Tolstoy’s Pacifism By Colm McKeogh

religious developments. He increasingly withdrew from society, but she did not. He quit hunting in the 1880s and adopted a vegetarian diet, a move she resented as it required her to prepare two menus each day. She accused him of hypocrisy in professing love for all humankind but denying it to his wife and family in practice, complaining of his lack of demonstrative affection for her or the children. “You used to be worried because you had no faith,” Sofya asked very pertinently of her husband in 1880, “why aren't you happy now that you have it?” ⁵⁵ In 1882 she lamented: “My love weighs me down but it only irritates him. He is filled with his Christian ideals of self-perfection.” ⁵⁶

Convinced that what mattered for Christians was what they did, rather than what they believed or preached, he was deeply unhappy because of the continuing disparity between his principles and his lifestyle. The more he tried to live a Christian life of simplicity, peace, and poverty, the more tempestuous, quarrelsome, and fractious his relations with his wife became. It seemed to Tolstoy that everything he stood for, she opposed. She lived for her children, he for the truth. She successfully urged a move to Moscow to further the children's education and introduction to society. To him, she was thereby ensuring their corruption. Tolstoy's comment on the marriage in 1884 was blunt: “Living with a woman who is a stranger to your soul is horrible!” ⁵⁷ The greatest conflict between the couple concerned property. His ideals led him to seek to divest himself of possessions (including copyrights), but her refusal to jeopardize her children's material well-being led her to fight him. The outcome was that his desire to relinquish his property led only to its being given to his wife and children. Tolstoy divested himself of his property in 1891, Yasnaya Polyana becoming the property of his wife and his second son, Ivan (upon Ivan's death in 1895, his share was divided among his brothers and Sofya). ⁵⁸ Tolstoy's solution to his ethical predicament merely increased his wife's duties greatly, as she now bore the onerous responsibilities of husband, home, children, and property, and also continued to protect and promote his literary output to the fullest extent. She copied out all his writings by hand (the draft of War and Peace no less than seven times), preserved his manuscripts and letters, published his new works,