As soon as he sent the letter, he regretted it. Perhaps he was going too far? lie had a few erotic dreams in rapid succession—each scrupulously noted in his diaryf—and, on September 8, took up his pen once again, to apologize to Valerya:
"I am tormented by the thought that I wrote to you without your permission and in such an awkward, stupid, vulgar manner. Send me one word to tell me whether you are angry and in what way. . . . Arc you still having a good time? . . . How is your music? Are you coming back, and if so, when?"
Thereupon, he fell ill. Congestion of the lungs, he was sure of it. Aunt Toinette called in several doctors. They bled him and applied lecchcs: ten in one day. Quaking with fever, he thought of his brother Dmitry's demise and wondered whether he, too, might not be consumptive. "I feel as though I am going to die," he wrote. Which did not prevent him from revising the manuscript of Youth in bed. He was completely recovered when the Misses Arsenyev returned to the fold, on September 24. That very day Mile. Vergani came over to Yasnaya Polyana, alone, to reconnoiter—she wanted to inspect the suitor's state of mind after a month and a half of separation. To arouse the young man's jealousy, she described Valeria's life in Moscow as one long triumphal procession from drawing room to drawing room. The dose was too big, the patient rebelled.43 "After what she told mc," Tolstoy wrote, "Valerya disgusts me."
Nevertheless, he saddled his horse next day and galloped over to Sudakovo. Once again, face to face with the girl, his spirits fell. "Valerya is nice," he wrote on September 25, "but, alas! just plain dumb." And the following day, "Valerya came to sec me. Nice, but narrow-minded and incrcdibly trivial." Was this the end? No! Mile. Vergani had her weather eye open: in the nick of time, Valerya began to refer to her tender sentiments for Mortier de Fontaine, her piano teacher in Moscow. Tolstoy immediately revived: "Curious, it annoyed me. I was embarrassed for her and for myself, but also, for the first time, I experienced something resembling an attachment for her."44 This new lease on love was not long-lasting. Two days later, calm and gloomy, he confided to his diary, "I am not in love, but this relationship has had a great effect on my life. Still, I have not yet known love and, judging by what I feel now from this foretaste, I think I must be capable of experiencing it with great violence. Please God, not for Valerya. She is slial-
f Beginning on September 3, 1856.
low and cold as ice, and has no principles." A few days later, on October 8, there was a decided turn for the worse: "I cannot speak to Valerya except to criticize her. I feel absolutely nothing for her, it's only a habit. She is no more than an unpleasant memory for me."
The snow had come. An infinity of white, a desert of incomprehension, spread out between Yasnaya Polyana and Sudakovo. Tolstoy argued with Aunt Toinette, set off into the country on horseback, hunted rabbit, arrived unannounced at the Arscnycvs', where everyone nevertheless behaved as though they were expecting him. On October 19 he found Valerya particularly homely; "Looked at Valerya more calmly. She has put on a great deal of weight, I most decidedly feel nothing at all for her now." TTiis did not prevent him from returning to Sudakovo on October 23 and telling Mile. Vergani the tale, invented by him, of one Khrapovitsky and a certain Dembitskaya, from which it emerged that marriage was a serious affair and a passion for clothes was incompatible with a sound approach to connubial bliss. Of course, he was counting on the companion to repeat this fable to the young lady, which she did that same evening. In the meantime, he had agreed to spend the night at Sudakovo, in a room prepared for him. "Went to sleep in their house, almost at peace, but far from in love." Hie next morning Valerya came to breakfast in a radiant twitter. She was all innocence, docility, sobriety, tenderness in person. Subjugated, Tolstoy took her to the ball at Tula: "Valerya was delightful, I am almost in love with her," he wrote upon his return, 011 October 24. And, on the twenty-fifth: "Talked to her. Went very well. Was even on the point of sniveling." Two more days passed and, in a burst of honesty, he showed her a page of his diary ending with the words, "I love her." She tore it out and ran away. 'Ibat night he rebuked himself for his rashness. Now she would surely imagine the affair was in the bag. To find out, he rushed over to see her the next morning- catastrophe! She was wearing that triumphant, mysterious air of the young fiancee that he dreaded above all else. "Her hair arranged in a ghastly fashion, decked out with a mantle in my honor. I suffered, I was miserable, the day went by in tedium, conversation languished. I have bccomc, without making a move, a sort of fiancЈ.'M5 The more clearly he saw the role he had been cast in by the Arscnycvs and all their neighbors and acquaintances, the more he wanted to quit the game. But could he, after all those months of arduous courtship, without dishonoring the girl to whom the entire province had unofficially united him? The devil take their wagging tongues! 'lhe time had come for trial by fire. He would go away for a few weeks, after which he- would make up his mind and be able to know what he was doing. When
Valerya heard that he was preparing to go to Moscow, she burst into tears. A final ball at Tula brought them closcr again: "She was very sweet. Plaintive voice, wanting to compromise herself, or make some sacrifice for me." But he held his ground. Against Aunt Toinette, against Mile. Vergani, against Valerya, against himself. His departure resembled flight more than anything else. Several times during the trip he asked himself, as he lurched along in an uncomfortable sledge, whether he ought not to turn around and go back.
The moment he reached Moscow he rushed to see his sister Marya and explain his behavior. But she sided with Valerya against him. Then, to atone for his remissness toward her, he wrote a long rambling and preachifying letter in which he confessed that there were two men in him: "the stupid man," who loved her only for her physical charms, and "the good man" who held her in too high esteem to be content with any commonplace form of love. There followed a dialogue between these two halves of Tolstoy—both equally long-winded. "And yet you are happy when you are with her, you look at her, listen to her, talk to her," said the stupid man. "Then why deprive yourself of this happiness? And then, is it not odious on your part to respond to her pure and devoted affection with cold rationalizations?" The good man's reply: "In the first place, you lie when you say I am happy with her; it is a pleasure for me to listen to her, of course, and look into her eyes; but that is not happiness. . . . Besides, sometimes her company weighs on me. ... I am happy because of her, even when I am not with her. . . . You love her for your happiness, and I love her for her own."
And, mixing heaven up with his affairs as usual, he proclaimed with unruffled hypocrisy, "I thank God for giving me the idea of going away. . . . I believe He has guided mc toward the best course for both of us. You may be forgiven for thinking like the stupid man. But in me, it would have been a shame and a sin. ... A great task lies before us: to understand each other and preserve our affection and respect for each other. For this, I am counting on our correspondence, we shall be able to talk things over calmly."
He began his education of the girl who might one day be his wife by giving her some advice (the eternal mania of "Rules of Life"), and urged her to follow it:
"Please go for a walk every day, no matter what the weather is like! This is recommended by every doctor. Put 011 your corset and stockings by yourself and, in general, try to make various improvements of this type. But these are trivialities. The main thing is that when you get into bed at night you should be able to tell yourself, 'Today, firstly, I have performed a good deed for someone else; secondly, I have become a little better myself.' Try, please, please, to plan your occupations a day in advance and give yourself an account of them every evening. You will sec what serene but intense joy results from being able to tell oneself, ever}' day, 'Now I am better than yesterday.' . . . Farewell, dear young ladv, the stupid man loves you, but stupidly, the good man is ready to love you with the strongest love there is, tender and eternal . . "4<i