Chapter 19 one seven

His countenance acquired definite features, by which it is forever engraved in the memory of mankind: a broad brow marked with double wrinkles, thick white eyebrows, and a beautiful long beard, reminiscent of the first The statue of Moses in the city of Rong.The old countenance softened; it bore the traces of sickness, sorrow, and boundless love.How much he has changed since he was rough and wild at twenty, and from the dead seriousness of Sevastopol when he was in the army!But Qingming's eyes still retain their sharp and compelling light, expressing infinite frankness, he does not hide anything, and nothing can be hidden from him.

Nine years before his death, in his reply to the Holy Synod (April 17, 1901), Tolstoy said: "My faith enables me to live in peace and joy, I can go to the end of my life in peace and joy." When referring to his two sentences, I cannot help thinking of the ancient proverb: "We can never call a man happy until he is dead." Would the peace and joy, so proud of him, be true to him then? Hopes for the "Great Revolution" of 1905 faded.In the darkness where the clouds and mist have been pushed away, the expected light has not come.After the excitement of the revolution was over, exhaustion of energy followed.All kinds of tyranny and violence in the past have not changed at all, only the people are trapped in more miserable misery.In 1906, Tolstoy had already doubted the historical mission of the Russian Slavic peoples; his strong faith searched far away for other peoples capable of taking up this mission.He thought of "the great and wise Chinese".He believed that "the liberty irretrievably lost by the peoples of the West will be regained by the peoples of the East."He believes that China leads Asia and will complete the great cause of human transformation through the cultivation of "Tao".Letter to a Chinese in October 1906.

But this is a hope that is quickly fading: the China of Lao Tzu and Confucius, like Japan, negates the wisdom of its past in order to imitate Europe.In his 1906 letter Tolstoy had already expressed this fear.The abused Dukhobors immigrated to Canada; there they immediately took possession of the land, much to Tolstoy's displeasure. "Since the private industry system is to be tolerated, it is meaningless to refuse military and police service in the past, because the private industry system depends entirely on the military and police system to maintain it. Those who are favored are better than those who refuse military service and police service and enjoy private property.” (1899 to the Dukhobor people living in Canada) Georgians have just broken away from the shackles of the state. They began to attack those who disagreed with them; and the Russian army was called to suppress everything.Even those Jews—"their country is the Bible, the most beautiful country in man's ideal,"—could not but be stained with this hypocritical nationalism, "the fur of modern Europaism, for its deformed product".

Tolstoy was sad, but not disappointed.He believed in God, he believed in the future: later facts proved that he was not bad, and God fully repaid his favor.In the months before his death, at the extremes of Africa, Gandhi's redeeming voice was heard. (See the book "Asia's Response to Tolstoy") "It would be perfect if people could manage to grow a forest in a flash. Unfortunately, this is impossible. We should wait for the seeds to germinate, It grows into a tree, gives birth to green leaves, and finally grows from the trunk to a tree." 1905, "Letter to the Statesman".

But it takes many trees to grow a forest; Tolstoy has only one person.Glorious, but lonely.People from all over the world wrote to him: Islamic countries, China, Japan, people translated his, and his doctrine of "granting land to the people" was spread everywhere.At the end of The Great Sin we find the Book of Prosecutions to the Ruled.American journalists came to visit him; Frenchmen came to ask him for his opinion on art or on the separation of church and state.Letter to Paul Sabatier, November 7, 1906.But his followers are less than three hundred, and he himself knows it.And he doesn't bother to win followers.He rejected attempts by his friends to organize a "Tolstoy faction".

"Should not cater to each other, but all should go to God... You say: united, it will be easier... - what? - for work, mowing, yes. But close to God, people can only do it alone Reach... The world in my eyes is like a huge temple, and the light shoots from the height to the center. In order to unite with each other, everyone should go to the light. There, all of us, from all sides, we and what we did not expect Many people meet: this is the joy." Letters to a friend in June 1892 and November 1901. How many of them were gathered in one place under the light from the vault? ——It doesn't matter, as long as there is one with God, that's enough.

"Only burning matter can ignite other matter. Similarly, only a person's true belief and true life can infect others and spread the truth." "War and Revolution". This may be true; but how far does solitary faith guarantee Tolstoy's happiness? ——In his last years, how far did he really differ from the clarity and tranquility achieved by Goethe's painstaking efforts?It can be said that he is avoiding the clarity and tranquility, and he is full of aversion to it. "To be able to be dissatisfied with oneself is to thank God. May it always be so! The dissonance of life and its ideal is the mark of life, the upward movement from small to great, from evil to good. And this dissonance is what becomes A necessary condition of good. When a man is at peace and complacent, it is an evil." Letter to a friend.

And he fantasizes about the subject of the novel, which proves that the boredom of Levin or Pierre Bezukhov is still not extinguished in his heart: "I often imagine a man who was brought up in a revolutionary group, the first revolutionary Party, then Populist, Socialist, Orthodox, monk on Mount Addo, then Atheist, good father in the family, and finally Dukhobor of the Caucasus. He tried everything, everything He gave up, people laughed at him, he did nothing, died in obscurity in an asylum. At the time of his death, he thought he had ruined his life. But, this is a saint." Maybe here is the Involved in "The Story of a Dukhobor Man".

So, he, who is so full of confidence, does he still have doubts in his heart? --who knows?For a person who is still strong physically and mentally when he grows old, life must not stop at a certain point of thought.Life must go on. "To move is to live." "Imagine that all human beings fully understand the truth and gather together to live on an island. Is this life?" (Letter to a friend, March 1901) in the last years of his life How many things have changed for him.Has he changed his mind about the revolutionaries?Who is to say that his faith in the doctrine of non-resistance has not wavered? ——In Nekhludoff's contacts with political prisoners prove that his views on the Russian Revolutionary Party have changed.

Hitherto, what he had always opposed to them was their cruelty, their concealment of crime, their violence, their self-satisfaction, their vanity.But when he looked at them more closely, when he saw how the authorities treated them, he understood that they had to. He admired their lofty conception of duty, in which the whole sacrifice was included. But from 1900 onwards the revolutionary tide began to spread and widen, starting from the intellectuals, it invaded the popular classes, it secretly shook thousands and thousands of unfortunates.The vanguard of their army paraded past the window of Tolstoy's house in Yasnaya Polyana. Three short stories published in the magazine "Mercury de France", December 1, 1910.As part of Tolstoy's last works in his later years, one can get a glimpse of how much pain and desolation this scene caused him mentally.In the fields of Tula, where are the times when groups of simple and pious pilgrims passed by?At this moment, countless famine victims are wandering.They come every day.Tolstoy talked to them and was appalled by the resentment in their breasts; they no longer regarded the rich as before, as people who "cultivate their souls by giving alms", but as robbers who drink the blood of the working people. thug".Many of them were educated, broke, and desperate to make their way out.

"The barbarians who will do in modern civilization what the Huns and Vandals did in ancient civilizations will not be bred in deserts and forests, but in villages and roads near cities." Henry George once said so.Tolstoy further added, saying: "The Vandals are already ready in Russia, and they will appear especially terrible in our nation, which is so religious, because we don't know the limit, as in Europe, it is already large." For well-developed public opinion and laws, etc.” Tolstoy often received letters from these rebels, protesting his non-resistance doctrine, saying that all the atrocities committed by the government and the rich against the people can only be answered with the voice of "Revenge! Revenge! Revenge!" — Tolstoy still blames them, doesn't he?we do not know.But when he saw a few days later in his village, in the homes of the poor who were weeping at the ruthless officials, the cauldrons and pots of cattle and sheep were taken away, he could not help shouting to those cruel officials. The slogan of vengeance came, those executioners, "those bureaucrats and assistants, who only know how to sell wine for profit, teach people to slaughter, sentence to exile, go to prison, hard labor, or hang,-these guys, it is agreed that those captured in the poor's house Cloth from cattle and sheep is more suitable for distilling alcohol that poisons the people, making ammunition for killing people, building prisons, and especially sharing the spoils with their assistants.” It is a sad thing: when a person who spends his whole life expecting the world of love to come, has to close his eyes and be filled with just bewilderment before these terrible sights. —It is all the more painful when one has a Tolstoy-like consciousness and has to admit that one's life has not yet conformed to his ideas. Here we touch on his last years—should we say his last thirty years? ——the most painful point of the world, and this we should only gently touch with pious hands: because of this pain, Tolstoy tried to keep a secret, and this pain belongs not only to the dead, but also to others. The living, the ones he loved, the people who loved him. He has never been able to infect his faith to his dearest people, his wife, his children.We have seen this faithful companion, who bravely shared his life and his artistic work, feel deep pain at his abandonment of his artistic beliefs for a moral belief she did not understand.Tolstoy suffered no less from seeing himself not understood by his best girlfriend. "With all my soul," he wrote to Danai Rama, "I feel the truth of the following words: Husband and wife are not two separate beings, but united as one; I can sometimes pass on to my wife a part of my religious sense of detachment from the troubles of life. I hope that this sense can be passed on to her, not from me, of course, but from God, although it is a sense that women are not very capable of. .” May 16, 1892.Tolstoy saw his wife suffering from the death of a boy, and he did not know how to comfort her. This volunteer does not seem to have been accepted.Countess Tolstoy loves the kindness of the great soul, the purity of his heart, the heroism of his confession, who is "one with her"; ; Book of January 1883.When the Holy Synod excommunicated him, she valiantly defended him, claiming that she would share in the dangers to which her husband was exposed.But she can't pretend to believe what she doesn't believe; and Tolstoy is too sincere to force her to pretend to believe - because he hates false faith and love more than complete disbelief and not love. "I never reproach people for not being religious. The worst thing is when people lie and pretend to be religious." Also: "If God pretends to love us, it is worse than hating us." So how can He compel Would she change her life in disbelief, sacrificing her property and that of her children? With his sons and daughters, the discord seems to be deeper.Leroy Beaulieu, who met Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, said that "at the dining table, when the father speaks, the sons do not conceal their annoyance and mistrust."See Two Ball Magazine, Paris, December 15, 1910.His faith had only slightly infected his three daughters, one of whom, Maria, his favorite, was dead by then.Paul Birukov recently published a correspondence between Tolstoy and his daughter Maria in a German translation.He was completely alone in spirit among his family."Only his young daughter and his doctor" knew him.See Two Ball Magazine, Paris, December 15, 1910. He was troubled by this distance in thought, he was troubled by the worldly communication he had to deal with, people from all over the world came to visit him, those Americans, those fashionable frivolous people made him very tired; distressed by the "luxury" that his family life forced upon him.In fact, it is also the minimum luxury, if we believe the narration of people who have seen him in his house, serious and cold furniture, in his small bedroom, there is an iron bed, and there is nothing on the walls!But this comfort has embarrassed him: it is his eternal torment.In the second short story of "The Mercury de France," he sadly contrasts the misery around him with the enjoyment of his own home. In 1903, he had written: "My activity, however beneficial it may appear to certain persons, has lost a great deal of its importance, because my life cannot be fully consistent with what I preach." Letter to a friend on December 10, 1903. How he could not achieve this agreement!He could neither compel his family to renounce the world, nor separate them from their lives—freed him from the attacks of his enemies, who accused him of hypocrisy and inconsistency! He had missed.For a long time, he had made up his mind.His letter of June 8, 1897, to his wife has been found and published.See the daily newspaper Le Figaro, December 27, 1910, which was delivered to Countess Tolstoy by their son-in-law, Prince Obolensky, after his death.This is a few years ago, Toshi entrusted this letter to his son-in-law.This letter was accompanied by another letter, dealing with private matters of their married life.The letter was destroyed after Countess Tolstoy read it. (See the narration of Tolstoy's eldest daughter, Mrs. Tatiana Sukhotin) It should be fully transcribed here.Nothing could have broken his heart with love and pain more than this letter: "For so long, dear Sophia, I have suffered at the inconsistency of my life with my beliefs. I cannot force you to change your life." and habits. Hitherto I could not leave you, because I thought that by going away I would lose the little influence I could have on your very young children, and I would make you all very sad. But I could not go on living as I had for the past sixteen years, a painful situation that had begun in 1881, that winter in Moscow, when Tolstoy first saw the horrors of society. Sometimes it is against you to displease you, and sometimes I am caught up in the temptations and influences I am used to all around me. I am now determined to carry out a plan I have been thinking about for a long time: to go... like an Indian, at sixty When he was old, he retired to the forest and, like all religious old people, would like to dedicate his remaining years to God, not to jokes, humorous remarks, fooling around, playing tennis, and I, too, at the age of seventy Seasons left and right, I wish to be quiet and solitary in all strength of soul and soul, if not perfect unity, at least there will be no inconsistency in the struggle between my life and conscience. If I go openly, it will surely arouse your prayers , argue, I shall back down, or fail to carry out my resolutions just when I should. So I ask you to forgive me if my actions have distressed you. Especially you, Sophia, let me go and do not seek Me, don't hate me, don't blame me. The fact that I left you doesn't prove that I have anything against you...I know you can't, you can't think and see like I do, so you can't change your life, you can't What sacrifices have been made for an object that you do not recognize. I therefore do not blame you for anything; on the contrary, I recall with love and gratitude our long thirty-five years of common life, especially the first half of this period, you With the bravery and fidelity of your gifted motherhood, take up your mission that you have acknowledged. You have given to me and to the world all that you can give. You have been motherly and sacrificed... But in the second half of our lives, for the last fifteen years, we've gone our separate ways. I can't believe it's my fault; I know I've changed, but it's not for fun, nor for anyone else, But because I had to. I cannot reproach you for not following me at all, I thank you, and I will always remember with true love what you have given me.—Farewell, my dear Sophia. I love you." "The fact that I left you..." In fact, he didn't leave her. —Poor letter!For him it seemed enough to have written this letter, as if his resolution had been fulfilled... It was done, his strength of resolution was exhausted. ——"If I go openly, it will definitely arouse your prayers, debates, and I will back down..." But he doesn't need any "prayers" or "debates", he only needs a moment to see everything he is going to leave At that moment he felt that he could not, that he could not leave them; the letter in his pocket was hidden in a piece of furniture, and it was marked on the outside: "After I die, I will give this to my wife, Sofia Andrea. Yevna." So much for his plans for exodus. Is this an expression of his strength?Could he not sacrifice his tenderness for his God? — Of course, there are no shortage of more resolute saints in the Who's Who of Christianity, who would not hesitate to abandon their affections for others... What to do?He was by no means one of those people.He is weak.He is human.We love him for that. Fifteen years ago, on a page of great poignancy, he asked himself: "So, Leo Tolstoy, do you live by the doctrine you preach?" He answered bitterly: "I am ashamed to death, I am a sinner, I deserve to be despised. . . . But compare my past life with my present one. You can see that I am seeking to live according to God's law .I don't do a thousandth of what I should do, and I'm ashamed of it, but I don't do it not because I don't want to but because I can't... reprimand me, not what I follow The way. If I know the way that leads to my home and I stagger along like a drunkard, does that mean that the way I take is a bad way? Either show me another way, or please Support me to follow the way of truth, and I am fully prepared to be supported by you. Don't snub me, don't take pleasure in my failure, and cry out with joy: 'Look! He says he's going home, and He's in the mud!' No, don't gloat, but help me, support me! As he drew nearer to his death, he repeated: "I am not a saint, and I never claim to be. I am a man driven, and sometimes does not say exactly what he thinks and feels; not because he will not, but because he cannot , for he often exaggerates or falters. In my conduct it is worse. I am a utter coward, with vices, willing to serve the god of truth, but perpetually depressed, and if people take me for a No one can make any mistakes, then every mistake I make will appear to be a lie or hypocrisy. But if people see me as a weak person, then my true colors can be fully revealed. This is a poor creature, but Sincerely, he has always wanted and sincerely wanted to be a good man, a faithful servant of God." Thus he suffers from reproaches of conscience, assailed by the silent complaints of his firmer but less human disciples, afflicted by his cowardice, by his hesitation, always in family love. and the love of God,--until a day, a moment of despair, or a whirlwind of madness before his death, drove him from his home, and wandered and fled along the road, to knock on the door of a convent. Then he set off again, finally fell ill on the way, and fell ill in a small nameless town.At five o'clock in the morning on October 28, 1910, Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana suddenly.He was accompanied by Dr. Markowitzky; his daughter Alexandra, whom Chertkov called "his dear collaborator," knew the secret of his departure.At six o'clock that evening he arrived at the Opta Monastery, one of the most famous in Russia, to which he had been several times before.He stayed here one night, and the next morning he wrote a long essay on capital punishment.On the evening of October 29, he went to the Samorkino seminary where his sister Marya was ordained.He dined with her, and he told her that he intended to spend the rest of his years in Opta Abbey, "taking any menial job, the only condition being that he was not forced to go to church."He stayed in Shamorkino, and the next morning he took a walk in the neighboring village, where he wanted to rent a lodging and see his sister in the afternoon.At five o'clock his daughter Alexandra arrived by accident.She had come, no doubt, to inform him that after he had gone a search for him had begun: they set off at once during the night.Tolstoy, Alexandra, and Markowitzky set off towards the Ksiersk Station, perhaps to enter the southern provinces, and then to the Balkans, Bulgaria, and Slavic settlements in Selbe .On the way, Tolstoy fell ill at the Astapovo station and had to stay in bed there.There he died. —About his last days, the most complete record can be found in "The Exodus and Death of Tolstoy" (Berlin, 1925 edition), the author René Puelup-Müller and Friedrich Eckstein collected records from Tolstoy's wife, daughter, doctor, and friends who were present, as well as records from secret government documents.This last part was discovered by the Soviet government in 1917, revealing a lot of conspiracy at that time. The government and the church surrounded the dying old man, trying to force him to cancel his previous attack on the church and express his repentance.The government, and especially the Tsar himself, tried their best to bully the Holy Synod into doing this.But it turned out to be a complete failure.The batch of documents also testifies to the government's anxieties.Following the police correspondence between the governor of the province, Prince Obolensky, General Lov, the chief of the Moscow military police, hourly reports of accidents in Astapovo, the most serious orders were given to guard the station.Keep the mourners completely isolated from the outside world.This is because the highest authorities are deeply afraid that Tolstoy's death will trigger a political demonstration in Russia-the house where Tolstoy died is full of policemen, spies, journalists, and cinematographers, watching It describes Countess Tolstoy's love, pain and repentance for the dying.On his dying bed, he wept, not for himself, but for the less fortunate; and in wailing he said: "Millions of beings are suffering on the earth; why are you all here to take care of only one Leo Tolstoy?" Thus, "liberation" came—this was November 20, 1910, at around six o'clock in the morning—"liberation", what he called "death, the blessed death..." came.