_January 6th._ Yesterday, when many letters came, Tolstoi said: “In old age one becomes indifferent to the fact that one will never see the results of one’s activity. But the results will be there. It is not modesty on my part, but I know there will be results.” To-day, speaking of the revolutionaries, Tolstoi said: “Their chief mistake is the superstition that one can arrange human life.” _April 12th._ Tatyana Lvovna was saying that A. N. Volkov is writing a book on art. Tolstoi became interested. Volkov says in his book that art must follow Nature blindly in everything. Tolstoi said: “It is absolutely untrue. It is always like that. When people are discussing art, they either say, like the modern decadents, that everything is allowed, everything is possible, that there is complete freedom in art. Or they talk about the slavish imitation of Nature. Both views are false. Just as every man is perfectly individual and never occurs twice over, so also his thoughts, his feelings are always new; they are _his_ thoughts and feelings alone. At the basis of a true work of art there must lie some perfectly original idea or feeling, but it must be expressed with slavish adherence to the smallest details of life.” _July 27th._ A fortnight ago Mme. E--v, the wife of a privy councillor, came here on a visit. Tolstoi played chess with me on the balcony and the lady talked at first to Sophie Andreevna, and then, I think, to Marie Nikolaevna, about the great service which landowners performed, and how the peasants are beasts, and how, but for the landed aristocracy and their culture, they would become absolute brutes. Tolstoi kept silent, but at last could stand it no longer. He got up from his chair and said to her: “You must forgive me, but what you are saying is terrible, one can’t listen to it with indifference. If one is speaking of beasts, then certainly it is not the peasants who are beasts, but all of us who rob them and live on them. And all the ‘work’ of the landowners is nothing but playing about for want of anything else to do!” Tolstoi was in a state of agitation and could not get calm for a long time afterwards. The same evening at tea, when Mme. E--v had gone, the talk was about executions. Sophie Andreevna tried to prove that any murder is as bad as an execution, and yet people don’t talk about them. Elisabetha Valerianovna replied that an execution is a murder which is considered to be just, and the horror of it lies in that. Tolstoi said: “If one were to ask who is worse, the wretched executioner, hired, intoxicated, spiritually destroyed, or those who hire him and those who pass sentence of death, the prosecutors, the judges, then it seems to me there can be no doubt.” At tea Elisabetha Valerianovna asked her mother, Marie Nikolaevna, to have some milk, and she began to drink it. Tolstoi said: