At this point I shall turn back and try to trace the influence
which my father had on my upbringing, and I shall recall as well as
I can the impressions that he left on my mind in my childhood, and
later in the melancholy days of my early manhood, which happened to
coincide with the radical change in his whole philosophy of life.
In 1852, tired of life in the Caucasus and remembering his old
home at Yásnaya Polyána, he wrote to his aunt,
Tatyána Alexándrovna:
After some years, I shall find myself, neither very young nor very
old, back at Yásnaya Polyána again: my affairs will
all be in order; I shall have no anxieties for the future and
no troubles in the present.
You also will be living at Yásnaya. You will be
getting a little old, but you will be healthy and vigorous. We
shall lead the life we led in the old days; I shall work in the
mornings, but we shall meet and see each other almost all day.
We shall dine together in the evening. I shall read you
something that interests you. Then we shall talk: I shall tell you
about my life in the Caucasus; you will give me reminiscences of my
father and mother; you will tell me some of those "terrible
stories" to which we used to listen in the old days with frightened
eyes and open mouths.
We shall talk about the people that we loved and who are no
more.
You will cry, and I, too; but our tears will be refreshing,
tranquilizing tears. We shall talk about my brothers, who will
visit us from time to time, and about dear Masha, who will also
spend several months every year at Yásnaya, which she loves,
with all her children.
We shall have no acquaintances; no one will come in to bore us
with gossip.
It is a wonderful dream; but that is not all that I let myself
dream of.
I shall be married. My wife will be gentle, kind, and
affectionate; she will love you as I do; we shall have children who
will call you granny; you will live in the big house, in the same
room on the top floor where my grandmother lived before.
The whole house will be run on the same lines as it was in my
father's time, and we shall begin the same life over again, but
with a change of rôles.
You will take my grandmother's place, but you will be better
still than she was; I shall take my father's place, though I can
never hope to be worthy of the honor.
My wife will take my mother's place, and the children ours.
Masha will fill the part of both my aunts, except for their
sorrow; and there will even be Gasha there to take the place of
Prashovya Ilyínitchna.
The only thing lacking will be some one to take the part you
played in the life of our family. We shall never find such a noble
and loving heart as yours. There is no one to succeed you.
There will be three new faces that will appear among us from
time to time: my brothers, especially one who will often be with
us, Nikólenka, who will be an old bachelor, bald, retired,
always the same kindly, noble fellow.
Just ten years after this letter, my father married, and
almost all his dreams were realized, just as he had wished. Only
the big house, with his grandmother's room, was missing, and his
brother Nikólenka, with the dirty hands, for he died two
years before, in 1860. In his family life my father witnessed a
repetition of the life of his parents, and in us children he sought
to find a repetition of himself and his brothers. We were brought
up as regular gentlefolk, proud of our social position and holding
aloof from all the outer world. Everything that was not us was
below us, and therefore unworthy of imitation. I knew that my
father felt very earnestly about the
chastity of young people; I knew how much strength he laid on purity. An early
marriage seemed to me the best solution of the difficult question
that must harass every thoughtful boy when he attains to man's
estate.
Two or three years later, when I was eighteen and we were
living in Moscow, I fell in love with a young lady I knew, my
present wife, and went almost every Saturday to her father's house.
My father knew, but said nothing. One day when he was going
out for a walk I asked if I might go with him. As I very seldom
went for walks with him in Moscow, he guessed that I wanted to have
a serious talk with him about something, and after walking some
distance in silence, evidently feeling that I was shy about it and
did not like to break the ice, he suddenly began:
"You seem to go pretty often to the F—s'."
I said that I was very fond of the eldest daughter.
"Oh, do you want to marry her?"
"Yes."
"Is she a good girl? Well, mind you don't make a mistake, and
don't be false to her," he said with a curious gentleness and
thoughtfulness.
I left him at once and ran back home, delighted, along the
Arbat. I was glad that I had told him the truth, and his
affectionate and cautious way of taking it strengthened my
affection both for him, to whom I was boundlessly grateful for his
cordiality, and for her, whom I loved still more warmly from that
moment, and to whom I resolved still more fervently never to be
untrue.
My father's tactfulness toward us amounted almost to timidity.
There were certain questions which he could never bring himself to
touch on for fear of causing us pain. I shall never forget how
once in Moscow I found him sitting writing at the table in my room
when I dashed in suddenly to change my clothes.
My bed stood behind a screen, which hid him from me.
When he heard my footsteps he said, without looking round:
"Is that you, Ilyá?"
"Yes, it's I."
"Are you alone? Shut the door. There's no one to hear us,
and we can't see each other, so we shall not feel ashamed. Tell
me, did you ever have anything to do with women?"
When I said no, I suddenly heard him break out sobbing, like
a little child.
I sobbed and cried, too, and for a long time we stayed weeping
tears of joy, with the screen between us, and we were neither of us
ashamed, but both so joyful that I look on that moment as one of
the happiest in my whole life.
No arguments or homilies could ever have effected what the
emotion I experienced at that moment did. Such tears as those shed
by a father of sixty can never be forgotten even in moments of the
strongest temptation.
My father observed my inward life most attentively between the
ages of sixteen and twenty, noted all my doubts and hesitations,
encouraged me in my good impulses, and often found fault with me
for inconsistency.
I still have some of his letters written at that time. Here
are two:
I had just written you, my dear friend Ilyá, a letter
that was true to my own feelings, but, I am afraid, unjust, and I
am not sending it. I said unpleasant things in it, but I have no
right to do so. I do not know you as I should like to and as I
ought to know you. That is my fault. And I wish to remedy it. I
know much in you that I do not like, but I do not know everything.
As for your proposed journey home, I think that in your position
of student, not only student of a gymnase, but at the age of study,
it is better to gad about as little as possible; moreover, all
useless expenditure of money that you can easily refrain from is
immoral, in my opinion, and in yours, too, if you only consider it.
If you come, I shall be glad for my own sake, so long as you are
not inseparable from G—.
Do as you think best. But you must work, both with your head,
thinking and reading, and with your heart; that is, find out for
yourself what is really good and what is bad, although it seems to
be good. I kiss you.
L. T.
Dear Friend Ilyá:
There is always somebody or something that prevents me from
answering your two letters, which are important and dear to me,
especially the last. First it was Baturlín,
then bad health, insomnia, then the arrival of D—, the friend of
H— that I wrote you about. He is sitting at tea talking to the
ladies, neither understanding the other; so I left them, and want
to write what little I can of all that I think about you.
Even supposing that S— A— demands too much of you,
[1] there is no harm in waiting; especially from the point of view of
fortifying your opinions, your faith. That is the one important
thing. If you don't, it is a fearful disaster to put off from one
shore and not reach the other.
The one shore is an honest and good life, for your own delight
and the profit of others. But there is a bad life, too—a life so
sugared, so common to all, that if you follow it, you do not notice
that it is a bad life, and suffer only in your conscience, if you
have one; but if you leave it, and do not reach the real shore, you
will be made miserable by solitude and by the reproach of having
deserted your fellows, and you will be ashamed. In short, I want
to say that it is out of the question to want to be rather good; it
is out of the question to jump into the water unless you know how
to swim. One must be truthful and wish to be good with all one's
might, too. Do you feel this in you? The drift of what I say is
that we all know what
Princess Márya
Alexévna's[2] verdict about your marriage would be:
that if young people marry without a sufficient fortune, it means
children, poverty, getting tired of each other in a year or two; in
ten years, quarrels, want—hell. And in all this
Princess
Márya Alexévna is perfectly right and plays the
true prophet, unless these young people who are getting married
have another purpose, their one and only one, unknown to
Princess Márya Alexévna, and that not a
brainish purpose, not one recognized by the intellect, but one
that gives life its color and the attainment of which is more
moving than any other. If you have this, good; marry at once, and
give the lie to
Princess Márya Alexévna. If
not, it is a hundred to one that your marriage will lead to nothing
but misery. I am speaking to you from the bottom of my heart.
Receive my words into the bottom of yours, and weigh them well.
Besides love for you as a son, I have love for you also as a man
standing at the cross-ways. I kiss you and Lyólya and
Nolétchka and Seryózha, if he is back. We are all
alive and well.
The following letter belongs to the same period:
Your letter to Tánya has arrived, my dear friend
Ilyá, and I see that you are still advancing toward that
purpose which you set up for yourself; and I want to write to you
and to her—for no doubt you tell her everything—what I think
about it. Well, I think about it a great deal, with joy and with
fear mixed. This is what I think. If one marries in order to
enjoy oneself more, no good will ever come of it. To set up as
one's main object, ousting everything else, marriage, union with
the being you love, is a great mistake. And an obvious one, if you
think about it. Object, marriage. Well, you marry; and what then?
If you had no other object in life before your marriage, it will be
twice as hard to find one.
As a rule, people who are getting married completely forget
this.
So many joyful events await them in the future, in wedlock and
the arrival of children, that those events seem to constitute life
itself. But this is indeed a dangerous illusion.
If parents merely live from day to day, begetting children,
and have no purpose in life, they are only putting off the question
of the purpose of life and that punishment which is allotted to
people who live without knowing why; they are only putting it off
and not escaping it, because they will have to bring up their
children and guide their steps, but they will have nothing to guide
them by. And then the parents lose their human qualities and the
happiness which depends on the possession of them, and turn into
mere breeding cattle.
That is why I say that people who are proposing to marry
because their life seems to them to be full must more than
ever set themselves to think and make clear to their own minds for
the sake of what each of them lives.
And in order to make this clear, you must consider the
circumstances in which you live, your past. Reckon up what you
consider
important and what unimportant in life. Find out what you believe
in; that is, what you look on as eternal and immutable truth, and
what you will take for your guide in life. And not only find out,
but make clear to your own mind, and try to practise or to learn to
practise in your daily life; because until you practise what you
believe you cannot tell whether you believe it or not.
I know your faith, and that faith, or those sides of it which
can be expressed in deeds, you must now more than ever make clear
to your own mind, by putting them into practice.
Your faith is that your welfare consists in loving people and
being loved by them. For the attainment of this end I know of
three lines of action in which I perpetually exercise myself, in
which one can never exercise oneself enough and which are specially
necessary to you now.
First, in order to be able to love people and to be loved by
them, one must accustom oneself to expect as little as possible
from them, and that is very hard work; for if I expect much, and
am often disappointed, I am inclined rather to reproach them than
to love them.
Second, in order to love people not in words, but in deed, one
must train oneself to do what benefits them. That needs still
harder work, especially at your age, when it is one's natural
business to be studying.
Third, in order to love people and to b. l. b. t.,
[3] one
must train oneself to gentleness, humility, the art of bearing with
disagreeable people and things, the art of behaving to them so as
not to offend any one, of being able to choose the least offense.
And this is the hardest work of all—work that never ceases from
the time you wake till the time you go to sleep, and the most
joyful work of all, because day after day you rejoice in your
growing success in it, and receive a further reward, unperceived
at first, but very joyful after, in being loved by others.
So I advise you, Friend Ilyá, and both of you, to live
and to think as sincerely as you can, because it is the only way
you can discover if you are really going along the same road, and
whether it is wise to join hands or not; and at the same time, if
you are sincere, you must be making your future ready.
Your purpose in life must not be the joy of wedlock, but, by
your life to bring more love and truth into the world. The object
of marriage is to help one another in the attainment of that
purpose.
The vilest and most selfish life is the life of the people who
have joined together only in order to enjoy life; and the highest
vocation in the world is that of those who live in order to serve
God by bringing good into the world, and who have joined together
for that very purpose. Don't mistake half-measures for the real
thing. Why should a man not choose the highest? Only when you
have chosen the highest, you must set your whole heart on it, and
not just a little. Just a little leads to nothing. There, I am
tired of writing, and still have much left that I wanted to say.
I kiss you.
[[1]]
I had written to my father that my fiancée's
mother would not let me marry for two years.
[[2]]
My father took Griboyéhof's Princess
Márya Alexévna as a type. The allusion here is
to the last words of Griboyéhof's famous comedy, "The
Misfortune of Cleverness," "What will Princess Márya
Alexévna say?"
