Chapter 10 Eight

During this transitional period, Tolstoy's genius was groping, doubting himself, and seemed to be getting impatient, "without strong desires, without the will to dominate everything", such as Nekhliud in "The Diary of a Counter" Like a husband and prince, but during this period produced a pure work he had never had before: "The Happiness of Conjugal Love" (1859).Complete Works Volume Five.This is the miracle of love. He had been friendly with the Biels family over the years.He loved four of them, mother and daughter, in turn.As a child, in a jealous quarrel, he pushed his playmate, the future Mrs. Biers, then only nine years old, off a balcony, so that she was for a long time crippled.Then he finally fell in love with the second girl for sure.But he dared not admit it.Sophia Andreyevna Biels was still a child: she was only seventeen; Teenage life combined.He endured it for three years.See Sergey's confession in "Happiness Between Couples": "Suppose a gentleman A, an old man who has lived a considerable life, and a woman B, young, neither knows men nor life. Due to various family environment, he loves her like a daughter, and thinks he can’t love her in another way..." Later, he tells how he confessed his love to Sophia Biles and how she answered him ,—Two people with a piece of lead powder, on a table traced the first letter of the words they dare not say.Like Levin in the novel, his extreme frankness made him show his fiancée a glance, making her fully understand all the shameful things in his past; excruciating pain.On September 23, 1862, they were married.

But in the past three years, when writing "Happiness Between Couples", this marriage has been completed in the poet's mind.In this work, perhaps, he added some reminiscences; he wrote an unfinished love story in Yasnaya in 1856, in which he described a girl who was very different from himself, very frivolous and flashy. He finally gave up, although they are sincerely in love with each other.In these three years, he has already experienced in his life: those indelible days when love is still unknowingly, those intoxicating days when love has been revealed, those days when the sacred and secret love words that are expected are revealed. Time, the time of tears for "happiness that never returns," and the elation of newlyweds, the selfishness of love, "joys that are endless and without reason"; , the two united souls slowly disintegrated, far away, and more dangerous worldly intoxication with young women—such as coquetry, jealousy, irremediable misunderstandings—and love was veiled, lost. at last, the autumn of the heart comes, the tender, desolate scene, the face of the reappeared love pales and grows old, with tears, wrinkles, memories of all kinds of experiences; The wasted years are more poignant and touching;—then comes the tranquility and clarity of the evening, the solemn stage from love to friendship, from passionate legendary life to kind motherly love...everything that should happen, everything, trust All of them have been dreamed and tasted in advance.And in order to live all this more thoroughly, he experimented on his lover.For the first time—perhaps the only time in Tolstoy's work—the story of the novel is played out in the mind of a woman and is dictated by her.How subtle!The beauty of the soul shrouded in a net of chastity... This time, Tolstoy's analysis abandons his slightly strong luster, and it no longer ardently insists on exposing the truth.The secrets of the inner life are not poured out but only pried into.Tolstoy's art and heart softened.Form and thought are harmoniously balanced: "Conjugal Happiness" has the perfection of a Racine.

Marriage, for which Tolstoy had a keen foreboding of its sweetness and turmoil, was indeed his savior.He is tired and sick.Disgust yourself, dislike your own efforts.After the grand success of the first works, critical silence and popular indifference followed.From 1857 to 1861.Haughtily, he expressed his complacency. "My reputation has lost much of its universality, which displeased me. Now I am at ease, knowing that I have something to say, and that I have the power to say it loudly. As for the masses, let them think Come!" October, 1857. But this is only his pride: he himself cannot master his art.Undoubtedly, he can master his literary tools; but he does not know what to do with them.As he said when talking about "Polykushka": "This is a man who can write and talk casually on a topic." Letter to Fetter in 1863. ("Tolstoy—Life and Work") His social career was aborted, and in 1862 he resigned as local arbitrator.In the same year, the police authorities conducted a major raid on Yasnaya Polyana and closed the school.At that time Tolstoy was not at home, because he was overtired, he was worried about his lungs. The ignorance of ignorance concealed, and the doubts it aroused, was so painful to me that I fell ill. If I didn't know that there was another aspect of life that could save me—that other aspect of life would be It's family life, and maybe I'm already in the same despair I'm in fifteen years later."