The Diary of Tolstoy's Wife—II By arrangement with Victor GoRana

Ltd., who will publish the complete book on November 20th, we are able to print a series of extracts from " The Diary of Tolstoy's Wife," which have been translated by Alexander Werth. The Russian text first appeared at Moscow in September of this year, and the information it contained has not previously been made public. Last week we published entries from a retrospective account of her engagement in 1862, when Tolstoy was thirty-four years old. This week we are publishing further extracts from the account of her marriage and entries, written between 1870 and 1881, relating to " Anna Karenina," and to Tolstay's religious awakening.

On September 14th, 1862, Lev Nikolaevich (Tolstoy) said that he had something very important to tell me, but he didn't have time to say what it was. It was easy enough to guess. He spoke to me at great length during that evening. I played the piano in the drawing-room, while he, leaning heavily on the mantel-piece, kept saying each time I stopped : " Go on, go on ! " The music prevented the others from hearing what he was saying, and my hands trembled with excitement and my fingers strinvided over the keys as I played for the tenth time the same tune from the Bacio waltz. I had learned it by heart in older to accompany Tanya's singing.

Lev Niiipevich didn't propose that evening, and I don't remember very clearly what he said. Briefly, however, it amounted to this—that he loved me and wanted to marry me.

About that time he wrote in his diary : " September 12th, 1862.—I did not believe I could ever be as much in love as I am. I'll go mad, I'll kill myself, if this goes on much longer. They had a party. She was fascinating in every respect.

" September 13th, 1862.—I'll tell her everything first thing to-morrow morning—or else shoot myself. It's past 3 a.m. I have written her a letter which I'll hand to her to-morrow- or, rather, to-day, the 14th. God, how afraid I am to die! Sueh great happiness is incredible ! Good God, help me ! "

The 15th went past, and on Saturday, September lath, the cadets arrived—Sasha and his pals. We had tea in the dining-room, and were busy feeding the starving cadets. Lev Nikolaevich had spent the whole day with us ; and at last choosing a moment when no one was watching, he called ne into my mother's room, which was empty at the time.

" I wanted to speak to you," he said, " but I couldn't do it. here is a letter which I have now been carrying in my pocket for several days. Read it. I shall wait here for your answer."

I seized the letter and rushed downstairs into the girls' room, which the three of us shared. Here is the letter :

" Sophie Andreyevna, it is becoming unbearable. For three weeks I've been saying to myself : I shall tell her now,' and yet I continue to go away with the same feeling of sadness, regret, terror, and happiness in my heart. Every night I go over the past and curse myself for not having spoken to you, and wonder what I would have said if I had spoken. I am taking this letter with me, in order to hand it to you should my courage fail me again. Your family have the false notion, 1 believe, that I am in love with Lisa. This is quite wrong. Your story has clung to my mind because, after reading it, I have come to the conclusion that Prince Dublitsky ' has no right to think of happiness, that your poetic view of love is different . . . that I am not jealous, and must not be jealous, of the man you will love. I thought I could love you all like children. I wrote at Ivitsy, Your presence reminds me too vividly of my old age '—your presence in Particular. But then, as now, I was lying to myself. At Ivitsy I might still have been able to break away and to return to my hermitage, back to my solitary work and my absorbing labours. Now I can't do anything ; I feel I have created a disturbance in your home, and that your friendship for me, as a good, honourable man, has also been spoiled. I dare not leave, and I dare not stay. You are a candid, honest girl ; with your hand on your heart, and without hurrying (for .God's sake, don't hurry 1), tell me what to do, I would have laughed myself sick a month ago if I had been told that I would suffer, suffer joyfully, as I have been doing for this past month. Tell me, with all the candour that is yours Will you be My wife ? If you can say yes, boldly, with all your •

heart, then say it ; but if you have the faintest shadow of doubt,- say no. For heaven's sake, think it over carefully. I am terrified to think of a no, but I am prepared for it and will be strong enough to bear it. But it will be terrible if I am not loved by my wife as much as I love you ! "

I didn't read the letter carefully, I merely skipped over it till I reached the words, " Will you be my wife ? " I was going to return upstairs and say yes to Lev Nikolaevich, when I ran into Lisa, who asked me : " Well ? "

" Le eomte m'a fait la proposition," I answered quickly. Mother came in then, and realized at once what had happened. She took me firmly by the shoulders and, turning my face to the door, she said, " Go and give him your answer."

I flew up the stairs, as light as a feather, and, rushing past the dining-room and drawing-room, I flew into my mother's bedroom. Lev Nikolaevich stood in the corner, leaning against the wall, waiting for me. I went up to him, and he took me by both hands.

" Well ? " he asked.

" Of course—yes," I replied.

A few minutes later everybody in the house knew what had happened, and began to congratulate us.

* * * * My engagement lasted for only a week—from September 16th to September 23rd. During that time I was taken round shops, where, with a feeling of complete indifference, I tried on dresses, linen, hats, and bonnets. Lev Nikolaevich kept coming daily, and once brought me his diaries to read. These diaries, which he made me read, before our wedding, out of an excessive sense of duty, upset me very much. He shouldn't have done it ; it made me cry as I looked into his past.

* * * * At last the wedding day came. I didn't see Lev Nikolae- vich all that day. He only dropped in for a minute, and as we sat down on the ready-packed luggage, he began to torture me with questions and doubts about my love for him. It even occurred to me that he might want to run away, having suddenly got frightened at the last moment. I began to weep. Mother came in and pounced on Lev Nikolaevich. " You've chosen a fine time for upsetting her," she said ; " to-day is her wedding day, and it's all very tiring, especially with the long journey in front of her ; and there she is now, crying." This, evidently, made Lev Nikolaevich feel uncomfortable. He soon went away.

The only near relation of his who attended the wedding was his aunt, Pelageya Ilyinishna Yushkov. She drove to the church in my carriage, with me and little Volodya, who carried the ikon.

After six, my sisters and girl friends began to dress me- I asked them not to call for a hairdresser, and did my hair myself, while the girls helped me to pin on the flowers and the long tulle veil. The dress was tulle, too, as the fashion of the time demanded ; very open in front and with frills at the sleeves. The whole thing was so thin and airy, and seemed to envelop me like a cloud. My slender, girlish arms and hands looked bony and pitiful. At last I was ready, and we began to wait for the best man, who would come to announce that the bridegroom was in the church. But an hour passed, and still no one had arrived. The thought shot through my head that he had run away ; he had behaved so strangely in the morning. Suddenly, instead of the best man, Lev Nikolaevich's valet, the squint-eyed little Alexey Stepanovich, came rushing along, in a state of great excitement, and asked us to hurry up and open the portmanteau and take out a clean shirt. In the heat of excitement, when they were packing up the luggage, they had forgotted to leave out a shirt for the wedding ! They had sent someone round to buy one, but it was Sunday and all the shops were closed. Before everything was right, another hour or so elapsed. But at last the best man arrived announcing that the bridegroom was at the church. Then there was no end to the tears and sobs of all the women around me, and all this upset me com- pletely.

We drove in solemn silence to the church, which wasn't a stone's-throw away from our house. I was weeping all the way. The winter garden and the Church of the Birth of the Holy Virgin were splendidly lit up. Lev Nikolaevich

met me in the palace garden, and, taking me by the hand, led me to the altar. The palace choir were singing, the service was conducted by two priests, and everything was very elegant and magnificent. All the guests had already assembled in the church, and there were also many strangers, mostly servants, from the palace. The public kept passing remarks about my extreme youth and the redness of my eyes.

The marriage ceremony has been splendidly described in Anna Karenina. In his account of Levin's and Kitty's wedding, Lev Nikolaevieh has not only given a vivid and brilliant picture of the ceremony, but has also described the whole psychological process in the bridegroom's mind. As for myself, I had lived through so much excitement during the last few days that, standing at the altar, I felt and experienced absolutely nothing. It seemed to me that something obvious, natural, and inevitable was happening—nothing more. I felt that all this had to be, and that it was useless to question it.

* * * * The following excerpts are taken from Reference in. Tolstoy's literary work the origin of Anna Karenina.

* * * VARIOUS ENTRIES FOR FUTURE * October 4th, 1873.

L. began Anna Karenina last spring, and outlined its whole plan at the same time. During the entire summer, which we spent in the Samara region, L. did no writing, but now he is busy once again correcting, polishing, and going on with the novel. Kramskoy is painting two portraits of L., and this rather interferes with the work. But, on the other hand, they have daily talks and discussions on art.

November 20th, 1876. L. N. has just been telling me how the ideas for his novel come to him : " I was sitting alone in my study and looking at the fine white silk embroidery on the sleeve of my dressing-gown. This made me wonder how people came to think of all this sewing and stitching and embroidery, and I realized that it represented a whole world of women's daily cares and interests ; that it must all be very fascinating and that it was no wonder that women went in for it. And my thoughts naturally turned to Anna Karenina, and in the end this bit of embroidery on my sleeve suggested a whole chapter to me. Anna is cut off from this joyful side of a woman's existence, for she is alone, abandoned by all women, and she has no one to talk to about a subject of such universal, everyday interest to women." All autumn he used to say : My brain is asleep "; but suddenly, about a week ago, something within him seemed to have burst forth into blossom : he sterted to work cheerfully and is thoroughly satisfied with his energy and work. This morning, before even taking his coffee, he sat down to write and went on for more than an hour, and altered the chapter on Alexander Alexandrovich's relation to Lydia Ivanovna, and the one on Anna's arrival in St. Petersburg.

November 21st, 1876.

He came up to me and said : It's so dull writing this."

Writing what ? " I asked. " Well, I have said that Vronsky and Anna were staying at the same room at the hotel, and that's impossible. On their arrival in Petersburg they simply must take rooms on different floors. As a result, it is going to be very difficult to arrange all the scenes with the persons who call to see them. The whole, thing will have to be hanged."

March 3rd, 1877. L. N. went up to his table yesterday, and, pointing at the manuscript, said " I wish I could have this finished soon " Notes for Future and the story of (1870-1881).

Last night he said that he had conceived the character of a married woman of high rank but who had lost her balance. He said that he would try to make this woman pitiable and blameless, and that no sooner had he imagined her clearly than he also visualized all the other male and female characters of the story whom he had thought of before. " Now I can see everything clearly," he said. He intends making an estate mana- ger of the educated peasant, whom he had thought out before.

" I am being accused of fatalism," he said, " and yet there is no more religious man than myself. Fatalism is an excuse for doing evil, while I believe in God and in the saying of the Gospel that even the very hairs of your head are all numbered, and that everything is predestined." * REFERENCE (i.e., Anna Karenina), so that I could start on something new. My idea is perfectly clear now; A work can only be good if one loves its fundamental, central idea. Thus, in Anna Karenina, I love the idea of the family, in War and Peace, in view of the war of 1812, the idea of the people ; the central idea of my new book will be the power of expansion of the Russian people." He sees an expression of this in the constant migration of Russians to new lands in the south-east, in Southern Siberia, in the Belaya River region, in Turkestan, &c.

We have a neighbour called A. N. Bibikov, a man of about fifty, who is neither rich nor very educated. A distant relative of his late wife was staying in his house, a woman of about thirty-five, who took care of the household and was his mistress. One day Bibikov got a new governess, a beautiful German woman, for his son and nephew. Before very long he fell in love, and proposed to her. His former mistress, whose name was Anna Stepanovna, went to Tula for the 'day, as if to visit her mother, but returned with a bundle of clothes to Yasenki, the nearest railway station, and there threw herself under a goods train. A post-mortem was held, which Lev Nikolaevieh attended. He saw her there, lying in the Yasenka barrack, with her skull dissected and her naked body terribly mangled. The effect on his mind was terrible. Anna Stepanovna was a tall, heavily built woman, with a Russian character and Russian features, dark hair and grey eyes, and, though not beautiful, a very pleasant woman.

January 31st, 1881.

Until about 1877 L. N. was more or less indifferent to religion. He was never an absolute unbeliever, but he did not have any very definite faith. This tortured him greatly —indeed, he wrote his religious confession at the beginning of his new work.

Having come into close contact with the people, with pilgrims, and with " holy men," he became deeply impressed by their strong, lucid, and unassailable faith. He grew terrified at his own lack of faith, and suddenly, with all his heart, he decided to follow the path of these people. He began to go to Mass, to eat lenten food, to pray, and to carry. out all the commands of the Church. This went on for quite a long time.

But L. N. soon came to realize that the teaching of the Church was not the source of all the love, goodness, and patience that he had observed in the people ; he said that, having seen the rays, he had followed these to their source, and had found that this source of light was not the Church, but Christianity itself, as taught in the Gospels. He firmly denies any other influence. I have taken all this down from his own words.

He also said : " Christianity lives in the spirit and in the legends of the people, unconsciously but steadfastly."

Little by little L. N. realized to his horror the great disparity between the Church and Christianity. He saw that, hand in hand with the Government, the Church had built up a conspiracy against Christianity. The Church thanks God for the slaughter of men and rejoices in military victories, and yet the Old Testament says : " Thou shalt not kill," and the Gospel : " Love thy neighbour as thyself." The Church approves of the oath, while Christ spoke against it. The Church created ritual, with which people are told to save themselves, and has put a check on Christianity ; the doctrine of the kingdom of God on earth has been obscured by the fact that the people have been made to believe in complete salvation through such things as baptism, communion, and fasting.

This is L. N.'s central idea at present. He has begun to

study the Gospel and to translate and interpret it. This work has now been going on for two years and he must be about half-way through it by now. He has become, as he says, " happy in the soul." He has seen what he calls the light. His whole view of life has been illuminated by it. As for his relation to people, he now says that he used to have a small circle of his own intimate people, but that now all the millions of mankind have become his brothers. Before he had his own wealth and estates, but now if a poor man asks for anything it must be given to him.

(A further extract from the diaries of Countess Tolstoy Will appear next week and in the two following weeks.)