ABSTRACT
TOLSTOY'S first serious attempt at marriage had ended in flight; but he still continued to believe that married me would settle many or the difficulties with which he was beset. This belief was strengthened after his return to Yasnaya early in 1857, when he first became entangled with a peasant woman named Axinia, who appealed so strongly to his sensual nature that, unlike his former casual affairs, he soon drifted into more or less permanent relations with her. Little is known of the woman, though there is reason to suppose that she was the model for the Stepanida of a later story, The Devil; and even the few diary entries which refer to her give but small indication of the force of the attachment. His relations with her, however, clearly went through all the oscillations that accompanied his purely emotional attachments. At first he found her "very attractive," and decided that he was in love "as never before in his life." He waited about in the hope of catching a glimpse of her; made assignations to meet her in the woods; called himself a fool and a brute; recorded her "bronzed flush and her eyes"; and was tormented with continual thoughts of her. Then, a month later, in one of his characteristic moods of revulsion, she had "grown repulsive to him."
