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

Tolstoi’s letter to Järnefelt, mentioned in the Journal, is as follows:

“Although we have never seen each other, we know and love each other, and therefore I boldly turn to you with a request to do me a great service.

“The matter which I bring before you ought to remain unknown to any one except to us, and therefore speak to no one about this letter, but answer me (Station Kozlovka on the Moscow-Kursk Railway), where you are now, and whether you are ready to help me. I am writing thus briefly, because I have little hope that with the insufficient address, my letter will reach you.

“Leo Tolstoi.”

In explanation of this letter Järnefelt communicated the following to the editors: “I quickly answered Tolstoi’s question. I was convinced that he wanted to leave Yasnaya and to plan an escape. But when we met later in Moscow in 1899, Tolstoi immediately said: ‘Yes, yes, you understood me, but the temptation passed by me in time.’ And then glancing about him with a deep sigh of pain he said, ‘You will excuse me, Järnefelt, that I live as I do, but probably it is as it ought to be.’ And we did not speak any more about this matter.”

And so, in his letter to Järnefelt of December 16, 1898, i.e., still before this meeting with him, Tolstoi wrote: “If I should ever meet you, which I want to very much, I will then tell you what kind of help I expected from you. Now the temptation which forced me to seek help from you has passed.”

In his letter to V. G. Chertkov of July 21st of that year, i.e., three days after the above mentioned note in the Journal, Tolstoi wrote: “Read this to no one. I teach others, but do not know how to live myself. For how many years have I given myself the question, Is it fitting that I continue to live as I am living, or shall I go away? – and I cannot decide. I know that everything is decided by renouncing oneself and when I attain that then everything is clear. But they are rare moments.”

349

See Note 347.

350

A collection in the church Slavonic tongue, Love of Good, or Words and Chapters of Sacred Sobriety, collected from the writings of the Saints and God-inspired fathers. In his library, Tolstoi had a volume of Love of Good with a great many notes in the margin made in his own hand.

351

With I. I. Gorbunov, who came for a short time to Ovsiannikovo to his brother, who lived there at this time, the actor N. I. Gorbunov. At this meeting, Tolstoi said to I. I. Gorbunov that it was the gentlemanly state of his life that had become more agonising to him, that he was “ashamed to look in the eyes of his lackeys” and that he wanted to go away. He said among other things that he was thinking of going away with I. I. Gorbunov to Kaluga (where Gorbunov lived at that time) – and further than that, he still had another plan … perhaps it was the plan about which Tolstoi had written a little while before to Järnefelt. (See Note 347.)

352

Tolstoi’s brother, Count Serge Nicholaievich.

353

Tolstoi’s sister, Countess M. N. Tolstoi.

354

The English authorities of the Island of Cyprus asked a money guarantee of about two hundred and fifty roubles for each man from the Dukhobors emigrating there, so that in case of need they would not have to be supported at the government expense. At that time it became known, that in Russia several influential governmental persons had begun to zealously urge the government to send the Dukhobors to Manchuria for the Russification of those Chinese borders adjacent to Russia. It was necessary to hurry with the emigration of the Dukhobors; the English Quakers pulled them out of their helpless position, who first of all persuaded the English Government to decrease the guarantee from two hundred and fifty roubles to one hundred and fifty for each man, and afterwards in several days, collected among themselves a guarantee of one hundred thousand roubles, which, together with the fifty thousand roubles which were contributed at that time by various people, made up the necessary sum for giving the guarantee for the whole party of Dukhobors. In his letter to the Dukhobors of August 27, 1898, Tolstoi ended thus: “May God help you to accomplish His will with Christian manhood, patience and faithfulness, in establishing this change in your life.”

355

M. N. Rostovtzev, the daughter of Madame M. D. Rostovtzev, a land-lady of Voronezh, and a follower of Tolstoi, on coming from the Chertkovs, was arrested on the border because, at the custom examination some pieces of proof of a forbidden book were found on her. She was soon freed.

356

The interruption in receiving letters from V. G. Chertkov was caused by the secret police looking through them. Therefore Chertkov was forced to carry on a part of this far-distant correspondence through a circuitous address. In the letter to him at the end of August, 1898, Tolstoi, informing Chertkov that one of his letters was kept back a month, wrote: “Yesterday I received your letter of August 5th. It is terribly vexing, this interference with our communications which now have become so specially important. And what is it for?”

357

See Note 355.

358

L. A. Sullerzhitsky went to the Caucasus to help the Dukhobors arrange for their emigration abroad.

The first group of Dukhobors, to the number of 1,126 persons, who had suffered the most from exile, hunger and illness, left on the 6th of August, 1898, for the Island of Cyprus while other lands be found and sufficient money collected for the transportation of those remaining to a more suitable place.

At the request of Tolstoi, L. A. Sullerzhitsky later accompanied a group of Dukhobors to Canada. He wrote a book about this journey, In America With the Dukhobors, issued by Posrednik, Moscow, 1905.

359

The sister of Tolstoi, Countess Maria Nicholaievna. A month later, September 30, 1898, Tolstoi wrote to V. G. Chertkov: “Yesterday my sister, M. N., left, with whom I spent a very friendly month, never having been so loving.”

360

V. A. Kuzminsky, a niece of Countess S. A. Tolstoi.

361

Countess Vera S. Tolstoi, a niece of Tolstoi, daughter of Count S. N. Tolstoi.

362

Tolstoi’s seventieth birthday, celebrated August 28, 1898.

363

According to the contract with the publisher of Niva, A. F. Marx, Tolstoi at the conclusion of the contract, received the whole of his royalty for only the first 200 pages of Resurrection.

364

In regard to the false rumours which were reaching Tolstoi at this time, about the affairs of the emigrating Dukhobors.

365

One of the Dukhobors exiled to Siberia, V. N. Pozdniakov, was sent by his brethren to the leader of the Dukhobors, P. V. Verigin, who was then in exile in the village of Obdorsk in the province of Tobolsk. Receiving a letter of instructions from Verigin for the group in general, he brought this letter to his brethren in the Caucasus and on his way reached Yasnaya Polyana. He showed Tolstoi marks on his body from ill-treatment he had suffered three years before.

366

Herbert Archer, an English co-worker with V. G. Chertkov, who went at his request to Tolstoi to transmit information to him with regard to the Dukhobors and to dissipate the false rumours about them which had reached Tolstoi from outsiders. About this time, in his letter to Countess S. A. Tolstoi, Tolstoi wrote about Archer: “He looks insignificant, but he is a very good man and a remarkably clever one.” (Letters of Count L. N. Tolstoi to his Wife, March, 1913, page 555.)

367

This thought Tolstoi changed in the following form for The Reading Circle: “Now I consider as myself my body with its senses, but then something entirely different is being formed in me. And then the whole world will become different, since the whole world is not something different, only because I consider myself such a being separated from the world and not another. But there may be an innumerable quantity of beings separated from the world.” The Reading Circle, issued by Posrednik, Volume I, Moscow, 1911, for April 16.

368

Tolstoi’s son, S. L. Tolstoi, and L. A. Sullerzhitsky went to the Caucasus to accompany the remaining Dukhobors to Canada. Tolstoi in order to protect them from the oppression of the authorities wrote a letter to the commander-in-chief of the Caucasus, Prince G. S. Golitsin.

369

Tolstoi sometimes could not remember which thought from his pocket note-book he had written out into the Journal and which one he had not. This explains the fact that several thoughts are entered without any changes at all in the Journal, in places not far from one another.

370

In the eighties and nineties the Tolstois went yearly from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow to spend the winter.

371

Princess E. V. Obolensky, niece of Tolstoi, daughter of his sister, Countess Maria Nicholaievna.

372

In the finished form, the novel had 129 chapters.

373

In another place Tolstoi says: “Playing the fool (like Christ) i.e., the purposeful representing of yourself as worse than you are, is the highest quality of virtue.” (Journal, May 29, 1893.)

374

An omission in the copy in possession of the editors.

375

Tolstoi wrote to V. G. Chertkov as early as December 13, 1898: “I absolutely cannot occupy myself with anything else than with Resurrection. Just like a shell, when it gets to the earth, falls more and more quickly, in the same way I now, when I am nearing the end, I cannot think – no, not that I cannot: I can and even do think – but I don’t want to think about anything else but about it.”

376

At this time the emigration of the Dukhobors to Canada had not yet been accomplished. Tolstoi took an active part in the affair: he addressed various people with the request for contributions for this purpose, he carried on a correspondence with friends in England in regard to a place of settlement for the Dukhobors, he sent letters to the authorities to try to remove obstacles which were in their way, he saw agents who suggested places of settlement, he carried on a correspondence with the Dukhobors themselves, etc.

377

February 15, 1899, Tolstoi wrote to V. G. Chertkov: “My back hurts all the time and I am weak and I am disgusted with Resurrection, which I can’t touch.”

378

The retired officer addressed himself to Tolstoi with the question whether the Gospels were not against military service. Tolstoi’s answer was printed in the leaflets of The Free Press, No. 5, 1899, and in 1906 in Petrograd in the publication, Obnovlenia, No. 130 (which was confiscated).

379

A group of representative Swedish intellectuals addressed themselves to Tolstoi with a letter as to the means of attaining universal peace. In this letter on the one hand, they expressed the thought that universal disarmament could be attained by the surest path of each separate individual refusing to take part in military service, and on the other hand, they acknowledged that the Peace Conference fixed for The Hague at the instigation of the Russian Government was useful to the attainment of universal peace…

380

In the middle of February, 1898, the students of the University of Petrograd, in the form of a protest against the beating of people in the streets, decided on the day of the student holiday, February 8th, as a peaceful-minded group of students, to cease work. They were soon joined by students of other higher schools in Petrograd and later in Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, Jurev, Odessa, Tomsk, Kazan, Riga and Novaia Alexandria. In this way the studies of several thousand men and women students were suspended. The representatives of the Moscow and Petrograd student bodies came to Tolstoi with the purpose of obtaining his opinion and sympathy for the student movement.

381

Sinet, an artist, who refused military service on religious grounds and was sent to the Algerian disciplinary battalion and who escaped from there. Tolstoi called Sinet the first religious Frenchman, therefore, because he was the first Frenchman he met who believed truly as he did.

382

In his letter to V. G. Chertkov of July 9, 1899, Tolstoi wrote, “The matter of the translations worry me. I can imagine, therefore, how they worry you. To-day I thought this: To drop all contracts with the translators and print the following in the newspaper…” Further on Tolstoi expounds the project of his letter to the newspapers, that he, in the matter of translation, decided to destroy the contracts with the publishers of the translations and to refuse the royalty of the first printing of these translations. And yet the need of the Dukhobors was so great that “having no means of employing cattle, they have hitched themselves and their wives to the plough and are ploughing with human power to till their land.” For this reason, Tolstoi drops his plan: “I ask all the publishers who will print this novel and the translators of it, as well as the readers of the novel, to remember those people for whom this publication has been begun and as far as their strength and their desire go, to help the Dukhobors by giving their mite to the Dukhobor fund in England.”

383

Taking no part in 1899, in the work of organising help for the famine-stricken peasants, Tolstoi directed the contributions received for this purpose from various people, to be sent to those who were occupied on the spot in giving help to the inhabitants.

384

Originally in English.

385

This thought was maintained in the book then being read by Tolstoi: Vergleichenden Uebersicht der Vier Evangelien, von S. G. Verus, Leipzig, 1897. In the letter of Biriukov of August 1, 1899, Tolstoi wrote thus about the significance of Verus’ book: “This supposition or probability is the destruction of the last suburbs which are susceptible to attacks from the enemy, so that the fortress of the moral teaching of the good, flowing not from a source which is only temporary and local, but from a totality of the whole spiritual life of humanity, be unshaken.”

386

Countess S. N. Tolstoi.

387

See Note 384.

388

This thought is developed more in detail by Tolstoi in the Legend of the Stones (see The Reading Circle, Volume II).

389

Alfred B. Westrup. Plenty of Money. N. Y., 1899.

390

Countess O. C. Tolstoi, born Dieterichs, first wife of A. L. Tolstoi.

391

The artist, Julia Ivanovna Igumnov, who lived a long time in Yasnaya Polyana. At this time she helped Tolstoi to copy his manuscripts and his letters.

392

A. D. Arkhangelsky, a student in the Moscow University, who lived as a teacher in Tolstoi’s house.

393

These chapters on Resurrection were sent to the publishing house of Niva to be set up.

394

An interrogation point in the copy at the disposal of the editors.

395

Living at this time with the Tolstois in Moscow, Countess O. K. Tolstoi, in a letter to V. G. Chertkov on November 22nd, 1899, described Tolstoi’s illness in this way: “Yesterday we lived through a terrible evening and night. In the evening after dinner, Tolstoi went to his room to lie down, and after several minutes we were all attracted by terrible groans from him … he was taken with severe stomach pains which were very severe from four o’clock in the morning to seven in the evening. He suffered terribly and at first nothing helped.” Tolstoi suffered especially from vomiting which lasted twenty-eight hours. His doctors were P. S. Usev and Prof. M. P. Cherinov. “Both medicine and feeding,” another person wrote to Chertkov from Moscow, December 5, 1899, “is given now by entreaty and persuasion, now by tears and now by deception, which is even more depressing than tears. To-day everything is better: pains and appetite and strength.” Tolstoi got out of bed December 6th and little by little began to walk. But the following days he had pain and felt weakness.

396

An omission in this place in the copy in possession of the editors.

397

This word in the original is underlined twice.

398

From Derzhavin’s Ode, “God.”

399

The exact title of the book by M. A. Engelhardt is Progress, As an Evolution of Cruelty, issued by F. F. Pavlenkov, Petrograd, 1899. To the author of this book, M. A. Engelhardt (1858–1882), Tolstoi wrote, in 1882, a very remarkable letter on the problem of non-resistance to evil by violence.

400

The journal, Niva.

401

The novel, The Forged Coupon.

402

Of the 170 entries in the present edition, the editors have omitted 102 places (1,707 words) because of their intimate character, and 55 places (1,102 words) on account of the censor. Besides this, in the Notes, one place (9 words) has been omitted on account of its intimate character and 14 places (245 words) on account of the censor.

403

The compilation of facts concerning the important events in Tolstoi’s life were not only made from his Journal but from letters to various individuals.

404

This list has been compiled not only from Tolstoi’s Journal, but from other sources. As far as can be judged from the Journal, Tolstoi during some months, while busied with the revision of some one of his manuscripts, would at the same time not write but only consider some other bit of work; this kind of creative work is noted in the list as “planned.”

405

All these letters have been printed, if not in Russia then abroad; in those instances where a letter has been printed under a definite title, that title is enclosed in quotation marks.

406

In parentheses I have given the dates in which he mentions the theme and the final title of the theme as it was developed.

407

I consider it absolutely necessary to mention that this exposition has been carefully revised by V. G. Chertkov, who, having been connected with Tolstoi by a friendship of many years, was closely acquainted with the home conditions of his outer life, as well as with the most intimate characteristic of his inner life.

408

November 5, 1895, page 5.

409

May 17, 1896, page 46.

410

May 28, 1896, page 52.

411

June 26, 1896, page 60.

412

June 19, 1896, page 58.

413

July 31, 1896, page 69.

414

October 20, 1896, page 83; November 5, page 88, and November 20, 1897, page 171.

415

December 20, 1896, page 108.

416

December 21, 1896, page 108.

417

January 18, 1897, page 117.

418

March 1, 1897, page 135.

419

March 9, 1897, page 136.

420

April 4, page 137, and April 9, 1897, page 139.

421

April 4, 1897, page 137.

422

May 3, 1897, page 139.

423

July 16, 1897, page 140.

424

This letter was published in many editions among others in the Letters of Tolstoi to his Wife, Moscow, 1913, pages 524–526.

425

July 16, 1897, page 140.

426

July 17, page 142; October 22, page 162; November 28, page 176, and further.

427

November 28, 1897, page 177.

428

December 2, 1897, page 177.

429

December 13, 1897, page 182.

430

January 13, 1898, page 195.

431

April 12, 1898, page 219.

432

July 17, 1898, page 244.

433

September 28, 1899, page 277.