University of Virginia Library

GORKY'S NOTES

I

THE thought which beyond others most often and conspicuously gnaws at him is the thought of God. At moments it seems, indeed, not to be a thought of God. He speaks of it less than he would like, but thinks of it always. It can scarcely be said to be a sign of old age, a presentiment of death — no, I think that it comes from his exquisite human pride, and — a bit — from a sense of humiliation: for, being Leo Tolstoy, it is humiliating to have to submit one's will to a Streptococcus. If he were a scientist, he would certainly evolve the most ingenious hypotheses, make great discoveries.

II

He has wonderful hands — not beautiful, but knotted with swollen veins, and yet full

of a singular expressiveness and the power of creativeness. Probably Leonardo da Vinci had hands like that. With such hands one can do anything. Sometimes, when talking, he will move his fingers, gradually close them into a fist, and then, suddenly opening them, utter a good, full-weight word. He is like a god, not a Sabaoth or Olympian, but the kind of Russian god who "sits on a maple throne under a golden lime tree," not very majestic, but perhaps more cunning than all the other gods.

III

He treats Sulerzhizky with the tenderness of a woman. For Tchekhov his love is paternal — in this love is the feeling of the pride of a creator. Suler rouses in him just tenderness, a perpetual interest and rapture which never seems to weary the sorcerer. Perhaps, there is something a little ridiculous in this feeling, like the love of an old maid for a parrot, a pug-dog, or a tom-cat. Suler is a fascinatingly wild bird from some strange, unknown land. A hundred men like him could change the face of, as well as the soul

of, a provincial town. Its face they would smash and its soul they would fill with a passion for riotous, brilliant, headstrong wildness. One loves Suler easily and gayly, and when I see how carelessly women accept him, they surprise and anger me. Yet under this carelessness is hidden, perhaps, caution. Suler is not reliable. What will he do tomorrow? He may throw a bomb or he may join a troupe of public-house minstrels. He has energy enough for three life-times, and fire of life — so much that he seems to sweat sparks like over-heated iron.

IV

Goldenweiser played Chopin, which called forth these remarks from Leo Nikolaevich [Tolstoy]: "A certain German princeling said: 'Where you want to have slaves, there you should have as much music as possible.' That's a true thought, a true observation — music dulls the mind. Especially do the Catholics realize that; our priests, of course, will not reconcile themselves to Mendelssohn in church. A Tula priest assured me that Christ was not a Jew, though the son of the

Jewish God and his mother a Jewess — he did admit that, but says he: 'It's impossible.' I asked him: 'But how then. . . . !' He shrugged his shoulders and said: 'That's just the mystery.'"

V

I remember his saying to me: "An intellectual is like the old Galician prince Vladimirko who, as far back as the twelfth century boldly declared: 'There are no miracles in our time.' Six hundred years have passed and all the intellectuals hammer away at each other: 'There are no miracles, there are no miracles.' And all the people believe in miracles just as they did in the twelfth century."

VI

"The minority feel the need of God because they have got everything else, the majority because they have nothing." That was how Tolstoy put it; I would put it differently: The majority believe in God from cowardice, only the few believe in him from fullness of soul.

VII

He advised me to read Buddhistic scriptures. Of Buddhism and Christ he always speaks sentimentally. When he speaks about Christ, it is always peculiarly poor — no enthusiasm, no feeling in his words, and no spark of real fire. I think he regards Christ as simple and deserving of pity; and, although at times he admires him, he hardly loves him. It is as though he were uneasy: if Christ came to a Russian village, the girls might laugh at him.

VIII

To-day the Grand Duke Nikolay Mikhailovich was at Tolstoy's, evidently a very clever man. His behavior is very modest, he talks little. He has sympathetic eyes and a fine figure, quiet gestures. Leo Nikolaevich smiled caressingly at him, and spoke now French, now English. In Russian he said: "Karamzin wrote for the Tsar, Soloviov long and tediously, and Klutchevsky for his own amusement. Cunning fellow Klutchevsky; at first, you get the impression that

he is praising, but as you read on, you see that he is blaming."

Some one mentioned Zabielin. Tolstoy's comment was: 'He's nice. An amateur collector; he collects everything whether it is useful or not. He describes food as if he had never had a square meal, but he is very, very amusing."

IX

He reminds me of those pilgrims who all their life long, stick in hand, walk the earth, traveling thousands of miles from one monastery to another, from one saint's relics to another, terribly homeless and alien to all men and things. The world is not for them, nor God either. They pray to him from habit, and in their secret soul they hate him — why does he drive them over the earth, from one end to the other? What for? People are stumps, roots, stones on the path, one stumbles over them, and sometimes is hurt by them. One can do without them, but it is pleasant sometimes to surprise a man with one's own unlikeness to him, to show one's difference from him.

X

On one occasion he remarked: "Frederick of Prussia said very truly: 'Every one must save himself in his own way.' He also said: 'Argue as much as you like, but obey.' But when dying he confessed: 'I have grown weary of ruling slaves.' So-called great men are always terribly contradictory: that is forgiven them with all their other follies. Though contradictoriness is not folly: a fool is stubborn, but does not know how to contradict himself. Yes, Frederick was a strange man: among the Germans he won the reputation of being the best king, yet he could not bear them; he disliked even Goethe and Willand."

XI

"Romanticism comes from the fear of looking straight into the eyes of truth," he said yesterday with regard to Balmont's poems. Suler disagreed with him and, lisping with excitement, read very feelingly some more poems.

"These, Liovushka," he said, "are not

poems, they are charlatanism, rubbish, as people said in the middle ages, a nonsensical stringing together of words. Poetry is artless; when Fet wrote

he expressed a genuine, real, people's sense of poetry. The peasant, too, doesn't know that he's a poet — oh, oi, ah, and aye — and there comes off a real song, straight from the soul, like a bird's. These new poets of yours are inventing. There are those silly French things called articles de Paris — well, that's what your stringers of verses produce. Nekassov's miserable verses too are invented from beginning to end."

"And Béranger?" Suler asked.

"Béranger — that's quite different. What's there in common between the French and us? They are sensualists; the life of the spirit is not as important to them as the flesh. To a Frenchman, woman is everything. They are a worn out, emasculated people. Doctors say that all consumptives are sensualists."

Suler began to argue with his peculiar directness,

pouring out a random flood of words. Leo Nikolaevich looked at him and said with a broad smile: "You are peevish to-day, like a girl who has reached the age when she should marry but has no lover."

XII

The illness dried him up still more, burnt something out of him. Inwardly he seemed to become lighter, more transparent, more resigned. His eyes are still keener, his glance piercing. He listens attentively as though recalling something which he has forgotten or as though waiting for something new and unknown. In Yasnaya Polyana he seemed to me a man who knew everything and had nothing more to learn — a man who had settled every question.

XIII

If he were a fish, he would certainly swim only in the ocean, never coming to the narrow seas, and particularly not to the flat waters of earthly rivers. Around him here there rest or dart hither and thither the little fishes: what he says does not interest them,

is not necessary to them, and his silence does not frighten or move them. Yet his silence is impressive, like that of a real hermit driven out from this world. Though he speaks a great deal and as a duty upon certain subjects, his silence is felt to be still greater. Certain things one can not tell to any one. Surely he has some thoughts of which he is afraid.

XIV

Some one sent him an excellent version of the story of Christ's godson. He read it aloud with pleasure to Suler, Tchekhov — he read amazingly well. He was especially amused by the devils torturing the landowners. There was something which I did not like in that. He can not be insincere, but, if this be sincere, then it makes it worse.

Then he said:

"How well the peasants compose stories. Everything is simple, the words few, and a great deal of feeling. Real wisdom uses few words, for instance, 'God have mercy on us."'

Yet the story is a cruel one.

XV

His interest in me is ethnological. In his eyes I belong to a species not familiar to him — only that.

XVI

I read my story, "The Bull," to him. He laughed much, and praised my knowledge of "the tricks of the language."

"But your treatment of words is not skilful; all your peasants speak cleverly. In actual life what they say is silly and incoherent, and at first you can not make out what a peasant wants to say. That is done deliberately; under the silliness of their words is always concealed a desire to allow the other person to show what is in his mind. A good peasant will never show at once what is in his own mind: it is not profitable. He knows that people approach a stupid man frankly and directly, and that's the very thing he wants. You stand revealed before him, and he at once sees all your weak points. He is suspicious; he is afraid to tell his inmost thoughts even to his wife. But with

your peasants in every story, everything is revealed: it's a universal council of wisdom. And they all speak in aphorisms; that's not true to life either; aphorisms are not natural to the Russian language."

"What about sayings and proverbs?"

"That's a different thing. They are not of to-day's manufacture."

"But you yourself often speak in aphorisms."

"Never. There again you touch everything up, people as well as nature — especially people. So did Lieskov, an affected, finicky writer whom nobody reads now. Don't let any one influence you, fear no one, and then you'll be all right."

XVII

In his diary which he gave me to read, I was struck by a strange aphorism: "God is my desire."

To-day on returning him the book, I asked him what it meant.

"An unfinished thought," he said, glancing at the page and screwing up his eyes. "I must have wanted to say: God is my desire

to know him. . . . No, not that. . . ." He began to laugh and, rolling up the book into a tube, he put it into the big pocket of his blouse. With God he has very suspicious relations; they sometimes remind me of the relation of "two bears in one den."

XVIII

Of science he said: "Science is a bar of gold made by a charlatan alchemist. You want to simplify it, to make it accessible to all: you find that you have coined a lot of false coins. When the people realize the real value of these coins, they won't thank you."

XIX

We walked in the Yussopor Park. He spoke superbly about the customs of the Moscow aristocracy. A big Russian peasant woman was working on the flower-bed, bent at right angles, showing her ivory legs, shaking her heavy breasts. He looked at her attentively.

"It is those caryatides who have kept all that magnificence and extravagance going.

Not only by the labor of peasant men and women, not only by the taxes they pay, but in the literal sense by their blood. If the aristocracy had not from time to time mated with such horse-women as she, they would have died out long ago. It is impossible with impunity to waste one's strength as the young men of my time did. But after sowing their wild oats, many married serf-girls and produced a good breed. In that way, too, the peasant's strength saved them. That strength is everywhere in place. Half the aristocracy always has to spend its strength on itself, and the other half to dilute itself with peasant blood and thus diffuse the peasant blood a little. It's useful."

XX

Of women he talks readily and much, like a French novelist, but always with the coarseness of a Russian peasant. Formerly it used to affect me unpleasantly. To-day in the Almond Park he asked Anton Tchekhov:

"You whored a great deal when you were young?"

Anton Pavlovich, with a confused smile,

and pulling at his little beard, muttered something inaudible and Leo Nikolaevich, looking at the sea, confessed:

"I was an indefatigable . . ."

He said this penitently, using at the end of the sentence a salty peasant word. And I noticed for the first time how simply he used these words, as though he knew no more fitting ones to use. Coming from his shaggy lips, they sound simple and natural and lose their soldierly coarseness and filth. I remember my first meeting with him and his talk about Varienka Oliessova and "Twenty-six and One." From the ordinary point of view what he said was a string of indecent words. I was perplexed by it and even offended. I thought that he considered me incapable of understanding any other kind of language. I understand now: it was silly to have felt offended.

XXI

He sat on the stone bench in the shade of the cypresses, looking very lean, small, and gray, and yet resembling Jehovah Sabaoth who is a little tired and is amusing himself

by trying to whistle in tune with a chaffinch. The bird sang in the darkness of the thick foliage: he peered up at it, screwing up his sharp little eyes and, pursing his lips like a child, he whistled incompetently.

"What a furious little creature! It's in a rage. What bird is it?"

I told him about the chaffinch and its characteristic jealousy.

"All life long one song," he said, "and yet jealous. Man has a thousand songs in his heart and is yet blamed for jealousy; is it fair?" He spoke musingly, as though asking himself questions. "There are moments when a man says to a woman more than she ought to know about him. He speaks and forgets, but she remembers. Perhaps jealousy comes from the fear of degrading one's soul, of being humiliated and ridiculous? Not that a woman is dangerous who holds a man by his lusts but she who holds him by his soul. . . ."

When I pointed out the contradiction in this with his "Kreutzer Sonata," the radiance of a sudden smile beamed through his beard and he said:

"I am not a chaffinch."

In the evening while walking, he suddenly said:

"Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and all the agonies of the soul, but for all time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will be — the tragedy of the bedroom."

Saying this, he smiled triumphantly: at times, he has the broad calm smile of a man who has overcome something extremely difficult or from whom some sharp, long-gnawing pain has lifted suddenly. Every thought burrows into his soul like a tick; he either tears it out at once, or allows it to have its fill of his blood, and then, when full, it just drops off of itself.

He read to Suler and me a variant of the scene of the fall of "Father Sergius" — a merciless scene. Suler pouted and fidgeted uneasily.

"What's the matter? Don't you like it?" Leo Nikolaevich asked.

"It's too brutal, as though from Dostoievsky. She is a filthy girl, and her breasts like

pancakes, and all that. Why didn't he sin with a beautiful, healthy woman?"

"That would be sin without justification; as it is, there is justification in pity for the girl. Who could desire her as she is?"

"I can not make it out. . . ."

"There's a great deal, Liovushka, which you can't make out: you're not shrewd. . . ."

There came in Andrey Lvovich's wife and the conversation was interrupted. As she and Suler went out, Leo Nikolaevich said to me: "Leopold is the purest man I know. He is like that: if he did something bad, it would be out of pity for some one."

XXII

He talks most of God, of peasants, and of woman. Of literature rarely and little, as though literature were something alien to him. Woman, in my opinion, he regards with implacable hostility and loves to punish her, unless she be a Kittie or Natasha Rostov, i. e., a creature not too narrow. It is the hostility of the male who has not succeeded in getting all the pleasure he could, or it is the hostility of spirit against "the degrading

impulses of the flesh." But it is hostility, and cold as in "Anna Karenin." Of "the degrading impulses of the flesh" he spoke well on Sunday in a conversation with Tchekhov and Yelpatievsky about Rousseau's "Confession." Suler wrote down what he said, and later, while preparing coffee, burnt it in the spirit-lamp. Once before he burnt Leo Nikolaevich's opinions on Ibsen, and he also lost the notes of the conversation in which Leo Nikolaevich said very pagan things on the symbolism of the marriage ritual, agreeing to a certain extent with V. V. Rosanov.

XXIII

In the morning some "stundists" came to Tolstoy from Feodosia, and to-day all day long he spoke about peasants with rapture.

At lunch: "They came both so strong and fleshy; says one: 'Well, we've come uninvited,' and the other says: 'With God's help, we shall leave unbeated.'" And he broke out into child-like laughter, shaking all over.

After lunch, on the terrace: "We shall

soon cease completely to understand the language of the people. Now we say 'the theory of progress,' 'the rôle of the individual in history,' 'the evolution of science'; and a peasant says: 'You can't hide an awl in a sack'; and all theories, histories, evolutions become pitiable and ridiculous, because they are incomprehensible and unnecessary to the people. But the peasant is stronger than we; he is more tenacious of life, and there may happen to us what happened to the tribe of Atzurs, of whom it was reported to a scholar: 'All the Atzurs have died out, but there is a parrot here who knows a few words of their language.'"

XVIV

"With her body, woman is more sincere than man; but with her mind, she lies. And when she lies, she does not believe herself; but Rousseau lied and believed his lies."

XXV

Dostoievsky described one of his mad characters as living and taking vengeance on himself and others because he had served a

cause in which he did not believe. He wrote that about himself; that is, he could have said the same of himself."

XXVI

"Some of the words used in church are amazingly obscure: what meaning is there, for instance, in the words: 'The earth is God's and the fullness thereof.' That is not Holy Scripture, but a kind of popular scientific materialism."

"But you explained the words somewhere," said Suler.

"Many things are explained. . . . 'An explanation does not go up to the hilt.'"

And he gave a cunning little smile.

XXVII

He likes putting difficult and malicious questions:

What do you think of yourself?

Do you love your wife?

Do you think my son, Leo, has talent?

How do you like Sophie Andreyavna? [Tolstoy's wife].

To lie to him is impossible.

Once he asked: "Are you fond of me, Alexey Maximovitch?"

This is the maliciousness of a "bogatyr" [a hero in Russian legend, brave but wild and self-willed, like a child]: Vaska Buslayev played just such pranks in his youth, mischievous fellow. He is experimenting, all the time testing something, as if he were going to fight. It is interesting, but not much to my liking. He is the devil, and I am still a babe, and he should leave me alone.

XXVIII

Perhaps peasant to him means merely — bad smell. He always feels it, and involuntarily has to talk of it.

Last night I told him of my battle with General Kornet's wife; he laughed until he cried and he got a pain in his side and groaned and kept on crying out in a thin scream:

"With the shovel! On the bottom with the shovel, eh? Right on the bottom! Was it a broad shovel?"

Then, after a pause, he said seriously: "It was generous in you to strike her like that; any other man would have struck her

on the head for that. Very generous! You understood that she wanted you?"

"I don't remember. I hardly think that I can have understood."

"Well now! But it's obvious. Of course she wanted you."

"I did not live for that then."

"Whatever you may live for, it's all the same. You are evidently not much of a lady's man. Any one else in your place would have made his fortune out of the situation, would have become a landed proprietor and have ended by making one of a pair of drunkards."

After a silence: "You are funny — don't be offended — very funny. And it's very strange that you should still be good-natured when you might well be spiteful. . . . Yes, you might well be spiteful. . . . You're strong . . . that's good. . . ."

And after another silence, he added thoughtfully: "Your mind I don't understand — it's a very tangled mind — but your heart is sensible . . . yes, a sensible heart."

XXIX

I asked him: "Do you agree with Poznyshiev [in 'Kreutzer Sonata'] when he says that doctors have destroyed and are destroying thousands and hundreds of thousands of people?"

"Are you very anxious to know?"

"Very."

"Then I shan't tell you."

And he smiled, playing with his thumbs.

I remember in one of his stories he makes a comparison between a quack village "vet." and a doctor of medicine:

"The words 'giltchak,' 'potchetchny,' 'blood-letting' [words used by quack 'vets.' for the diseases of horses], are not they precisely the same as nerves, rheumatism, organisms, etc.?"

And this was written after Jenner, Behring, Pasteur. It is perversity!

XXX

How strange that he is so fond of playing cards. He plays seriously, passionately. His hands become nervous when he takes the

cards up, exactly as if he were holding live birds instead of inanimate pieces of cardboard.

XXXI

"Dickens said a very clever thing: 'Life is given to us on the definite understanding that we boldly defend it to the last.' On the whole, he was a sentimental, loquacious, and not very clever writer, but he knew how to construct a novel as no one else could, certainly better than Balzac. Some one has said: 'Many are possessed by the passion for writing books, but few are ashamed of them afterwards.' Balzac was not ashamed, nor was Dickens, and both of them wrote quite a number of bad books. Still, Balzac is a genius. Or at any rate, the thing which you can only call genius. . . ."

XXXII

Sometimes he seems to be conceited and intolerant like a Volga preacher, and this is terrible in a man who is the sounding bell of this world. Yesterday he said to me:

"I am more of a mouzhik than you and I feel better in a mouzhik way."

God, he ought not to boast of it, he must not!

XXXIII

I read him some scenes from my play, "The Lower Depths"; he listened attentively and then asked: "Why do you write that?"

I explained as best I could.

"One always notices that you jump like a cock on to everything. And more — you always want to paint all the grooves and cracks over with your own paint. You remember that Andersen says: 'The gilt will come off and the pigskin will remain,' just as our peasants say: 'Everything will pass away, the truth alone will remain.' You'd much better not put the plaster on, for you yourself will suffer for it later. Again, your language is very skilful, with all kinds of tricks — that's no good. You ought to write more simply; people speak simply, even incoherently, and that's good. A peasant doesn't ask: 'Why is a third more than a fourth, if four is always more than three,' as one

learned young lady asked. No tricks please."

He spoke irritably; clearly he disliked very much what I had read to him. And after a silence, looking over my head, he said gloomily:

"Your old man is not sympathetic, one does not believe in his goodness. The actor is all right, he's good. You know 'Fruits of Enlightenment'? My cook there is rather like your actor. Writing plays is difficult. But your prostitute also came off well, they must be like that. Have you known many of them?"

"I used to."

"Yes, one can see that. Truth always shows itself. Most of what you say comes out of yourself, and therefore you have no characters, and all your people have the same face. I should think you don't understand women; they don't come off with you. One does not remember them. . . ."

At this moment A. L.'s wife came in and called us to come to tea, and he got up and went out very quickly as if he were glad to end the conversation.

XXXIV

"What is the most terrible dream you have ever had?" Tolstoy asked me.

I rarely have dreams and remember them badly, but two have remained in my memory and probably will for the rest of my life.

I dreamt once that I saw the sky scrofulous, putrescent, greenish-yellow, and the stars in it were round, flat, without rays, without luster, like scabs on the skin of a diseased person. And there glided across this putrescent sky slowly reddish forked lightning, rather like a snake, and when it touched a star, the star swelled up into a ball and burst noiselessly, leaving behind it a darkish spot, like a little smoke; and then the spot vanished quickly in the bleared and liquid sky. Thus all the stars one after another burst and perished and the sky, growing darker and more horrible, at last whirled upwards, bubbled, and, bursting into fragments, began to fall on my head in a kind of cold jelly, and in the spaces between the fragments there appeared a shiny blackness as though of iron.

Leo Nikolaevich said: "Now that comes

from a learned book; you must have read something on astronomy; hence the nightmare. And the other dream?"

The other dream: a snowy plain, smooth like a sheet of paper; no hillock, no tree, no bush anywhere, only — barely visible — a few rods poked out from under the snow. And across the snow of this dead desert from horizon to horizon, there stretched a yellow strip of a hardly distinguishable road, and over the road there marched slowly a pair of gray felt top boots — empty.

He raised his shaggy, werewolf eyebrows, looked at me intently and thought for a while.

"That's terrible. . . . Did you really dream that; you didn't invent it? But there's something bookish in it also."

And suddenly he got angry, and said, irritably, sternly, rapping his knee with his finger: "But you're not a drinking man? It's unlikely that you ever drank much. And yet there's something drunken in these dreams. There was a German writer, Hoffmann, who dreamt that card tables ran about the street and all that sort of thing, but then he was a drunkard — a 'calaholic,' as our

literate coachmen say. Empty boots marching — that's really terrible. Even if you did invent it, it's good. Terrible!"

Suddenly he gave a broad smile, so that even his cheek bones beamed: "And imagine this: suddenly, in the Tverskaya Street, there runs a card table with its curved legs, its boards clap-clap, raising a chalky dust, and you can even still see the numbers on the green cloth — excise clerks playing whist on it for three days and nights on end — the table could not bear it any longer and ran away."

He laughed and then, probably noticing that I was a little hurt by his distrust of me:

"Are you hurt because I thought your dreams bookish? Don't be annoyed; sometimes, I know, one invents something without being aware of it, something which one can not believe, which can't possibly be believed, and then one imagines that one dreamt it and did not invent it at all. There was a story which an old landowner told: he dreamt that he was walking in a wood and came out of it onto a steppe. On the steppe he saw two hills which suddenly turned into a woman's breasts, and between them rose up a black

face which instead of eyes had two moons like white spots. The old man dreamt that he was standing between the woman's legs, in front of him a deep dark ravine which sucked him in. After the dream his hair began to grow gray and his hands to tremble, and he went abroad to Doctor Kneipp to take a water cure. But really he must have seen something of the kind — he was a dissolute fellow."

He patted me on the shoulder.

"But you are neither a drunkard nor dissolute — how do you come to have such dreams?"

"I don't know."

"We know nothing about ourselves."

He sighed, screwed up his eyes, thought for a bit, and then added in a low voice: "We know nothing."

This evening, during our walk, he took my arm and said: —

"The boots are marching — terrible, eh? Quite empty — tiop, tiop — and the snow scrunching. Yes, it's good; but you are very bookish, very. Don't be cross, but it's bad and will stand in your way."

I am scarcely more bookish than he, and at the time I thought him a cruel rationalist despite all his pleasant little phrases.

XXXV

At times he gives one the impression of having just arrived from some distant country, where people think and feel differently and their relations and language are different. He sits in a corner tired and gray, as though the dust of another earth were on him, and he looks attentively at everything with the look of a foreigner or of a dumb man. Yesterday, before dinner, he came into the drawing-room, just like that, his thoughts far away. He sat down on the sofa, and, after a moment's silence, suddenly said, swaying his body a little, rubbing the palm of his hand on his knee, and wrinkling up his face:

"Still that is not all — not all."

Some one, always stolidly stupid as a flat-iron, asked: "What do you say?"

He looked at him fixedly, and then, bending forward and looking onto the terrace where I was sitting with Doctor Nikitin and

Yelpatievsky, he said: "What are you talking about?"

"Plehve."

"Plehve . . . Plehve . . ." he repeated musingly after a pause, as though he heard the name for the first time. Then he shook himself, like a bird, and asked with a faint smile:

"To-day from early morning I have had a silly thing running in my head; some one once told me that he saw the following epitaph in a cemetery:

and something like that. . . ." He was silent, and then, nodding his head and smiling faintly, added: "In human stupidity, when it is not malicious, there is something very

touching, even beautiful. . . . There always is."

They called us to come to dinner.

XXXVI

"I do not like people when they are drunk, but I know some who become interesting when they are tipsy, who acquire what is not natural to them in their sober state; wit, beauty of thought, alertness, and richness of language. In such cases I am ready to bless wine."

Suler tells how he was once walking with Leo Nikolaevich in Tverskaya Street when Tolstoy noticed in the distance two soldiers of the Guards. The metal of their accoutrements shone in the sun; their spurs jingled; they kept step like one man; their faces, too, shone with the self-assurance of strength and youth. Tolstoy began to grumble at them: "What pompous stupidity! Like animals trained by the whip. . . ."

But when the guardsmen came abreast with him, he stopped, followed them caressingly with his eyes, and said enthusiastically: "How handsome! Old Romans, eh, Liovushka?

Their strength and beauty! O Lord! How charming it is when man is handsome, how very charming!"