Maxim Gorky

“ A good peasant will never show at once what is in his own mind: it is not profitable. He knows that people approach a stupid man frankly and directly, and that's the very thing he wants. You stand revealed before him and he at once sees all your weak points. He is suspicious; he is afraid to tell his inmost thoughts even to his wife. But with your peasants in every story everything is revealed: it's a universal council of wisdom. And they all speak in aphorisms; that's not true to life, either; aphorisms are not natural to the Russian language. ”

“ Yes, what he himself did not need, he gave to people as though they were beggars; he liked to compel them, to compel them to read, walk, be vegetarians, love the peasants, and believe in the infallibility of the rational-religious reflections of Leo Tolstoi. People must be given something which will either satisfy or amuse them, and then let them be off. Let them leave a man in peace, to his habitual, tormenting, and sometimes cosy loneliness in face of the bottomless pit of the problem of "the essential." ”

“ THE thought which beyond others most often and conspicuously gnaws at him is the thought of God. At moments it seems, indeed, not to be a thought, but a violent resistance to something which he feels above him. He speaks of it less than he would like, but thinks of it always. It can scarcely be said to be a sign of old age, a presentiment of death—no, I think that it comes from his exquisite human pride, and—a bit—from a sense of humiliation: for, being Leo Tolstoi, it is humiliating to have to submit one's will to a streptococcus. ”

“ HE treats Sulerzhizky with the tenderness of a woman. For Tchekhov his love is paternal—in this love is the feeling of the pride of a creator—Suler rouses in him just tenderness, a perpetual interest and rapture which never seems to weary the sorcerer. Perhaps there is something a little ridiculous in this feeling, like the love of an old maid for a parrot, a pug dog, or a tom-cat. Suler is a fascinatingly wild bird from some strange unknown land. A hundred men like him could change the face, as well as the soul, of a provincial town. ”

“ One loves Suler easily and gaily, and when I see how carelessly women accept him, they surprise and anger me. Yet under this carelessness is hidden, perhaps, caution. Suler is not reliable. What will he do to-morrow? He may throw a bomb or he may join a troupe of public-house minstrels. He has energy enough for three life-times, and fire of life—so much that he seems to sweat sparks like over-heated iron. ”

“ HE reminds me of those pilgrims who all their life long, stick in hand, walk the earth, travelling thousands of miles from one monastery to another, from one saint's relics to another, terribly homeless and alien to all men and things. The world is not for them, nor God either. They pray to Him from habit, and in their secret soul they hate Him—why does He drive them over the earth from one end to the other? ”

“ In such cases Leo Nicolayevitch always chaffed him.
I remember that Suler once got hold of a thin little pamphlet by Prince Kropotkin; he flamed up, and all day long explained to everyone the wisdom of anarchism, overwhelming them with his philosophizing.
"Oh, stop it, Liovushka," said Leo Nicolayevitch irritably, "you are annoying. You hammer away like a parrot at one word, freedom, freedom; but what is the sense of it? If you attained your freedom, what do you imagine would happen? In the philosophic sense, a bottomless void, and in actual life you would become an idler, a parasite. ”

“ Journalists have come asserting that a telegram has been received in Rome "denying the rumour of Tolstoi's death." They bustled and chattered, redundantly expressing their sympathy with Russia. The Russian newspapers leave no room for doubt.
To lie to him, even out of pity, was impossible; even when he was seriously ill, one could not pity him. It would be banal to pity a man like him. They ought to be taken care of, cherished, not loaded with the wordy dust of worn-out, soulless words. ”

“ And later I heard him say to Anton Pavlovitch Tchekhov: "He (Uspensky) is a writer! In the power of his sincerity he recalls Dostoevsky, only Dostoevsky went in for politics and coquetted, while Uspensky is more simple and sincere. If he had believed in God, he would have been a sectarian."
"But you said he was a Tula writer and had no talent."
He drew his shaggy brows down over his eyes and said: "He wrote badly. What kind of language does he use? There are more punctuation marks than words. Talent is love. One who loves is talented. Look at lovers, they are all talented." ”

“ Great—in some curious sense wide, indefinable by words—there is something in him which made me desire to cry aloud to everyone: "Look what a wonderful man is living on the earth." For he is, so to say, universally and above all a man, a man of mankind.
But what always repelled me in him was that stubborn despotic inclination to turn the life of Count Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi into "the saintly life of our blessed father, boyard Leo." ”

“ It was curious to see Leo Nicolayevitch among "Tolstoyans"; there stands a noble belfry and its bell sounds untiringly over the whole world, while round about run tiny, timorous dogs whining at the bell and distrustfully looking askance at one another as though to say, "Who howled best?" I always thought that these people infected the Yassnaya Polyana house, as well as the great house of Countess Panin, with a spirit of hypocrisy, cowardice, mercenary and self-seeking pettiness and legacy-hunting. ”

“ In the South, which, with its self-asserting luxuriance and flaunting, unbridled vegetation, seems so strangely incongruous to a man from the North, he, Leo Tolstoi—even his name speaks of his inner power—seemed a small man, but knitted and knotted out of very strong roots deep in the earth—in the flaunting scenery of the Crimea, I say, he was at once both out of place and in his place. ”

“ Suler asked.
"Béranger—that's quite different. What's there in common between the French and us? They are sensualists; the life of the spirit is not as important to them as the flesh. To a Frenchman woman is everything. They are a worn-out, emasculated people. Doctors say that all consumptives are sensualists."
Suler began to argue with his peculiar directness, pouring out a random flood of words. Leo Nicolayevitch looked at him and said with a broad smile:
"You are peevish to-day, like a girl who has reached the age when she should marry but has no lover." ”

“ With such hands one can do anything. Sometimes, when talking, he will move his fingers, gradually close them into a fist, and then, suddenly opening them, utter a good, full-weight word. He is like a god, not a Sabaoth or Olympian, but the kind of Russian god who "sits on a maple throne under a golden lime tree," not very majestic, but perhaps more cunning than all the other gods. ”

“ Holiness is attained by flirting with sin, by subduing the will to live. People do desire to live, but he tries to persuade them: "That's all nonsense, our earthly life." It is very easy to persuade a Russian of this; he is a lazy creature who loves beyond anything else to find an excuse for his own inactivity. On the whole, of course, a Russian is not a Platon Karatayev, nor an Akim, nor a Bezonkhy, nor a Neklyudov; all these men were created by history and nature, not exactly on Tolstoi's pattern, he only improved on them in order more thoroughly to support his teaching. ”

“ If Leo Nicolayevitch had had a reconciliation with the Church, it would not have at all surprised me. The thing would have had a logic of its own; all men are equally insignificant, even Archbishops. In fact, it would not have been a reconciliation, strictly speaking; for him personally the act would have been only logical: "I forgive those who hate me." It would have been a Christian act, and behind it there would have hidden a quick, ironical, little smile, which would be understood as the way in which a wise man retaliates on the fools. ”

“ In the musing motionlessness of the old man I felt something fateful, magical, something which went down into the darkness beneath him and stretched up, like a searchlight, into the blue emptiness above the earth—as though it were he, his concentrated will, which was drawing the waves to him and repelling them, which was ruling the movements of cloud and shadow, which was stirring the stones to life. ”

“ He spoke superbly about the customs of the Moscow aristocracy. A big Russian peasant woman was working on the flower-bed, bent at right angles, showing her ivory legs, shaking her ten-pound breasts. He looked at her attentively.
"It is those caryatids who have kept all that magnificence and extravagance going. Not only by the labour of peasant men and women, not only by the taxes they pay, but in the literal sense by their blood. If the aristocracy had not from time to time mated with such horse-women as she, they would have died out long ago. ”

“ Leo Nicolayevitch took the book from the table, waved it in the air, and said: "What he says here about political murder is good, that there is no clear idea in that method. The idea, says a frenzied murderer, can only be anarchical sovereignty of the individual and contempt for society and for mankind. That is true, but 'anarchical sovereignty' is a slip of the pen, it should have been 'monarchical.' That is a good and true idea; all the terrorists will trip up over it—I mean the honest ones. The man who naturally loves killing won't trip up. There is nothing for him to trip up over. ”

“ Your disbelief comes from obstinacy, because you have been hurt: the world is not what you would like it to be. There are also some people who do not believe out of shyness; it happens with young people; they adore some woman, but don't want to show it from fear that she won't understand, and also from lack of courage. Faith, like love, requires courage and daring. One has to say to oneself 'I believe,' and everything will come right, everything will appear as you want it, it will explain itself to you and attract you. ”

“ I often thought him to be a man who in the depths of his soul is stubbornly indifferent to people: he is so much above and beyond them that they seem to him like midges and their activities ridiculous and miserable. He has gone too far away from them into some desert, and there solitary, with the highest effort of all the force of his spirit, he closely examines into "the most essential," into death.
All his life he feared and hated death, all his life there throbbed in his soul the "Arsamaxian terror"—must he die? The whole world, all the earth looks toward him ”

“ XXXVI
"I DO not like people when they are drunk, but I know some who become interesting when they are tipsy, who acquire what is not natural to them in their sober state—wit, beauty of thought, alertness, and richness of language. In such cases I am ready to bless wine."
Suler tells how he was once walking with Leo Nicolayevitch in Tverskaya Street when Tolstoi noticed in the distance two soldiers of the Guards. The metal of their accoutrements shone in the sun; their spurs jingled; they kept step like one man; their faces, too, shone with the self-assurance of strength and youth. ”

“ Suddenly, in a moment of madness, I felt it is possible, he will get up, wave his hand, and the sea will become solid and glassy, the stones will begin to move and cry out, everything around him will come to life, acquire a voice, and speak in their different voices of themselves, of him, against him. ”