"Goethe's words were all recorded, but Tolstoi's thoughts are being lost in the air. That, my dear fellow, is intolerably Russian. After his death they will bestir themselves, will begin to write reminiscences, and will lie."
But to return to Shestov. "'It is impossible,' he says, 'to live looking at horrible ghosts,' but how does _he_ know whether it's horrible or not? If he knew, if he saw ghosts, he would not write this nonsense, but would do something serious, what Buddha did all his life."
"Hardly," said Leo Nicolayevitch doubtfully.
"No, he is not like a Jew; there are no disbelieving Jews, you can't name one.... no."
It seemed sometimes as though this old sorcerer were playing with Death, coquetting with her, trying somehow to deceive her, saying: "I am not afraid of thee, I love thee, I long for thee."
And at the same time peering at Death with his keen little eyes: "What art thou like? What follows thee hereafter? Wilt thou destroy me altogether, or will something in me go on living?"
A strange impression used to be produced by his words: "I am happy, I am awfully happy, I am too happy." And then immediately afterwards: "To suffer." To suffer--that, too, was true in him; I don't doubt for a second that he, only half convalescent, would have been really glad to be put into prison, to be banished--in a word, to embrace a martyr's crown. Would not martyrdom probably in some measure justify death, make her more understandable, acceptable from the external, from the formal point of view? But he was never happy, never and nowhere; I am certain of that: neither "in the books of wisdom," nor "on the back of a horse," nor "in the arms of a woman" did he experience the full delights of "earthly paradise." He is too rational for that and knows life and people too well. Here are some more of his words:
"The Kaliph Abdurahman had during his life fourteen happy days, but I am sure I have not had so many. And this is because I have never lived--I cannot live--for myself, for my own self; I live for show, for people."
When we left, Anton Tchekhov said to me: "I don't believe that he was not happy." But I believe it. He was not. Though it is not true that he lived for show. 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."