Meanwhile, back in his apartment, Tolstoy, worn out by emotion and incapable of articulating his thoughts, wrote down these few words in his diary: "I told her. She: 'Yes.' Like a wounded bird. No point in writing. Impossible to forget or to relate."
The next day, September 17, Mrs. Behrs was entertaining in honor of her nameday. Her two oldest daughters, Lisa and Sonya, were dressed alike, according to custom. Lilac and white woolen dresses with round necklines and rosettes of lilac ribbons at waist and shoulder. Both were pale, there were shadows under their eyes and beneath their pilcd-up hair their faces were drawn. The table groaned under the weight of the victuals and all the vases were full of flowers. At two in the afternoon the room began to fill. Every time a guest came up to wish Lyubov Alcxandrovna many happy returns, she smiled graciously and said, "You may also congratulate us upon our daughter's engagement." Before she had time to say which daughter, the new arrival was bearing down on Lisa, who blushed, forced a social half-smile and indicated Sonya, who blushed in turn. And to make matters worse, a magnificent horse guardsman suddenly strode into the midst of the crowd: Mitrofan Polivanov, coming to pay his respects to the mistress of the house and give his regards to the young woman whom he already regarded as a sort of fiancee. Sonya drew herself up stiffly to hide her discomfort. Her brother Sasha quickly took the young man aside. After a whispered explanation, Mitrofan Polivanov came up to Sonya and muttered between clenched teeth:
"I knew you would betray me. I could feel it coming. . . ."
Tolstoy anxiously observed this uniformed fop whispering to the girl who was soon to bear his name. Lisa stood a little way off, her head high and her lips pinched together. "Fiancd, gifts, champagne," wrote Tolstoy that evening. "Lisa pitiful and difficult. She ought to detest me; she embraces me."
It remained to set the date. Like most people who can never make up their minds, once he had reached his decision Tolstoy could not bear a moment's delay. Leaving Sonya's parents flabbergasted, he demanded that the service take place on September 23, 1862, one week after the engagement had been announced. Lyubov Alexandrovna objected that the trousseau had to be prepared.
"Why?" he said. "She is perfectly well dressed the way she is! What more docs she need?"
With a sigh, Mrs. Behrs acquiesced. Having gotten his way on this point, Tolstoy then asked his fiancee whether she wanted to take a honeymoon trip abroad or go immediately to Yasnaya Polyana. She opted for Yasnaya Polyana, in order "to begin real life right away, family life." He was grateful to her for this. Of course, they would not be alone in the big house, Aunt Toinette was part of the furniture. But Sonya already dearly loved the old spinster and was sure to find an ally in her. Only six days left! The girl was suddenly caught up in a whirlwind of calls, letters, seamstresses, shopping, invitation lists. . . . Tolstoy disapproved of all this futile agitation, motivated by coquetry. Souls, not dresses, were what counted in marriage. It was wrong to try- to appear more handsome than one really was, to the person in whom one had placed one's faith; 011 the contrary one must stand before him naked. Naked in all one's ugliness. If love could survive this trial by tTuth, then a family could be born. If not, better to separate, each to his own.
It was in this spirit of sincerity that he decided to give his fiancee his private diaries to read. She had thought to portray him, in her Dublitsky of the unprepossessing outward appearance? He would show her that Dublitsky's interior was even more spine-chilling. His wild ambitions, his absurd rules of life, his intellectual acrobatics, his somersaults, his toothachc, his rages, his diarrheas, his erotic dreams, his false engagement to Valerya, his real affairs with the peasant women, she would know it all. In his wedding basket he would deposit this bundle of dirty linen; if she did not turn up her nose at the smell, then she could understand anything. He reveled in debasing himself thus, in the true Russian manner, in the eyes of the person whose respect was most essential to him. A few day's before, he had held her in his arms for the first time, there between the wall and the piano, and she had given him a clumsy kiss. He had been so excited by this that he wrote, when he came home, "Apparition of Satan. Jealousy of her past. Doubted her love and thought she was deceiving herself about her own feelings."7 Let her read that, too! He was as tense as though he were staking his entire fortune on a single card.
Sonya accepted the notebooks with misgivings, and spent a whole night reading them. As she turned the pages, the image of her future husband became steadily blacker. Revelations that an experienced woman of the world might have found it hard to pardon horrified the eighteen-year-old girl raised by her mother in total ignorance of the "nasty side" of life. She did not understand how a man who spoke so wonderfully of virtue, sacrifice and courage could be a weakling and profligate at the same time. And all those sudden about-faces, in politics, art, love! What avid fascination with everything relating to his own person! If he were so concerned with himself, would it ever occur to him to pay any attention to her? If he laid down such stem principles for himself, would he not demand a degree of moral perfection of her that was beyond her reach? If he changed his mind so rapidly, would he not tire of her the morning after the wedding? The most contradictory nature in the world, a two-faced fanus, one side of light and the other of darkness. Terrible sentences leaped to her eyes: "Regard the company of woman as a necessary' social evil and avoid them as much as possible. Who indeed is the cause of sensuality, indolence, frivolity and all sorts of other vices in us, if not women? . . ." "Felt voluptuous desires . . "Went home with a girl . . ." The abbreviated style of the diary accentuated the air of cynicism it exuded. Sonya began to cry. "How stricken I was by those pages he insisted, in his excessive honesty, that I read before we were married!" she later wrote. "Wasted honesty! I shed many tears over that look into his past."
By dawn, she had grown calm again. Red-eyed and with feverish chccks, she greeted her fiance, who had come to find out her reaction, with a smile. He seemed tired and nervous. She reassured him, forgave him, handed back his notebooks. But she knew at heart that something irreparable had happened to her. She had been marked for life by that desecration.
The wedding was to take place on September 23, 1862, at eight in the evening in the imperial Church of the Nativity of the Virgin in the Kremlin. Halfway through the morning, when the entire household was topsy-turvy, Tolstoy arrived unexpectedly and burst into the girls' room. Custom forbade a fiancЈ to call on his betrothed on the wedding day. At the sight of him, Sonya's heart gave a leap. What new bombshell was he going to drop? White and haggard, his eyes staring fixedly ahead of him, he sat down next to her on a trunk already strapped and asked her whether she was absolutely sure she loved him, whether she did not regret Mitrofan Polivanov or some other suitor, whether she did not want to take back her promise. He personally didn't care a hoot about what people said; a good break was better than a bad marriage! She thought lie was looking for some pretext to back out, and burst into tears. While he was trying to console her, Mrs. Behrs swept into the room, borne aloft by maternal indignation as a ship on an ocean swell.
"You've chosen a fine time to come and worry her to death!" she cried. "The wedding is today—there's quite enough to do already. And then all that distance to travel—and there she sits in tears."
The chastened fiancd apologized profusely and slunk away. At six o'clock Sonya, utterly limp, began to dress. Her sisters and girlfriends arranged her hair and placed on her head a long tulle veil and a crown of flowers. Her dress, also of tulle, bared her neck and shoulders in the fashion of the time. "The light, transparent material surrounded me like a cloud," she wrote.8 But she was worried because her shoulders were too thin.