The Last Days of Tolstoy Part 7

_July 19._--She came in to me and began a hysterical scene--the upshot of which is that nothing can be changed and she is unhappy and wants to run away somewhere. I was sorry for her, but at the same time I recognised that it was hopeless--to the day of my death she will be a millstone round my neck and my children's. I suppose it must be so. I must learn not to drown with a millstone round my neck.

But the children? It seems it must be, and it only hurts me because I am short-sighted. I soothed her as though she were ill.

_August 8._--I thought; we reproach G.o.d, we complain that we meet with obstacles in fulfilling the teaching of Christ. Well, but what if we were all free from families who disagree with us? We should come together and live happily and joyfully. But the others? The others would not know. We want to gather all the light together that it may burn better, but G.o.d has scattered the fire among the logs.

They are being kindled while we fret that they are not burning.

_August 12._--It is all right with my wife, but I am afraid and straining every nerve.

_August 14._--Peace and friendliness with my wife, but I am afraid every minute.

_August 20._--An outburst against me at dinner.... The sense of peace and welfare had got hold of the family. Every one depressed ...

painful conversation in the house. Sonya, feeling that she was to blame tried to justify herself by anger. I was sorry for her.

_August 21._--In the morning began a conversation, hotly too but well. I said what ought to be said.... I came home. Sonya was reconciled. How glad I was. Certainly if she would take to being good she would be very good.

_September 3._--Something touches them somehow ... but I don't know how.

_September 7._--Went looking for mushrooms ... my wife did not follow me but went off by herself not knowing where, only not after me--that is all our life.

_September 9._--It is pleasant being with my wife. Told her unpleasant truths and she was not angry.

_September 10._--Sonya tidied my room and then shouted disgustingly at Vla.s.s. I am training myself to abstain from indignation and to see in it a moral b.u.mp which one must recognise as a fact and face its existence in one's action.

_September 15._--Went to look for mushrooms. Miserable.

_September 17._--Talk in the morning. And sudden fury. Then she came to me and nagged until I was beside myself. I said nothing and did nothing, but I was very unhappy. She ran away in hysterics, I ran after her, horribly worried.

After this diary of 1884 no diaries so far as I know were left by Leo Nikolaevitch for several years. Did he cease to keep his diary that he might not increase his spiritual sufferings by recording them on paper, preferring to continue his intense struggle with himself in complete solitude before no one but his G.o.d? Did he keep a diary and afterwards himself destroy it, not wis.h.i.+ng to reveal to anyone the sufferings to which he was subjected? Were the missing diaries lost in some other way, if indeed they ever existed? To these questions there is no answer, and it is hardly likely there will be.

By Leo Nikolaevitch's notes in his later diaries kept from the year 1888, one thing is placed beyond doubt, that is, that his spiritual sufferings and inward struggles in connection with his family relations continued the whole of the rest of his life. And in this struggle his higher consciousness became brighter and brighter, his spiritual force grew and gained strength. As the years pa.s.sed he gained an amazing mastery of his personal desires and weaknesses. At times, as indeed was inevitable, he recognised with peculiar pain his complete loneliness in the midst of the people surrounding him. To what degree he felt himself a stranger in his own family, how completely he was deprived of that warm, genuine sympathy on the part of his wife which is the most precious thing in married life, can to some extent be judged by the notes in which, with irrepressible grief, he recalls his mother.

His att.i.tude to her memory, as is well known, was always the most reverent. In his _Recollections of Childhood_ he writes of her: "It was necessary for her to love not herself, and one love followed another. Such is the spiritual figure of my mother in my imagination; she stood before me as such a lofty, pure, spiritual being that often in the middle period of my life, when I was struggling with temptations which almost overwhelmed me, I prayed to her soul, entreating her to help me, and this prayer was always a help to me."

Leo Nikolaevitch sometimes invoked the holy image of his mother in his most difficult moments, even in his old age. In the beginning of 1900 he wrote on a sc.r.a.p of paper, "Dull, miserable state the whole day. Towards evening this mood pa.s.sed into tenderness--a desire for fondness, for love, longed as children do to press up to a loving, pitying creature and to weep with emotion and to be comforted. But what creature is there to whom I could come close like that? I go over all the people I have loved; not one is suitable to whom I can come close. If I could be little and snuggle up to my mother as I imagine her to myself! Yes, yes, mother whom I called to when I could not speak, yes, she, my highest imagination of pure love,--not cold, divine love, but earthly, warm, motherly. It is to that that my battered, weary soul is drawn. You, mother, you caress me. All this is senseless, but it is all true."

On apparently the next day, calmly a.n.a.lysing the attack of misery he had pa.s.sed through the day before, he wrote in his diary: "Yesterday particularly oppressed condition. Everything unpleasant felt with peculiar vividness. So I say to myself, but in reality I seek what is unpleasant; I am receptive, absorbent to what is unpleasant. I could not get rid of this feeling anyhow. I have tried everything--prayer and the sense of my own badness--and nothing succeeds. Prayer, that is, vividly picturing my position does not reach to the depths of my consciousness; the recognition of my worthlessness, paltriness does not help. It is not that one wants something, but is miserably dissatisfied one does not know with what. It seems it is with life, one longs to die. Towards evening this condition pa.s.sed into a feeling of forlornness and an overwhelming desire of fondling, of love; I, an old man, longed to be a baby, to snuggle up to a loving creature, to be petted, to complain and to be fondled and comforted.

But who is the being to whom I could snuggle up and on whose arms I could weep and complain? There is no one living. Then what is this?

Still the same devil of egoism which in such a new, cunning form is trying to deceive and overpower me. This last feeling has explained to me the state of misery which preceded it. It is only the weakening, the temporary disappearance of spiritual life and the a.s.sertion of the claims of egoism which on awakening finds no food for itself and is miserable. The only means to use against it is to serve someone in the simplest way that comes first, to work for someone."--(_Diary, March 11, 1906._)

The complete absence in Leo Nikolaevitch of the slightest sentimentality in regard to the spiritual sufferings which he had to endure was apparently connected with his lofty conception of Christ and the deep reverence he felt for his heroic life. In 1885 Leo Nikolaevitch wrote: "Christ conquered the world and saved it not by suffering for us, but by suffering with love and joy, _i.e._ by conquering suffering, and he taught us thereby."

And indeed to the very last days and hours of his life Leo Nikolaevitch persistently and with striking success strove to train himself to "conquer suffering." In confirmation of my words I quote a series of further extracts from his diaries and letters.

_June 15, 1889_ (from a diary).--"I am burdened by life, I forget that if one has vital forces they can be used for the service of G.o.d, and that there is no getting away, there is no emptiness, everywhere there is contact, and in contact there is life."

_July 18, 1889_ (from the letters).--"What do I want? To live with G.o.d, according to His will, with Him. What is wanted for that? One thing only is wanted: to preserve the talent given to me, my soul, given to me not only to preserve but to make it grow. How make it grow? I know for myself what is needed; to keep what is animal in me in purity, what is human in humility, and what is divine in love.

What is wanted for preserving purity? Privations, privations of every sort. Humility? humiliation. Love? the hostility of men. Where and how am I to keep my purity without privations, my humility without humiliation, and my love without hostility? 'And if you love those that love you, that is not love, but love ye your enemies, love ye those that hate you.' One sorrow approaches humiliation and hostility, and these thoughts have revived me. Another sorrow is privation, suffering--the very thing that is needed for the growth of the soul. That is how one must look at it."

_July 18, 1889_ (from the letters).--All our sorrows have one root, and, strange as it sounds, they all not only can, but ought, to be a blessing.... G.o.d grant that we may believe in the possibility of it--that is one thing; and the other is that we may not return in thought to our sorrow, in our imagination changing the conditions in which our sorrow has occurred and correcting our actions. "If we had done this or that this would not have happened." G.o.d preserve us from this mistake, with its painful consequences. What has been is, and what is was bound to have been, and all our vital force ought to be directed to the present, to bearing our cross in the best way possible.

_December, 1889_ (from the letters).--The cross is given according to the strength.... I believe that, and cannot but believe it, because I know by experience that the harder my sufferings have been, if only I have succeeded in taking them in a Christian spirit ... the fuller, more vivid, more joyful and full of meaning life has become. It is so often insincerely repeated that sufferings are good for us and are sent by G.o.d, that we have ceased to believe it, and yet it is the simplest, clearest and most indubitable truth. Suffering--what is called suffering--is the condition of spiritual growth. Without suffering growth is impossible, the widening of life is impossible.

For this reason sufferings also always accompany death. If a man had no suffering he would be in a bad way; that is why they say among the people that those whom G.o.d loves He visits by misfortunes. I understand that a man may be sad and apprehensive when misfortunes have not visited him for a long time. There is no movement, no growth of life. Suffering is only suffering for the heathen, for the man who has not the light of the truth, and for us in the measure in which we have not the light; but sufferings cease to be such for the Christian--they become birth-pangs, even as Christ promised to deliver us from evil. And all this is not rhetoric, but is for me as undoubtedly in accordance with reason and experience as that it is now winter.

1892-3 (from the letters).--Nothing, I imagine, sets a man free from dependence on others and brings him near, or rather may bring him near, to G.o.d so much as your position. One only leans upon Him when men compel one to. G.o.d help you to bear your cross patiently, submissively, so as to get from it all the good which external suffering gives and can give. Or it will be mortifying that there has been suffering, but struggling with it, indignant and despairing, you did not get from it all that it is capable of giving.

_May 17, 1893_ (from the letters).--I am forced to live without personal, legitimate joys such as you have: labour, a.s.sociations with animals, nature; without a.s.sociation (not poisoned by their corruption) with children; without the encouragement of public opinion. What has happened to me is not exactly that the praise of men has destroyed for me the attractiveness of their praise, but their praise has been tainted, has become poisoned. I cannot now desire the praise of men, fame among the crowd, because I have it and know how double-faced it is; if there are some who praise, there are others who revile; that praise of men which you have, the good opinion of estimable men for a good life, at least consistent with your convictions I cannot have. And on the top of all that this praise of men--the way they write abroad and the opinion is current, that I lead a modest, laborious life in poverty--that praise arraigns me every second as a liar, a scoundrel living in luxury, making money out of the sale of his books. If I think of the praise of men it is like a thief who is every minute afraid that he will be caught, so that I have not only to live without the stimulus of lawful joys, and not only without the praise of men, but even with the perpetual consciousness of the shamefulness of life; I have to live by that which I consider men can and ought to live by; that is, by the consciousness of fulfilling the will of Him who sent us. And I see that I am still far from being ready for that, and am still only learning, and life is teaching me. And I ought to rejoice, and I do rejoice.

_February 28, 1894_ (from the letters).--The longer I live and the nearer I am to death, the more certain to me is the injustice of our wealthy mode of life, and I cannot help suffering by it.

_March 27, 1895_ (from a diary).--If there is suffering there has been and is egoism. Love does not know suffering, because the loving life is the divine life which can do all. Egoism is the limitation of personality.

_December 20, 1896_ (from a diary).--Everything just as painful. Help me, O Father. Comfort me. Be strong in me, subdue me, drive out and destroy the unclean flesh and all that I feel through it. It is better now though. Particularly soothing is the problem--the trial of meekness, of humiliation, of quite unexpected humiliation. In fetters, in prison one may be proud of humiliation, but in this case it is merely painful, unless one takes it as a trial sent from G.o.d.

Yes, I will learn to bear it calmly, joyfully and to love.

_January 18, 1897_ (from a diary).--Depressing, disgusting.

Everything repels me in the life they are living around me.

Alternately I get free from misery and suffering and fall into it again. Nothing shows so clearly how far I am from what I want to be.

If my life really were spent wholly in the service of G.o.d nothing could trouble it.

_April 4, 1907_ (from a diary).--I have not lost my calm though my soul is agitated, but I am mastering it. O G.o.d! if one could but remember that one is His messenger, that the divinity ought to s.h.i.+ne through one! But what is hard is that if one only remembers this, one will not live, and yet one must live, live energetically and remember. Help me O Father. I have prayed a great deal of late that life might be better, for I am ashamed and cast down by the consciousness of the unrighteousness of my life.

_July 12, 1897_ (from the letters).--I understand your trouble and sympathise with all my heart. It is your examination, try not to fail in it. Remember that it is the one chance of applying your faith to life. I always strengthen myself with that in difficult moments, and sometimes with success.

1897 (from the letters).--The doubts as to whether one makes concessions for the sake of not destroying love or for the sake of indulging in one's own weaknesses persist as ever, and the older I get, the more strongly I feel this sin, and I humble myself, but I do not submit, and I hope to rise up again.

_March 10, 1899_ (from the letters).--It is very difficult and dreary and lonely for me and I am afraid of unpleasantness--of people being angry with me, and people are angry with me.

_November 29, 1901_ (from a diary).--If you are suffering it is only from your not seeing everything (the time has not yet come). What is accomplished by those sufferings has not been revealed.

_January 31, 1903_ (from the letters).--Sufferings are profitable just because a man in ordinary worldly life forgets the unbreakable bond which exists between all living creatures; the sufferings which he endures and of which he has been the cause to other people remind him of that bond. This bond is spiritual, seeing that the Son of G.o.d is one in all men; physical sufferings drive a man involuntarily into the spiritual sphere in which he feels in union with G.o.d and with the world, and in which he ... bears the sufferings caused by others as though caused by himself, and even joyfully takes upon himself the burden of suffering, taking it from others. In that is the profit and fruitfulness of suffering.

_June 12, 1905_ (from a diary).--More and more I am pained by my abundance and the want surrounding me.

_May 29, 1906_ (from a diary).--I am very heavy-hearted with shame at my life, and what to do I don't know: Lord, help me.

_November 23, 1906_ (from a diary).--In a very good spiritual state of love for all. Read the Epistle of St. John. Marvellous, only now I understand it fully. To-day there was a great temptation which I did not fully conquer. Abak.u.mov overtook me with a pet.i.tion and a complaint at having been sentenced to prison on account of the oak trees. It was very painful. He cannot understand that I, the husband, cannot do as I like, and looks on me as an evil-doer and a Pharisee hiding behind my wife. I had not the strength to bear it lovingly, said that I could not go on living here. And that was wrong.

Altogether I am more and more abused on all hands; that's a good thing, it drives me to G.o.d--if I could only remain there. Altogether I am conscious of one of the greatest changes which has taken place in me just now. I feel this from my serenity and joyfulness and the good feeling (I dare not say love) for people.

_June 7, 1907_ (from a diary).--My former ailment has pa.s.sed, but a new one seems to be beginning. To-day I was very, very sad. I am ashamed to confess it, but I cannot call up joy. My soul is calm and grave, but not joyful. My sadness is chiefly due to the darkness in which people live so persistently. The exasperation of the peasants, our senseless luxury. Experienced the joy of being alone with G.o.d ...

sorrowful, sorrowful. Lord, help me, burn up the old fleshly man in me. Yes, the one consolation, the one salvation is to live in eternity and not in time.

_April 7, 1908_ (from the letters).--One thing I can say, that the reasons which restrain me from changing my manner of life as you advise me,--though not changing it, is a source of misery to me--the reasons that hinder me have their origin in the same principles of love, in the name of which the change is desirable both for you and me. It is very probable that I do not know and am not capable, or simply there are bad qualities in me which prevent me from doing what you advise me. But what is to be done? With the utmost effort of my mind and heart I cannot find the means, and I should only be thankful to anyone who will point it out to me. I say this quite sincerely, without any irony.

_May 20, 1908_ (from a diary).--My life is good in that I bear all the burden of a wealthy life which I detest--the sight of others labouring for me, the begging for help, the censure, the envy, the hatred,--and I do not enjoy its advantages, even that of loving what is done for me and helping those who ask.

_July 3, 1908_ (from a diary).--The day before yesterday I received a letter full of upbraidings for my wealth and hypocrisy and persecution of the peasants, and, to my shame, it hurt me. To-day I have been sad and ashamed all day. Just now I went for a ride, and it seemed so desirable, so joyful to go away like a beggar, thanking and loving everyone. Yes, I am weak, I cannot perpetually live in my spiritual self, and as soon as one does not live in it, everything vexes one. One thing is good, that I am dissatisfied with myself and ashamed, but I must not be proud of it.

_July 9, 1908_ (from a diary).--I have pa.s.sed through very painful feelings; thank G.o.d that I have pa.s.sed through them. An innumerable mult.i.tude of people, and all this would be joyful if it were not all poisoned by the consciousness of the senselessness, sinfulness, nastiness, luxury, servants, and poverty and overstrained intensity of labour around. Without ceasing I suffer misery from it, and I alone. I cannot help wis.h.i.+ng for death, though I hope as far as I can to make use of what is left.