On November 7, 1856, he was in St. Petersburg. 'ITiere, he moved into a small furnished apartment at the corner of Great Meshanskaya and Vozhncscnsky Prospect and went immediately to see General K011- stantinov, director of the School of Pyrotechnics. He had tendered his resignation from the army on September 30 and was surprised to have had no news of it for a month. I lis superior assured him that the matter was pursuing its normal course, although Grand Duke Michael Nikolayevich, having heard that Tolstoy was the author of the highly irreverent "Song of Sevastopol," was very cross with him. Indignant at this "base calumny"—in which there was a fair share of truth—Tolstoy went to staff headquarters to vindicate himself, and they pretended to believe him.
He was more deeply disturbed by another misunderstanding, also founded, no doubt, 011 gossip. Just before he left Moscow he learned from Prince Volkonsky that, according to a number of eyewitnesses, little Valerya Arsenyev really had fallen in love with Morticr de Fontaine, the pianist, and was even writing to him. So much duplicity in a young person who gave every indication of wishing to become his wife outraged him, it was an insult to his honor. He was sorry he had sent her such a friendly letter the week before. However, instead of leaping at this opportunity to break with her, he toyed with the idea of bringing her to her knees first. Did he care more for her since he suspected her of being faithless? On November 8, needled by jealousy, he wrote her a letter of savage recrimination:
"I no longer respect you as I did before, I don't believe you. ... Is it my fault? Judge for yourself. You knew me for three months, you saw what kind of friendship I felt for you, only you weren't sure whether I was going to propose, and you fell in love with Mortier. . . . Then you stopped seeing him, but you haven't stopped thinking about him or writing to him. You learned that I was about to ask for your hand in marriage, and then you fell in love with me. . . . But which was the real emotion, and is it an emotion? Did you really love Morticr? How far did your relationship go? Did he kiss your hands? . . . Yes, I am in love with you and that is why I am continually oscillating between my feelings for you: passionate love and hatred."
Having thus poured out his heart, he could not resist his desire for even more sympathy and, as a consummate man of letters, added, "I am in poor health and my books arc selling badly."J When he read it over, however, this q)istlc struck him as being too violent. He penciled "unmailed" across the first page and immediately wrote another, in milder tones.
"I am furious with you because I cannot help loving you. ... If you would please tell me about your relations with Mortier, and say definitely that your feeling for him was a beautiful one, that you miss him, even that you still love him, I would prefer it to the indifference and feigned scorn with which you speak of him. . . . 'Hie main question is whether we can live together and love each other, and it is essential for that very reason to reveal even-thing bad in ourselves. ... I should suffer, I should suffer horribly if I were to lose your affection for me; but better to lose it right away than have to reproach myself for a deception that would end in your unhappiness."
Having worked well the following day, November 9, he felt disposed to love anyone and forgive anything, and Valerya immediately reaped the benefit of this change of heart. With soul raised on high and pen dipped in honey, Tolstoy wrote:
'This extraordinary feeling I have for you, which I have not experienced for any other person, takes the following form: the instant anything disagreeable happens to me, whether important or trivial—any failure, any dent in my vanity—I think of you and say, 'All this is trivial, since a ccrtain young lady back there exists; so nothing bad can happen to me. . . .' Ah, if only you might learn, through suffering, to believe that the only possible happiness—true, eternal, elevated—is achieved through these three things: work, self-denial and love. . . . You see, I want to love you so badly that I am teaching you how to make me love you. Because my real feeling for you is not love, yet, but a passionate desire to love with all my strength. . . . One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one's work."
Could the little goose from Sudakovo grasp the true meaning of that last sentence? Perhaps, for Tolstoy vainly awaited her reply. In the night of November 11-12 he wrote again to explain his views on marriage, using the two allegorical figures, Khrapovitsky and Dcmbitskaya. Khrapovitsky—alias Leo Tolstoy—spurned high society because worldly agitation destroys even the most beautiful, the most noble and purest of thoughts, and yearned for a "healthy and peaceful" family life.
t Refers to Childhood, Boyhood and Tales of Army Life, published in one volume in 1856.
Dembitskaya—alias Valerya Arsenyev—was the exact opposite; for her, happiness "was the ball, the bare shoulders, the carriages and diamonds, her acquaintanceship with the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber and the aides-de-camp." According to Tolstoy, the solution for these two characters was to live seven months of the year in the country and five in St. Petersburg. He was already estimating the household expenses; that should be reassurance enough for the young lady! And yet four more days went by without a sign from her. Vexed, Tolstoy resumed his habits of the previous winter. He went out in society, dined at Dussot's, exercised at the gymnasium and found no pleasure at all in the company of his fellow writers. "Love and love alone can provide certain happiness,"47 he declared. If only Valerya were a better correspondent! Did she really have nothing to say, or didn't she know how to hold a pen? At last, on November 19, he received two letters from his beloved. He should have been in transports of joy—but no: what he had longed for so keenly now left him cold. I lis fever had dropped. "Strangely enough, when I am taken up by my work, I am indifferent to Valerya," he wrote the same day. And he sat down with a sigh to grind out his answer. No more talk of love in this letter. The tone was brotherly, protective and gay. If he were still attracted to her it was only, he said, because he thought she might be "good" and he had always been subjugated by virtue. And his jealousy had so diminished that he positively entreated her to go out with other men so that she could analyze her reactions to them:48 "Go to the ball 011 Wednesday. It would be interesting for you to test yourself. Do it, my dove, and then tell me your honest impressions."
Days passed, and Valerya's stock rose a few points as a result of the prolonged absence: "Thought a great deal about her," he wrote. "Perhaps because I have not met any women of late."49 In the interim, he received another "very sweet" letter from her, to which he replied with patronizing affcction.
"I feel that you love mc and so you are beginning to adopt a more serious attitude toward life. ... By the grace of God, my dove, love mc, love the whole world, God's world, men, nature, poetry, all the wonderful things that exist, and cultivate your mind so that you can understand things worthy of love. ... If the overall destination of a woman is to be a wife, her particular destination is to be mother, not womb."
Not content with instructing his dove as to the best way of ornamenting her mind, he threw in for good measure a few lessons on the best way of ornamenting her body: "Alas, you are mistaken to believe you have taste. Your little blue hat with the white flowers is pretty, but it would only be right for the wife of a great aristocrat, stepping out of her coach behind an English trotter. Your little hat looks absurd enough on a person of modest means, with only a simple caldche, and even more on a person living in the country, with nothing but a tarantas to drive. There is another kind of elegance, based on modesty, that shuns everything exaggerated and loud. It may be seen in the smallest details of dress—in slippers, for example, and collars and gloves. It also requires spotless nails and neatly dressed hair." If, after this, Valerya did not turn into a model young lady, there was no hope for the future of correspondence courses. Upon coming to the end of his letter, he was seized with a sudden frenzy, he was overflowing with tenderness, his pen was quivering with it: "Farewell, my turtledove, turtledove, thousand times turtledove, whether you're angry or not, I'll say it just the same!"