Countess Tolstoy also felt that her husband was wasting himself; he had a genius for writing novels, and he deliberately gave up writing them and occupied himself instead with log-splitting, reaping, and making boots which anybody could do, and do better. It was tiresome of him to play at being “Robinson Crusoe,” as Countess Tolstoy expressed it.
No doubt he was provoking, but though Tolstoy and his wife sometimes quarreled, they were devoted to one another all the same, as may be seen by the very delightful quotation out of a letter of Countess Tolstoy’s to her husband.
All at once I pictured you vividly to myself, and a sudden flood of tenderness rose in me. There is something in you so wise, kind, naïve, and obstinate, and it is all lit up by that tender interest for every one natural to you alone, and by your look that reaches to people’s souls.
Sometimes Tolstoy had to accompany his family to Moscow. This became the regular arrangement in the winter, when his daughter Tanya grew up and began to go to balls and parties. Countess Tolstoy was always very energetic, arranging their flat and calling upon people who would ask her daughter to parties.
Tolstoy, after living in the country, found the artificiality of town life almost unbearable, and the luxury of the circle they lived in was to him torture. He had to occupy himself in order to bear it. One winter he spent his time taking a census of people in the poorest part of Moscow.
He was so horrified at the appalling misery he came across that he wanted to run away. He knew poverty in the country, but he had never seen anything like the poverty he came across in the town. Writing about it, he says:
I could not look at our own or anybody else’s drawing-room, or a clean, well-spread dining-table, or a carriage with well-fed coachman and horses, or shops or theaters without a feeling of profound irritation.
It was because he had seen the other side of the picture. And unfortunately there always is another side to the picture.
He saw this side by side with the wretched lodging-houses he had been visiting, filled with cold, hungry, dreadful people, and one he felt was the result of the other.
His son says the look of suffering on his father’s face at that time he shall never forget.