Unlike some old people, for whom the approach of death brings greater indulgence toward themselves, his need to submit to a stern moral code was stronger than ever. The years had not weakened his love of perfection. Every evening without fail he would shut himself up in his study, open a notebook and, by the light of a single candle, without glasses, his nose buried in the page and his hand steady, record his
good resolutions, his failures, his resentments, his weaknesses and victories, and lay down rules of conduct as he had done when he was twenty. In addition to his diary, he had a notebook that never left his pocket, in which he jotted down candid impressions and thoughts. Very often the notes from it were expanded and enlarged upon in the diary. Everything he read, saw and heard was food for thought.
On March 23, 1900, his daughter Tanya, who was suffering from a frontal abscess, had to have her skull trepanned. Von Stein, the surgeon, thought he was doing the right thing when he invited Tolstoy who was waiting in the next room to watch the operation. He entered apprehensively, took one glance between the white-coated men at his daughter, who lay stretched out, livid, her skull bared and her face covered with blood, and nearly fainted. As he was being helped from the room Sonya aroused the whole hospital with her cries of indignation. But it was neither the horror of the sight nor the surgeon's tactlessness that had affected Tolstoy: it was the injustice, he said, all the care lavished upon a privileged few like his daughter, while so many died because they could not afford treatment. The next day, March 24, he wrote in his diary: "Yesterday, dreadful operation on Tanya. I saw clearly that all these clinics, built by merchants and manufacturers who have grown rich exploiting and continuing to exploit tens of thousands of lives, can only be evil. The fact that they heal one rich man after causing the death of hundreds if not thousands of poor ones, is abominable. It is also abominable that they arc learning, so they claim, to lessen suffering and lengthen life—for the means they employ in doing so are such (they say 'for the time being' and I say Tjy their very nature') that only a chosen few can be saved or comforted; and that is because medicine is less concerned with preventing—through hygiene —than with healing." I lis hatred of the wealthy had grown so intense that he added: "I cannot rejoice at the birth of a child into the wealthy class; it is the proliferation of parasites."1
Despite his age, physical love was still a source of torment to him, and he classified the attitudes that a man could take toward desire as follows: "The best thing one can do with the sexual drive is (1) to destroy it utterly in oneself; next best0 (2) is to live with one woman, who has a chaste nature and shares your faith, and bring up children with her and help her as she helps you; next worset (3) is to go to a brothel when you are tormented by desire; (4) to have brief relations with different women, remaining with none; (5) to have intercourse with a
• In English in the original.
{ In English in the original.
young girl and abandon her; (6) worse yet, to have intercourse with another man's wife; (7) worst of all, to live with a faithless and immoral woman."2 The list ended with the following sentence, encircled: "'Ihis page must be torn out."
However, if he considered it preferable not to divulge his opinions on this subject, he made 110 secret of his views on domestic and foreign politics. The quelling of the Philippine uprising by the United States, and the British expeditions against the Boers in the Transvaal shocked his sense of justice. "They are horrible, these wars that the English and Americans are waging in a world in which even schoolchildren condemn war!"3 he wrote. And he told a friend: "Above all else I place the ethical motives that impel and mold the course of history. ... If Poland or Finland were to rise [against Russia} and succeed, my sympathy would l>c with them as oppressed peoples."4 After watching the factory hands and freight gang at the Moscow-Kazan freight station, he flew into a rage against this exploitation of man by man, and wrote The Slavery of Our Times. The assassination of King Umberto of Italy inspired him to appeal to universal conscience: Who Is Guilty? And there were other occasional pieces: Letter to the Canadian Dukhobors, Patriotism and Government, Which Way Out?, Is It Necessary? He even started a Message to the Chinese.I He had been fascinated by them for some time, considering them to be the possessors of supreme wisdom. He devoured Confucius ("Everything else seems so trivial by comparison"5), meditated upon the paths to moral perfection proposed by "the king without a kingdom" and despaired at being unable to read his prcccpts in the original. Fortunately, there were less obscure languages; having heard that the best version of the Bible was that used in the Netherlands, he set out to learn Dutch. He made fairly rapid progress and marveled to rediscover the Sermon on the Mount as he felt his way along in his translation.
That year his religious convictions were confirmed by his indignation over Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. "It is perfectly clear to me," he wrote in his diary on December 29, 1900, "that Nietzsche was quite mad when he wrote it, not in any figurative sense but in the most literal and direct sense: his incoherence, leaping from one thought to the next, making comparisons without telling what he is comparing, his beginnings of reasonings that have no end . . . and all against a positively demented background, with this obsession that by denying the most noble principles of life and thought the author is demonstrating
t Subsequently abandoned.
his brilliant superiority! . . . But what kind of a society are we living in, where a man as mad as that, dangerously insane, can pass for a teacher?"
In contradiction to Nietzsche, who sang hymns to the will-to-power and wanted to elevate man into "superman," Tolstoy felt a profound joy in debasing himself before God. lie called himself "foul scum"tf and affirmed that, whatever he did, he would never know for sure why he was bom or where he was going, as the Lord alone held the key to the mystery. Now, every day, he prayed to God in his own way, and conversed with him in his diary: "Lord, thou who art within me, give me light give me love . . ."7 However, while confessing his impotence and unworthiness, he was still convinced that his purpose on earth was to teach his fellow men. At times the "foul scum" lifted its head, and a breath from on high blew over him. With the tranquil assurance of the visionary, he stated his role: "I must remember that I am not an ordinary individual, but an emissary, and my vocation is as follows: (1) never to prostitute the dignity' of him whom I represent; (2) always to act according to his prescriptions (love); (3) always to work to accomplish the mission I have been given (kingdom of God); (4) whenever its interests conflict with mine, to sacrifice mine."8