“The present movement in Russia is a world movement, the importance of which is still little understood. This movement, like the French Revolution formerly, will perhaps give, by means of its ideas, an impetus for hundreds of years to come. The Russian people has in the highest degree the capacity for organization and self-government. They gave up their power to the Government and waited, as they formerly did for the liberation of the serfs, for the liberation of the land. They have not been given the land, and they themselves will carry out that great reform. Our revolutionaries are perfectly ignorant of the people and do not understand this movement. They might help it, but they only hamper it. In the Russian people, it seems to me, and I think I am not biased, there is more of the Christian spirit than in other peoples. Probably the reason is that the Russian people got to know the New Testament about five centuries before the people of Europe, who until the Reformation hardly knew it.” Tolstoi criticized the complexity and artificiality of modern art in general, and of music in particular. He said: “Certainly, if I love art, I can’t love _no_ art, but I must love that which exists. Still I have always before me the ideal of the highest art: to be clear, simple, and accessible to all.” I was saying how long and systematically one must teach piano-playing in order to be able to play well. Tolstoi found that “system” dangerous. He said: “In doing this one may lose the direct fresh feeling with which you regard a new work of art. I know it from my own experience--when one begins to write something, one works with excitement and interest, and the work goes well; but then the same old thing begins to tire one and it becomes boring. Of course, there is the love of one’s work, and the love is stronger than the boredom, and by love the boredom is overcome, but still boredom there is.” I spoke about the complexity of certain of Chopin’s works, whom Tolstoi loves very much. “Well, he too makes mistakes,” Tolstoi replied smilingly. “Once I stayed with the Olsufevs in the country, and, referring to the weather and the gathering in of the harvest, I said to the old butler there--he was a sceptic and pessimist--that God knows what He does, to which he replied: ‘He too makes mistakes!’” Of creative activity Tolstoi said: “The worst thing of all is to begin a work with the details; then one gets muddled and loses the power of seeing the whole. One has to behave like Pokhitonov who has spectacles with double glasses divided in two (looking at the distance and at his work), to look now through these and now through those and to put on now the bright and now the dark glasses.”