Autobiography of Countess Tolstoy

by S. A. Tolstaia

On our way back Leo Nikolaevich accompanied us as far as Moscow, and he used to come and see us almost daily at our country-house in Pokrovskoye, and afterwards in Moscow. On the evening of 16 September he handed me a written proposal of marriage.[{16}] Up to that time no one knew the object of his visits.[{17}] There was a painful struggle going on in his soul. In his diary at the time he wrote, for instance:

12 Sept. 1862.

I am in love, as I did not think it was possible to be in love.

I am a madman; I'll shoot myself, if it goes on like this. They had an evening party; she is charming in everything....

13 Sept. 1862.

To-morrow as soon as I get up, I shall go and tell everything or shoot myself....

I accepted Leo Nikolaevich and our engagement lasted only one week. On 23 September we were married in the royal church of the Nativity of Our Lady, and immediately afterwards left for Yasnaya Polyana in a new carriage with a team of six horses and a postillion. We were accompanied by Alexei Stepanovich,[{18}] Leo Nikolaevich's devoted servant, and the old maid-servant, Varvara.

After coming to Yasnaya Polyana, we decided to settle down there with Aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna Ergolskii.[{19}] From the very first I assisted my husband in the management of the house and estate, and in copying out his writings.[{20}]

After the first days of our married life had passed, Leo Nikolaevich realized that besides his happiness he needed activity and work. In his diary of December, 1862, he wrote: "I feel the force of the need to write." That force was a great one, creating a great work which made the first years of our married life bright with joy and happiness.

Soon after our marriage Leo Nikolaevich finished Polikushka, finally completed The Cossacks and gave it to Katkov's Russkii Vyestnik. He then began to work on the Decembrists whose fate and activity interested him a great deal. When he began to write about that period, he considered it necessary to relate who they were, to describe their origin and previous history, and so to go back from 1825 to 1805. He became dissatisfied with the Decembrists, but The Year 1805 served as a beginning for War and Peace and was published in Russkii Vyestnik.[{21}] This work, which Leo Nikolaevich did not like to be called a novel, he wrote with pleasure, assiduously, and it filled our life with a living interest.