Sunday, August 8:
Richard very unwell! I in consequence in a mood of abstraction, glad it is Sunday and the children can just be left to play. Embark on Goethe's Wanderjahre.
Serovs for lunch; he a good independent person, she as ugly as the night, interested in women's emancipation, while only yesterday R. and I were expressing our loathing for this so-called up-to-date rubbish.
R. says: "The fact that Mill is for it shows that people today have no idea of even the simplest things, that they do not even know what being a mother means. They understand that in the East; there, where women are supposedly in a subordinate position, the mother is held sacred. The father is there to protect mother and child, that is to say, to take care of the external things; woman has nothing to do with the outside world. Of course she has immeasurable influence, but not by voting and trying to turn herself into a man, which she can never do."
I find it impossible to understand how a woman with a child of her own can ever even consider doing anything beyond bringing up this child; in this field she is the indispensable ruler.
Worried about Claire's failure to reply to my telegram. Serov tells me how badly Berlioz spoke about my father in St. Petersburg. I feel almost like laughing over this baseless and superfluous malignancy.