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I jotted down the following:
1 ) People can in no way agree to the unreality of all that is material. “ But a table exists and always, even when I go out of the room it is there, and for all it is the same as it is for me,” they generally say. Well, and when you twist two fingers and roll a little ball under them do you not unquestionably feel two? It is certainly so, every time I take up a little ball in that way there are two and for every one who takes up a ball in that way there are two, and nevertheless there are no two little balls. In the same way, the table is a table only for the twisted fingers of my senses, but it is perhaps half a table, a thousandth of a table in fact, no part of a table at all, but something altogether different. So that what is real is only my ever recurring impression, con-firmed by the impressions of other people.
2) … I acted badly when I gave my estate to the children. It would have been better for them. Only it was necessary to have been able to do this without violating love, and I was un-able.
3) You are often surprised how intelligent, good people can defend cruelty, violence, savage superstitions . . . ? But it is sufficient to re-member the exilings, the oppressions, the offences, which are beginning to penetrate the working-classes and you see that this is only a feeling of
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self-preservation. Only by this is explained the tenacity of life. . . .
4) Pharesov told me about Malikov’s 295 teach-ing. All this was beautiful, all this was Chris-tian: be perfect like your Father; but it was not good that all this teaching had for its end influ-ence over people and not inner satisfaction, not an answer to the problem of life. Influence on oth-ers is the main Achilles’ heel.
So that my condition, which is false for people, is perhaps the very thing necessary.
5) … In order to wipe out one’s sin, one ought to … repent before all the people for the deception, to say: forgive me that I have deceived you . . . What a strong scene ! And a true one.
6) Our art with its supplying of amusement for the rich classes, is not only similar to prostitu-tion, but it is nothing else than prostitution.
Feb. 20. Moscow.
To-day, Feb. 25. Moscow.
Have made no entries; corrected something. Wrote letters to-day, more than 7 letters. But I can’t write anything, although I haven’t stopped thinking about Hadji Murad and The Appeal. Feb. 26. Moscow. If I live.
Have made no entries for more than three weeks. To-day March ig. Moscow.
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Finished all my letters. During this time wrote serious letters :
i) To the American colony, 296 2) Peter-burgskia Fiedomosti about the Dukhobors; 297 3) to the English papers also about the Dukhobors, and 4) a preface to the English edition What is Art about the censor distortions. 298
My inner life is the same. As I foresaw, the new consciousness of life for God, for the perfec-tion of love, has become dulled, weakened, and when I needed it, these days, it proved itself to be, if not exactly ineffectual, yet less effectual than I expected.
The principal event during this time was the permission to the Dukhobors to emigrate.
What is Art? seems to me to be entirely finished now.
I have worked very little during all this time.
I made rather many notes; I shall try to write them out:
i ) One of the greatest errors in summing up a man, is that we call, we define a man as intelli-gent, stupid, good, evil, strong, weak. But man is everything, all possibilities, is a flowing mat-ter. 299 This is a good theme for an artistic work and a very important one and a good one, because it destroys malicious judging “ the can-cer “ and assumes the possibility of everything
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good. The workers of the devil, convinced of the presence of bad in man, achieve great results : su-perstition, capital punishment, war. The work-ers of God would attain greater results, if they believed more in the possibility of good in people.
2) They want to become the masters of China the Russians, Japan, England, the Germans: there are quarrels, diplomatic struggles, there will even be military ones. And all this is only for the mixing of the yellow race into one Christian batter, the propagating and the assimilating of ideas like the Crusades and the Napoleonic wars.
3) Lebon writes: “Not only are they going to make food in laboratories, but there will be no need for labour.” People have so badly distrib-uted their two functions, food and labour, that instead of joy, these functions are a torture to them and therefore they want to be freed from them. It is just the same as if people would so pervert their functions of perspiration and breath-ing, that they would seek a way of changing them by an artificial method.
4) The longer you live, the less time there re-mains for life. For an endless duration of life, there would then be absolutely no life.
5 ) Only when you live without consideration of time, past or future, do you live a real, free life for which there are no obstacles. You are only then dissatisfied, in straits, when you remember
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the past (the offences, the contradictions, even your own weaknesses) and when you think of the fu-ture: will something be or will it not be? Only at one point, do you fuse with God and live your divine essence: in the present (even when you live your animal life). Whenever you use your reason to consider what will be, then you are weak, insignificant; but whenever you use it to do the will of Him who sent you, then you are omnipo-tent, free. You can even see this in the way you immediately weaken, become deprived of strength, when you consider the consequences of your act.
To-day, March 21. Moscow.
I continue copying. I am very indisposed, weak, but thank God, in peace, I live in the pres-ent. Just now I put in order the papers on Art.
6) Socialists will never destroy poverty and the injustice of the inequality of capacities. The stronger, the more intelligent, will always make use of the weaker, the more stupid. Justice and equality of goods will never be attained by any-thing less than Christianity, i.e., by negating one-self and by recognising the meaning of one’s life in the service to others.
7) I have written down the same as in the 5th, but differently. In order to live with God, by God and in God, it is necessary not to be guided
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by anything from without. Neither by that which was nor by that which can be; to live only in the present, only in this, to fuse with God.
8) Intelligent Socialists understand that for the attainment of their ends the principal thing is to lift the working men intellectually and physically. This is possible to be done only by religious edu-cation, but they do not understand this and there-fore all their work is in vain.
9) “ Seek the Kingdom of God and His Right, the rest will follow you “ this is the only means of attaining the ends of Socialism.
10) For The Appeal:
All are agreed that we live not as we ought to or as we could. The remedy of some is this: a religious fatalism and, still worse, a scientific, evo-lutionary one. Others comfort themselves by the gradual bettering and bettering of things by them-selves : the step by step people. The third assert that everything will establish itself when things will reach their very worst (Socialism), when the Government and the rich classes will control every-body fully, i.e., the working-men, and then the power will somehow or other make a somersault not only to working-men, but to unerring disinter-ested self-sacrificing working-men, who will then direct all affairs without error and without sin. The fourth say that to improve the whole matter, it is possible only by the destruction of evil people,
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the bad ones. But there is no indication where the bad people end and where the harmless ones, if not the good ones, begin. Either they will de-stroy every one as bad or as in the big revolution they will catch the good ones with the bad. As soon as you begin to judge strictly, no one will remain in the right. What is to be done? But there is only one instrument : a religious change in the soul of people. And it is this change which is interfered with, by all imaginary remedies.
n) My body is nothing else than that piece of everything existing which I am able to govern.
12) The whole world is that which I sense. But what am I? It is that which acts.
13) How good it would be to write a work of art, in which there would be clearly expressed the flowing nature of man: that he, one and the same man, is now a villain, now an angel, now a wise man, now an idiot, now a strong man, now the most impotent being.
14) Every man, as all people, being imperfect in everything, is nevertheless more perfect in some one thing than in
