Tolstoy hid this letter under the imitation leather upholstery of his desk chair. A few years later, when told that the chair was to be recovered, he removed the letter from its hiding place and gave it to Obolcnsky, with instructions to hand it to Sonya after his death.*
After giving up the idea of going into retreat like a Hindu, he rushed to the opposite extreme and, the moment his rival was out of sight, yielded to the "urges of the flesh" in his wife's arms. She, however, continued to feel herself a virgin, after her thirteen children. There was a lavender haze drifting through her head. All the gossip about Tanayev left her quite unconcerned: "I am proud to have my name associated with that of a man who is kind, upright and gifted. My conscience is clear before God, my husband and my children. I am as pure in soul, thought and body as a newborn child."19 After giving Tolstoy the animal satisfaction he claimed, she watched in amused astonishment as he reveled, at the age of sixty-nine, in his manly prowess. Her disrespect even went as far, on occasion, as to call him an "old man" in her diary. She wrote, "We women cannot live without someone to worship. ... I have uncrowned Leo Nikolayevich who is no longer my idol. I am still profoundly attached to him. . . . But happiness, true happiness—lie can no longer give to me."20 On August 1 her daughter Sasha observed, "How cheerful Papa is this morning!" Sonya's wry comment in her notebook: "If she knew that Papa is always cheerful for the same reason—the love that he denies!" That day, Papa, who was decidedly "his old self" again, played tennis for three hours nonstop, rode over to Kozlovka on horseback and, on his return, was sorry he could not give his calves a little workout on the bicycle, which was being repaired. No more "old man" now! "What a vigorous nature!" sighed Sonya. "Yesterday, not without regret, he told me I had aged lately. I shall be worn out before him, in spite of my good health and youthful looks and the fact that I am sixteen years younger than he."21
Since she felt nothing but loathing for the physical act of love, she thought wistfully back to the delights of her sentimental conversations with Tanayev: "I am doing my duty toward my husband," she wrote on August 3, 1897, "and there is some satisfaction in that, but I am often very sad and then I have other desires." At the end of the summer, "Soon I shall be going to Moscow, I shall rent a piano and play, and I hope that Sergey Ivanovich will comc and play with me. That would be so lovely! The mere thought of it restores me to life!"
In the autumn the couple separated, Tolstoy staying on at Yasnaya Polyana while his family returned to Moscow. After rebuking her husband for not coming too, Sonya immediately began to invent pretexts for seeing Tanayev. She attended his concerts, invited him to tea, called on him at his home if he happened to say he was feeling unwell. When there were obstacles, she thought—pious soul—"God will help me, somehow. And if He doesn't, never mind!" But she was not above taking help from the devil too: a gypsy read her palm and offered to cast a spell on her aspirant and drive him mad with love. She hesitated before saying no. "I was terribly frightened," she wrote in her diary. "I suddenly wanted to buy her potion."
• After Tolstoy's death, Sonya found not one but two letters: she tore up the first as soon as she had read it, and the second is the one quoted here.
Upon joining his wife Tolstoy soon realized that she was more infatuated than ever with her pianist. The stormy scenes resumed, absurd, grotesque. At last a quarrel broke out that was so violent Tolstoy consigned it verbatim to paper and entitled it Dialogue. They were lying in bed one night when it began. At first a murmur, then the voices began to rise, a candle was lighted. Summoned by her husband to confess that she was still enamored of Tanayev, Sonya protested her innocence.
"All I ask," she whimpered, "is the right to have him here once a month! To comc in and sit down and play the piano for me, like any other friend could do!"
"That's just the point, what you just said proves that your feelings toward the man are out of the ordinary," retorted Tolstoy. "I don't know of any other person whose monthly visit could give you such joy. If that's the case, you would find it that much more agreeable to sec him every week, or every day! . . ."
• He finally called her a "concert hag," which made her wild with rage. Screaming, laughing, sobbing and hiccoughing, she bccamc hysterical.
"My head is splitting!" she stuttered. "There! . . . Right there! . . . Cut open the vein in my neck! . . ."
"I held her at arm's length," wrote Tolstoy. "Knowing that it usually helps, I kissed her on the forehead. It took her a long time to get her breath back. Then she began to yawn and sigh, and fell asleep. She is still sleeping now."
This crisis was followed by a long truce. Sonya's passion for the potbellied pianist began to wane. And Tanayev, who must finally have become aware of Tolstoy's resentment, began to space his calls.
But Tolstoy had not seen the last of love's devastations. That year, 1897, it seemed to him that every female at Yasnaya Polyana had been bitten by the devil. 'They are scampering about in every direction like cats 011 a hot tin roof," he wrote. "What a blessing to be married, but how good it would be to be rid of this galloping and miaowing on the rooftops!" When it wasn't the wife who had to be called to order, it was the daughters. He would never have believed that Masha and Tanya, his two darling girls, who had his teachings in the very marrow of their bones, could turn away from him, one after the other.
It began with Masha—noble, uncompromising, industrious, vegetarian, saintly Masha—who had given up her share of the inheritance out of respect for her father's principles. Of course, she had had boyfriends, but all of them were harmless little Tolstoyans like Biryukov, and not for one moment had the master dreamed that his favorite daughter might desert him for a mere disciple. Now, all of a sudden, here she was crazy about young Prince Nicholas Leonidich Obolensky, a distant relative and a handsome, lazy, affable and irresponsible boy with empty pockets and polished fingernails. His only affinities with Tolstoyism were that he did not drink or gamble and would not have hurt a fly. In grieving wonder, Tolstoy watched as Masha melted in admiration of the playboy from Moscow. Even Sonya, deep in the toils of her intrigue with Tanayev, observed that the "child" had lost her wits. To disenchant the poor girl, her father sent her a solemn letter enumerating the pecuniary difficulties she would have to face when she set up housekeeping:
"You are going to exchange your peace of mind and independence for the most agonizing and complicated sufferings. . . . Does he want to enter the service, and where? Where and how will you live? ... Do you intend to claim your share of the inheritance? . .
And a few days later: