Sometimes he seems to be conceited and intolerant, like a Volga preacher, and this is terrible in a man who is the sounding bell of this world. Yesterday he said to me:
"I am more of a mouzhik than you and I feel better in a mouzhik way."
God, he ought not to boast of it, he must not!
I read him some scenes from my play, _The Lower Depths;_ he listened attentively and then asked:
"One always notices that you jump like a cock on to everything. And more--you always want to paint all the grooves and cracks over with your own paint. You remember that Andersen says: 'The gilt will come off and the pig-skin will remain'; just as our peasants say: 'Everything will pass away, the truth alone will remain.' You'd much better not put the plaster on, for you yourself will suffer for it later. Again, your language is very skilful, with all kinds of tricks--that's no good. You ought to write more simply; people speak simply, even incoherently, and that's good. A peasant doesn't ask: 'Why is a third more than a fourth, if four is always more than three,' as one learned young lady asked. No tricks, please."
He spoke irritably; clearly he disliked very much what I had read to him. And after a silence, looking over my head, he said gloomily:
"Your old man is not sympathetic, one does not believe in his goodness. The actor is all right, he's good. You know _Fruits of Enlightenment_? My cook there is rather like your actor. Writing plays is difficult. But your prostitute also came off well, they must be like that. Have you known many of them?"
"Yes, one can see that. Truth always shows itself. Most of what you say comes out of yourself, and therefore you have no characters, and all your people have the same face. I should think you don't understand women; they don't come off with you. One does not remember them...."
At this moment A. L.'s wife came in and called us to come to tea, and he got up and went out very quickly, as if he were glad to end the conversation.
"What is the most terrible dream you have ever had?" Tolstoi asked me.
I rarely have dreams and remember them badly, but two have remained in my memory and probably will for the rest of my life.
I dreamt once that I saw the sky scrofulous, putrescent, greenish-yellow, and the stars in it were round, flat, without rays, without lustre, like scabs on the skin of a diseased person. And there glided across this putrescent sky slowly reddish forked lightning, rather like a snake, and when it touched a star the star swelled up into a ball and burst noiselessly, leaving behind it a darkish spot, like a little smoke; and then the spot vanished quickly in the bleared and liquid sky. Thus all the stars one after another burst and perished, and the sky, growing darker and more horrible, at last whirled upwards, bubbled and bursting into fragments began to fall on my head in a kind of cold jelly, and in the spaces between the fragments there appeared a shiny blackness as though of iron. Leo Nicolayevitch said: "Now that comes from a learned book; you must have read something on astronomy; hence the nightmare. And the other dream?"