Neither Dr. Behrs' letter nor Sonya's tears nor the gentle remonstrances of Tanya made any dent in Tolstoy's dogged disapproval. He could not look at his wife without finding fault with her. In his diary —which she read—he sarcastically called her "the countess":
"I arrive in the morning, full of joy and gladness, and I find the countess in a tantrum while Dunyasha, the chambermaid, is combing her hair; seeing her thus I mistake her for Mashenka* on one of her bad days, everything collapses, and I stand there as though I had been scalded. I am afraid of everything and I see that there can be no happiness or poetry for me except when I ain alone. I am kissed tenderly, out of habit, but then the quarrels resume immediately, with Dunyasha, Auntie, Tanya, me. . . . One o'clock in the morning already, and I can't sleep at all, much less in her room with her, when I have such a weight on my heart; she will begin to whine and moan as soon as she knows there is someone to listen; just now she is snoring peacefully away. She will wake up absolutely convinced that I am wrong and she is the most unfortunate woman alive. . . . And the worst of it is that I must hold my tongue and sulk, however much I cxccratc and despise such a situation."30
And, pen in hand, Sonya exhaled her despair:
"It is monstrous not to nurse one's child! Well, who says it isn't? But what can I do in the face of a physical impossibility? ... He would banish me from the earth because I am suffering and not doing my duty, and I cannot bear him because he is not suffering and he is writing. . . . How can one love a fly that will not stop tormenting one? . . . I shall take care of my son and do everything I can, but not for Lyova, certainly, because he deserves to get evil in return for evil."
After letting off steam, she melted, and ended: "It's starting to rain. I am afraid he will catch cold. My irritation has vanished. I love him. God protect him."31 Sincere statement or subtle maneuver? As soon as he had read these lines Tolstoy, deeply touched, wanted to
• Maiya, Tolstoy's sister.
retract what he had written and added, below her entry: "Sonya, forgive me ... I was cruel and crude. And to whom? To the person who has given me the greatest joy in my life and the only one who loves me. . . . Sonya, my darling, I am guilty, but I am wretched too. There is an excellent man in me, but sometimes he is asleep. Love him, Sonya, and do not criticize him." A fresh quarrel broke out immediately afterward, he snatched up the notebook and furiously crossed out what he had just written. And at the bottom of the desecrated page Sonya, the tears welling in her eyes, added: "I had deserved those few lines of tenderness and repentance, but in a moment of anger lie took them away from me before I had even read them."
Nursing his resentment, Tolstoy sought a pretext—any pretext—for getting away from the house. An insurrection had broken out in Poland and he already had visions of himself taking up arms to put down the rebels whom France, England and Austria had the effrontery to support. "What do you think of the Polish business?" he wrote to Fet. "It looks bad, doesn't it? Maybe you and Borisov and I shall have to take down our swords from their rusty nails."32 It little mattered to the future anti-autocrat that Marion Langiewicz's rebels were idealists ready to die for independence. As a loyal subject of the tsar, lie put his faith in the wisdom of the government. The fact was that he wanted to enlist less to exterminate the Poles than to get away from his wife. He later made Prince Andrey say, in War and Peace, "I am going to the war because the life I am leading here—does not suit me."33 And elsewhere, "Marry as late as possible, when you're no good for anything else. Or else everything good and noble in you will be lost. You will be submerged by triviality. ... If, now, you expect anything from the future, then you will feel at ever}' step that all is finished, that for you it's all over."34
Keeping these thoughts to himself, he set out to convince Sonya that he should go. But—whether out of utter absent-mindedness or arch fiendish cruelty—he selected the eve of their first wedding anniversary to inform her of his designs. Stupefied, she burst into dire imprecations, first to him and then to her diary: "To war. What is this latest whim? Irresponsibility? No, not that, sheer instability! . . . Everything in him is whim and passing fancy! Today he gets married, the idea appeals to him, he has children. Tomorrow he has a hankering to go off to war and he abandons us. All I can do is hope the child will die, for I shall not live after Lyova. I do not believe in such enthusiasm and love of the fatherland in a man of thirty-five. As though children weren't the fatherland, as though they weren't Russian too! He is ready to neglect them because he thinks it's fun to go galloping about on a horse and admire the war and hear the shells whistling past."85
The mere act of imagining that he would soon be engaged in battle was enough to bring Tolstoy back to earth. Having thrown Sonya, Aunt Toinette and all his friends into a dither, he felt better. Besides, there wasn't going to be any war. While the Western powers were still planning their campaign, the uprising had been quelled. They were already hanging the instigators. Reassured, the future apostle of universal peace contemplated his married life and concluded that it was not so bad as he had thought: "It is over," he wrote on October 6, 1863. "There was nothing true in it. I am happy with her; but I am dreadfully unhappy with myself. . . . My choice has been made for a long time: letters, art, education and family."
Contrary to his affirmations, Tolstoy was not giving education a thought, having closed the schools and let most of the teachers go. And as for his family, he hoped he would not be required to do much about it, and Sonya would supervise the household. But art and literature were calling him once again.
The publication of The Cossacks, early in the year, had revived his desire to write. He had filled the book with all his memories of his years in the Caucasus. Like the author, its hero, Olenin, was a disoriented young nobleman who found a renewed taste for life among more simple people. Like the author, he fell in love with a Cossack girl, deeply enough to contemplate marriage. Like the author, he was surrounded by rustic and picturesque companions: Eroshka the hunter, Lukas the dzhigit. . . . Like the author he left, sore and disappointed, having failed to integrate himself into the primitive life whose charms had so long held him in sway. The character of the young man who leaves the city to discover the joys of a profound union with nature after the artificiality of civilization does, it is tnie, bear some resemblance to Aleko in Pushkin's Gypsies or Pechorin in Lcr- montov's A Hero of Our Time. But despite their attempt at sobriety, both those authors' works arc still draped in romanticism. Their Caucasus was wreathed in operatic mists, whereas Tolstoy stuck to the truth. His description of life in a stanitsa was a valid ethnological document. The slightest detail, whether referring to the Cossacks' morals, dress, weapons, hunting or fishing customs, or their songs or the behavior of their girls and women, was drawn from life and striking in its accuracy. And the large proportion of description did not detract from the swift-moving action of the story. One felt the narrator's youth, his appetite for life, the remarkable vivacity of his eye and breath. The manuscript had been fussed over for ten years, started