3 January, Moscow Only today has my toothache begun to ease up a bit. She talks about jealousy: one must respect people – I’m sure that it’s just talk, but one is constantly afraid. The epic manner is becoming the only natural one for me. Polivanov’s presence is disagreeable to me: I must put up with him as best I can. We’re alone in Moscow; I must faire des avances [make approaches]; but then suddenly there will be unhappiness and worse, whereas now it’s so good. She kissed me while I was writing. I felt it was in earnest; I looked round and she was crying. Tatyana is getting on my nerves. I’m astonished that I don’t need anybody; solitude surprises me, but doesn’t inhibit me; but to her it always seems that time is passing in vain.
5 January Family happiness completely absorbs me, and it’s impossible to do anything. I must do something about the journal. It often occurs to me that happiness and all its special attributes are vanishing, and nobody knows it or will know it, and that such a thing never existed and never will exist for anybody, and yet I am conscious of it. I don’t like Polikushka.1 I read it at the Behrs’. I love her when I wake up at night or in the morning and see her – she looks at me and loves me. And no one – least of all I – prevents her from loving the way she knows, her own way. I love it when she sits close to me and we know that we love each other as much as we can, and she says: ‘Lyovochka’, and stops – ‘why are the pipes in the stove so straight?’, or ‘why do horses live such a long time?’ etc. I love it when we are alone for a long time and I say: ‘What are we to do, Sonya, what are we to do?’ And she laughs. I love it when she is angry with me and suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, her thoughts and words are sometimes harsh: ‘Leave me, I’m tired of you’; and a minute later she’s already smiling timidly at me again. I love it when she doesn’t see me and doesn’t know I’m there, and I love her in my own way. I love it when she is a girl in a yellow dress and sticks out her lower jaw and tongue; I love it when I see her head thrown back and her serious and frightened and childlike and passionate face; I love it when …
8 January In the morning – her clothes. She challenged me to object to them, and I did object, and said so – tears and vulgar explanations. Sasha Kuzminsky2 is a nice young man, but he’s in a bad situation; too weak, too young, and surrounded by temptations. We patched things up somehow. I’m always dissatisfied with myself on these occasions, especially with the kisses – they are false patches. […] Over dinner the patch came off; tears and hysterics. The best indication that I love her is that I wasn’t angry, but I was depressed, terribly depressed, and sad. I went away to forget and to amuse myself. Aksakov is just the same self-satisfied upright hero with an eloquent mind. Stupid, consumptive Rayevsky. At home I felt depressed with her. I suppose a great deal has boiled up inside me unnoticed; I feel that she is depressed, but I’m more depressed still, and I can’t say anything to her – there’s nothing to say. I’m just cold, and I clutch at any work with ardour. She will stop loving me. I’m almost certain of that. The one thing that can save me is if she doesn’t fall in love with someone else, and that won’t be my doing. She says I’m kind. I don’t like to hear it; it’s just for that reason that she will stop loving me. […]
15 January, Moscow A new diary: but there’s nothing new. I’m still the same. I’m often just as dissatisfied with myself, and just as firmly believe in myself and expect things of myself … If only I were not happy! All the conditions for happiness have come together for me. Often the only thing missing (all this time) is the awareness that I’ve done everything that I ought to have done in order to enjoy to the full what has been given me, and to repay others, the whole world, by my work for what they have given me.
Got up late; we’re on friendly terms. The last squabble has left some small (imperceptible) traces – or perhaps time has. Every such squabble, however trivial, is a scar on love. A momentary feeling of passion, vexation, self-love or pride will pass, but a scar, however small, will remain for ever on the best thing that exists in the world – love. I shall know this and guard our happiness, and you know it too. Corrected some proofs. […] At home I suddenly snarled at Sonya because she wouldn’t leave me alone, and I felt ashamed and frightened. At dinner we were in good spirits. Mamma. Tanya – the charm of naiveté, egoism and sensibility. […]
23 January Somebody told me quite truly that I’m wrong not to use the time for writing. It’s a long time since I can remember such a strong desire – and a calm, self-assured desire – to write. I have no subjects, that is no one specially asking to be written, but, mistakes or not, I think I could take any subject. The type of Westerner-professor who has acquired for himself by assiduous work in his youth a certificate entitling him to intellectual idleness and stupidity comes to mind in various aspects, as opposed to the man who has retained to maturity his boldness of thought and the indivisibility of thought, feeling and action.3 And another situation: the love of a husband, which makes strict demands on itself, all-absorbing and becoming the business of his whole life, in conflict with the attractions of the waltz, outward glitter, vanity and the poetry of the moment. Polenka Sachs and perhaps the present drama Sin and misfortune.4 I’ve never experienced a stronger impression, or one so unspoiled by a single false note. Corrected the proofs of The Cossacks – it’s terribly weak. Probably for that reason the public will be pleased with it. I’ve been feverish and idle all the time, and weighed down by it. Relations with my wife are the best possible. The ebbs and flows don’t surprise me or frighten me. From time to time, including today, I still have the fear that she’s young and can’t understand or love much in me, and that she suppresses much in herself for my sake, and instinctively debits all these sacrifices to my account. Today was a day of activity; I went to Auntie’s and the Gorchakovs’ (Hélène is wonderful) and Fet’s (he has a wife too). The main change in me during this time is that I’m beginning to love people in moderation. Before it was all or nothing, but now love’s real place is occupied, and relations are simpler. Friends at the theatre. I was glad they all liked her.
25 January Morning. Yesterday we had a quarrel, allegedly over the big room but really because we [one indecipherable word] and because we are both idle. I used to think before, and now as a married man I’m more than ever convinced that in life, in all human relationships, the basis of everything is work – feelings in action – and reasoning and thought not only do not govern feelings and actions, but masquerade as feelings. Even circumstances don’t govern feelings, but feelings govern circumstances, i.e. provide a choice from among thousands of facts …
8 February, Yasnaya Polyana We’re at Yasnaya. Islenyev and Seryozha interrupted us, but still I feel so well, so well; I love her so. The estate and the affairs of the journal are in good shape. Only the students are a burden because of the unnaturalness of our relations and their involuntary envy, for which I don’t reproach them. How clear it all is to me now. It was the passion of youth – a farce almost – which I can’t go on with now that I’m grown up. She is everything. She doesn’t know and couldn’t understand how she is transforming me – incomparably more so than I her. Only not consciously. Consciously both she and I are powerless.
On the journey it occurred to me that the discovery of laws in science is only the discovery of a new method of looking at things whereby what was previously wrong seems right and logical, as a result of which (this new view of things) other aspects become more obscure. I understand that iron is cold and a fur coat warm, that the sun rises and sets, the body dies and the soul is immortal. From the new point of view I must forget about fur coats and iron and not understand what a fur coat or iron is, but see atoms attracting and repelling and so disposed that they become good and bad conductors of something called heat, or must forget that the sun still rises and sets, forget the dawn and the clouds, and imagine to myself that the earth moves and I with it. (I can explain a lot along certain lines by such a view, but this view is not the truth, it is one-sided.) For chemistry still more so. Either I have to forget that I have a soul and a body, or I have to remember that I have a body with nerves. For medicine it’s been a success, for psychology the opposite.
23 February Sent off my article5 – it’s good, although careless. I’ve started writing.6 It won’t do. I’ve been looking through my papers – a swarm of thoughts, and a return, or an attempt at a return, to lyricism. That’s good. I can’t write, it seems, without a set idea and without passion. Les Misérables7 – powerful. […]
1 March […] We recently began to feel that our happiness is frightening. Death – and that’s the end of it all. Can it really be the end? God. We prayed. I wanted to feel that happiness is not chance, but My destiny.
3 March Twice we almost quarrelled in the evening. Almost. Today she feels bored and hemmed in. The foolish seek the storm – the young, but not the foolish. I’m afraid of this mood more than anything in the world. I’ve been absorbed in the estate the whole day. I can’t get on with The Gelding8 – it’s false. But I can’t change it. Everything, everything that people do, they do in accordance with the demands of nature as a whole. Only the mind fabricates for each act its own imaginary causes, which in the case of one man it calls convictions – faith – and in the case of peoples (in history) ideas. This is one of the oldest and most harmful mistakes. The mind’s game of chess goes on independently of life, and life of it. The only influence is the mould that human nature receives from such an exercise. One can only be educated physically. Mathematics is physical education. So-called self-sacrifice and virtue are only the satisfaction of one morbidly developed propensity. The ideal is harmony. Only art feels this. And only that is real which takes as its motto: there are no guilty people in the world. He who is happy is right! The self-sacrificing person is more blind and cruel than the others. Everything is going wrong in The Gelding except for the coachman who is whipped and the galloping of the horses.
24 March I love her still more and more. Today is the seventh month, and I’m experiencing a feeling which I haven’t experienced for a long time, not since the beginning – a feeling of nothingness compared to her. She is so impossibly pure and good and chaste for me. At moments like this I feel that I don’t possess her, despite the fact that she gives herself completely to me. I don’t possess her because I don’t dare, I don’t feel myself worthy. I’m nervously irritable and so not fully happy. Something torments me. Jealousy of the man who could be fully worthy of her. I’m not worthy.
1 April I sat in Auntie’s room today; she was asleep. I began to recall an earlier conversation with Serdobolsky; Easter is quite different this year, with tedious plans for the estate, and I began to detest myself. I’m a dissolute egoist. But I’m happy. I must work on myself here and now. Not much is needed to consolidate this happiness. (1) order, (2) activity, (3) resoluteness, (4) perseverance, (5) desiring good and doing good to everyone. I’ll keep an eye on myself in these respects.
2 June This whole time has been for me a depressing time of physical sleep and – whether for that reason or independently – moral sleep too, depressing and without hope. I’ve been thinking that I have no strong interests or passions (how is that possible? And why?). I’ve been thinking that I’m getting old and dying; thinking that it’s terrible that I don’t love anything. I’ve been horrified at myself and the fact that my interests are money or vulgar prosperity. It’s been a periodic sleep. I think I’ve woken up now. I love her, and the future, and myself and my life. You can’t go back on what has happened. What seems weakness may be the source of strength. I’m reading Goethe, and thoughts are swarming in my head.
18 June Where am I, the I whom I knew and loved, who will sometimes come to the surface and gladden me and frighten me? I’m puny and insignificant. And I’ve been like that since I married the woman I love. Everything written in this book is almost a lie – deceitfulness. The thought that she is here reading over my shoulder detracts from and mars the truth of what I write. Today her evident pleasure at talking and attracting Erlenwein’s attention9 and an insane night suddenly raised me to my old heights of truth and power. You have only to read this and say: ‘yes, I know – jealousy’ – and to comfort me again, and to do something else to comfort me, in order to throw me back again into all the triviality of life which I’ve hated since I was young. And I’ve been living in it for nine months. It’s terrible. I’m a gambler and a drunkard. In the intoxication of estate management I’ve ruined nine irretrievable months which could have been the best of my life, but which I made almost the worst. What do I need? To live happily – i.e. to be loved by her and myself; but all this time I’ve hated myself. How many times have I written: ‘Today it’s all over.’ I won’t write it now. My God, help me. Let me always live in this awareness of Thee and of my own strength. An insane night. I’m looking for some way to hurt you, against my will. This is bad and will pass, but don’t be angry, I can’t help loving you.
I must add something for her – she will read it; I won’t write anything for her that is untrue, but, from a choice of many things, something I wouldn’t have written for myself alone. The fact that she might like another man, and a very insignificant one, is understandable to me, and ought not to seem unjust to me, however intolerable it is, because for these last nine months I have been the most insignificant, weak, absurd and trivial man myself.
Today the moon raised me upwards, but how, nobody knows. Not for nothing did I think today that the same law of gravity which attracts matter to earth also exists for what we call the spirit, attracting it to the spiritual sun. A bee only flies in the sun. The queen bee works and fertilises eggs in the dark, and mates and plays (we call it idleness) in the sun. I’ll write tomorrow.
I’m sitting down to write again for the third time. It’s awful, terrible and absurd to link one’s happiness with material conditions – a wife, children, health, wealth. The holy fool is right. One can have a wife, children, health, etc. but that’s not the point. Lord have mercy and help me.
5 August I’m writing now, not for myself alone as formerly, and not for the two of us as recently, but for him.10 On 27 June during the night we were both particularly disturbed. She had stomach-ache and was tossing about, but we thought it was the result of eating berries. In the morning she became worse and at 5 o’clock we woke up, having decided the previous evening that I should go to meet our people. She was in her dressing-gown, feverish and crying out; then it passed and she smiled and said: ‘it’s all right’. I sent for Anna, more in order to do what I could, but I didn’t believe it was necessary. I was both anxious and calm, occupied with trivialities as one is before a battle or at the moment of approaching death. I was annoyed with myself for feeling so little. I wanted to go to Tula and do everything as properly as possible.
I travelled with Tanya and Sasha, and we felt somehow unnatural. I was calm and didn’t want to let myself be so. In Tula I found it strange that Kopylov wanted to talk about politics as usual, and the chemists were sealing up their little boxes. We set off with Marya Ivanovna (Seryozha’s midwife). We drove up home and there was no one to be seen. Auntie, who at first hadn’t wanted me to go and was afraid, came out to meet me distraught, animated, frightened, but with kindly eyes. ‘How are things?’ – ‘How good that you’ve come, mon cher. The pangs have begun.’ I went in. The darling, how beautiful she was with her expression of seriousness, honesty, strength and emotion. She was wearing a dressing-gown which was open, and a little embroidered jacket; her black hair was untidy – with a feverish, blotchy red face and big burning eyes she walked about and looked at me. ‘Have you brought them?’ ‘Yes. How are things?’ ‘Terribly fierce pangs. Anna Petrovna isn’t here, but Aksinya is.’ She kissed me simply and calmly. While people were swarming about, the pangs started again. She seized hold of me. I kissed her as I had done in the morning, but she wasn’t thinking about me, and there was something serious and stern about her. Marya Ivanovna went into the bedroom with her and came out. ‘Labour has begun,’ she said softly and solemnly and with concealed joy, like an actor taking a benefit when the curtain has gone up. She kept walking up and down, pottering about round the cupboards, getting things ready and then sitting down for a bit, and there was the same calm and solemn glow in her eyes. There were a few more pangs, and each time I held her and felt her body trembling, stretching and contracting; and the impression her body made on me was quite, quite different from previously, both before and during our marriage. In between times I ran about, arranging for the sofa on which I was born to be moved into her room, etc., and I still had the same feeling of indifference, reproachfulness because of it and irritation. I wanted to think out and do everything as quickly, thoroughly and as well as possible. They laid her down and she herself began to think of … (I haven’t finished this and I can’t write any more about this present agony).
Her character gets worse each day; I can recognise both Polenka and Mashenka in her,11 with her grumbling and spiteful taunts. It’s true this usually happens when she is not so well, but her unfairness and quiet egoism frighten and torment me. She has heard from someone and got it firmly in her head that husbands don’t love sick wives, and as a result has consoled herself with the belief that she is right. Or else she never loved me, but was deceiving herself. I’ve looked through her diary – suppressed anger with me glows beneath words of tenderness. It’s often the same in real life. If this is so, and it’s all a mistake on her part – it’s terrible. To give up everything – not a dissipated bachelor’s life at Dusseau’s and mistresses like other married men, but the poetry of love and ideas and work for the people – and to exchange it all for the poetry of the family hearth, and egoism in what concerns everything except one’s own family; and in place of everything to get all the worries of a tavern, worry about baby powder and preserves, as well as grumbling, and without anything that brightens up family life, without love and without a peaceful and proud family happiness, but only outbursts of tenderness, kisses, etc.! I’m terribly depressed, I still don’t believe it, but then I wouldn’t be ill, wouldn’t be distraught all day – quite the contrary.
In the morning I come in happy and in good spirits, and see the Countess who is in a bad temper and whose hair is being combed by her maid Dushka, and I think of Mashenka when times were bad for her, and everything goes to pieces, and like someone possessed I’m afraid of everything, and I can see that only in a place where I am alone do I feel well and in a poetic mood. I get kisses, tender from habit, and then the nagging begins at Dushka, Auntie, Tanya, me and everybody, and I can’t endure it calmly because it’s all not simply bad, but terrible, in comparison with what I desire. I don’t know what I wouldn’t do for the sake of our happiness, but people will contrive to sully and demean our relations and allege that I grudge giving away a horse or a peach. There’s no point in explaining. There’s nothing to explain … But the slightest glimmer of understanding and feeling, and I’m completely happy again, and believe that she understands things the way I do. People believe what they earnestly desire. And I’m pleased that it’s only I who suffers agony. Like Mashenka, she has the same trait of morbid and capricious self-assurance and submission to what she imagines to be her unhappy fate.
It’s already one o’clock in the morning and I can’t sleep, still less go and sleep in her room, with the feeling that oppresses me; for when someone can hear her she will groan, but now she is snoring peacefully. And she will wake up in the full assurance that I’m unjust and that she is the unfortunate victim of my fickle whims – about feeding and looking after the baby.12 Even her father is of the same opinion. I haven’t given her my diary to read, but I’m not writing everything in it. The most terrible thing is that I must say nothing and sulk, however much I hate and despise the condition. To talk to her now is impossible, but perhaps all could still be explained. No, she never loved me and doesn’t love me. I don’t feel so sorry about it now, but why did I have to be so cruelly deceived?
6 October All that is over now and it was all untrue. I’m happy with her: but I’m terribly dissatisfied with myself. I’m sliding, sliding down the hill of death, and hardly feel I have the strength to stop. But I don’t want death, I want and love immortality. I don’t have to choose. The choice has been made long ago. Literature – art, pedagogy and the family. Inconsistency, timidity, laziness, weakness – these are my enemies.
1 The story he had begun in Brussels.
2 A cousin of the Behrs sisters, who later married Tatyana.
3 Believed to be the germ of the idea of the Koznyshov–Levin relationship in Anna Karenina.
4 Druzhinin’s story and Ostrovsky’s drama respectively. Tolstoy had just seen the Ostrovsky play a day or two before.
5 Progress and the Definition of Education, published in the final issue of Yasnaya Polyana.
6 Probably Strider.
7 Hugo’s novel was the one work which Tolstoy claims to have made an ‘enormous’ impression on him between the ages of thirty-five and fifty.
8 The original title of Strider.
9 A teacher at the school in Baburino. Sonya refers to her husband’s jealousy of him in her autobiography.
10 Tolstoy’s eldest son was born on 28 June 1863.
11 Pelageya Yushkova, Tolstoy’s guardian in Kazan, and his sister Marya Nikolayevna.
12 A reference to Tolstoy’s disapproval of his wife’s refusal, because of mastitis, to feed her baby herself.