But as soon as they are together again the same discord occurs. The Countess cannot share this religious mania which is now impelling Tolstoy to study Hebrew with a rabbi.
"Nothing else interests him any longer. He is wasting his energies in foolishness. I cannot conceal my impatience."[4]
She writes to him:
"It can only sadden me that such intellectual energies should spend themselves in chopping wood, heating the samovar, and cobbling boots."
She adds, with affectionate, half-ironical humour of a mother who watches a child playing a foolish game:
"Finally, I have pacified myself with the Russian proverb: 'Let the child play as he will, so long as he doesn't cry.'"[5]
Before the letter was posted she had a mental vision of her husband reading these lines, his kind, frank eyes saddened by their ironical tone; and she re-opened the letter, in an impulse of affection:
"Quite suddenly I saw you so clearly, and I felt such a rush of tenderness for you 1 There is something in you so wise, so naive, so persevering, and it is all lit up by the radiance of goodness, and that look of yours which goes straight to the soul.... It is something that belongs to you alone."
In this manner these two creatures who loved also tormented one another and were straightway stricken with wretchedness because of the pain they had the power to inflict but not the power to avoid. A situation with no escape, which lasted for nearly thirty years; which was to be terminated only by the flight across the steppes, in a moment of aberration, of the ancient Lear, with death already upon him.