A revolting report concerning the missionary congress in Kazan.[218]
There is noted: “Woman’s character”--and I remember that it was
something very good. Now I have forgotten. It seems to me that it
was that the peculiarity of woman’s character is that her feeling
alone guides her life, and that reason only serves her feeling.
She cannot even understand that feeling can be made subservient to
reason.
2) But there are not so many women--as there are such men--who do
not hear, do not see, the unpleasant, do not see it just as if it
didn’t exist.
3) When people haven’t the power to get rid of superstition and
they continue to pay tribute to it, and at the same time when they
see that others have freed themselves, they grow angry at those who
have freed themselves. “But I suffer when I commit stupidities and
he is free.”
4) Art, i.e., artists, instead of serving people, exploit them.
5) From the time I became old, I began to confuse people, ...
belonging or being marked in my mind as one type. So that I do not
know N, N N, but I know a collective personality to which N, N N,
belong.
6) We are so accustomed to the thought that everything is for us,
_that the earth is mine_, that when we have to die, we are surprised
that my earth, something belonging to me, will remain and I won’t.
Here the principal mistake is in thinking the earth as something
acquired and complementary to me, when it is I who am acquired by
the earth, an appendage to it.
7) How good it would be if we could live with the same concentration,
do the work of life--principally; communion among people--with that
concentration with which we play chess, read music, etc.
_Aug. 16. Y. P. If I live._
_To-day Sept. 19. Y. P._
More than a month I have made no entries. Things are the same and
the work has been advancing all the time. And it could advance still
more as to form, but there is absolutely no time. Such an amount
of work! A typist is making the final copy on a Remington. I have
reached the 19th chapter, inclusive.
During this time the important thing was the expulsion of
Boulanger.[219]
My work has been interrupted occasionally only by a letter to the
Swedish papers about the Dukhobors[220] on the occasion of the Nobel
prize.
Also ill health interrupted: a terrible boil on the cheek. I thought
it was a cancer, and I am happy that it was not very unpleasant to
think that: I am receiving a new appointment; one which in any case,
isn’t slipping past me.
St. John was here.[221]
My work was interrupted also by the arrival of the Molokans from
Samara--in reference to their children which were taken away.[222]
I wanted to write abroad and even wrote a very violent, and what
seemed to me, strong letter, but changed my mind. It was not to be
done before God. I have to try again.
To-day I wrote letters: to the Emperor,[223] to Olsuphiev,[224] to
Heath,[225] and to E. I. Chertkov,[226] and saw the Molokans off.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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