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(A Publicist’s Notes)

p In No. 311 of Kievskaya Mysl^^169^^ Mr. Homunculus announced that all Russia was divided into two camps. "Some people simply love Tolstoy; others love him within limits.” According to Mr. Homunculus it transpires that people with a more or less progressive way of thinking simply love Tolstoy, whereas the protectors and reactionaries love him only within limits. I do not belong either to the reactionaries or to the protectors. I trust Mr. Homunculus will believe this. But nevertheless I too cannot "simply love Tolstoy”; I too love him merely "within limits”. I consider him a brilliant artist and an extremely poor thinker. What is more, I assume that only someone with a total misunderstanding of Tolstoy’s views can assert, as Mr. Volodiri does in the selfsame Kievskaya Mysl (No. 310), that "living with Tolstoy is joyful. Living without Tolstoy is terrible”. To my mind, it is just the opposite: "living with Tolstoy" is as terrible as “living” with Schopenhauer, for example. And if our present-day “intelligentsia” does not notice this in the “simplicity” of its love of Tolstoy, I think this is a very bad sign. Earlier, in the days of the late N. Mikhailovsky, say, progressive Russians loved Tolstoy precisely only "within limits”. And this was far better.

p I know that only a very few will agree with this today. So what can I do? Even if all the progressive “intellectuals” of presentday Russia were to speak out against me, I could not think otherwise. Let me be called a heretic. There is no harm in that. Lessing remarked quite rightly: "The thing called a heretic has its very good side. The heretic is a man who at least wants to look with his own eyes.” Of course, being a heretic is not enough to see clearly. The selfsame Lessing added equally rightly: "The question is only whether the eyes with which the heretic wants to look are good eyes.” One can, and occasionally even should, argue with a heretic. That is so. But nevertheless it does no harm to listen to the heretic too sometimes. This is also beyond all doubt.

_p So I invite Mr. Volodin, for example, to argue with me. He says: "Living with Tolstoy is joyful.” And I object: "No. living with Tolstoy is terrible.” Who is right? Let the reader, to whom I shall try to explain my view, be the judge of that.

p 3d*

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p It is obvious that in saying "living with Tolstoy is terrible”, I have in mind Tolstoy the thinker, and not Tolstoy the artist. It can perhaps also be terrible with Tolstoy the artist, but not for me and, in general, not for people of my way of thinking; for us, on the contrary, it is very “joyful”. But living with Tolstoy the thinker is really terrible for us. That is, to be more precise, it would be terrible if we could “live” with Tolstoy the thinker. Fortunately, there can be no question of this: our point of view is diametrically opposed to that of Tolstoy.

p Tolstoy says of himself: "As a matter of fact I arrived at faith because apart from faith I probably have nothing, have found nothing, except perdition."  [564•* 

p Here, as you can see. is a very serious argument in my favour. A person who became imbued with Tolstoy’s mood would run the risk of finding himself faced with nothing but perdition.

p And this is terrible indeed. True, Tolstoy saved himself from perdition by faith. But what is the position of a person who, imbued with Tolstoy’s mood, is dissatisfied with his faith? Such a person will have one way out only: perdition, in which, as we know, there is nothing “joyful”.

p What was the path that led Tolstoy to his faith? According to Tolstoy himself, he arrived at faith by seeking for God. And this seeking for God was, he says, "not reasoning, but feeling, because this seeking proceeded not from my train of thought,—it was even directly opposed to it,—but from my heart".  [564•**  Tolstoy is not right, however. In fact his seeking for God by no means excluded reasoning. This is shown, inter alia, by the following lines:

p “I remember one day in early spring I was alone in the forest, listening to the forest sounds. I listened and kept thinking about one thing, as I had constantly thought about one and the same thing for the last three years. I was again seeking for God.

p “Very well, there is no God, I said to myself, no God that is not my imagining, but reality, the same reality like the whole of my life,—there is no such God. And nothing, no miracles can prove that there is, because miracles will be my imagining, and foolish imagining at that.

p ’"But my concept of God, of God Whom I seek?’ I asked myself. ’Where did this concept come from?’ And again at this thought joyous waves of life swelled within me. Everything around me quickened, acquired meaning. But my joy did not last for long. My mind continued its work. ’The concept of God is not God,’ I said to myself. ’The concept is what takes place within me, the concept of God is what I can arouse or not arouse within myself. It is not what I seek. I seek that without which there could be no 565 life.’ And again everything began to die around me and within me, and again I wished to kill myself."  [565•* 

p This is a regular dispute with oneself. And in a dispute one cannot do without reasoning. Nor did Tolstoy do without it either when his painful dispute with himself evolved towards what was for him a pleasing conclusion:

p “But what are these quickenings and dyings? I do not live when I lose faith in the existence of God, I would have killed myself long ago, if I had not had a vague hope of finding Him. I live, truly live only when I feel Him and seek Him. ’Then what else do I seek?’ a voice cried within me. ’He is here. He—that without which one cannot live. To know God and to live is the same thing. God is life.’"  [565•** 

p But, of course, it was not reasoning alone that led Tolstoy to his faith. His logical operations were undoubtedly based on the strong and obsessive feeling that he himself describes in the following words: "It was a feeling of fear, of loneliness, of isolation amid everything alien and of hope for someone’s help."  [565•*** 

p This feeling alone explains how Tolstoy could have failed to notice the weak point of his reasoning. Indeed, from the fact that I live only when I believe in the existence of God it does not follow that God exists: from this it follows only that I myself cannot exist without faith in God. And this fact can be explained by upbringing, habits, etc. Tolstoy himself says:

p “And it is strange that the life force that returned to me was not a new one, but the oldest one,—the same one that drove me in the earliest days of my life. I returned in everything to what was at the beginning, in childhood and youth. I returned to faith in the will that produced me and wants something of me; I returned to the fact that the main and only aim of my life is to be better, i.e., to live in closer harmony with this will; I returned to the fact that I can find the expression of this will in what the whole of mankind developed for its own guidance in distant clays concealed from me, i.e., I returned to faith in God, in moral peri’ ectionment and in the tradition that has handed down the meaning of life. The only difference was that then all this was accepted unconsciously, whereas now I knew that I could not live without it.”  [565•**** 

p Tolstoy is wrong to regard as strange the fact that the life force which has returned to him "was not a new one, but the oldest" faith of childhood. There is nothing strange about this. People frequently return to their childhood beliefs; for this only one 566 condition is necessary: that these beliefs leave a deep impression on the soul. Tolstoy is equally wrong in saying of himself:

p “Judging by certain recollections, I never actually believed seriously, but only trusted what I was taught and what grown-ups professed to me; but this trust was very shaky."  [566•* 

p No. Tolstoy’s memory has deceived him. Everything shows that his childhood beliefs were extremely deeply engrained in his soul  [566•**  and if by virtue of his impressionability he later succumbed easily to the influence of unbelieving friends, this influence remained extremely superficial.  [566•***  As a matter of fact, in another passage of his Confession Tolstoy himself says that he was always close to the Christian truths.  [566•****  This is indisputable at least in the limited sense that Tolstoy always felt an affinity with what is the foundation not only of the Christian, but of all religious world outlooks in general: the animist view of the relation of the “finite” to the “infinite”. Here is an extremely convincing example. We already know that when he began to seek God Tolstoy experienced great suffering at moments when his reason rejected one after another the proofs of God’s existence which were known to him. Then he felt his life "coming to a stop”, and again and again he would set about trying to prove to himself that God did exist. How did he prove it? Like this:

p “But again and again from various different sides I would arrive at the same recognition that I could not have appeared in the world without any cause, reason and meaning, that I could not be the fledgeling fallen out of its nest that I felt myself to be. Very well, I, a fallen fledgeling, am lying on my back and squeaking in the tall grass, but I am squeaking because I know that my mother conceived me, hatched me, warmed, fed and loved me. Where is she, this mother? If I have been abandoned, who has abandoned me? I cannot conceal from myself that someone who loved gave birth to me. Who is this someone? Again God."  [566•***** 

p Thus all religious people reason, irrespective of whether they believe in one God or several. The main distinguishing feature of such reasoning is its total logical invalidity: it takes as proven precisely that which requires to be proved,—the existence of God. Once having assumed the existence of God and once having 567 represented God in his own image, a person then has no trouble in explaining all the phenomena of nature and social life. Spinoza remarked most aptly: "Men commonly suppose that all natural things act like themselves with an end in view, and they assert with assurance that God too directs all things to a certain end (for they say that God made all things for man, and made man that he might worship God)."  [567•*  This is precisely what Tolstoy assumes: teleology (the viewpoint of purpose). It would be pointless to dwell on the fact that explanations reached by people who adhere to the teleological viewpoint in fact explain nothing at all and collapse like houses of cards at the slightest contact with serious criticism. But it must be noted that Tolstoy could not or would not understand this. Life seemed possible to him only when he adopted the teleological viewpoint: "As soon as I realised,” he says, "that there was a force that held me in its power, I immediately felt life was possible."  [567•**  It is obvious why: the meaning of life was determined in this case by the will of the being in whose power Tolstoy placed himself. All that remained was to obey, not to reason. Tolstoy says so himself:

“The life of the world proceeds according to someone’s will—someone is carrying out a purpose of his own with the life of the whole world and with our lives. In order to have a hope of understanding the meaning of this will, we must first obey it, do that which it wants from us. And if I do not do what it wants from me, I will never understand what it wants from me, and even less what it wants from all of us and from the whole world."  [567•***