"I can see only three alternatives: 1. Act upon my rights and distribute all my property to those to whom it rightfully belongs, I mean the workers; in a word, give it to anybody, simply to deliver my children, big and little, from temptation and damnation; but I would be forcing this upon them, and that would provoke their anger and irritation and frustration and the result would be even worse. 2. Abandon my family; but then I would be leaving them to their fate and depriving them of my influence, which I believe ineffectual but which does, perhaps, make some slight impression upon them; I would be condemning my wife and myself to live apart, and in so doing would be disobeying God's commandments. 3. Continue to live as I have done, trying to fight evil with love and kindness. ... Is that what must be clone? Is it possible that I am to endure this torment until I die? . . . My children do not even sec fit to read my books. They think my literature is one thing and I another. But every inch of me is in what I write. . . . You arc looking for the cause, look for the cure instead. If the children were to stop gorging themselves (vegetarian diet) I should be happy and
gay, and not mind the petty affronts and snubs. If the children were to keep their rooms neat, stay away from the theater, show some feeling for the peasants and women of the people, read serious books, you would see me in a transport of joy and all my ailments would vanish at once. But this is not what happens, no move is made in this direction, willfully, out of sheer stubbornness. A fight to the finish has begun between us. . .
To this diatribe Sonya might have replied that after marrying her when she was eighteen, taking her to live at Yasnaya Polyana, associating her in his writing and the management of all his affairs, and begetting a dozen children upon her, nine of whom were still living, he did not have the right to demand that she give up every comfort in life overnight in obedience to "God's commandments." And besides, which God? He changed them so often! Had he forgotten what he once said about the family? Love, marriage, childbearing, the education of children, respect for ancestral traditions, affection for parents—they were all themes he had glorified in his early books. And now, after summoning his wife to join him at the altar of the self-sufficient little family unit, he would compel her to forswear her role as guardian of the hearth. Furthermore, there was not one idea in his whole arsenal that he had not contradicted at some point in his career. Sonya was not sharing the destiny of one man but of ten or twenty, all swom enemies of each other: aristocrat jealous of his prerogatives and people's friend in peasant garb; ardent Slavophil and Westernizing pacifist; dcnouncer of private property and lord aggrandizing his domains; hunter and protector of animals; hearty trencherman and vegetarian; peasant-style Orthodox believer and enraged demolisher of the Church; artist and contemptuous scorner of art; sensualist and ascetic. . . . This multiplicity of psychological impulses made it possible for Lyovochka to put himself inside the skins of many characters and hence to be a matchless writer of fiction, but it also complicated his partner's task. So many husbands had succeeded each other beside her inside tlic same skin that in order to preserve some semblance of stability in her life she was forced to oppose the ever-shifting course set by Leo Tolstoy.
"With all my children around me," she was to write, "I really could not turn myself into a weather vane, spinning around to point wherever my husband's fickle mind led him. In him, it was an ardent and earnest search for the truth, in me it would only have been blind mimicry, and bad for the whole family."
She was convinced that by adopting Lyovoehka's ideas but without carrying them to extremes, she would ultimately shape their lives into something at once Christian and reasonable. But this moderate policy
could not content a nature enamored of cataclysms like that of the master of the house. lie complained that his wife did not love him enough to accept the poverty he was yearning for with his whole being. As a mother she could not bring herself to make such a sacrifice, which she might have acccptcd at the beginning of their marriage. When she fought for her inheritance she was not thinking of her personal comfort, but of the future of those she had brought into the world. She would never be able to dispossess them of everything, deprive them of a proper education, turn them into laborers, peasants and beggars. Hie vow of poverty could not be imposed from without. The soul had to be predisposed to it and hers was not. Since tolerance was the essence of the Christian, Lyovochka ought to respect the views of his family. His behavior in trying to force them to adopt his ideas was that of a sectarian. What mattered to him was not that his family should be happy, but that everybody should think the way he did. His altruism was simply another form of selfishness. Didn't he keep saying that a real wife was one who had the "ability to absorb and assimilate ideas until she saw everything through her husband's eyes"? Indeed, to Christ all humans were equally precious. So why should Sonya give in to him? She felt as imperturbably at peace with her conscience defending the status quo as he did preaching against the bourgeoisie. Which was the greater sin: to conform to the law obeyed by all or to pretend to be God's messenger on earth? Sonya saw the intervention of divinity, not in her husband's vaticinations, but in the enormous powers he had been given as a teller of talcs. In her eyes, he served the Almighty by accomplishing what lie had been set on earth to do, and he betrayed Him by philosophizing and making boots, and no demonstration by Lyovochka, no speech, no threat could make her see otherwise. She was sure that by opposing him, she was protecting him from himself. After all, if he had not written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, who would have paid any attention to his philosophical and social writings? His message would never have got beyond a tiny circle of disciples; he would have been a peasant preacher, a visionary heretic, like hundreds of others in Russia. The thinker's ever-growing public had been won for him by the novelist. Didn't he realize, he of all people, with his hatred of misunderstandings, that his importance as an apostle rested on a quid pro quo? She might have written all these things to him in reply to the letter he had left for her, but where would that get her? She opted for a softer treatment:
"I would give anything to know how you are. But I'm afraid to touch these painful wounds which are not only unhealed but, it seems to 111c, have started to bleed again. ... I am happy to think that away from me your shattered nerves have been calmed. Maybe you will even be able to do some work. . . . Give the Olsufyevs all my blessing. . . . You are comfortable with them. You don't hate and condemn them as you do me. You sec? I was the one who wanted to go away and it was you who left. As always, I am the one who stays behind, with my worries and my hurt feelings."20 Restored to reason, Tolstoy admitted his guilt: "I do not tell you this to pacify you, but, truly, I sec how badly 1 have wronged you. The moment I understood this and expelled from my soul all sorts of imaginary grievances, and resurrected my love for you and Sergey, I felt well again!"