Besides, she did not need a flesh-and-blood rival to arouse her jealousy. She had only to read Tolstoy's lwoks for her wifely dignity to feel offended by the sensuality of some of his descriptions. The words of love, the kisses exchanged by his characters made her flush with shame as though Lyovochka had put on an obsccnc exhibition of himself in front of a crowd. She was tormented by the thought that the
sexual joy he attributed to one or another of his heroes was merely an echo of the pleasure he had himself known with someone else. "I read the beginning of his book," she wrote on December 16, 1862.15 "Every time he speaks of love or women I have such an awful feeling, such loathing, that I could burn the whole thing. I want nothing to remind me of his past! And 1 would not even spare his writing, for jealousy has made me terribly selfish." And she ended her confession with this chilling sentence: "If I could kill him and create another new person exactly like him, I should do it with pleasure."
And yet, by a strange inconsistency in her nature, the intensity of her jealousy of the other women in her husband's life was equaled only by her indifference to his passion for herself. She was flattered to sec that she aroused such powerful desire in him. But when he took her in his arms, she tunied to stone. Passive and attentive, she followed the signs of amorous disarray on his panting countenance with a mixture of curiosity and terror. At the end of the struggle, she felt bruised and soiled; he was happy. "When he embraces me," she wrote, "I think that I am not the first woman he has crushed to him in the same way. . . . It is bitter and painful to think that my husband is like the rest of the world. . . ." (October 8, 1862.) "All this commerce of the flesh is repellent." (October 9,1862.) "The physical side of love plays a very big role for him, and none at all for me." (April 29, 1863.) At first, though shocked by his ardent virility, she kept her revulsion to herself. A shrewd feminine instinct warned her that by showing a semblance of pleasure she might increase her hold over Lyovochka. The inconvenience of being mauled about now and then was a small price to pay for the satisfaction of dominating a man.
He, however, was not unduly worried by his wife's bashfulness. On the contrary, everything that was young and virginal about her excited him. The master subduer of farmgirls was presumably having his first taste of the delights of profaning more refined flesh. His confidences to his diary were becoming a hymn to wedded bliss: "I love her when, at night or early in the morning, I wake up and find her looking tenderly at me. Nolwdy—and I less than anyone else—can prevent her now from loving me in her own way, the way she wants to. I love her when she is sitting close to me and we are both feeling that we love cach other with all our strength. She says, 'Lyovochka,' and adds, after a pause, ^Vhy are stovepipes set 011 straight?' Or, 'Why do horses have such a hard life?' ctc. I love her when, after we have been silent together for a long time, I finally say, 'Well, Sonya, what shall we do now?' And she laughs. I love her when she is angry with me and suddenly widens her eyes and tries to look mean and nasty and snarls, 'Leave me alone!
You're bothering me!' And the next minute she is smiling shyly at me. . . . I love her when, a little girl in a yellow dress, she shoves her chin forward and sticks out her tongue at me. I love to see her head thrown back, her face solemn and frightened, her passionate child's face. I love her when . . ."I6
Sometimes his exultation was so intense that he became worried, as though God had given him a gift by mistake and were about to snatch it away from him: "Just lately, we felt that there was something terrifying in our happiness. . . . We started to pray." (March 1, 1863.) And a little later: "I love her more and more. Today, after seven months, a feeling of humility that I had not had for a long time came over me in her presence. She is ineffably pure, and good, and virginal in my eyes. At those times I feel that I do not possess her, even though she gives all of herself to me. I do not possess her because I dare not, I do not feel worthy. I am anxious; that is why my happiness is not complete. Something keeps tormenting me: I am jealous of the man who could be entirely worthy of her. I am not." (March 24, 1863.) Sonya's youth and grace made him over-sensitive. She was afraid she would lose him because of his excessive sexual demands, but he was afraid lie would lose her because of her predilection for flirting. One day he had been alarmed because she was paying too much attention to young Erlen- wcin, one of the student teachers at Yasnaya Polyana. Another time a young man named Pisarev came out from Moscow to spend some time with them; Leo found him over-assiduous in his attentions to Sonya and suddenly announced, without any explanation, that his carriage was at the door to take him back to the city.
The fact was that Tolstoy, who claimed to be so broad-minded, was extremely old-fashioned when it came to women. A champion of freedom outside the home, he applied the principles of tyranny under his roof. According to him, a wife should abandon all interest in her appearance, turn her back on the "futilities of society" and devote herself to running the household, educating her children and distracting her husband. The very qualities that had attracted him to Sonya unwed— her gaiety, spontaneity, elegance, eagerness to amuse herself and please others—now seemed incompatible with the position she had acquired at Yasnaya Polyana. If she changed her dress or did her hair differently, he accused her of frivolity. Tin's made her rebellious; she felt like "flirting with someone," "losing my temper with a chair," "going to a ball," or "kicking up my heels, instead of going upstairs to bed." "I am surrounded by decrepitude. Everyone I see is old. I try to restrain every sign of youth because it seems so out of place in this staid and sedate atmosphere. . . . Lyovochka's only occupation in life is to tell me
That's enough!'"" At such moments she was sorry she had left Moscow. "Dearest Maman, dearest Tanya, how sweet they were! Why did I abandon them? I made poor Lisa suffer horribly and now I feel guilty when I remember."18 She callcd her husband a "kill-joy," she complained that she was growing "numb," she wrote: "I have a wild desire to escape from his influence, which I sometimes find oppressive, and not to care about him any more."19 And yet, as soon as he left to inspect the farm or attend to some business in Tula, she was lost. A thousand wild ideas tormented her: he no longer loved her, perhaps he was being unfaithful to her, she was not worthy of him, he was not worthy of her. . . . But he came back. Ecstasy: "He still loves me! His expression is so gentle, so humble, the eyes of a saint!" She had hardly finished purring over him, though, when she began moaning over her fate again. Her lightning changcs of mood were enough to astonish Tolstoy, himself a sufficiently unstable character. To balance the impetuous side of his own nature, he thought, a forbearing and even- tempered partner was what he needed. And here he was with a wife who delighted in analyzing herself, discussing herself, pitying herself, switching from anxiety to effcrvcscencc, love to loathing, tears to laughter with hair-raising speed, provoking thunderstorms in order to bask in the ensuing lull. Sometimes she wanted to be "more permeable to her husband's influence," and sometimes she was afraid she 110 longer saw anything "except through his eyes," which put her in "a position of inferiority"; sometimes she insisted how happy she was to live in the shadow of a great man, and sometimes she cxclaimcd, "I have a senseless and involuntary' desire to test my power over him; that is, I want to make him obey me"; sometimes she found him too cold, and at others too forward; sometimes he seemed "old," "odious," "boring," "selfish," and at others she confessed, "There are moments—and they are not rare—when I am sick with love of him. ... It hurts me to look at him or hear him or be near him, as it must hurt a devil to be near a saint."20