During this time have thought principally the following: 1) When a man lives an animal life, he does not know that God lives through him. When reason awakens in him, then he knows it. And knowing it, he becomes united with God. 2) Man in his animal life has to be guided by instinct; reason directed to that which is not subject to it, will spoil everything. 3) Is not luxury a preparing for something better, when there is already a sufficiency? Yesterday was not the 6th, but the 8th. To-day, _June 9, Y. P._ I have written little and not very well. It seems to me that it is getting clearer. In the morning I had a conversation with the workingmen who came for books. I remembered the woman who asked to write to John of Kronstad.[99] The religion of the people is this: there is a God and there are gods and saints. (Christ came on earth, as a peasant told me to-day, to teach people how and to whom to pray.) The gods and the saints perform miracles, have power over the flesh and perform heroic deeds and good works, and the people have only to pray, to know how and to whom to pray. But people can not perform good works, they can only pray. Here is their whole faith. I bathed and don’t feel well. _June 19, Y. P._ Have been feeling weak all this time and sleep badly. Posha came yesterday. He spoke about the Khodinka accident well, but wrote it badly. Our very idle, luxurious life oppresses me. N. came. A stranger. He is young and he does not understand in the same way as I do, that which he understands, although he agrees with everything. Finished the first draft[100] on the 13th of June. Now I am revising it, but am working very little. ... Struggled with myself twice and successfully. Oh, if it were always so! Once I passed beyond Zakaz[101] at night and wept for joy, being grateful for life. The pictures of life in Samara stand out very clearly before me; the steppes, the fight of the nomadic, patriarchic principle with the agricultural civilised one.[102] It draws me very much. _Konefsky_ was not born in me; that is why it moves so awkwardly. Have been thinking: 1) Something very important about art: what is beauty? Beauty is that which we love. “He is not dear because he is good, but good because he is dear.” Here is the problem; why dear? Why do we love? And to say that we love, because a thing is beautiful, is just the same as saying that we breathe because the air is pleasant. We find the air pleasant, because we have to breathe; and in the same way we discover beauty, because we have to love. And he who hasn’t the power to see spiritual beauty, sees at least a bodily one and loves it. _June 26, Y. P. Morning._