Authors From Russia

"One of my friends, Vasilii Maklakov, a learned and sharp-witted person, used to talk of Tolstoy's followers: "The one who understands Tolstoy does not become his follower. Whereas the one who becomes a follower does not understand him." I was often convinced of the truth of these words. There were many so called "Tolstoyans" amongst the numerous visitors who came from all over the world to meet father. More often than not they strove to resemble their teacher in their outward appearance without comprehending the real essence of his ideas. Those who understood Tolstoy could not follow in his footsteps. After all, Tolstoy felt that each person was free to live according to his own beliefs. And so, for those who understood Tolstoy the external appearances did not mean much. I once noticed an unknown young man amongst father's visitors. He was dressed in a Russian shirt, his trousers tucked into enormous boots. "Who is it?" I asked my father. Papa bent towards me and shielding his mouth with his hand whispered into my ear: "This young man belongs to an alien and totally beyond my understanding, sect—the Tolstoyan sect.""

"I was fortunate enough to grow up surrounded by people who loved one another and who loved me. I assumed then that such loving relationships were only natural, an inherent characteristic of human nature. And despite a long existence during which I have since encountered cruelty and hatred between men, that is still my belief. I am truly convinced to this day that such behaviour is no more normal than illness is. And that, like illness, it is produced by transgressing the fundamental laws of life."

"We also loved a certain story papa used to tell us. It was called 'the Seven Cucumbers' … 'A little boy went into a garden. He saw a cucumber. A cucumber as big as this (holding up his two forefingers to demonstrate the length). He picked it, hup!, and ate it. (The voice quite matter of fact so far, and pitched fairly high.) The little boy continued on his way and saw a second cucumber, a cucumber as big as this. Hup! He ate it. (The voice now slightly louder and deeper.) He went on, he saw a third cucumber, a cucumber as big as this (the forefingers indicating a length of about eighteen inches), and hup ! He ate it. … And so it went on until the seventh cucumber, with papa's voice getting louder and louder, deeper and deeper … When papa showed how the little boy ate the seventh cucumber his mouth with its missing teeth opened so wide it was frightening to see."

"The youngest daughter, Alexandra, was getting older. Dedicating herself completely to her father, she was an effective moral support and helper in his writing labors. She even learned stenography."

"How difficult it is to recognize spiritual illness in a person close to you, especially if the habit of years has established that person's power and authority. Had I realized that my mother was ill, my whole attitude toward her would have been different. But people far more experienced than I were equally blind. With every day Mother grew more nervous. Everything irritated her, made her weep, have hysterics, outbursts of temper."

"Masha died quietly, conscious to the last. Father and Kolya were sitting by her bed. They raised her on her pillow. An hour before she died she opened her eyes wide, saw Father and laid his hand on her breast. Father leaned over her and raised her thin, transparent hand to his lips. “I am dying,” she whispered almost inaudibly."

"From time to time he Tolstoy] posed—a tiring obligation—for painters and sculptors: for Repin, Pasternak who did a study of the family, Aronson, and Paolo Trubetskoy. Trubetskoy, a Russian educated in Italy, did some splendid little statues of Tolstoy—one of him on horseback. Father was very fond of him. A sweet and childlike person in addition to his great gifts, he read practically nothing, spoke little, all his life was wrapped up in sculpture. As a convinced vegetarian he would not eat meat but cried: “Je ne mange pas de cadavre!” if anyone offered him some. In his studio in St. Petersburg there was a whole zoo: a bear, a fox, a horse, and a vegetarian wolf."

"Tanya strove to reconcile her parents. She was very fond of her mother, but she sympathized with her father's views and she pleaded with her mother to make some concessions. Sergei tried to get away from it all. Ilya was absorbed in his own material cares and family. Lev was inclined to his mother's side. Masha was on bad terms with her mother; wholeheartedly devoted to her father, she suffered more than anyone else on his account."

"Seryozha was different from all the other Tolstoys because of his great shyness and reserve. He often concealed his emotions, his outbursts of tenderness or passion, under a cloak of deliberate rudeness, or brusqueness. The most serious-minded and industrious of all the Tolstoy brothers, he had his own separate existence; he did not lean toward either his mother, or his father, and he rarely confided his thoughts to the members of his family. It was only when he sat down to the piano and for hours played his beloved Chopin, Beethoven, Bach, Grieg, or attempted to compose something himself, that everyone listened to him."

"There was one characteristic which Tolstoy kept until late in life—a childlike, spontaneous gaiety, an unaffected, almost passionate enthusiasm for sports, games, all sorts of pastimes. “A game is a serious matter”—this was a saying of Tatiana A. Behrs-Kuzminskaya which Tolstoy loved to repeat. When he was playing, wrestling, hunting, chasing his children, he did it in earnest, he threw himself into it with all his being and enjoyed it as much as his children. The school children were infected with his gaiety."

"In what did Tolstoi's work actually consist? It is the outcry of the universal conscience. His works voice the consciences of us all, expressed sincerely by the most ardent and the most sensitive of hearts. The popularity of Tolstoi throughout the world is explained solely by the simplicity and the sincerity of his doctrine, which appeals to all, without distinction, calling on mankind to recognise the same great truth, to make the same great moral effort for the realisation of love."

"If I could kill him and create a new person exactly the same as he is now, I would do so happily."

"My diary again. It's sad to be going back to old habits I gave up since I got married. I used to write when I felt depressed €”– now I suppose it's for the same reason. Relations with my husband have been so simple these past two weeks and I felt so happy with him; he was my diary and I had nothing to hide from him. But ever since yesterday, when he told me he didn't trust my love, I have been feeling terrible. I know why he doesn't trust me, but I don't think I shall ever be able to say or write what I really think."

"My jealousy is a congenital illness, or maybe in loving him I have nothing else to love."

"It is always the way, the richer the imagination the poorer the life. One can imagine anything – thousands of different worlds – yet one has to live in one's own little circle."

"We live in such isolation, and here I am again with my silent friend, my diary."

"I am so tired of all this intellectualising – attacking this and denying that, and searching not for truth, for that would be good, but for anything startling, shocking or original, anything that hasn't been said before – and it is so tedious. When people endure heart-ache and suffering in their search for truth, that is fine and honourable, but it's wrong merely to try and shock others. Each person should seek the truth for himself."

"His coldness is a torture to me, and I have started to seek other things to fill my inner life, and have learnt to love music, to read into it and discern the complicated human emotions contained in it; but not only is music disapproved of in this house, I am bitterly criticised for it, so once again I feel that my life has no purpose, and bowing my back I copy out some boring article on art for the tenth time, trying to find some consolation in doing my duty, but my lively nature resents it and I long for a life of my own, and when there's an icy wind blowing I rush out of the house, run through the forest to the Voronka and throw myself into the freezing water, and there's some pleasure in the physical emotion."

"Everyone wants love, but there are so few who can give it. Or else you offer it passionately, selflessly, and it's rejected, your love is not wanted, it's a burden."

"L.N. said that before one spoke about women's inequality and oppression one should first talk about people's inequality in general. And he said that if a woman raises this question herself, there is something immodest, unwomanly and impertinent about it. I think he is right. It's not freedom we women need, but help. Help mainly in educating our sons, setting them on the right road of life, influencing them to be brave, independent, hardworking and honest."

"Those last days of my girlhood were extraordinarily intense, lit by a dazzling brightness and a sudden awakening of the soul. I have had this same sense of spiritual elation on two other occasions in my life, and it was these rare and extraordinary awakenings of the soul that have done more than anything else to convince me that it has an independent life of its own €”that it is immortal, and it is when the body dies and it is liberated that it finds its freedom."

"Lev Nikolaevich has described our wedding beautifully in his account of Levin and Kitty's wedding in his novel Anna Karenina. Not only did he paint a brilliantly imaginative picture of the ceremony, he also described the whole psychological process taking place in Levin's mind."

"Persistent and undiscerning almost to the point of criminality as far as resources were concerned, this woman was of immeasurable hindrance to her husband, her children and humankind as a whole."

"How difficult it is to recognize spiritual illness in a person close to you, especially if the habit of years has established that person's power and authority. Had I realized that my mother was ill, my whole attitude toward her would have been different. But people far more experienced than I were equally blind. With every day Mother grew more nervous. Everything irritated her, made her weep, have hysterics, outbursts of temper."

"My father was accustomed to say that disorders of the mind are simply a heightened form of egoism. And it was certainly in this form that my mother's psychological anomalies presented themselves. She who had once been always ready to give of herself totally, without any thought of self, now fell prey to a single morbid preoccupation: what other people were saying about her. What would they say about her in the future? Might they one day, after her death, treat her as a Xantippe? And she had some grounds for such fears, since she was surrounded by people who pitied her husband for all she made him endure."

"Calm had come to her during her final years. Her husband's dream for her had in part come true, that transformation for which he would have sacrificed all his fame. My father's ideas had become less alien to her. She had become a vegetarian. She was kind to those around her. But she had retained one weakness: she was still afraid of what people would say and write about her when she had gone, she feared for her reputation. As a result she never let slip the slightest opportunity of justifying her words and actions."

"The chief personage in the house was my Mother. She settled everything. She interviewed Nikolái, the cook, and ordered dinner; she sent us out for walks, made our shirts, was always nursing some baby at the breast; all day long she was bustling about the house with hurried steps. One could be naughty with her, though she was sometimes angry and punished us. She knew more about everything than anybody else. She knew that one must wash every day, that one must eat soup at dinner, that one must talk French, learn not to crawl about on all fours, not to put one's elbows on the table; and if she said that one was not to go out walking because it was just going to rain, she was sure to be right, and one must do as she said. When I coughed she gave me liquorice or King of Denmark drops; so I was very fond of coughing. When my Mother put me to bed and went upstairs to play duets with Father, I found it very hard to go to sleep, and I was annoyed at being left alone; so I started coughing and went on until Nurse went and fetched Mamma, and I was angry with her for coming so slowly. I entirely refused to go to sleep until she had come to my rescue and measured out exactly ten drops in a wineglass and given them to me."

"My mother was the source of Tolstoi's greatest happiness, and the real author of his greatness. If there is sometimes ground for thinking, while reading the works of Tolstoi, "Do what I do, and not what I say!" such things can never be said in reading the book of my mother's life, for she was not only a model and devoted wife, a tender and affectionate mother to her children, a born housekeeper, a woman of society and an author's wife, but she was also the celebrated Russian writer's greatest moral support, without which he would never have attained the position he holds in the eyes of the world today."

"Vegetarianism is necessary for the very rich and the very poor. The poor need it because it is cheap and nourishing. The rich, in order to cleanse all the poisons from the corpses that have accumulated in their overfed organism."

"He (Lenin) had a habit of becoming passionately attached to people. His attachment to Plekhanov from whom he got so much, was typical in this respect, but it never prevented him from fighting hard against Plekhanov when he saw that Plekhanov was wrong, that his point of view harmed the cause; it did not prevent him from breaking completely with him when Plekhanov became a defencist."

"Bourgeois scientists make sure that their theories are not dangerous to God or Capital."

"There is no historical fact that did not owe its origin to social economics; but it is no less true to say that there is no historical fact that was not preceded, not accompanied, and not succeeded by a definite state of consciousness."

"People [who belong in this environment] look for a path in the heavens for the simple reason that they have lost their way on earth."

"Children like to work, and are always eager to imitate the work of adults."

"I need your help. The abstruse nature of the subject requires not only concentrated reading, not alone clear understanding, but co-operation with the author. For that which could easily be made comprehensible by personal contact and demonstration, must of necessity depend on mere words and intellectual concepts. Many of the questions that may arise in your mind during or after reading of each chapter can best be answered through the practical application of the exercises prescribed herein. Unfortunately, there is no other way to co-operate: the technique of acting can never be properly understood without practicing it."

"All exercise of authority perverts, and submission to authority humiliates."

"Liberty is so great a magician, endowed with so marvelous a power of productivity, that under the inspiration of this spirit alone, North America was able within less than a century to equal, and even surpass, the civilization of Europe."

"Unity is the great goal toward which humanity moves irresistibly. But it becomes fatal, destructive of the intelligence, the dignity, the well-being of individuals and peoples whenever it is formed without regard to liberty, either by violent means or under the authority of any theological, metaphysical, political, or even economic idea. That patriotism which tends toward unity without regard to liberty is an evil patriotism, always disastrous to the popular and real interests of the country it claims to exalt and serve. Often, without wishing to be so, it is a friend of reaction – an enemy of the revolution, i.e., the emancipation of nations and men."

"There is but one way to bring about the triumph of liberty, of justice, and of peace in Europe's international relations, to make civil war impossible between the different peoples who make up the European family; and that is the formation of the United States of Europe."

"By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward."

"Freedom is the absolute right of every human being to seek no other sanction for his actions but his own conscience, to determine these actions solely by his own will, and consequently to owe his first responsibility to himself alone."

"Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom — and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it."

"Bakunin's social theory began, and almost ended, with liberty. Against the claims of liberty nothing else in his view was worth consideration at all. He attacked, remorselessly and without qualification, every institution that seemed to him to be inconsistent with liberty."

"The world carnage put an end to the golden era when a Bakunin and a Herzen, a Marx and a Kropotkin, a Malatesta and a Lenin, Vera Sazulich, Louise Michel, and all the others could come and go without hindrance. In those days who cared about passports or visas? Who worried about one particular spot on earth? The whole world was one's country."

"Bakunin has become a monster, a huge mass of flesh and fat, and is barely capable of walking any more. To crown it all, he is sexually perverse and jealous of the seventeen year-old Polish girl who married him in Siberia because of his martyrdom. He is presently in Sweden, where he is hatching ‘revolution’ with the Finns."

"Although Bakunin had included in the programme of his International Alliance of Social Democracy the explicit aim of abolishing sexual inequality along with class inequality, the anarchist record on women's rights was an uneven one."

"This man was born not under an ordinary star but under a comet."

"Everything about him was colossal, and he was full of exuberance and strength."

"Every state, like every theology, assumes man to be fundamentally bad and wicked."

"I hate Communism because it is the negation of liberty and because humanity is for me unthinkable without liberty. I am not a Communist, because Communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the State all the forces of society, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of the State, whereas I want the abolition of the State, the final eradication of the principle of authority and the patronage proper to the State, which under the pretext of moralizing and civilizing men has hitherto only enslaved, persecuted, exploited and corrupted them. I want to see society and collective or social property organized from below upwards, by way of free association, not from above downwards, by means of any kind of authority whatsoever."