Caretaker’s Notes – Weekend
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Like almost all books by the philosopher Vladimir Bibikhin, this book is a recording of his lectures: the course “Leo Tolstoy’s Diaries” was read at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University in the 2000/2001 academic year. Ivan Limbakh’s publishing house already printed the Diaries in 2012, that edition has long been sold out, now a reprint is coming out. Over the years, Bibikhin’s name has gone beyond university auditoriums, and his texts can more often be heard from the stage: St. Petersburg director Boris Pavlovich recently launched the self-developing theater project Les, a network of independent performances tied to Bibikhin’s texts or themes. In winter, some of them were brought to Moscow, the program included a performance based on Tolstoy’s Diaries, and – separately – a reconstruction of Bibikhin’s lecture at the faculty.
I heard these lectures in the original, in the early 1990s. Even then people went to Bibikhin like they go to the theater: he didn’t just read, but almost sang out his lectures, with a detached priestly intonation – and every word seemed to be groped on the go, woven out of thin air. Later I learned that the author was reading pre-prepared texts, but the feeling was this: a systematic presentation of the material, but a movement to the touch, striking now with a strange turn, now with a departure to an unexpected depth. The topics of the courses were formulated in an extremely abstract way – “Peace” or “Forest”; it seemed that one day Bibikhin should give a course called “Everything”, where everything would finally be explained. It was something bewitching, hypnotic, and when reading transcripts, this effect does not disappear.
Tolstoy’s diaries themselves, once available only in the complete works, are now posted online, quotes from them scattered across social networks. There is a whole telegram channel made up of quotes, Tolstoy is always lazy in them, whining, tormented by his own imperfection. He makes promises to himself how to become better, and immediately breaks them: “I decided that I need to love and work, and that’s all” – and the next day: “I’m tired. Didn’t love and didn’t work. The character is anecdotal, but sympathetic, like Oblomov with an exaggerated penchant for introspection – or a modern city dweller who has read books on self-help. Similar to us.
However, there were also more serious approaches. Irina Paperno in her recent book Who Am I? What am I?” sees the beginning of literary modernism in Tolstoy’s diary entries: attempts to write down sequentially all the thoughts and states that the author experiences, to translate into text the entire microcosm of bodily and mental experience (up to dreams and loss of consciousness) – indeed, the “diary” Tolstoy understood in this way is ahead of Joyce , and Proust.
For Bibikhin, self-reflection is also important, but not as literature or “touches to the portrait of the author.” Bibikhin is the translator of Heidegger, a man whose range of philosophical interests ranged from hesychasm and Nicholas of Cusa to Wittgenstein; it is clear that what matters to him is not Tolstoy’s ability to record in his diaries all the shades of his bad mood, but what Tolstoy says about human nature through this introspection. Generally about the nature of things. About everything.
Tolstoy in his diaries does not look like Tolstoy the publicist: the latter is systematic and conclusive, his articles are impeccably rhetorically structured, the former now rushes from side to side, now hesitantly tramples around the same topics. Bibikhin’s method is closer to the “diary” Tolstoy: at first it is easy to get confused in the book. The actual analysis of the diaries begins on page 66, this is preceded by discussions about the spirit of painting of the 20th century, lamentations about people in whom “providing oneself with food and drink precedes thought and never ends”, a quote from an English-language song “fashionable among young people” (“I Just Want You” by Ozzy Osbourne) and the mysterious phrase “Everything is undermined, no one succeeded” (apparently, it just explains everything). The text is viscous and dense, you have to wade through it – and this seems to be no coincidence: for Bibikhin, the topic of “substance”, “physicochemistry”, in which a person gets bogged down, is important.
If you look closely at yourself (as Tolstoy does), you can find many unconscious processes that do not depend on the will and reason of conditioning – from the movement of blood through the veins to a “mood”, which is not clear why this or that. Bibikhin, following Tolstoy, peers into this opaque viscosity, his thoughts move to the touch, go in circles, return to the same place. Just as in Tolstoy’s diaries: Bibikhin refers to his author’s position as “yaw” or “fermentation” – how people wander without a goal or how wine wanders. Something happens inside him, regardless of his will, he watches and writes it down.
An important opposition for Bibikhin is “metric” and “topic”. The first is a reliably arranged, cognizable world, on which a grid of categories, regulations and schedules is superimposed; our routine, in which we are perfectly oriented and equipped. The second is the invisible world, but experienced from the inside, the space of the inner “I”, in which there are no rules, algorithms and navigator (no matter what self-help books say about this). Even if Tolstoy approaches this inner cosmos with the standards of “metrics” – “decided that you need to love and work” – this decision is not secured by anything, he has nothing to rely on, a breakdown is possible at any moment (“did not love and did not work” ) and have to start over. This is not even a conscious choice between good and evil, but a constantly ongoing “invisible battle” in an unmarked dark space, where there are no “life hacks” and “rules of life” – only the most subtle, barely noticeable sensations: is it good or bad, it contributes to the growth of life, adds to it fullness and integrity, or vice versa. Actually, Tolstoy’s reflection is the practice of peering into the invisible, the school of discrimination – it is not even clear between what and what – between salvation and death, probably.
Bibikhin reconstructs Tolstoy’s bizarre natural philosophy: he sees in nature not strictly defined objects, but a complex interaction of forces and processes, of which a person perceives only a small part. “All matter is pierced by the rays of the sun,” the difference between bodies is determined by the greater or lesser penetration of rays through them. The sun can be imagined as an octopus or a complex organic body, in the grooves of which are the planets. “The sky is possible, even most likely, thunders with a terrible noise always, from the very beginning, continuously” – we simply do not perceive this sound spectrum, just as we do not hear radio waves. Man is involved in this dynamic connection of everything with everything, he is not so much a body as a force and a process. Accordingly, the moral law is not just a system of rules imposed by the authorities, the church or other authority, but something like the law of gravity, organic, laid down by nature. This is a very Tolstoyan idea, but Bibikhin moves on: using the example of Tolstoy, who keeps a diary, he speaks about a person in general – about the levels at which a person exists.
There is Tolstoy, about whom the diary writes: he works, is lazy, gets irritated, eats, laughs, and quarrels with the coachman. Sets rules for himself and immediately breaks them. There are moments—they are recorded in a diary—when this limited consciousness, closed in itself, suddenly breaks through its boundaries, penetrates the consciousnesses of other people and beings, and experiences a superpersonal experience. In a state of ecstasy, in love, on the verge of death, in minutes (again, incomprehensible and coming from nowhere) insight.
And next to Tolstoy, who does and experiences all this, and at the same time inside him, at a depth, there is an instance that watches him, without interfering in anything: Bibikhin calls her “caretaker”. He does not judge, does not analyze, does not assign rules – but remains, as it were, behind the scenes, calmly watching and imperceptibly directing. He, this caretaker, writes a diary – and Tolstoy even knows about it. “How good, it is necessary, useful, with the consciousness of all emerging desires, to ask yourself: whose desire is this: Tolstoy or mine. Tolstoy wants to condemn, to think unkindly about NN, but I don’t want to. And as soon as I remember this, I remember that Tolstoy is not me, then the issue is resolved irrevocably. Tolstoy is afraid of illness, condemnation, and hundreds and thousands of little things that affect him in one way or another. You just need to ask yourself: what about me? And it’s all over, and Tolstoy is silent.
This is the most mysterious part of the book: what is this “I” in Tolstoy, which is not Tolstoy? “I” are different? But this is the most important thought for Bibikhin: an invisible presence that does not judge, but observes and directs – all hope is on him alone. From this calm, attentive self-observation, Bibikhin derives all moral maxims: “love your enemies” – this is possible because at the level of this internal observation there can be no enemies, they are generated by a darkened mind, which no one has looked after for a long time. It is this invisible instance that allows you to look at the world without imposing your own rules on it and not wanting to destroy it: “love is the attentive leaving of things to themselves.” It is this vision that you need to find in yourself.
Ten years after the first edition of the book, this thought seems completely out of time: what other caretakers, what kind of “leaving things to themselves” are we talking about? There is so much evil around, it overwhelms, climbs out of all the cracks, you need to, if not fight it, then at least not turn away from it, think about it constantly. Probably Tolstoy – with the wars he experienced, natural disasters, revolutions – also had something to say about this, and, of course, Tolstoy, who follows the “growth of love in himself” in his diary, does not cancel Tolstoy – the author of the article “I can not be silent.”
More often (especially today) it happens the other way around: a publicist and ruler of thoughts, accelerating on a wave of righteous anger, cancels this calm attention in himself, but Tolstoy’s scope is enough for both. With one correction: Tolstoy the publicist can write a program for his followers and like-minded people, explain to them what to do, Tolstoy the man (or the inner “I”, which is no longer quite Tolstoy) will not write such a schedule for the “growth of love”. “The decisive thing happens in the first invisible non-spatial movement of the mind”: something happens inside, invisible, imperceptible and independent of human will, and salvation and death depend on this something – perhaps not the whole world, not “Russia of the future”, but without this invisible one, they cannot be saved either.
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