After Marya left for Europe, Tolstoy rented an apartment from a German bootmaker in Moscow, but he could not feel comfortable in it. He was obsessed by Sonya. One thing was certain: she, and not Lisa, was now his favorite among the three Behrs daughters. But should he propose to her, in spite of the difference in their ages? Would it not be better for a man like him to preserve his independence at all costs? He had never regretted breaking off with Valerya. But on the other hand, he had never felt for her what he felt for Sonya. If he disappeared from the scene and she were to marry someone else, he would regret it his whole life long. What to do? He was exhausted by his own indecision. He read his fortune in the cards, looked for good and evil marriage omens, and hiked almost daily the eight miles to Pokrovskoye- Streshnevo. He would reach the house at twilight, covered with dust, his throat dry and his heart thumping. The girls' bright-colorcd dresses, high voices and the charming nonsense they chattered rewarded him for his long walk. "When I am empress, I shall issue my commands and orders—like this!" Sonya said one evening, sitting in an unharnessed cabriolet in the courtyard. Tolstoy seized the shafts, set the heavy vehicle in motion with one heave of his back, and trotted off, crying:
"And this is how I shall take my empress for a drive!"
"No, no! It's too heavy! Stop!" implored Sonya, clasping her hands.
But she was delighted. "This incident shows how strong and healthy he was," she wrote in her memoirs. Of course, the count must stay to supper; a bed was prepared for him. Ah, those dangerous folds of comfort in which the parents of a marriageable daughter can swathe an undecided bachelor! At Pokrovskoyc-Strcshnevo nature itself conspired to concentrate the suitor's mind on thoughts of romance. The nights were so beautiful, the moon shone in the nearby pond, the grass in the meadow shivered as though covered with silver powder, the earth, which had drunk in the heat of the sun all clay, exhaled its perfumes in the lengthening shadows. Sitting under the arbor with the girls,
Tolstoy lalked of this and that, forgot his worries and strove to make himself agreeable. A rival had appeared on the scene of late, a certain Popov, professor of Russian history at the University of Moscow, who kept looking intently at Sonya and then turning away and heaving sighs. Rut he proved no more dangerous than the horse guardsman Mitrofan Polivanov, whom the girls were expecting any week. Twenty times Tolstoy's declaration was on his lips, and twenty times he bit it back. When the feeling became too strong for him, lie would lean 011 the wooden railing of the balcony and murmur, "Nights of madness!"
Consumed with anxiety, lie returned to his diary. "Slept at the Behrs'," he wrote on August 23, 1862. "A child! Or certainly looks like one. And yet, what utter confusion. Oh, if only I could put myself in a clear and honorable position. . . . I'm afraid of myself: what if it is only the desire for love again, and not love itself? I try to see only her weaknesses, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. A child! Or certainly looks like one."
Three days later he asked the child whether she kept a diary. Ilcr answer was evasive, but she admitted that she had written a story. He insisted upon seeing it. What went on in her mind in that moment? She knew Tolstoy might be offended by the unattractive personality she had given Dublitsky in her autobiographical tale. But hurt feelings or even an open conflict would be better than this stagnation in her love life. Since they were both too shy to speak out, and since lie had made one confession to her with the initials chalked on the table cover, why shouldn't she do as much through her thinly disguised characters? Burning with embarrassment, she handed him her notebook, staking everything on one throw of the dice.
He took the story home with him to Moscow and raced through it, and it was as though he suddenly saw his own face in the mirror, after forgetting how ugly and eroded it had become. Wounded vanity was his first reaction. Then he reflected that even though the heroine found Dublitsky ugly, old and moody, she was nonetheless in love with him. This observation only half-consoled him. "She gave me her story to read," he wrote on August 26. "I low furiously she insisted upon truth and simplicity. Anything unclear torments her. I read it all without a twinge, without a glimmer of jealousy or envy. Even so, expressions like 'unattractive outward appearance' and 'inconsistent in his opinions' hit mc hard." So hard that two days later, August 28—his birthday—he concluded that he was "too great" for the common path of matrimony. Wounded in masculine pride, he sought refuge in his author's pride: "I am thirty-four years old. . . . Cot up with my usual
feeling of depression. . . . Ugly mug. Give up any thought of marriage. Your vocation is elsewhere, that is why much has been given to you."
But work could no longer content him. Little Sonya had played the right card when she showed him her story. Now, every wriggle he gave to shake the hook loose only drove it deeper into his flesh. He went back to Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo, saw her again, hesitated, hoped, filled his diary with conflicting entries: "It is no longer love as before, or jealousy or even regret, but something similar I cannot name, very sweet; something like a bit of hope (that must not be). Pig! A little regret and sorrow too. Delicious night. Good, comfortable feeling. . . . I was confuscd. She too." (August 29.) "I am not jealous of Popov when he is with Sonya, I cannot believe she doesn't prefer me. I think the time has come, but it is night now. Her voice, too, is sad, peaceful. We took a walk. In the arbor. Back at the house, supper—her eyes. What a night! Dolt, this is not for you; yet you're in love, like with Sonya Koloshin or Alexandra Obolensky—but no more than that. Spent the night there, could not sleep, her again! 'Ilavc you never loved, then?' she says, and I want to laugh, I am suddenly wildly gay." (August 30.) "Never have I imagined my future with a woman as clearly, as joyfully and calmly. . . . Memento: Dublitsky, loathsome creature!" (September 3.) "Did not sleep all night, so clear was the picture I was painting of my happiness. In the evening we talked of love. From bad to worse." (September 5.) "Dublitsky, don't go poking your nose into youth and poetry and beauty and love. There are cadets for that, old man. . . . The monastery—work, there's your vocation, and from that summit you can look calmly and contentedly down upon the love and happiness of others. I have lived in that monastery and shall go back to it." (September 7.) After writing that sentence Tolstoy had a second thought and noted above it: "My diary is not truthful. Underneath, I am thinking that she will be here beside me one day, reading, and . . . and this is for her."
The next day the Behrs moved back to their apartment in the Kremlin, and Tolstoy rang at their door once again: "Sonya opened. . . . She looks thinner. There is nothing in her of what I have always seen in the others: neither false soulfulness nor the conventional tricks of allure. I am irresistibly drawn to her." (September 8.) "She blushed, she was deeply disturbed: 'O Dublitsky, do not dream! . . .' 1 cannot, I cannot tear myself away from Moscow. . . . Sleep impossible until three in the morning. Dreamed, and worked myself into a state like a kid of sixteen." (September 9.)
That night he resolved to abandon all hope of the joy he deemed impossible, and wrote a long letter of explanation to Sonya, telling her