After this flare-up he subsided, colder and more empty than before; two letters from Valerya could not fan the flame to life again. "She is deceiving herself, I see it plainly, and I don't like it." (November 27, 1856.) "I think little about Valerya and not very favorably." (November 29, 1856.) Nothing had happened to alter his feelings, but it was as though he were purged of a hallucination, and ashamed to have let himself be carried away. Yet he still did not have the courage to burn his bridges. He explained to Valerya that he was "terribly afraid" of meeting her, for the shock might be irreparable:
"In our letters we inflate each other with all sorts of tender declarations ... we show off our best side, we hide the bad features in ourselves. . . . When you see me again, all of a sudden, with my looks, my faded smile, my turnip nose and my temperament (gloomy, fickle, an easy prey to boredom)—all the things you have already forgotten— they will all seem new to you, and will come as a painful surprise."-'10
He prevaricated less with Aunt Toinette, a militant partisan of his marriage to the young lady:
"I should very much like to be able to tell you that I am in love, or simply that I love her, but it is not there. The only feeling I have for her is gratitude for her love for me, and the thought that, of all the girls I have known and know now, she would make the best wife for me."51
But distributing these analyses right and left was not helping him to find an honorable way out. He himself was surprised at his cowardice. There he was, quaking and limp-handed like an apprentice executioner facing a too-tender victim. He did not dare bring down the ax on the neck of this over-plump, over-silly and ridiculously over-drcsscd provincial scatterbrain. Was he afraid of hurting her, or of being hurt himself? On December 10 he received a stinging letter from her, reproaching him for "boring" her with his "preaching." She was making it easy for him! "Received an offended letter from Valerya and, to my eternal shame, was glad of it," he immediately wrote in his diary. After thinking for two days, he replied:
"We are too far apart. . . . Love and marriage would have given us nothing but misery, whereas friendship, I am certain, is good for both of us. . . . Then, too, I think I must not be made for family life, even though it is what I most admire in all the world. You know what a difficult person I am, suspicious and moody, and God only knows whether anything will ever happen to change me. ... Of all the women I have known you arc the one I loved most and still love most, but it is not enough."02
This time Valerya could not fail to understand. The break had come, clean and sharp as a scalpel's edge. After posting his letter, he felt both relieved and uncertain. That night he had a nightmare so bizarre that he described it in his diary: "A brown woman lying on top of me; she was stretching forward, completely naked, whispering into my ear." Was this Valerya's last assault?
As he had expected, his break with the girl aroused general indignation in the drawing rooms of Tula. He was blamed by his aunt, his sister, all his friends in the province; the best way to avoid hearing all this nasty gossip was to flee abroad. He had been toying with the idea for some time. His resignation from the army had been accepted on November 26. He ordered civilian clothes and applied for a passport to leave Russia. He scarcely recognized himself in civilian dress! Was it possible that this inglorious garb was to be his for the rest of his life? Now he was nothing but a writer, a mere artist! lie spent New Year's Eve listening to Beethoven in the apartment of his friend Stoly- pin. On January' 1 he talked until midnight with Olga Turgenev.0 "I never liked her so well before." On January 3, at a costume ball, he met a young woman wearing a mask: "Sweet mouth. I pleaded with her a long time. She finally agreed, after much hesitation, to come home with me. Inside, she took off her mask. As like A.D. [Alexandra Dyakov] as two peas. But with coarser features." Two days later, another noteworthy encounter: the violinist George Kizevctter, a drunkard, a "gifted madman." Touched by Tolstoy's interest in him, the musician told him the story of his downfall. Tolstoy immediately decided to write a story about him, to be entitled A Lost Mcm.t But he soon realized that he was not in the mood for writing. Was the atmosphere of St. Petersburg bad for him, or was it remorse at having offended Valerya that nagged
• No relation to Ivan Tuigenev.
f Later called Albert.
at him? She had tried to get him back by letter; he replied, to discourage her for good. What a Iccch! Quick! lie had to get away. He went to Moscow first, and there he wrote to Aunt Toinette on January 14, 1857:
"I have received my passport and have come to Moscow to spend a few days with Marya.$ . . . You will surely understand, dear Aunt, why I do not want to—and must not—come to Yasnaya Polyana just now, or rather to Sudakovo.* I think I behaved very badly toward Valerya, but if I were to see her now I should behave still worse. As I have already written you, I feel less than indifferent toward her and cannot go on deceiving myself or her. And if I were weak enough to go back there, I should begin telling myself stories again. Do you remember, dear Aunt, how annoyed you were with me when I told you I was going to St. Petersburg as a test? Yet it is thanks to that idea that I have avoided bringing both of 11s to grief—for do not believe it is capriciousness or infidelity on my part: I have not been attracted by anyone else during these two months; I simply saw I was fooling myself, and not only never have had but never would have the least feeling of genuine love for Valerya."
As Yasnaya Polyana was only a few versts from Sudakovo, he thought it wiser not to kiss his aunt good-bye before embarking on his travels abroad. If he should happen to run into Valerya, what a scene there would be. The girl in tears, Mile. Vergani's scathing reproaches! Anything, rather than this mudbath of sentiment. His target now was Paris, where good old Turgenev was waiting for him. As though by design, two days before he was scheduled to leave he met a woman who captivated him: Baroness Elizabeth Ivanovna Mcngden, six years his senior. At the mere sight of her, he regretted that his passport was in his pocket and his scat reserved in the coach. IIow beautiful she was, pure and full of mystery, the stranger standing at the roadside while the horses whirl you off into the distance. Thinking of her, lie wrote in his diary:03 "Docs the attraction lie in remaining just on the verge of love?"
On January 29, 1857 he boarded the stagecoach. Cold, snow and the monotonous jingle of the horses' bells. Packed with strangers into the coach like a sardine in a tin, he thought back over his experiences of the last few years. In human relations, nothing noteworthy: no revolutionary friendships, no revelations in love, neither progress toward virtue nor backsliding toward evil. In the field of literature, on the other hand, he couldn't complain. The Snow Storm, Two Hussars, A