ing that he was misunderstood by his nearest friend.
“I feel in all my being,” he wrote to Teneromo, “the truth of these words: that the husband and the wife are not separate beings, but are as one… I wish most earnestly that I had the power to transmit to my wife a portion of that religious conscience which gives me the possibility of sometimes raising myself above the sorrows of life. I hope that it will be given her; very probably not by me, but by God, although this conscience is hardly accessible to women.”[1]
It seems that this wish was never gratified. Countess Tolstoy loved and admired the purity of heart, the candid heroism, and the goodness of the great man who was “as one” with her; she saw that “he marched ahead of the host and showed men the way they should follow”;[2] when the Holy Synod excommunicated him she bravely undertook his defence and insisted on sharing the danger which threatened him. But she could not force herself to believe what she did not believe; and Tolstoy was too sincere to urge her to pretend—he who loathed the petty deceits of faith and love even more than the negation of faith and love.[3] How then could he constrain her, not
- ↑ May 16, 1892. Tolstoy’s wife was then mourning the loss of a little boy, and he could do nothing to console her.
- ↑ Letter of January, 1883.
- ↑ “I should never reproach any one for having no religion. The shocking thing is when men lie and pretend to religion.” And further: “May God preserve us from pretending to love; it is worse than hatred.”
