just as he has loved the school, nature, the people, perhaps literature as well, one after the other. Then the craze passes and he becomes enamored of something else."5
To justify this latest switch in his own eyes, Tolstoy now affirmed that his interest in popular education had been nothing but "an exaggerated impulse of youth, no more nor less than exhibitionism" and that he could not continue it now that he had "come of age." lie added: "She has done it all. She does not know, she does not understand that she has changed me far more than I have changed her."tt
After disposing of the schools, Sonya's next move was to sweep out the sentimental cobwebs that clung to her husband. She had read his diary, she knew about his past, and she did not like to inhale the reminders of it that eddied around her. To begin with, she could not abide Leo's tender affection for his dear aunt, his little grandmother, his babushka Alexandra Tolstoy. The more he praised the noble soul, sensitivity, piety, intelligence and culture of the old maid of honor, the more he annoyed his wife who felt inferior to this paragon of all the virtues. "She does not want to write to the aunts at court," he sorrowfully noted on October 1, 1862. And he added, marveling at her perceptiveness, "She senses everything." Four days of persuasion were required to induce the bride to produce her letter of convention, written in French:
"Leo has spoken to me about you so often that I have already grown to love you and I treasure your affection for my husband. . .
The sentences followed each other with artificial elegance. Ilcr heart was clearly not in it. She signed: "Countess Sofya Tolstoy." Upon reading over this classroom theinc, Tolstoy felt how cold it was and added a postscript in his own hand, by way of apology:
"I am not at all happy with the letter Sonya has written to you, my dear friend Alexandra, and I know your personal relationship will be a very different matter. . . . You understand that I cannot tell you the truth about her now, for fear of being carried away and lending fuel to the skeptics' fire. I can only say that her most striking feature is that of a 'man of integrity'—I mean what I say: both 'integrity' and 'man.' . . . What a dreadful responsibility it is to live with another person! . . . She is reading what I write to you and understands nothing- refuses to understand (Besides, she doesn't need to understand!) that state we men reach after wrestling with a long, laborious and painful series of doubts and sufferings. . . ." Whereupon Sonya intcrnipted, and wrote:
"I cannot let that pass, dear Aunt. He is wrong, I understand every-
thing, absolutely everything that has to do with him, and his letter is gloomy because he has a headache and is in a bad mood."
At the bottom of the page Tolstoy merely commented, "There, you see!" And the missive went off as it was, bittersweet, evasive, odd. Reading it, Alexandra understood that the bride had determined to clear the air around her husband, and did not need to be told twice. She wrote an amiable, formal letter in reply and signed it, "Your old Aunt"
Reassured on that scorc, Sonya conccded a few months later that Alexandra was a remarkable person. "I would not mind if they continued to correspond," she wrote, "but I should hate Alexandra to think that Leo's wife had nothing more to recommend her than an easygoing nature, barely competent to be a children's nursemaid. No matter how jealous I am of Leo, jealous of his heart, I know Alexandra cannot be nibbed out of his life. Besides, she must not be removed from it. She has played a pretty part, one I am incapable of playing. ... I should so like to know her better! Would she find me worthy of him? . . . Since reading Leo's letters to her, I have been thinking about her constantly. I might even like her. . . ."7
Tolstoy's letters to Alexandra, of which he kept the drafts, were not the only ones Sonya read. In his effort to be completely honest, he let her explore all his correspondence to her heart's content. She liorc his name, she shared his bed, and so she was entitled to know everything about him. Thus she renewed her acquaintance with Valerva Arsenyev, of whom she had already had a glimpse in her fiance's diary. She immediately saw that this was not a dangerous rival. "Pretty but insignificant," she noted. And she applauded Tolstoy's moral exhortations to the girclass="underline" "I recognize him in every line. The same principle, the same striving after the good. . . . Reading those letters I felt no jealousy at all, as though Valerya were not some other woman he may have cared for, but myself. ... It was not Valcrya he loved, but love and goodness."8 Her indulgence toward this harmless specter of the past vanished, however, when it encountered Axinya, the peasant who had been Tolstoy's mistress for three years before his marriage. An illegitimate child, Timothy, had been born during their affair, and it was the general opinion that he greatly resembled Tolstoy. The mother and her boy lived in a hamlet close to the main house. Every time Sonya passed them, she felt a fresh surge of protest and depression. How had her husband been able to find pleasure in caressing that blowsy and probably unclean female? Was the animal instinct in men so powerful that anybody would do to satisfy them? To think that Leo had written about the creature in his diary! And in flattering tenns, too! "She is
very fine. ... I am in love as I have never been before. . . . The feeling is no longer bestial, but that of a husband for his wife."9 Countess Tolstoy, stepping into the shoes of a village trollop! One day Sonya recognized Axinya among the women scouring the floor in the house. Choking with rage, she drowned Tolstoy in reproaches, and wrote that evening, with trembling hand: "I believe I shall kill myself one day out of jealousy. Tn love as I have never been before!' And with whom? A fat peasant, a vulgar woman with white skin. It's ghastly! The sight of the sword and gun comforted inc. Just one shot, it's so easy! As long as I have no children! . . . And to think the woman is there, a few steps away from us! I am quite simply losing my mind. I shall go for a drive. Maybe I shall meet her. How he loved her! If only I could burn his diary and his past with it."10
Axinya and her child pursued Sonya even in her nightmares. One night she dreamed she was having an argument with the insolent woman, who had put on "a black silk dress" to provoke her. A murderous wave swept over her brain. In her dream she indulged the lust for vengeance which she knew she could not satisfy awake. The scene was so horrible that when she awoke the next morning, she rccordcd it in her diary in all its gory detail. "Suddenly I was in such a rage that I seized her child and tore it limb from limb," she wrote. "I tore off its legs, its arms, its head. I was in a frenzy of anger. And at that moment, Lyovochka arrived.11 I told him they were going to deport me to Siberia, but he picked up the scattered limbs and comforted me, telling me it was only a doll. I looked, and lo and behold, instead of a body I saw nothing but a few strips of deerskin and lumps of cotton wadding. I was very cross."12 Sonya wrote of her hatred of Axinya several times in her diary: "It upsets me dreadfully whenever I think of her."13 "That disgusting woman again. How does she dare to keep turning up in front of mc all the time?"14 Then, obsessed by jealousy, she persuaded herself that her husband could not look at a peasant without sleeping with her. To test him, she disguised herself as a common woman, tied a scarf down over her eyes, and ran after him on the road. She was certain he would take her for someone else and motion her to follow him into the bushes. But she could not find which way he had gone and came home worn out and embarrassed by her getup.