Tolstoy’s Pacifism By Colm McKeogh

continually as though I've stolen an undeserved, illicit happiness that wasn't meant for me. There she is walking about and I can hear her, and it's so good.” ³² They wanted many children and she was to bear him thirteen, of whom nine survived. Admiring her husband greatly as a writer, Sofya sought to assist him in every way, transcribing his corrected manuscripts into new fair copies, discussing his writings with him, keeping him free from distractions, and running a large household. (Following the sale and removal of the central thirty-two-room wooden house, what remained at Yasnaya Polyana were two stone buildings that used to stand on either side of it; it was in one of these that the Tolstoys lived, adding to it as their family grew). Visitors in those early years were struck by the evident happiness of the newlyweds. He passed the 1860s bound up in family life and in writing War and Peace. Tolstoy welcomed the “moderation, duty, and moral tranquility” that came with family life and responsibilities. Describing himself as “not yet a Christian, and… still far from being one,”) he felt aware of himself and of his soul as never before, and believed in God. ³³ In his search for meaning in life, neither nonviolence nor vegetarianism yet played a part, commenting to a relative in 1865 that “it's a matter of complete indifference to me who suppresses the Poles…Butchers kill the oxen we eat, but I'm not obliged to accuse them or sympathize with them.” ³⁴ Writing became the means to express his desperate desire for meaning in life but not to satiate it. He had always felt acutely the pain of his human existence, knowing the time of his life was limited but seeing no meaning or purpose to it. In 1869 he completed War and Peace which placed him at the peak of nineteenth-century novel writing, a status confirmed by Anna Karenina in 1877. His great novels had established his fame and yet, by the end of the 1870s, he was closer to the abyss of despair than ever before.