Page:Gorky - Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi.djvu/51

, no one but he has experienced with such terrifying clearness. I often thought him to be a man who in the depths of his soul is stubbornly indifferent to people: he is so much above and beyond them that they seem to him like midges and their activities ridiculous and miserable. He has gone too far away from them into some desert, and there solitary, with the highest effort of all the force of his spirit, he closely examines into "the most essential," into death.

All his life he feared and hated death, all his life there throbbed in his soul the "Arsamaxian terror"—must he die? The whole world, all the earth looks toward him; from China, India, America, from everywhere living, throbbing threads stretch out to him; his soul is for all and for ever. Why should not Nature make an exception to her law, give to one man physical immortality—why not? He is certainly too rational and sensible to believe in miracles, but, on the other hand, he is a bogatir, an explorer, and, like a young recruit, wild and headstrong from fear and despair in face of the unknown barrack. I remember in Gaspra he read Leo Shestov's book Good and Evil in the Teaching of Nietzsche and Tolstoi and, when Anton Tchekhov remarked that he did not like the book, Tolstoi said: "I thought it amusing. It's written swaggeringly, but it's all right and interesting. I'm sure I like cynics when they are sincere. Now he says: 'Truth is not wanted'; quite true, what should he want truth for? For he will die all the same."