aiAI the Classics
← Library

AI the Classics

A Diary for Myself Alone

Дневникъ для одного себя · 1910

LEO TOLSTOY · translated by Thom Jenkins & Claude

Reading textManuscript

Read it clean, or switch to the manuscript to see the words Tolstoy struck out, the ones he added above the line, and the passages a later hand inked over. Hover a blot to read what it hides — one of them is lost for good.

Part I

29 July – 22 September 1910

29 July [11 August N.S.]

I begin a new diary, a true diary, for myself alone. Today one thing must be set down: that if the suspicions of certain of my friends are just, an attempt is now under way to gain the end by tenderness. For several days now she has been kissing my hand, which she never did before, and there are no scenes, no despair. May God and good people forgive me if I am wrong. And It is easy for me to be wrong on the good side, the loving side. I can love her quite sincerely,I completely sincerely love can love her, which I cannot do with Lev. Andrey is simply one of those about whom it is hard to believe that God's soul is in them (but it is: remember that). I shall try not to grow irritated, and to hold my ground, above all by silence.

One cannot, after all, deprive millions of people of what may be needful to their souls. I repeat: may be. But if there is even the smallest chance that what I have written is needful to men's souls, they cannot be robbed of that spiritual food so that Andrey may go on drinking and whoring and Lev may go on daubing in general, and... Well, God be with them. Do your own work and judge no one. Morning.

The day like the days before it: unwell, but less that is bad in my soul. I am waiting to see what will come, and the waiting is itself what is wrong.

Sofya Andreyevna is perfectly calm.

The note The second strike-out, now visible in the line itself, is the sorest wound in the entry: «искренно любл[ю] могу любить», love struck and replaced by the capacity for love. Love is demoted, in the act of writing, from a fact to a capacity. The suspicions are those voiced in letters from Chertkov and Goldenweiser of 27 July; the goal is the will; the tenderness (ласка: caress, fondness, blandishment) is suspected of being instrumental, and the instrumental case carries the suspicion in the grammar itself: достичь цѣли лаской, to reach the goal by means of caress.

30 July [12 August N.S.]

Chertkov has drawn me into a struggle, and the struggle is both heavy and repugnant to me. I shall try to wage it lovingly (a frightening thing to say, so far am I from it).

In my present position the chief thing needful, perhaps, is non-doing, non-saying. Today I understood vividly that all I need is not to spoil my own position, and to remember vividly that I need nothing, nothing,

The note Недѣланіе, non-doing, is a technical term of Tolstoy's own late vocabulary, the title of his 1893 essay on Lao-tzu, his rendering of wu wei. Its appearance here is not a mood but a doctrine invoked against a crisis. The entry ends, in the manuscript and in the Jubilee text, on a comma: I need nothing, nothing, and then nothing. We print the comma.

31 July [13 August N.S.]

The evening passed idly. The Ladyzhenskys came; I talked too much. Sofya Andreyevna again did not sleep, but there is no anger in her. I wait.

1 August [14 August N.S.]

Slept well, but am dull all the same, sad, lifeless, with the heavy consciousness of unlove around me and, alas, within me. Help me, Lord! Sasha is coughing again. Sofya Andreyevna told Posha all the same things. It all lives on: the jealousy of Chertkov and the fear for the property. Very heavy. Lev Lvovich I cannot endure. And he wants to settle here. There is a trial for me! In the morning, letters. I wrote badly, corrected one small proof. I go to bed in a heavy state of soul. I am poor stuff.

The note Нелюбовь we render as unlove: the Russian is a real word but a marked one, the negation worn as a prefix, and English happens to possess the exact calque. Posha is P. I. Biryukov, the biographer.

2 August [15 August N.S.]

[2 August.] Very clearly, very clearly I have understood my mistake. I ought to have gathered all the heirs and declared my intention, not done it in secret. I wrote this to Chertkov. He was much grieved. Rode to Kolpna. Sofya Andreyevna drove out to check on me, to waylay me; reads she digs through my papers. Just now she interrogated me as to who carries the letters from Chertkov: Tha[t] "You are conducting a secret love correspondence." I said I did not wish to speak of it, and left the room, but gently. Unhappy woman, how can I not pity her. Wrote Galya a letter.

The note «Е. б. ж.», если буду живъ, if I live: Tolstoy's lifelong diary formula, written when he set down the next day's date in advance. Every tomorrow in this book is conditional. And here for the first time comes the verb the whole volume will turn on: жалѣть. Russian peasant usage famously lets жалѣть mean to love; pity and love are one word in the register Tolstoy prized most. «Какъ мнѣ не жалѣть ее» is rendered how can I not pity her, but the reader must hold the second meaning underneath: how can I not love her. The ruling stands provisionally; the word recurs at nearly every crisis. Galya is A. K. Chertkova, Chertkov's wife.

3 August [16 August N.S.]

You lie down with anguish at heart and wake with the same anguish. I still cannot master it. Walked in the rain. Worked at home. Rode out with Goldenweiser; with him, for some reason, I feel heavy. A letter from Chertkov. He is much grieved. I say yes, and have decided to wait and to undertake nothing. It is very good that I feel myself to be worthless. In the evening a mad note from Sofya Andreyevna, and the demand that I read it. I glanced at it and handed it back. She came and began to talk. I locked myself in, then fled, and sent Dushan. How will this end? If only I do not sin myself. Going to bed. If I live.

The note The entry opens in the second person singular, ложишься, просыпаешься: the generic you of Russian self-address, a man giving evidence about himself as about anyone. English cannot keep the person without keeping the strangeness, so the smooth layer keeps it. Тоска enters here and receives its provisional ruling, anguish, pending its recurrences; no single English word covers its span from ache to longing to dread. Dushan is Dr Dušan Makovický, the household physician.

4 August [17 August N.S.]

Today nothing heavy happened, and yet I am heavy. Finished the proofs but wrote nothing. Lost my temper with the schoolboys, and pointlessly; received a student and his wife and gave them a book. A great deal of bustle. Rode with Dushan to the Ladyzhenskys. Posha is leaving; Korolenko is coming.

5 August [18 August N.S.]

My thoughts were a little brighter. My abstention from all contact with Chertkov is conscience-stricken, shameful, comic and sad. Yesterday morning she was very pitiable, I alw[ays] without malice. I am always so glad of that: it is so easy for me to pity her and to love her when she is suffering, and not making others suffer.

The note The 2 August ruling on жалѣть is confirmed from within the text: when Tolstoy needs pity and love held apart, he writes both verbs, жалѣть и любить. Where he writes жалѣть alone, therefore, we must not inflate it to love; the second sense stays underneath, where he left it.

6 August [19 August N.S.]

Today, lying in bed, a thought came that seemed to me very important. I told myself I would write it down later. And I forgot it, forgot it, and cannot call it back. Just now, in the very place where I was writing this, I met Sofya Andreyevna. She walks fast, terribly agitated. I felt very sorry for her. At the house I said they should watch, secretly, where she goes. But Sasha told me that she does not walk without purpose: she is lying in wait for me. I felt less sorry. There is unkindness in that, and I cannot yet be indifferent to it, indifferent in the sense of loving what is not good. I think of going away and leaving a letter, and I am afraid, though I know think it would be better for her. Just now I read the letters, took up Madness and put it aside. No wish to write, and no strength. It is going on one o'clock. The everlasting hiding is heavy, and the fear for her.

The note The second self-revision of the book: he first wrote I know it would be better for her, struck знаю, and wrote думаю, I think. Certainty demoted to opinion under his own pen, exactly as love was demoted to the capacity for love on 29 July. Note also the arithmetic of pity inside a single entry: жалко стало, I felt very sorry; стало менѣе жалко, I felt less sorry. Pity is metered here, and the diary keeps the accounts. Madness is the projected article «О безуміи», On Madness, which he was reading psychiatry for; see 7 August.

7 August [20 August N.S.]

A talk with Korolenko. An intelligent and good man, but entirely under the superstition of science. The work ahead is very clear to me, and it will be a pity not to write it, but the strength, it seems, is not there. Everything runs together; there is no order, no persistence in one direction. Sofya Andreyevna is calmer, but there is the same unkindness toward everyone, the same irritation. Read the chapter "Paranoia" in Korsakov. As if it were copied from her. The book was in Sasha's keeping, and the passages underlined, probably by her. Korolenko says to me: "And what a good person Alexandra Lvovna is." And there are tears in my throat from tenderness, and I cannot speak. When I had recovered I say: I have no right tocannot have no right to speak, she loves me too much.

The note The third self-revision in ten days: he first wrote I cannot speak, struck the can, and wrote in have no right. Inability corrected to prohibition. The series now reads: love, revised to the capacity for love (29 July); knowledge, revised to opinion (6 August); incapacity, revised to interdiction (7 August). The diary for himself alone is also a court he holds over his own verbs. Korsakov is the standard Russian psychiatry textbook; the sentence As if it were copied from her is left exactly as bare as he made it.

8 August [21 August N.S.]

Rose early. Many, many thoughts, but all of them scattered. Well, no matter. I pray, I pray: Help me. And I cannot, I cannot not desire death, not await it with joy. The separation from Chertkov grows more and more shameful. I am plainly at fault. Golden[weiser]

I am like a frantic sheep. How he bellows at us.

Again the same with Sofya Andreyevna. She wishes Chertkov to come. Again she did not sleep till seven in the morning.

with the drink-shop... they drove.

My memory has gone, gone completely, and, astonishing thing, I have not only lost nothing but have gained, and gained enormously: in clarity and strength of consciousness. I even think it is always the one at the cost of the other.

The note The ruled-off lines are the pencil passage: jottings made away from the desk. Among them, what reads as overheard country speech set down for keeping: благая овца, where благой carries its folk sense, frantic, possessed (as in кричать благимъ матомъ), not the church sense blessed; and the drink-shop fragment, which breaks off in the manuscript and is printed here as it breaks off. Then, in ink again, one of the great sentences of the diary: the ledger of losses and gains at eighty-two, memory traded for consciousness, and he suspects the exchange rate is fixed: always the one at the cost of the other.

9 August [22 August N.S.]

More and more seriously I take my life. Agitation again. Talks with Fere, with Sasha. Sasha is harsh. Lyova is a great and hard trial.

10 August [23 August N.S.]

Still heavy, still unwell. It is good to feel oneself guilty, and I do.

Help me, Father, beginning of life, spirit of all the world, source, beginning of life: help me, if only in the last days, the last hours, of my life here, to live only before Thee, serving only Thee.

Yesterday for the first time, writing the letter to Galya, I felt my guilt in everything, and the natural desire to ask forgiveness; and now, thinking of it, I felt "perfect joy". How simple, how easy, how it frees one from the praise of men, how it eases everything between people. Ah, if only it were not self-deceit, and if only it would hold.

The note «Радость совершенную», perfect joy, is Gospel language: да радость ваша будетъ совершенна, that your joy may be full (John 15:11, 16:24); Tolstoy sets it in quotation marks himself, and the marks are kept. Слава людская, the praise of men, likewise carries John 12:43 underneath (they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God), and is a fixed term of his late vocabulary. In the prayers, and only in the prayers, Thee and Thou are retained, because he capitalises Тобой and Тебѣ and the register shift is his.

11 August [24 August N.S.]

Health worse and worse. Sofya Andreyevna is calm, but as alien as ever. Letters; answered two. With everyone it is heavy. I cannot not desire death. A long letter from Chertkov, describing all that went before. Very sad it was, hard to read and to remember. the whole He is completely right, and I feel myself guilty before him. Posha was not right. I will write to the one and to the other. All this I am writing.

12 August [25 August N.S.]

Decided yesterday to tell Tanya everything. This morning a heavy feeling, unkind toward her, toward Sofya Andreyevna. And one must forgive and pity, but as yet I cannot.

Told Tanya. She is glad, and agrees. Chertkov is very pleased with my letter, by Sasha's account. Did not go out all day. In the evening Ge told good stories of Switzerland. Sofya Andreyevna is very agitated, and always in such a state, evidently ill; I pity her very much. Going to bed.

The note Everything is the secret will. The regret of 2 August, I ought to have gathered all the heirs and declared my intention, is here enacted one heir at a time, beginning with the one he trusted. Tanya is his eldest daughter, T. L. Sukhotina; Ge is N. N. Ge the younger, son of the painter.

13 August [26 August N.S.]

Everything the same, and as heavy as ever; with her it is dangerous. A good letter from Chertkov: that I should not come to say goodbye if it might hinder the departure. Tanichka is pleasant, sweet,

The note Tanichka is Tanya's small daughter, not yet five. The entry breaks off inside its own tenderness, and we print the break. The departure is the coming journey to Kochety, the Sukhotins' estate.

14 August [27 August N.S.]

Worse and worse. She did not sleep in the night. Burst in on me in the morning: "Whom are you talking to?" Then she told me a terrible thing: sexual arousal. Frightening to say:  ··· ··· ··· 

Terrible; but thank God she is pitiable, and I can pity her. I will endure. God help me. She has worn everyone out, and most of all herself. She is coming with us. Varya she is all but driving from the house. Sasha is grieved. Going to bed.

The note Her hand enters the manuscript here, twice in one entry, and the two brackets record the two outcomes of the contest between her ink and the editors' eyes. The words naming what she had confided were blotted and recovered; the words after Frightening to say were blotted and lost. What he found frightening to say is exactly what she succeeded in sealing, and no one will read it now. Note that in the same breath as the horror stands the book's verb: слава Богу жалка, могу жалѣть, thank God she is pitiable, and I can pity her. The capacity for pity, which on 6 August was metered and on 5 August was easy, is here received as a mercy to himself. Varya is V. M. Feokritova, Sasha's friend and the household copyist.

15 August [28 August N.S.]

On the road to Kochety I thought: if these alarms and demands only begin again, I will go away with Sasha. I even said so. No[w] So I thought on the road. Now I no longer think it. We arrived peacefully, but in the evening, as I was taking the notebook from Sasha, she saw it: "What is that?" The Diary. Sasha is copying it.

The note Дорòгой carries the Jubilee's own stress mark, printed to hold the word to on the way and keep it from dear; the accent is part of the base text and stays. The notebook incident is the near-discovery: the secret book, passing between hands, seen but not yet recognised. Fifty-nine days remain before she finds it.

16 August [29 August N.S.]

This morning again she did not sleep. She brought me a note saying that Sasha is copying out of the diary, for Chertkov, my accusations against her. Before dinner I tried to calm her by telling the truth: that Sasha copies out only separate thoughts, not my impressions of life. She wants to be calm, and is very pitiable. It is now toward four o'clock; something is coming. I cannot work. It seems I need not, either. In my soul, not bad.

The note The truth he offered as comfort is a fine one: the big Diary was being copied for Chertkov with the thoughts kept and the life left out, which is to say the very division out of which this second diary was born. Что то будетъ, something is coming, enters here and will toll through the book; the phrase is kept identical at every recurrence.

17 August [30 August N.S.]

Today a good day. Sonya is entirely good. But not Good, too, in that I am in anguish. And the anguish finds its expression in prayer and in consciousness.

The note Two things happen on the good day. She is Sonya, the diminutive, for the first time in this book, where she has been С[офья] А[ндреевна] at every appearance since 29 July. And the strike-out is an act of charity performed on the page: he wrote But not, the reservation already forming, and refused it. Of all the self-revisions the apparatus preserves, this is the only one where the pen is stopped by kindness.

18 August [31 August N.S.]

Sofya Andreyevna, learning that Chertkov has permission to live at Telyatinki, fell into a morbid state. "I will kill him." I asked her not to speak, and kept silent myself. And this, it seems, worked well. Something is coming. Help me, Th[ee] God, to be with Thee and to do what Thou wilt. And what will come is not my affair. Often, and no, not often, but sometimes I am in such a state of soul, and then how good it is!

The note Two kinds of self-correction stand side by side here, and the difference is instructive. Often, no, not often is a correction he made and let stand: the sentence audits itself aloud and keeps the audit, honesty preferred to elegance. The struck words are corrections he hid. The diary thus contains both a public and a private conscience, even with a readership of one.

19 August [1 September N.S.]

From the morning Sofya Andreyevna asked me to promise the old promises over again, and to have no portraits made. I agreed, and should not have. A good letter from Chertkov. He writes truly about the ways that work best with the sick. At dinner, out of place, I told the story of Arago tout court. And I was ashamed. And ashamed of being ashamed.

The note The French stays. The story, as Makovický heard it told that evening, was of Arago stopping an orator who addressed him as Monsieur Arago: thirty years of work, he said, had earned him the right to be called Arago tout court, Arago plain. A story about earned fame, told at table by the author of everything ever written against the praise of men; hence the shame, and then the second, deeper shame at discovering that even his shame was a form of self-regard. The portraits are Chertkov's photographs of him, which she could not bear.

20 August [2 September N.S.]

Talked well with the watchman. Not well that I told him of my situation. Rode out, and the sight of this lordly kingdom so torments me that I think of running away, of hiding.

Today, remembering my marriage, I thought: it was something fateful. I was never even in love. And I could not not marry. ⟦in the hand of S. A. Tolstaya, written in after this place: “In the old diaries of that time is written: ‘in love as never before. I will shoot myself if she refuses me’”⟧

The note Her hand's third act, and its most articulate. On 14 August she blotted out; here she answers. Beneath I was never even in love she set down, from his own diary of September 1862, the young man's voice: in love as never before, I will shoot myself if she refuses me. She does not argue; she cites. The old diary is summoned to impeach the new, husband called as witness against husband, and the rebuttal is unanswerable precisely because both testimonies are his. She can only have written it after 13 October, when the book came into her hands, which means this marginal note is, among other things, proof that she read it. The smooth layer prints his text alone; her answer stands in the scholarly layers and here, where it will not be missed.

21 August [3 September N.S.]

Rose late. Feel fresher. Sofya Andreyevna is the same as ever. She told Tanya how she did not sleep all night because she had seen a portrait of Chertkov. Hea[lth] The situation is threatening. I want, I want to speak, that is, to write.

The note The closing correction is the book's own definition of itself: the urge is to say, and the emendation, made in the open like the one on 18 August, converts saying to writing, because there is no one to say it to. The diary is what speech becomes when it has nowhere to go.

22 August [4 September N.S.]

A letter from Rossolimo, remarkably stupid, about Sofya Andreyevna's condition; and a letter from B., very good. I am conducting myself fairly well.

The note Rossolimo is the Moscow neurologist consulted about her; the diagnosis of the professional is dismissed in four words by the diagnostician of the house. B. stands as he wrote it.

23 and 24 August [written 24 August; 6 September N.S.]

Little by little I revive. Sofya Andreyevna, poor woman, suffers without ceasing, and I feel it is impossible to help her. I feel the sin of my exclusive attachment to my daughters.

25 August [7 September N.S.]

Varvara Mikhailovna writes of the gossip at the Zvegintsev house. It irritates Sasha. To me, thank God, it is all one, but it worsens my feeling toward her. It must not. Ah, if only one knew how to be gentle, but firm.

The note Не над. is не надо broken off at the pen's speed: the shortest moral command in the book, two words cut to five letters. His emphasis on her does the naming that the sentence declines to do.

26 August [8 September N.S.]

In the night Sofya Andreyevna spoke hotly with Tanya. She is entirely hopeless in the inconsecutiveness of her thought. Ve[ry] I am glad that to her challenges and complaints I answered with silence. Thank God, I have not the least bad feeling.

27 August [9 September N.S.]

Terribly pitiable, and hard to bear. This evening she began again about the portraits, obviously from her morbid point of view. I tried to get free of it. And left the room.

28 August [10 September N.S.]

Heavier and heavier with Sofya Andreyevna. Not love, but the demand for love, close to hatred and passing into hatred.

Yes, egoism is madness. The children saved her: animal love, but self-sacrificing all the same. And when that ended, there remained only a terrible egoism. And egoism is the most abnormal of states: madness.

Just now I talked with Sasha and Mikhail Sergeyevich; Dushan and Sasha will not admit illness. And they are wrong.

The note The demand for love enters here as a diagnosis and will return on 2 September as a quotation, when his own Circle of Reading hands him Schopenhauer saying the same. Mikhail Sergeyevich is Sukhotin, Tanya's husband and host at Kochety. Note the direction of the quarrel over diagnosis: it is the household that refuses the word illness, and the husband who insists on it, as pity's last defensible form.

29 and 30 August [written 30 August; 12 September N.S.]

Yesterday a terrible morning, without any cause. She went off into the garden, lay there. Then grew quiet. We talked well. Leaving, she touchingly asked forgiveness. Today, the 30th, I am unwell. Mavor. Sasha telegraphed that all is well. Something is coming?.

The note Mavor is the Toronto political economist James Mavor, then visiting; one proper noun stands for the whole social duty of the day. The motif returns with its punctuation doubled, что то будетъ?., a question that immediately answers itself with a full stop, and we print both marks.

31 August, 1 and 2 September [written 2 September; 15 September N.S.]

I wrote Sonya a letter poured straight from the heart.

Today, 2 September, I received a very bad letter from her. The same suspicions, the same malice, the same demand for love, which would be comic were it not so terrible and so tormenting to me.

Today in the Circle of Reading, Schopenhauer: "As the attempt to compel love calls forth hatred, so......"

The note The diary here reads its author his own anthology. The Circle of Reading is Tolstoy's compiled calendar of daily wisdom, and on this day it dealt him Schopenhauer on the mechanism he had himself named on 28 August: the demand for love breeding hatred. He copies the sentence only to its turn and lets the six points stand where the application would begin, because the diary is the application. She is Sonya again, letter-writing distance restoring the diminutive that presence had been rationing.

3 and 4 September [written 4 September; 17 September N.S.]

Sasha came. She brought bad news. All the same: Sofya Andreyevna writes that she will come. She burns the portraits, has a service of intercession sung in the house. When I am alone I prepare to be firm with her, and it seems I can; with her, I weaken. I will try to remember that she is ill.

Today, the 4th, there was anguish; I wanted to die, and want to still.

The note A moleben is an Orthodox service of supplication; sung in his house, over his affairs, by the Church he was excommunicated from, at his wife's request: the single word carries all of that and is left in the text. The last line's two tenses, wanted... and want, are the entry's whole grammar of despair, and the anguish is тоска, ruled at 3 August.

5 to 8 September [written 8 September; 21 September N.S.]

Sofya Andreyevna arrived. Very talkative, but at first there was nothing heavy; since yesterday it has begun: hints, the hunting out of pretexts for condemnation. Very heavy. This morning she ran in to tell me something vile about Zosya. I hold on, and will hold on as long as I can, and pity her, and love her. God help me.

The note Zosya is S. A. Stakhovich, a family friend. The 5 August pair returns under strain and in resolution's mood rather than ease's: жалѣть и любить, pity her, and love her, no longer what comes easily but what is held onto.

8, 9 and 10 September [written 10 September; 23 September N.S.]

Yesterday, the 9th, she was in hysterics the whole day; ate nothing, wept. She was very pitiable. But no persuasion and no reasoning can reach her. I spoke some things out and, thank God, without bad feeling, and she received it, as usual, without understanding. I myself was bad yesterday: gloomy, dejected. She received Chertkov's letter and answered him. From Goldenweiser a letter with an extract V. M. which horrified me.

Today, the 10th, all the same. I to[ok] She eats nothing. I went in. At once reproaches, and about Sasha, that she must go to the Crimea. In the morning I thought I would not hold out, and would have to go away from her. With her there is no life. Only torment. As I told her myself: my grief is that I cannot be indifferent.

The note The Jubilee's word is густо, thickly: the pen went back and forth over the two letters until they were nearly buried, and the editors do not say whose pen. The extract was from the diary of В. М., Varvara Mikhailovna Feokritova, sent on by Goldenweiser, and it horrified him; someone then did to her initials, in miniature, what Sofya Andreyevna had done to his five words on 14 August. In a book of surveillance, even the witnesses get redacted.

11 September [written 11 September; 24 September N.S.]

Toward evening there was there began the scenes: running into the garden, tears, cries. Even to this, that when I went out after her into the garden she cried out: it is a beast, a murderer, I cannot look at him, and ran off to hire a cart and leave that instant. And so the whole evening. But when I lost my temper and told her son fait, she suddenly became well; and so it is today, the 11th. To speak with her is impossible, because, in the first place, neither sound logic binds her, nor truth, wor[ds] nor the truthful reporting of words she said to her or by her. I am coming very close to running away. he[alth] My health has turned poor.

The note Dire son fait à quelqu'un: to tell someone their few home truths. The French takes over exactly where Russian would have to say what the truths were; the diary that hides in a boot also hides inside a language. Note the buried false start здравый: he began sound [sense] and chose logic, the cooler word, the clinician once more revising the husband.

12 September [25 September N.S.]

After terrible scenes Sofya Andreyevna left. Little by little I grow calm.

16 and 17 September [29-30 September N.S.]

But the letters from Yasnaya are terrible. The heavy thing is that among her mad thoughts there is also this one: to present me as weakened in mind, and so to make my will invalid, if there is such a thing. Besides that, all the same tales about me, and confessions of hatred toward me. I received a letter from Chertkov confirming everyone's counsel of firmness, and my own decision. I do not know whether I will hold out.

Tonight is the night of the 17th.

I want to return to Yasnaya on the 22nd.

The note If there is such a thing. The will exists; he had signed it on a tree stump in the Grumont wood on 22 July, a week before this diary began, and its protection is the diary's whole occasion. Yet even here, in the book for one reader, he keeps the conditional. The secret diary keeps a secret from itself, and the sentence is the deepest fold of concealment in the volume: deniability maintained before an audience of exactly one, who already knows.

22 September, morning [5 October N.S.]

I am going to Yasnaya, and horror takes hold of me at the thought of what awaits me. Only fais ce que doit... And the chief thing: to be silent, and to remember that in her there is a soul — God.

The note His lifelong motto, fais ce que doit, advienne que pourra: do what you must, come what may; he gives only its first half, riding toward the second. And Part I closes its own ring: it opened on 29 July straining to see God's soul in his sons (but it is, remember), and ends commanding himself to remember the same of his wife. The instruction has not changed; only the person it must be applied to has come nearer.

The glued leaf

"With pain of heart I have copied out this sorrowful little diary of my husband. How much there is in it that is unjust, cruel and — forgive me, God and Lyovochka — untruthful about me, rigged, invented.... Take only what he says of his marriage. Let good people read his diary, how and when he courted me.

In love as never before... I will shoot myself if it goes on like this, and so forth.

Then he was my Lyovochka, and for long. Here he is Chertkov's.

Sofia Tolstaya."

The note She read the book, copied the book, and then answered the book on a leaf glued into its body, and her answer is composed out of his own opening sentence. His 29 July plea, прости меня Богъ и добрыя люди, forgive me, God and good people, if I am wrong, returns as her прости меня Бог и Левочка, forgive me, God and Lyovochka; and his good people, whose forgiveness he asked, become the jury she appoints: let good people read his diary. Even дневничек, her diminutive for the book, answers his own дневникъ маленькій. The diary for one reader thus ends addressed to everyone; concealment's last page is an open letter. Her italics are hers throughout, and the most heavily weighted words in the volume are her two possessives: my Lyovochka; Chertkov's. She signs. He never did.
Part II

24 September – 2 October 1910 · Yasnaya Polyana

Headnote

Part I was written in a pocket notebook, 14 by 10 centimetres, bound in dark green leather, bought at Muir & Mirrielees in Moscow; a sleeve in the spine holds a thin, sharpened pencil with a metal tip, the instrument of the 8 August jottings. Of its 121 leaves Tolstoy filled sixteen, both sides, in ink; after the sixteenth leaf her notes are glued in. Part II, which follows, was written on three loose leaves from an English-made pocket notebook after the green notebook went missing on 24 September. The three leaves were handed to Sasha and kept in an envelope inscribed in her hand: From the notebook of L. N. Tolstoy. Given to me 4 Oct. 1910 for safekeeping, so that no one should read it. A. Tolstaya. The diary for one reader here acquires a keeper sworn to none.

24 September [7 October N.S.]

I have lost the little diary. I write here. The day began quietly. But at breakfast a conversation started about Childhood Wisdom: that Chertkov is a collector, has been collecting. Where will he put the manuscripts after my death? I asked, a little hotly, to be left in peace. It seemed to pass. But after dinner the reproaches began: that I had shouted at her, that I ought to pity her. I kept silent. She went to her room, and it is now going on eleven; she does not come out, and I am heavy. From Chertkov a letter with reproaches and denunciations. They are tearing me to pieces. Sometimes the thought comes: to go away from them all. — It turns out she was asleep, and came out calm. I went to bed after twelve.

The note Here is a loose leaf of the English pocket notebook; the green notebook is mislaid, not yet found by her. Three things converge in one entry. She demands the book's own verb, that I ought to pity her, жалѣть quoted back into the diary from her mouth. They in they are tearing me to pieces has no single antecedent and needs none: her reproaches and his arrive in the same sentence. And the leaving-verb changes register: after убѣжать, to run away (20 August, 11 September), comes уйти, to go away, the calm word, the one whose noun, уход, will name the whole final act. The ruling long held open in the glossary begins here: flight is becoming departure.

25 September [8 October N.S.]

Woke early, wrote a letter to Chertkov. I hope he will take it as I ask. I am dressing now. Yes, my whole affair is with God, and one must be alone. Again a request to stand for a photograph in the pose of loving spouses. I agreed, and was ashamed the whole time. Sasha was terribly angry. It hurt me. In the evening I called her in and said: it is not your stenography I need, but your love. And the two of us, kissing, had a good cry together.

The note The photograph is the anniversary picture, taken for their forty-eighth wedding anniversary of 23 September, and the diary supplies its caption from behind the lens: the pose of loving spouses, agreed to, and shameful the whole time. It is the instrumental ласка of 29 July made visible at last, staged for the plate. The evening's tears are with Sasha, not with her: the day's one unposed embrace.

26 September [9 October N.S.]

Again scenes, because I hung the portraits back as they were. I began to say that it is impossible to live like this. And she understood. Dushan said she had fired a child's pistol to frighten me. I was not frightened, and did not go to her. And indeed it is better so. But very, very hard. Help me, Lord.

27 September [10 October N.S.]

How comic is the contradiction I live in, in which, without false modesty: I carry and bring forth the most important, the most significant thoughts, and alongside them: struggle over, and part in, women's caprices, and to these I give the greater part of my time.

In the matter of moral perfection I feel myself an utter boy, a pupil, and a bad pupil, not diligent enough.

Yesterday a terrible scene with Sasha, who had come back. She shouted at Marya Alexandrovna. Sasha left today for Telyatinki. And she is perfectly serene, as though nothing had happened. She showed me the toy pistol, and fired it, and lied. Today she rode out after me on my walk, probably tracking me. Pitiable, but hard. Help me, Lord.

The note The pronouns are his: after the first sentence of the third section, she is never named, and the reader is trusted to know which she shouts, fires, lies, and tracks; Marya Alexandrovna is M. A. Schmidt, the gentlest of his old disciples, which measures the shout. She showed me the toy pistol, and fired it, and lied: three verbs, one comma each, the flattest sentence in the book, and the worst.

28 September [11 October N.S.]

Very heavy. These expressions of love, this talkativeness, this constant interference. It is possible, I know it is possible, even so, to love. But I cannot. I am poor stuff.

29 September [12 October N.S.]

Sasha wants to stay away from the house a while longer. I fear for her. Sofya Andreyevna is better. Sometimes a false shame at my own weakness comes over me; and sometimes, as today, I rejoice at that weakness.

Today for the first time I saw the possibility of conquering her by goodness, by love. Ah, if only....

The note Кабы is the folk if only, the word of peasant wishes and fairy tales, and the sentence it begins is left standing open on four points. On 29 July, conquest by tenderness was the suspicion levelled at her; on 29 September it is his own last hope, and he cannot finish the sentence that hopes it.

30 September [13 October N.S.]

Today all the same. She talks much for the sake of talking, and does not listen. There were heavy minutes today, from my own weakness: I saw the unpleasant, the heavy, where it is not, and cannot be, for the true life.

1 October [14 October N.S.]

Terribly heavy is the unkind feeling toward her that I cannot overcome when the talking begins, talking without end and without sense or aim. Chertkov's article on the soul and God: I fear the cleverness in it has outrun the sense. A joy, that it is one and the same among all truly original religious men. With Antoine le Guérisseur too.

The note Умъ за разумъ is the idiom of wit overshooting wisdom, and it is aimed, gently, at Chertkov's theology in the very weeks Chertkov's cause is consuming the household. Говоренье, the talking, is the same noun he coined the doctrine against on 30 July, не говореніе, non-saying: her affliction and his discipline are one word with a prefix between them. Antoine le Guérisseur, Antoine the Healer, is the Belgian founder of Antoinism, whose writings had reached him that year; the comfort is his oldest one, that the true religion is single and appears everywhere.

2 October [15 October N.S.]

From the morning the first word is of her own health, then condemnation, and conversations without end, and interference in every conversation. And I am poor stuff. I cannot conquer the feeling that is not good, not kind. Today I vividly felt the need of artistic work, and I see the impossibility of giving myself to it, because of her, because of the clinging thought of her, because of the struggle within. And of course this struggle, and the possibility of victory in this struggle, matters more than all possible works of art.

The note Part II ends with the last sentence Tolstoy the artist ever wrote about art, and it is a demotion delivered without regret: the unwritten masterpiece weighed against one unkind feeling conquered, and found lighter. The clinging word is неотвязный, what cannot be untied; twenty-eight years of Anna Karenina's author, and the last artistic problem is a knot in himself.
Part III

5 – 31 October 1910 · Yasnaya Polyana, Optina, Astapovo

Headnote

from 5 October the diary survives only at one remove. Part III was written on removable leaves of his last pocket notebook; what the Jubilee printed from is a Remington typescript of them, eight sheets, preserved in T. L. Sukhotina’s archive, with some words corrected in her hand in green ink. The autograph stands behind the copy, not before the editors. Every genetic mark in this part therefore passed through a typewriter on its way to us, and where the copy stumbles the apparatus says so (see 16 October). The section’s itinerary outruns its entries: Shamordino, where his sister the nun received him between Optina and the last train, happens in a gap between dates, like the flight itself.

5 October [18 October N.S.]

I have given up the leaves, and today I begin the new. And it seems the new needed beginning: on the 3rd, after my before-dinner sleep, I fell into unconsciousness. They undressed me, put me to bed, gave me an enema; I said something, and remember nothing. I woke and came to myself toward eleven. Headache and weakness. Yesterday I lay all day in fever, with pain in my head, ate nothing, the same weakness. The night likewise. It is now seven in the morning; the head still aches, and the liver, and the legs, and I am weakened, but better. The chief thing about my illness is that it has reconciled Sasha with Sofya Andreyevna. Sasha was especially good. Varya has come. We shall see. I struggle with my unkind feeling toward her; I cannot forget these three months of torment for everyone near to me, and for me. But I will master it. I did not sleep in the night, and not to say that I thought: thoughts wandered in my head.

The note The collapse of 3 October is entered with the body's full inventory kept, enema included; the man who hid a notebook in his boot hides nothing from the notebook. The last sentence deserves its strangeness preserved: not to say that I thought; thoughts wandered, thinking demoted from an act to a weather.

6, 7 and 8 October [written 7-8 October; 19-21 October N.S.]

Yesterday, 6 October. I was weak and gloomy. Everything was heavy and unpleasant. A letter from Chertkov. He thinks so, and needlessly. She is trying, and asked him to come. Today Tanya went over to the Chertkovs. Galya is very irritated. Chertkov decided to come at eight; it is now ten minutes to. Sofya Andreyevna asked that I not kiss him in greeting. How repugnant it all is. There was a hysterical fit.

Today is the 8th. I said out to her everything I thought needful. She objected, and I grew irritated. And that was bad. But perhaps something of it will remain even so. It is true that the whole matter lies in not acting badly oneself; but her, too, not always, yet for the most part, I sincerely pity. I go to bed having passed the day better.

The note He thinks this, and in vain is as compressed in Russian as in English, and the object of Chertkov's mistaken opinion is not stated; the sentence is left as clenched as he made it. The clock detail, now ten minutes to, is unique in the diary: the only entry written while waiting, the reunion with Chertkov after three months timed to the minute. Her one condition, no kiss of greeting, and his one comment, how repugnant, between them contain the whole quarantine.

9 October [22 October N.S.]

She is calm, but keeps starting to talk about herself. I read on hysteria. Everyone is guilty except her. I did not go to the Chertkovs and will not go. Calm is dearer than anything. In my soul it is strict, serious.

The note Everyone is guilty except her sits between the textbook and the woman and belongs to both: it is the clinical signature of hysteria as his book described it, and the day's observation, and the diary declines to say which. The psychiatric reading resumes from 7 August's Korsakov.

10 October [23 October N.S.]

Quiet, but everything unnatural and eerie. There is no peace.

11 October [24 October N.S.]

From the morning, talk of how I had secretly seen Chertkov yesterday. She did not sleep all night. But, thanks be, she struggles with herself. I held myself well, kept silent. Everything that happens, whatever it is, she converts into confirmation of her mania — no matter....

12 October [25 October N.S.]

Again from the morning, talk and a scene. Something, someone told her of some will of mine leaving the diaries to Chertkov. I kept silent. An empty day; I could not work well. In the evening again the same talk. Hints, probings.

The note Rumour arrives in rumour's own grammar: something, someone... some will, three indefinite pronouns carrying one definite fact. The same triple will return from her side tomorrow.

13 October [26 October N.S.]

It turns out she has found and carried off my diary, the little one. She knows of some will, to someone, about something — obviously touching my writings. What torment over their money worth — and she fears I will hinder her edition. And she fears everything, unhappy woman.

The note The book records its own capture, and time folds. Everything her hand did to the pages we have already read, the blottings of 14 August, the answer of 20 August, the glued and signed leaf, became possible on this day: the earlier pages of this diary were wounded later than its later pages were written. And the indefinite pronouns of 12 October return, now as the exact measure of what she knows: some will, to someone, about something, three blanks and one certainty. The entry ends where the whole book keeps ending, in the verb of the title-ruling's shadow: несчастная, unhappy woman, the same word as 2 August, pity's address.

14 October [27 October N.S.]

A letter with reproaches over some paper about rights, as if the chief thing of all were the money question — and that is better — clearer; but when she speaks with exaggeration of her love for me, goes down on her knees and kisses my hands, it is very heavy for me.

Still I cannot bring myself to declare outright that I will go to the Chertkovs.

The note The hand-kissing closes the ring the first entry opened. On 29 July it was the suspect novelty: for several days now she has been kissing my hand, which she never did before. On 14 October it is on her knees, and he no longer weighs whether it is strategy; he only records that it is heavy. Between the two entries the question is the tenderness instrumental has stopped mattering, which is itself the saddest datum in the book.

15 October [28 October N.S.]

There was a collision with Sasha, and general agitation, but bearable.

16 October [29 October N.S.]

Today it came to a head.

I wanted to go away to Tanya, but I waver. A hysterical fit, a vicious one.

The whole affair is this: she herself proposed that I go to the Chertkovs, asked it of me; and today, when I said I would go, she began to rage like one possessed. Very, very hard. God help me. I said that I will give no promises, and give none, but will do all I can not to grieve her. Tomorrow's departure I shall hardly carry out. And yet it is needful. Yes, this is a trial, and my task is to do nothing unkind. God help me.

The note Бѣсноваться is built on бѣсъ, the demon: to rage as the possessed rage, the Gospels' word for what happens at Gadara. He reaches for it once only, here, on the day it came to a head.

17 October [30 October N.S.]

Weak. Sofya Andreyevna is better, seems to repent, but in this too there is hysterical exaggeration. She kisses my hands. Very excited, talks without ceasing. I feel myself morally well. I remember who I am. Read Shri Shankara. The fundamental metaphysical thought on the essence of life is good, but the whole teaching is a muddle, worse than mine.

The note I remember who I am: four words doing the work the prayers have been doing, the whole discipline of the book compressed to a sentence one could carry in a boot. And then the driest joke in the diary: Shankara's system judged a muddle, worse than mine. He ranks the muddles of the world's metaphysics and quietly enters his own; fourteen days from death, the self-irony is intact.

18 October [31 October N.S.]

Still the same heavy relation of fear and estrangement. Today there was nothing. In the evening she began a conversation about faith. She simply does not understand what faith is.

19 October [1 November N.S.]

A very heavy conversation in the night. I bore it badly. Sasha spoke of a sale for a million. We shall see. Perhaps for the better. If only to act before the highest judge, to earn His approval.

20 October [2 November N.S.]

Nothing bad to write down. It is bad. One thing I will write: how she gladdens me, and how too dear, too precious, Sasha is to me.

The note Nothing bad to record. Bad. The two sentences refute each other and are both true, and the entry's one recorded joy arrives wearing the book's word of excess: слишкомъ, too, the same adverb as 7 August's she loves me too much. In this family even the love is over the limit, and he knows it, and writes it down anyway.

21 October [3 November N.S.]

Very heavily I carry my trial. The words of Novikov: "I went over her with the whip; she got much better," and of Ivan: "in our way of life, with the reins," keep coming back to me, and I am displeased with myself.

In the night I thought about departure. Sasha talked long with her, and I hold back the unkind feeling with difficulty.

The note Novikov is M. P. Novikov, the peasant he trusted; Ivan a coachman. Their remedies recur to him unbidden, in their own voices, whip and reins, and what he confesses is not the thought but that the thought keeps visiting, and that some part of him must be summoning it: displeased with myself carries all of that. Two days later the same name will return meaning refuge instead. And the leaving-word advances again: отъѣздъ, departure, thought about in the night, the noun approaching.

22 October [4 November N.S.]

Nothing hostile from her side, but this pretence on both sides is heavy to me. From Chertkov a letter to me, a letter to Dosev, and a statement. All very good, but the violation of the diary's secrecy is unpleasant. Dunayev spoke well. Terrible, that he recounted it, from her words, to him, and to Marya Nikolayevna.

The note The violation of the diary's secrecy: the secret diary, itself already found and carried off, here objects to diary-secrecy violated elsewhere, in Chertkov's circulated statement. There is no unread diary left anywhere in this story; every private page is in evidence. The last sentence's pronouns are knotted as he left them, and we do not untie them. Marya Nikolayevna is his sister, a nun of Shamordino convent; in six days the flight will go to her.

23 October [5 November N.S.]

Still the mutual pretence, just as heavy; I try to be simple, but it does not come off. The thought of Novikov does not leave me. When I rode out, Sofya Andreyevna went to track me, in case I had gone to Chertkov's. Shaming, even in a diary, to confess one's own stupidity. Since yesterday I have begun doing gymnastics — wants to grow young again, the fool — and pulled the wardrobe down on myself, and wore myself out for nothing. There is your eighty-two-year-old fool.

The note The thought of Novikov is now refuge, not whip: the next day he wrote to Novikov asking whether a hut in his village might be found for him, the first practical act of the going-away. And in the middle of the plotting, the book's one comedy, told against himself with the grammar splitting in two: the sentence begins in the first person and the fool arrives in the third, wants to grow young again, the fool, the judge and the defendant sharing one clause. Shaming even in a diary to confess: even here, at the bottom of all the concealments, there is a further privacy that blushes.

24 October [6 November N.S.]

Sasha wept aloud over having quarrelled with Tanya. And I too. Very heavy; the same strain and unnaturalness.

25 October [7 November N.S.]

Still the same heavy feeling. Suspicions, spying, and the sinful wish that she would give me a pretext to go away. So poor stuff am I. But when I think of going away, and of her position — pity, and again I cannot.

She asked me for the letter to Chertkova, to Galya.

The note Three days before the departure, the exact mechanics of his paralysis, stated once and completely: the wish for a pretext confessed as sin, and then жаль, pity, the book's own verb, physically barring the door. What finally opens it will have to be stronger than the pity, and the diary is about to record what was.

26 October [8 November N.S.]

More and more I am burdened by this life. Marya Alexandrovna forbids going away, and my own conscience does not allow it either. To endure her, to endure, changing nothing outward, but working on the inward. Help me, Lord.

The note The last entry written before the shock, and it is a renunciation of leaving: conscience and the gentlest of his friends agree, and the resolution taken is to stay. The diary's final position, two days before the flight, is endure. What follows is not the failure of the resolution but its overruling.

25 [in fact 27] October [9 November N.S.]

All night I dreamed my heavy struggle with her. I wake, fall asleep, and again the same. Sasha recounted what is being said to Varvara Mikhailovna. And I pity her, and it is unbearably foul.

The note The days themselves are coming loose: he is two dates adrift, and the fight has moved into his sleep, where it runs on its own. Видѣлъ, I saw, is the Russian verb of dreaming; the struggle no longer needs him awake.

26 [in fact 27-28] October

Nothing special happened. Only the feeling grew: of shame, and of the need to undertake.

The note Предпринять, to undertake, is transitive and arrives with its object withheld: undertake what is not written, even now, even here. The verb stands with its hands empty, waiting. It will be given its object by the next entry's first line.

28 October. Optina Pustyn [10 November N.S.]

In the night of the 27th to the 28th came that shock which compelled the undertaking. And here I am at Optina, on the evening of the 28th. I sent Sasha both a letter and a telegram.

The note The going-away happens between two sentences. The shock which compelled the undertaking, and then, without transition, and here I am at Optina: the night departure itself, the candle, the note left behind, the drive to the station in the dark that the big Diary and every biography recount, is a gap in this book. The shock was waking after midnight to hear her searching his study, his papers, once more. The diary that was born from being watched ends its home life on one last watching, and the verb of 26 October receives its object off the page. He fled to a monastery: the excommunicate at Optina, the elders a corridor away, and he did not knock.

29 October. Optina Pustyn [11 November N.S.]

Sergeyenko arrived. Everything the same, still worse. If only not to sin. And to hold no malice. Now there is none.

The note Sergeyenko brought word of what had followed the departure at Yasnaya; everything the same, still worse is all the diary will hold of it. These are the last words Tolstoy wrote in this book with his own hand. They are an audit of malice, returning nil: Now there is none. The prayer of 3 August, if only I do not sin myself, is here answered in his own final accounting. What follows is dictation.

31 October. Dictated [13 November N.S.]

God is that unlimited All of which man is conscious of himself as a limited part.

Truly there exists only God. Man is His manifestation in matter, time and space. The more the manifestation of God in man, which is life, unites with the manifestations, the lives, of other beings, the more he exists. The uniting of this his life with the lives of other beings is accomplished by love.

God is not love; but the more love there is, the more man manifests God, and the more truly he exists.

The note Dictated to Sasha on the last day of travel, the day the fever put him off the train at Astapovo. The hand is gone; the theology is not. God is not love stands in deliberate contradiction of 1 John 4:8, and then rebuilds the verse the only way his metaphysics permits: love not as what God is but as how God is manifested, existence itself made proportional to love. It is the immanentist's credo delivered whole, in three paragraphs, on a moving train.

Astapovo, 31 October, half past one in the afternoon

God — if we wish by this concept to explain the phenomena of life — then in such an understanding of God and of life there can be nothing solid and firm. These are mere idle reasonings that lead to nothing. God we know only through the consciousness of His manifestation in us. All the conclusions drawn from that consciousness, and the guidance of life founded upon it, always fully satisfy man, both in the knowledge of God Himself and in the guidance of his life founded on this consciousness.

The note The first sentence is an anacoluthon, and we have kept the break: it begins with God as its subject and never returns to him. The grammar gives way exactly where the thought insists nothing firm can stand, so that the sentence enacts its own doctrine, syntax failing at the same point as system. What survives the collapse is the second half, the only epistemology he ever finally trusted: God known not by definition but by the consciousness of His manifestation in us. The last complete word of the diary is сознаніе, consciousness, the same stake he named on 8 August when he weighed his vanished memory against it and found he had gained. The book that began for myself alone ends with the self dissolved into the one thing it was ever, on his account, a part of.

Reprinting permitted without payment. Free reproduction for all countries. Printed in every volume of the Jubilee edition, 1928–1958, and honoured here as CC BY.