Your whole life will become this retrospective dream...
This was one of Tolstoy's final letters, written to his closest friend, his editor Vladimir Chertkov, less than a month before his death. Two days after writing the letter, Tolstoy left his country estate at Yasnaya Polyana where he had spent most of his life. He was unhappy with life there and his relationship with his wife had become extremely troubled. This is the ‘situation’ and ‘plan’ that he refers to at the end of the letter. We'll find out more about Tolstoy's troubled life in the next translation, an extract from the author's secret diary — you might think 82 is a bit old to start a secret diary, but Tolstoy and his wife would routinely read each other's diaries and Tolstoy felt the secrecy was necessary.
This is a particularly jumpy letter containing several long, winding sentences in the original Russian. For clarity, I've split many of them up but I think the stream-of-consciousness style still comes through, particularly in the second paragraph.
26 October 1910, Yasnaya Polyana
Recently for the first time I felt with particular clarity — sadness even — how much I will miss you…
There’s a whole realm of thoughts, of feelings, which I can’t share with anyone as frankly as I do with you, certain that I’m being fully understood. Recently I had a few of these thought-feelings. One of them was about how I recently suffered a heart tremor which woke me. When I woke up, I remembered a long dream where I was walking downhill and holding on to branches but I still slipped and fell — i.e. I woke up. The whole dream seemed like something from the past and was through in an instant. One thought was about how when death comes there will be a moment outside time, like my heart tremor, and your whole life will become this retrospective dream. By now you [1] are right at the height of this retrospective dream… Sometimes this all seems true to me, and sometimes it seems like rubbish.
The second thought-feeling is something else I dreamt of recently, for the third time in these last two months. An artistic, charming, current, artistic dream. I’ll try to write it and the ones before it down, even just a summary.[2]
The third one is actually less of a thought and more of a feeling, and a stupid feeling. The desire to change my situation. I feel something improper, something shameful in my situation. Sometimes I look at it as a blessing — as I ought to — but sometimes I oppose and resent it.
Sasha told you about my plan, which I contemplate sometimes during moments of weakness. Please pretend that what Sasha told you about it and my mention of it above never happened.
I will miss you a lot. I can’t tell you everything in writing. But at least I’ve told you something. I’m writing to you about myself. Please write to me about yourself and how things ended up. I know you’ll understand what I mean from this hint, just as I understand you. Well, see you soon.
If I put anything into action then I’ll let you know. Perhaps I might even need your help.
[1] ‘You’ is used as collective ‘you’ meaning ‘one is right at the height…’ Interestingly in Chertkov’s book The Last Days of Leo Tolstoy, Chertkov quotes this letter as ‘we are at the height of this retrospective dream’. He made some other amendments to punctuation to make the letter more readable (see my note in the introduction). Clearly Tolstoy’s editor couldn't let his job go.
[2] In his diary entry for the same day as this letter, Tolstoy wrote the following: ‘Had a dream. Grushenka, a book, seemingly written by Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov. A fabulous plot’.
