was, in his latter days, from the voluntary calm of a Goethe! One would almost say that he avoided it, fled from it, hated it.
“One must thank God for being discontented with oneself. If one could always be so! The discord of life with what ought to be is precisely the sign of life itself, the movement upwards from the lesser to the greater, from worse to better. And this discord is the condition of good. It is an evil when a man is calm and satisfied with himself.”[1]
He imagines the following subject for a novel—showing that the persistent discontent of a Levine or a Besoukhov was not yet extinct in him:
“I often picture to myself a man brought up in revolutionary circles, and at first a revolutionist, then a populist, then a socialist, then orthodox, then a monk at Afone, then an atheist, a good paterfamilias, and finally a Doukhobor. He takes up everything and is always forsaking everything; men deride him, for he has performed nothing, and dies, forgotten, in a hospital. Dying, he thinks he has wasted his life. And yet he is a saint.”[2]
Had he still doubts—he, so full of faith? Who knows? In a man who has remained robust in body and mind even into old age life cannot come to a halt at a definite stage of thought. Life goes onwards.
“Movement is life.”[3]
- ↑ War and Revolution.
- ↑ Perhaps this refers to the History of a Doukhobor, the title of which figures in the list of Tolstoy’s unpublished works.
- ↑ “Suppose that all the men who had the truth were to be installed all together on an island. Would that be life?” (To a friend, March, 1901. Further Letters.)
