Tolstoy’s Pacifism By Colm McKeogh

teacher's certificate the year before. Sofya and Tolstoy first met when she was eleven or twelve and his Childhood was already her favorite book. Awed by Tolstoy's talent and fame, she waited on him at the table, learned passages of his works by heart, and afterward tied a ribbon to the chair on which he had sat. ²⁷ Her father was a Moscow physician; her mother, three years older than Tolstoy, had been a childhood sweetheart of his brother Nikolai; her maternal grandfather had caroused and gambled with Leo on more than one occasion. ²⁸ Tolstoy's thoughts were filled by Sofya in a way they had never been by any other woman, though her youth and beauty made him feel old and ugly: “I am in love as I did not believe it possible to be. I am insane, I shall put a bullet through my head if this goes on much longer.” ²⁹ Tolstoy was in love not only with Sofya but with her family; to the orphan they seemed the ideal of a complete and happy family. If, as is said, he borrowed from them for the Rostov family scenes in War and Peace, then one can feel some of the attraction they held for him. The wedding, in the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin in the Kremlin, came eight days after the proposal of marriage, which itself was preceded by a relationship of only one month's duration, and comprised flirtatious conversation and sitting silently together in the company of others. As one of his biographers points out, they were “not even sufficiently well-acquainted to know whether they liked one another.” ³⁰ But that was not the worst of it. So that there would be no secrets in the marriage, Tolstoy gave his diaries to Sofya before the ceremony. The frank record of twenty years of debauchery, vice, and self-denunciation shocked the young woman deeply: “How stricken I was by those pages he insisted, in his excessive honesty, that I read before we were married! Wasted honesty! I shed many tears over that look into his past.” ³¹ It provoked jealousy too, most acutely when she discovered on her arrival at Yasnaya Polyana that the peasant mother of Leo's illegitimate child was still employed in the house. The revelations of the diaries created difficulties in the early days of the marriage and also led to an expectation of unrestricted access to her husband's diaries and private papers, a source of tension in the marriage in later decades.

The marriage started well; “I've lived to the age of thirty-four and I didn't know it was possible to be so much in love and so happy…I feel