3) Something very important. I lay and was almost asleep, suddenly something seemed to tear in my heart. It occurred to me: that is the way death comes from heart failure; and I remained calm--I felt neither grief nor joy, but blessedly calm--whether here or there, I know that it is well with me, that things are as they ought to be, just like a child, tossed in the arms of its mother, does not stop smiling from joy for it knows that it is in her loving arms. And the thought came to me: why is it so now and was not so before? Because before, I did not live the whole of life, but lived only an earthly life. In order to believe in immortality, one must live an immortal life here. One can walk with one’s feet and not see the precipice before one, over which it is impossible to cross, and one can rise on one’s wings....[60] (It isn’t going and I don’t feel like thinking.) _March 7, 1896. Nicholskoe. If I live._ _To-day May 2. Yasnaya Polyana._ It is almost two months since I have made an entry. All this time I lived in Moscow. Of important events there were: a getting closer to the scribe Novikov[61] who changed his life on account of my books which his brother, a lackey, received from his mistress abroad. A hot-blooded youth. Also his brother, a working man, asked for “What is my Faith?” and Tania[62] sent him to Mme. Kholevinsky.[63] They took Mme. Kholevinsky to prison. The prosecuting attorney said that they ought to go after me. All this together made me write a letter to the ministers of Justice and the Interior in which I begged them to transfer their prosecution to me.[64] All this time I wrote on the Declaration of Faith. I made little progress. Chertkov, Posha Biriukov were here and went away. My relations with people are good. I have stopped riding the bicycle. I wonder how I could have been so infatuated. I heard Wagner’s Siegfried.[65] I have many thoughts in connection with this and other things. In all I have jotted down 20 thoughts in my notebook. Still another important event--the work of African Spier.[66] I just read through what I wrote in the beginning of this notebook. At bottom, it is nothing else than a short summary of all of Spier’s philosophy which I not only had not read at that time, but about which I had not the slightest idea. This work clarified my ideas on the meaning of life remarkably, and in some ways strengthened them. The essence of his doctrine is that things do not exist, but only our impressions which appear to us in our conception as objects. Conception (Vorstellung) has the quality of believing in the existence of objects. This comes from the fact that the quality of thinking consists in attributing an objectivity to impressions, a substance, and a projecting of them into space. _May 3. Y. P._