After a month, he makes an entry in his Journal, but tears it out, putting only the words, “A bad and sterile month” and adds, “Have torn out, burned, what I have written in heat.”[a21] Then for a long time he wrote nothing, and during this time he “lived through much that was difficult and good.”[a22] On the 8th of July he wrote his very famous letter to his wife, which she received after his death,[a23] which began with the words, “It is already a long time that I am tortured by the lack of harmony between my life and my beliefs” and in which further on he wrote about his decision to do that which “he had wanted to do for a long time: to go away.” But no matter how difficult the conditions of his family life were at this time, they were not yet sufficiently ripe to bring him over to a definite decision to leave his family, and to fulfil his ancient dream of life in more simple conditions among working people. And in view of the fact that he decided to change his decision, he gave the above-mentioned letter for safe-keeping to his son-in-law, Prince N. L. Obolensky, with the request to give it to the one designated, when he was no longer among the living. Although Tolstoi remained this time in Yasnaya Polyana, his life among master-class conditions did not cease to burden him even for a short time, and he felt himself alone,[a24] he often experienced sorrow as before, and in spirit he felt “solemn,” “gloomy.”[a25] At the end of that year (1897), he wrote the thought in his Journal, of the tragedy of the situation of “a man kindly disposed wishing only the good” but who in return meets only “hissing malice and the hatred of people.”[a26] And soon again he writes in his Journal that he is in an agonised, sad, crushed state,[a27] which, however, he is trying to fight off with all his strength. (“The house is depressing but I want to and will be joyous.”[a28]) But this inner struggle in spiritual isolation was of course not easy, and demanded great spiritual strength before it could be fully successful. He was constantly tortured by the injustice of his surrounding life and his own almost futile situation in this life; and he becomes “at times good and calm, at times uneasy and not good.”[a29] In this state he often wants to cry,[a30] and only in time does his condition become less agitated and sometimes even entirely calm.