December 23. Violence
is a temptation because it
frees us from the strain of attention, from the work of reasoning:
one must labour to undo a knot; to cut it, is shorter.
4) A usual perversion of reason, which is made through a violently
enforced faith, is to make men satisfied either with idolatry or with
materialism, which at bottom is one and the same thing. Faith in the
reality of our conceptions is faith in an idol, and the consequences
are the same; one must bring sacrifices to it.
5) I can imagine consciousness transferred to the life of the spirit
to such a degree that the sufferings of the body would be met gladly.
6) A beautiful woman smiles, and we think that because she smiles
she says something good and true when she smiles. But often the
smile seasons something entirely foul.
7) Education. It is worth while occupying oneself with education, in
order to find out all one’s shortcomings. Seeing them, you will begin
to correct them. But to correct oneself is indeed the best method
of education for one’s children and for others’ and for grown-up
people.
Just now I read a letter from Shkarvan[31] that medical help does
not appear to him like a boon, that the lengthening of many empty
lives for many hundred years is much less important to him than the
weakest blowing, as he writes, (a puff) on the spark of divine
love in the heart of another. Here then in this blowing, lies the
whole art of education. But to kindle it in others, one must kindle
it in oneself.
8) To love means to desire that which the beloved object desires.
The objects of love desire opposing things, and therefore, we can
only love that which desires one and the same thing. But that which
desires one and the same thing is God.
9) Man beginning to live, loves only himself, and separates himself
from other beings in that he constantly loves that which alone
constitutes his being. But as soon as he recognises himself as a
separate being, he recognises also his own love, and he is no longer
content with this love for himself and he begins to love other
beings. And the more he lives a conscious life, the greater and
greater number of beings he will begin to love, though not with such
a stable and unceasing love as that with which he loves himself, but
nevertheless, in such a way that he wishes good to everything he
loves, and he rejoices at this good, and suffers at the evil which
tries the beloved beings, and he unites into one all that he loves.
As life is love, why not suppose that my “self,” that which I consider
to be myself and love with a special love, is perhaps the union I
made in a former life of things which I loved, just as I am making
a union of things now. The other has already taken place and this
one is taking place.
Life is the enlargement of love, the widening of its borders, and
this widening is going on in
various lives. In the present life,
this widening appears to me in the form of love. This widening is
necessary for my inner life and it is also necessary for the life of
this world. But my life can manifest itself not only in this form.
It manifests itself in an innumerable quantity of forms. Only this
one is apparent to me.
But in the meantime, the movement of life understood by me in this
world, through the enlargement of love in myself and through the union
of beings through love, produces at the same time other effects, one
or many, unseen by me. As for instance, I put together 8 toy cubes
to make a picture on one side of them, not seeing the other sides
of the constructed cubes, but on the other sides are being formed
pictures just as regular, though unseen by me.
(All this was very clear when it came into my head, and now I have
forgotten everything and the result is nonsense.)
10) I have thought much about God, about the essence of my life, and
it seemed I only doubted one and the other and believed in my own
conclusions; and then, one time, not long ago, I simply had the desire
to lean upon my faith in God and in the indestructibility of my soul,
and to my astonishment I felt so firm and calm a confidence, as I
have never felt before. So that all my doubts and scrutinisings have
evidently, not only
not weakened my faith, but have strengthened
it to an enormous degree.
11) Reason is not given that we should recognise what we ought to
love; this it won’t disclose; but only for this: to show what we
ought not to love.
12) As in each piece of handiwork, the principal art lies not in the
regular making of certain things anew, but in the ever bettering of
the inevitable faults of a wrong and ruined work, so even in the
business of life, the principal wisdom is not how to begin to act
and how to lead life correctly, but how to better faults, how to
liberate oneself from errors and seductions.
13) Happiness is the satisfaction of the requirements of a man’s
being living from birth to death in this world only; but the good is
the satisfaction of the requirements of the eternal essence living
in man.
14) The essence of the teachings of Christ consists in this, that
man ought to know who he is; that he should understand, like a bird
which does not use its wings and runs on the land, that he is not a
mortal animal, dependent on the conditions of the world, but like a
bird which has understood that it has wings and has faith in them, he
should understand that he himself was never born and never died and
always is, and passes through this world in one of the innumerable
forms of
life to fulfil the will of Him who sent him into this life.
Dec. 8.
Moscow. If I live.
Mascha[32] is with Ilia,[33] a loving letter from her to-day.
