Exasperated by the languishing airs assumed by Sonya, who was living a teen-age romance at the age of fifty-two, he becamc increasingly impolite to Tanayev: "Morning. Did not sleep all night. Heart bothering me . . . Unable to overcome my pride and indignation . . ." (July 26, 1896.) "I console myself with the thought that I ought to pity her, that she is suffering and that I am infinitely to blame. We talked of the
Gospels. Tanayev tried to prove to me, in jest, that Christ was in favor of castration. I lost my temper. Am ashamed of myself." (July 30, 1896.)
When summer was over Tanayev left, and the helpless Sonya remained alone to face her husband's recriminations. She protested that he was insane to imagine she had fallen in love with a man twelve years her junior, that they were just good friends, that music was the only thing that prevented her from losing her mind. But she confided her true feelings to Mrs. Annenkov, a family friend, in a letter written in September 1896:
"As to my attitude toward the man who has disrupted my married life, against his will and without his knowledge, I can only say that I try not to think about him any more. It is hard for me to sever my friendly relations with him and to offend such a fine person and good and gentle man; but I am obstinately compelled to do so. lie left Yasnaya Polyana a month ago and I shall undoubtedly see him fin Moscow] in a few days. I do not know what I shall feel when I see him again. Joy, perhaps, or perhaps nothing at all. Sometimes my heart rebels and I refuse to alxindon the artistic, musical happiness he gave me; I do not want to live without this relationship, so simple and tender, which has given me so many shining hours in the past two years. . . . But when I think of my husband's sufferings and his insane jealousy, I feel deeply bitter and ashamed and I don't want to go on living; it is better for me to die than to hear such offensive accusations made against me, who have always taken care to behave so that neither my husband nor my children should have any cause to blush for me. And it is ludicrous, now, to have suspicions of any kind about a woman at my time of life—over fifty-two years old. Anyway, that's not what I mean to say: there arc no suspicions, nor can there be; there is only his demanding, tyrannical nature and his possessive love of himself and his family, and I must try to submit to it. The future looks terribly bleak to me. ... I continue to pine and seek comfort in new interests, totally different from those I had when my sweet little boy was alive. Where will all this lead me? I have no idea."
When she returned to Moscow at the beginning of winter she immediately resumed her relationship with Tanayev. She took piano lessons to please him and deafened the house practicing scales. He appeared almost every evening before supper, with his paunch, red-tipped nose and honeyed smile. Or else she, meaning no harm, would drop in on him after running her errands in town. She was dressed to the teeth, in fur-lined velvet cloak and otter toque. Gliding along in the sledge with her daughcr Sasha, she would suddenly raise her head with
a bright smile, tap the coachman on the l>ack with her tortoise-shell lorgnette ancl call out:
"Take us round to Mertvy Street!"
Tanayev, seeing the mother and daughter comc in, would leap up from his piano, beaming to hide his confusion while Sasha sputtered with fury. Sometimes the child defied her mother and refused to go out driving or comc into the drawing room because she did not want to meet the musician.14 As for Tolstoy, he had to muster all his willpower and all his faith in God to accept such a humiliating situation. When he reached the boiling point, he, spurner of the flesh, denier of earthly passions and sworn enemy of human love, rushed to his diary to relieve himself:
"i.I.l. I am still as upset as ever. Help me, Father. Dwell in me, subjugate me, drive out, abolish the base urges of the flesh and everything I feel through the flesh. Talking of art a while ago, saying one could only create when thinking of the loved one. And the way she tries to conceal it from me! It does not make me laugh, it does not make me feel sorry for her, it hurts. . . . When one is in prison in irons, at least one can take pride in one's humiliation, but in this situation there is nothing but pain, unless I look at it as a trial ordained by God. Yes, teach me to bear it with equanimity, joy and love." (December 20-21, 1896.) "Sonya came in a moment ago. She spoke to me. It merely added to my pain." (December 21.) "What is bad is that I want to feel sorry for myself and my last years, which are being ruined for nothing." (December 22.) "My hands are cold, I want to weep and love. At dinner, my sons' vulgarity was most trying." (December 26.)
At the beginning of 1897, he thought his patience would come to an end, with "these games of all kinds, this continual eating ancl this senile flirtation." "I write it so that it will be known, even if only after my death," he fumed. "For the moment I cannot talk about it. She is ill, it's true, but her illness is being treated as a form of health and encouraged instead of fought. What will become of all this, how will it end? I pray all the time, accuse myself ancl pray!"18
He wrote to his daughter Masha and to Chertkov, making veiled allusions to his woes. Then, after a night of bad dreams in which he clearly saw "the same offense, over and over," his old desire came back to him: to go away, avoid having to look on any longer at "the life of degrading madness" to which his wife was subjecting him. She still glanced occasionally into her husband's diary and was infuriated by his comments about her improper conduct. In tones of outraged innocence she asked him what right he had to treat her in this manner in pages which strangers might read one day. Did he want posterity
to put her down as a strumpet? From accuser, he somehow found himself turned into accuscd. In self-defense he assured her that no one who had seen them together could believe she was unfaithful. But a few pages later lie wrote, "If she wants to come looking in this diary again, then she must take the consequences. I can't write if I must be thinking all the time of her and the readers of the future, trumping up a sort of clean bill of health for her. All I know is that last night I imagined that she died before I did, and I was terror-stricken."16 Hie moment he had told Sonya that he believed she was incapable of being unfaithful to him, she went tearing off to St. Petersburg where Tanayev was giving a concert. Aghast, Tolstoy also left, with his daughter Tanya, for the Olsufyev estate at Nikolskoye, from which he wrote to his wife:
"It is infinitely sad and humiliating that an utterly useless and uninteresting outsider should now be ruling our life and poisoning our last years together; infinitely sad and humiliating to be obliged to inquire when he is leaving, where he is going, when he is rehearsing, what he will be playing. It is horrible, horrible, base and shameful! And it had to happen just at the end of our lives, which had been honest and clcan until then—and at a time when we were drawing closer and closer together in spite of all the things that had divided us. . . . And suddenly instead of the good, healthy, happy ending of thirty-five years of life together, there comes this sordid nonsense, leaving its abominable imprint on everything. I know you are miserable too, because you love me and you want to behave deccntly; but thus far you haven't been able to, and the whole thing is making me ill; I am ashamed, I feel deeply sorry for you because I love you myself, with the best love in the world, not the love that comes from the body or the mind, but the one that comes from the soul."17