Summer—young revolutionaries flock “to the people”, travelling to the villages dressed as artisans and peasants to teach literacy classes, give medical help and spread socialist ideas. Hundreds arrested.
Spring—Tolstoy gives up work on his Peter the Great novel and starts work on Anna Karenina. A bull on the estate gores a peasant to death. Shortly afterwards, the whole family travels south to Samara to stay on their new estate. November—publication of the third edition of the Complete Works of L.N. Tolstoy, in eight volumes. 9th November—Petya dies of croup. Tolstoy haunted by fears of death.
13th February. Lyovochka has gone to Moscow* and all day I have been sitting alone here staring into space, a prey to sickening anxieties. I sometimes search my heart and ask myself what I really want. And to my horror, the answer is that I want gaiety, smart clothes and chatter. I want people to admire me and say how pretty I am, and I want him to see and hear them too; I long for him occasionally to emerge from his rapt inner existence that demands so much of him; I wish he could briefly lead a normal life with me, like a normal person. But then my heart cries out against the Devil’s temptations of Eve, and I think even worse of myself. I hate people to tell me I am beautiful. I never believed them, and now it would be too late anyway—what would be the point? My darling little Petya* loves his old mother as much as he would love a great beauty. And Lyovochka could get used to the plainest wife, so long as she was docile and quiet and lived the sort of life that suited him. I want to turn my character inside out and demolish everything that is mean and false in me. I am having my hair curled today, and have been happily imagining how nice it will look, even though nobody will see me and it’s quite unnecessary. I adore ribbons, I would like a new leather belt—and now I have written this I feel like crying…
The children are waiting upstairs for their music lesson, and here I am in the study writing all this stupid nonsense.
We went skating today. The boys kept bumping into their tutor Fyodor Fyodorovich* and I had trouble pacifying him and trying to comfort them. I don’t take to the new Englishwoman* who arrived here the other morning; she is too lethargic and commune for my liking. But it’s too early to tell.
11th November. On 9th November at nine in the morning, my little Petyushka died of a throat infection.* He died peacefully, after two days’ illness. He was born on 13th June, 1872, and I had fed him for fourteen and a half months, and he lived just another three afterwards. What a bright, happy little boy—I loved my darling too much and now there is nothing. He was buried yesterday. I cannot reconcile the two Petyas, the living and the dead; they are both precious to me, but what does the living Petya, so bright and affectionate, have in common with the dead one, so cold and still and serious? He loved me very much—I wonder if it hurt him too to leave me.