Women

As a young man Leo Tolstoy is never particularly popular with the young women he meets in society. He is shy, a bit clumsy and not particularly good looking – when young he despairs over his big nose, small eyes under heavy brows, unruly hair, and big hands and feet. He does not have a naturally sunny demeanour -- he examines everything far too carefully for that -- and casual, witty conversation is not easy for him.

He loses his virginity, not to a woman he is attracted to, but after being dragged to a brothel by his brothers. He weeps afterwards. He is driven by lust throughout most of his adult life and his breeding and wealth allows him to easily procure women from the classes below him and he constantly does so in the lead-up to his marriage. In Resurrection he writes of just how cruelly a landowner’s exploitative behaviour can impact on the life of a servant girl. He has his first bout of gonorrhea before turning 20 years of age.

He fears the sexual power women have over him and the act of intercourse both repulses and attracts him. He is full of guilt and self-reproach about sleeping around and this colours the way he views women, love and marriage. He tells an important confidante, his cousin Alexandra Tolstoy, in one letter: “I was in the right state of mind for falling in love, having lost at roulette, being dissatisfied with myself and completely idle (I have a theory that love consists of the need to forget oneself, and that is why, like sleep, it most often comes over a man when he is displeased with himself or unhappy) ... Soon after returning from a trip to Europe a diary entry reads: “Princess Lvov is pretty, clever, honest and kind-hearted. I wanted with all my might to fall in love with her, saw her often, and nothing! ... What kind of a monster am I? Obviously I am lacking in something” (p164, Tolstoy, Crankshaw).

Princess Lvov is just one of the women he thinks about marrying but is alternatively infatuated and unimpressed with. He carries a flame for his friend Dmitry Dyakov’s sister, Alexandra Obolensky, and considers the poet Fyodor Tyutchev’s daughter Yekaterina. During a week in Kazan before he and Nicholas set off for the Caucasus he catches up with his childhood friend Zinaida Molostvov and is just as bewitched as he was in their university days.

His most serious failed courtship involves Valerya Arsenyev, who lives near Yasnaya Polyana. It went on for many months in late 1856 but his actions and diary entries make it appear he is keener just on the idea of being married than on her. His regard for her oscillates dramatically and he lectures her relentlessly – even on bonnets! When he eventually abandons all plans to ask for her hand in marriage he escapes to Paris. Family Happiness, a novella about a marriage, draws on the conflicted feelings he has about Valerya.

While fighting in the Caucasus he becomes extremely enamoured with a Cossack woman, Maryanka, and at Yasnaya Polyana he falls in love with a married peasant, Aksinya Bazykin,. As his diary records: “I am afraid when I see how attached I am to her. The feeling is no longer bestial, but that of a husband for his wife” (p174, Tolstoy, Crankshaw). The relationship continues for three years and produces a son, Timothy, who grows up to be a coach driver on the estate. (Tolstoy’s father had at least one illegitimate child on the estate who also worked as a coach driver). Marrying outside his class and living a simple country life was often the subject of his fantasies, but it is extremely unlikely to happen, although his brother Sergey marrieds a gypsy and his brother Dmitry spends his last years with a former prostitute.

He is intellectually very attracted to his cousin, Alexandra Alexandrovna Tolstoy, who is a decade older. She knows him well and often advises him to marry, thinking it would stop his tendency toward self-obsession. But Alexandra and his sister Marya both doubt his ability to settle down; they know the extent of his dalliances, how brightly his passionate infatuations burn and how quickly the flame dies.

Even after he decides he wants to marry in his late 20s and starts to seriously consider women that he meets or hears about from family and friends, he constantly struggles to decide whether he is in love with a particularly woman or just with the idea of marriage.

A proposal and a marriage
Married life and children
His other family: The peasants