Tolstoy

I consider it unworthy to assure Your Majesty that the insult I have suffered is undeserved. All my past, my contacts, my activities in serving people’s education, which are open to all, and finally the journal in which my most heartfelt convictions are expressed, could have proved to anyone interested in me, without the deployment of measures which have destroyed people’s peace and happiness, that I could not have been a conspirator, an initiator of proclamations, murders or arson. Apart from the insult, suspicion of criminal activities, apart from the opprobrium in the opinion of society and that feeling of eternal threat, under which I am obliged to live and work, as a result of this visit, I have completely plummeted in the opinion of the people, which I have cherished, which I spent years earning, and which was vital for the activity which I had chosen – the foundation of schools for the people.

Alexander II happened to be visiting Moscow, which meant the letter could be hand-delivered. The Tsar did not bother to reply to Tolstoy himself, but Prince Dolgorukov, the head of the secret police, was instructed to send a mealy-mouthed letter of self-justification to the governor of Tula for him to pass on.¹¹

Fortunately Tolstoy had other things to occupy him at this time. Rather than return to Yasnaya Polyana, he had stayed on in Moscow when the Bers returned to their kremlin apartment at the beginning of September, and for once the strength of his romantic feelings stopped him from becoming too self-analytical. The previous year, when he was considering the merits of another woman as a potential bride, his sister Maria had warned: ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t analyse too much, because once you start analysing, you always find some stumbling block in every straightforward issue, and without knowing how to respond to what and why, you run away.’¹² He had indeed prevaricated back then, and nothing came of the liaison, but this time he moved swiftly, perhaps realising the dangers of reflection. On Sunday 16 September he proposed to Sonya and, at his insistence, they were married seven days later.

It was not just the fact that the engagement lasted only a week which made their marriage quite unusual, or even that Sonya could only eat pickled cucumbers and black bread in the days leading up to the wedding.¹³ Tolstoy offered his fiancée the choice of going back to live with her parents, a honeymoon abroad, or starting their new life straight away in Yasnaya Polyana.¹⁴ Sonya chose the last option; she never went abroad even later in her life. There was no time for Lyubov Alexandrovna to sew her daughter a complete trousseau, but Tolstoy made sure to give Sonya his old diaries to read, not wanting to conceal anything in his past. As an innocent and inexperienced girl who had seen little of life, she was deeply shocked and upset by what she later termed his ‘excessive conscientiousness’. The previous month she had given him a thinly disguised autobiographical story to read, it is true, in which she described a young girl being courted by a prince of ‘unusually unattractive appearance’ and volatile opinions.¹⁵ But this was different. Sonya found it painful to learn about his sexual conquests and romantic liaisons with peasant women, no matter how much he now repented of them.¹⁶ Her father, meanwhile, was seething with anger. Initially opposed to the marriage, he felt deeply for his slighted elder daughter, who should have been the one to marry first, and he was only gradually reconciled. Sonya’s mother was also hardly overjoyed by the match, and for a while adopted a patronising tone with Tolstoy, whom she continued to call by his childhood nickname of ‘Lyovochka’.¹⁷ Both parents were well aware, however, of Tolstoy’s eligibility, and of the unlikelihood of finding similar suitors for their other daughters.