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 prin-cipal 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
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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 Vander-veer. 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 marvel-lous 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 deter-mine the very essence of things, fall into a crude materialism, i.e., ignorance. Such, besides Des-cartes’ 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 ap-pears 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 cosmo-politanism. But on the contrary, with us at pres-
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ent 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 remem-ber 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 de-pressed. The day after to-morrow I am going to Moscow, if God commands. 143
… In the meantime I received a strange let-ter from the Spaniard Zanini, with an offer of 22,000 francs for good works. I answered that
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I would like to use them for the Dukhobors. What is going to happen? 144 I wrote to Kuzmin-sky on Witte and Dragomirov 145 and the day be-fore 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 occu-pies 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:
i) They say that God must be understood as a personality. In this lies great misunderstand-ing; 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 con-ceptions 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 person-ality; if man were not a personality he would not recognise the existence of other beings. And therefore man within this Universe is inconceiv-able otherwise than as a personality. But how
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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 num-ber and therefore it is even impossible to say of God that he is one (i 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 one-self, i.e., not exactly to pray, but that there is a relationship between me, something which is limited, a personality, and God something in-conceivable 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 involuntar-ily represent him to ourselves in the shape of a personality and then He is no longer a higher be-
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ing, no longer everything. But, however, in or-der to know God and to lean on Him one must un-derstand Him as filling everything and at the same time as one.
2) I have been thinking how obviously mis-taken 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 deter-mined and produced by that body through its senses? November //. Y. P. If I live.
November 77. Y. P.
Yesterday I hardly wrote anything.
. . . There is a fight in the papers over Repine’s m 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 Mi-chailovich 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
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now; the aesthetic 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 re-verse. 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 im-provement. 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
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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 compan-ies in the city crush several passers-by every year and do not change the crossings to make the dis-asters impossible, because the change would cost dearer than paying to the families of those crushed yearly. The same thing
