Hand-tinted photograph of Tolstoy dressed as a peasant[Tolstoy was 77 when the paper's St Petersburg correspondent Harold Williams travelled to interview him.]
I reached Yasnaya Polyana on Thursday morning. A snowstorm had blown over, and the sun shone from a wind-swept sky on the rising ground upon which stands the plantation enclosing the well-known homestead.
Yasnaya Polyana seems a very haven of peace. And about Tolstoy's own personality the atmosphere of peace seemed to be resting continually. He was very calm, with the calmness of one whose time of struggle is past, and though he talked freely about current events and was kind and courteous after the gracious manner of Russian noblemen of the old school, one knew that his real life was hidden in some remote world of quiet contemplation.
Tolstoy walks with a brisk step, but stoops slightly. He has not abandoned his habits of vigorous exercise. He is in excellent health. He is as firmly convinced as ever of the value of a vegetarian diet.
In the evening, after dinner, we forsook the thorny ground of politics, and Tolstoy began speaking of questions that affect him more nearly. Speaking of the choice of a profession, he said that a man's mode of life is the resultant of the action of two opposing forces - his own effort to reach the ideal, and the inertia of his past.
"There is a terrible saying of Kant's," he said, "a saying that for a long time I did not dare to accept, but which I now see to be true, to the effect that a man who does good merely from habit is not a good man.
"But it is a fact. When we have reached one stage of goodness we dare not rest there, but must strive to reach a higher."
"I am an old man now," he said again, "and must soon die, and for me it is more important to think of the eternal life than the forms of the world. And, moreover, as other men do not know how soon they will die, it seems to me important that they too should concern themselves with the life eternal.
"When I am asked about the future life, where I shall be after death, I can only refer again to my dear old Kant, who pointed out that the conceptions of space and time are merely formative principles of the human intellect. The question 'where' involves a consideration of space, 'shall I be' one of time. And in the eternal life there is neither space nor time. We are each one of us a part of the universal life that is above space and time."
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