ardour that he brought to life. But it is always life that he strains to him, with the violence of a lover. He is “maddened with life.” He is “intoxicated with life.” He cannot live without this madness.[1] He is drunk at once with happiness and with unhappiness, with death and with immortality.[2] His renunciation of individual life is only a cry of exalted passion towards the eternal life. The peace which he finds, the peace of the soul which he invokes, is not the peace of death. It is rather the calm of those burning worlds which sail by the forces of gravity through the infinite spaces. With him anger is calm,[3] and the calm is blazing. Faith has given him new weapons with which to wage, even more implacably, unceasing war upon the lies of modern society. He no longer confines himself to a few types of romance; he attacks all the great idols: the hypocrisies of religion, the State, science, art, liberalism, socialism, popular education, bene-
- ↑ “One can live only while one is drunken with life.” (Confessions, 1879). “I am mad with living… It is summer, the delicious summer. This year I have struggled for a long time; but the beauty of nature has conquered me. I rejoice in life.” (Letter to Fet, July, 1880.) These lines were written at the height of the religious crisis.
- ↑ In his Journal, dated May 1, 1863: “The thought of death.” … “I desire and love immortality.”
- ↑ “I was intoxicated with that boiling anger and indignation which I love to feel, which I excite even when I feel it naturally, because it acts upon me in such a way as to calm me, and gives me, at least for a few moments, an extraordinary elasticity, and the full fire and energy of all the physical and moral capacities.” (Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov, Lucerne, 1857.)
