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.[134]

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.[135] 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.[136] 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.[137] 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;[138] how is he living now, what is he thinking, feeling. Of Kolichka,[139] 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.[140] 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 prescriptions[141] 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.

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.[142]

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.[143]

... 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?[144] I wrote to Kuzminsky on Witte and Dragomirov[145] and the day before yesterday I wrote diligently all morning on War.[146] 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’s[147] 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 Michailovich[148] 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,[149] Boulanger,[150] Dunaev. I called on Rusanov myself.[151] 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 Goldenweiser[152] played. One thing—a fantasy fugue:[153] an artificiality; studied, cold, pretentious; another—“Bigarrure” by Arensky;[154] 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.[155] Tischenko, a good novel on poverty.[156] 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.[157] 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,[158] from Mme. Kudriavtsev.[159] 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.[160]

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:[161] 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,[162] 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 Perfileev[163] 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 and[164] ...

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.[165] The principal thing is that I have understood my filial relation to God, brotherhood,—and my attitude to the whole world has changed.

Jan. 5, Moscow.

There is still nothing good to write about myself. I feel no need of working and the devil does not leave me. Have been ill for about 6 days.

Began to reread Resurrection and reached up to his decision to marry and threw it away with disgust. It is all untrue, invented, weak. It is hard to repair a spoiled thing. In order to repair it, there is necessary: 1) alternately to describe his feeling and life, and hers,[166] and 2) sympathetically and seriously hers, and critically and with a smile, his. I shall hardly finish it. It is all very spoilt.

Yesterday I read Arkhangelsky’s[167] article “Whom to Serve” and was very delighted.

Have finished the notebook. And here I am writing from it:

1) My article on ... must be written for the people ...

2) (For The Notes of a Madman or for The Drama). Despair because of madness and wretchedness of life. Salvation from this despair in the recognition of God and one’s filiality to Him. The recognition of filiality is the recognition of brotherhood. The recognition of the brotherhood of man and the cruel, brutal, unbrotherly arrangement of life which is justified by people—leads inevitably to a recognition of one’s own insanity or that of the whole world.

3) I read Nakashidze’s[168] letter about the Congress of the Dukhobors, where they discussed social questions. Here is an instance of the possibility of administration without violence. One condition is necessary—no, two conditions: the respect of the youth and of the spiritually weak in general, to the resolutions of the elected elders, the spiritually stronger—the “little old men” as the Dukhobors call them; and the second condition that these “little old men” be rational and loving. At this Congress the question of uniting property (in common), was discussed and the “little old men” were in favour of it, but constantly repeated: “Only let there be no violence, let things be done voluntarily.”

Among the people and the Dukhobors this respect and recognition of the necessity of fulfilling the resolutions of the old men exist. And all this without forms; the election of the elders and the methods of agreement.

4) No matter how you grind a crystal, how you dissolve it, compress it, it will mould itself again at the first opportunity into the same form. And so the structure of society will be always the same, no matter to what changes you submit it. The form of a crystal will only then be changed when chemical changes occur in it, inner ones; the same with society.

5) It would be good to write a preface to Spier[169] containing the following:

The world is such as we see it, only if there do not exist any other beings differently built from us and endowed with other senses than ours. If we see not only the possibility, but the necessity, of the existence of other beings endowed with other senses than ours, then the world is in no case, merely such as we see it. Our imagination of the world shows only our attitude to the world, just as the visual picture which we form for ourselves from what we see as far as the horizon and the sky represents in no way the actual outlines of the objects seen. The other senses, hearing, smell, principally—touch, in verifying our visual impressions give us a more definite conception of the seen objects; but that which we know as broad, thick, hard or soft or how the things seen by us sound or smell, do not prove that we know these things fully and that if a new sense (above the five) were given us, it would not disclose to us that our conception of things formed by our five senses was not just as deceptive as that conception of the flatness of objects and their diminishing in perspective which sight only gives us.

I see a man in the mirror, hear his voice and am fully convinced that he is a real man; but I approach, I want to grasp his hand and I touch the glass of the mirror and see my delusion. The same thing must come to pass in a dying man; a new feeling is born which discloses to him (through his new feeling and the new knowledge it gives him) the delusion of recognising his body as himself, and of all that he recognised as existing through the means of the senses of this body.

So that the world is certainly not such as we know it to be: let there be other instruments of knowledge—and there will be another world.

But no matter how that which we consider as the world, our attitude to the world, should change—one thing is unalterably such as we know it and is always unchanging, it is that which knows. And it knows not only in me, but in everything which knows. This thing which knows is the same everywhere and in everything and in itself. It is God, and it is that for some reason limited particle of God which composes our actual “self.”

But what then, is this God, i. e., something eternal, infinite, omnipotent, which has become mortal, finite, weak? Why did God divide himself within himself? I do not know, but I know that this is so, and that in this is life. All that we know is nothing else than just such divisions of God. All that we know as the world is the knowledge of these divisions. Our knowledge of the world (that which we call matter in space and time) is the contact of the limits of our divinity with its other divisions. Birth and death are the transitions from one division into another.

6) The difference between Christian happiness and pagan is this, that the pagan seeks happiness, prepares it for himself, awaits it, demands it—the Christian seeks, prepares, awaits and demands the kingdom of God and accepts happiness when it comes as something unexpected, undeserved, unprepared. And it is no less.

Jan. 18. Moscow.

Dismal, horrid. Everything repels me in the life they lead around me. Now I free myself from sadness and suffering, then again I fall into it. In nothing is it so apparent, as in this, how far I am from what I want to be. If my life were really entirely in the service of God, there would be nothing which could disturb it.

I am still writing on art. It is bad. A Dukhobor was here.

Feb. 4. Nicholskoe with the Olsuphievs.

I am already here the 4th day and am inexpressibly sad. I am writing badly on art. I just now prayed and became horrified at how low I have fallen. I think, I ask myself, what am I to do; I doubt, I hesitate, as if I did not know or had forgotten who I was and therefore what I was to do. To remember that I am not master, but servant and to do that to which I have been put. With what labour have I struggled and attained this knowledge, how undoubted is this knowledge and how I can forget it nevertheless—not exactly forget it, but live without applying it.

... Well, enough about this.

I am going to write out what I thought during this time:

1) When all is said and done, it is those people over whom violence is used who always rule, i.e., those who fulfil the law of non-resistance. So women seek rights, but it is they who rule, just because they are the ones subjected to force—they were and they still are. Institutions are in the power of men, but public opinion is in the power of women. And public opinion is a million times stronger than any laws and armies. The proof that public opinion is in the hands of women is that not only the construction of homes, food, are determined by women, and not only do the women spend the wealth, consequently control the labour of men, but the success of works of art, of books, even the appointment of rulers, are determined by public opinion; and public opinion is determined by women. Some one well said that men must seek emancipation from women, and not the contrary.

2) (For The Appeal).[170] Unmask the deceivers, spread the truth and do not fear. If it were a matter of spreading deception and murder, then of course, it would be terrible, but here you would be spreading the freedom from deception and murder. Besides, there is no ground for fear. Of whom? They ... are themselves afraid.

I remember there worked for us in our village a weak and phlegmatic 12 year-old boy who once caught on the road and brought back, an enormous healthy peasant, a thief, who had taken a coat from the hall.

3) The poets, the verse-makers torture their tongues in order to be able to say every possible kind of thought in every possible variety of word and to be able to form from all these words something which resembles a thought. Such exercise can only be indulged in by unserious people. And so it is.

4) If we never moved, then everything which we saw would appear to us flat and not in perspective. Motion gives us a conception of things in three dimensions of space. The same thing is true concerning the material side of things: if we weren’t living, were not moving in life, we would see only the material side of things; but moving in life, moving our spiritual side across the material side of the world, we recognise the falseness of the idea that the material is actually such as it appears to us.

5) Twenty times I have repeated it, and 20 times the thought comes to me as new, that release from all excitement, fear, suffering, from physical and especially from spiritual, lies in destroying in one’s self the illusion of the union of one’s spiritual “self” with one’s physical. And this is always possible. When the illusion is destroyed then the spiritual “self” can suffer only from the fact that it is joined to the physical, but not from hunger, pain, sorrow, jealousy, shame, etc. In the first case, as long as it is joined it does that which the physical “self” wants: it gets angry, condemns, scolds, strikes; in the second case, when it is separated from the physical, it does only that which can free it from the torturing union. And only the manifestations of love frees it.

6) For the article on Art. When it is beauty that is recognised as the aim of art, then everything will be art which for certain people will appear as beauty, i.e., everything which will please certain people.

7) I have noted, “the harm of art, especially music” and I wanted to write that I had forgotten, but while I was writing, I remembered. The harm of art is principally this, that it takes up time, hiding from people their idleness. I know that it is harmful when it encourages idleness both for the producers and those who enjoy it, but I cannot see a clear definition of when it is permissible, useful, good. I should like to say only then when it is a rest from labour, like sleep, but I do not yet know if that is so.

8) (For The Appeal). You are mistaken, you poor, if you think that you can shame or touch or convince the rich man to divide with you. He cannot do that because he sees that you want the same thing that he wants and that you are fighting him with the same means with which he fights you. You will not only convince him, but you will compel him to yield to you only by ceasing to seek that which he seeks, ceasing to struggle with him, but if you cease to struggle you will cease also ... (very important).

9) If the end of art is not the good, but pleasure, then the distribution of art will be different. If its end is the good, then it will inevitably be spread among the greatest number of people; if its end is pleasure, then it will be confined to a small number (not exact and still unclear).

10) Art is—I was going to write food, but it is better to say—sleep, necessary for the sustenance of the spiritual life. Sleep is useful, necessary after labour. But artificial sleep is harmful, does not refresh, does not stimulate, but weakens.

11) I heard counterpoint singing and ...[171] This is the destruction of music, a means of perverting it. There is no sense to it, no melody, and any first senseless sequence of sounds are taken and from the combination of these insignificant sequences is formed some kind of a tedious resemblance to music. The best is when the last chord is finished.

12) The most severe and consequential agnostic, whether he wants it or does not want it, recognises God. He cannot but recognise that in the first place, in the existence both of himself and of the whole world, there is some meaning inaccessible to him; and in the second, there is a law of his life, a law to which he can submit or from which he can escape. And it is this recognition of the highest meaning of life, inaccessible to man but inevitably existing, and of the law of one’s life, which is God and His will. And this recognition of God is immensely stronger than the recognition of ... etc. To believe like this means to dig to bedrock, to the mainland, and to build the house on that.

13) Stepa[172] related the physiologic process which takes place in the infant when it separates from its mother. Truly it is a miracle.

This thought occupied me in relation to the doctrine that everything material is illusion. How can illusion take place there where I do not see it? As you see it, so it takes place. You see everything through your glasses. That is well enough as regards all other phenomena, but here the most fundamental thing is taking place, that from which the whole of my life and of everything living is composed: the detachment from the world. And here right in front of my eyes this detachment is taking place; there was one and there became two, like among the first cells, (unclear.)

14) Every living being carries within himself all the possibilities of its ancestors. Having been detached, he manifests several of them, but carries in himself the remaining ones and acquires new ones. In this lies the process of life; to unite and to separate. (Still more unclear.)

I have decided no matter what happens, to write every day. Nothing strengthens one so much for the good. It is the best prayer.