Doubt and despondency, increased by the vexations and failures attending
his philanthropic endeavours, at length obsessed Tolstoy to the verge of
suicide.

"The disputes over arbitration had become so painful to me, the
schoolwork so vague, my doubts arising from the wish to teach others,
while dissembling my own ignorance of what should be taught, were so
heartrending that I fell ill. I might then have reached the despair to
which I all but succumbed fifteen years later, if there had not been a
side of life as yet unknown to me which promised me salvation: this was
family life" ("My Confession").

In a word, his marriage with Mademoiselle Sophie Andreevna Bers
(daughter of Dr. Bers of Moscow) was consummated in the autumn of
1862--after a somewhat protracted courtship, owing to her extreme
youth--and Tolstoy entered upon a period of happiness and mental peace
such as he had never known. His letters of this period to Countess A. A.
Tolstoy, his friend Fet, and others, ring with enraptured allusions to
his new-found joy. Lassitude and indecision, mysticism and altruism, all
were swept aside by the impetus of triumphant love and of all-sufficing
conjugal happiness. When in June of the following year a child was born,
and the young wife, her features suffused with "a supernatural beauty"
lay trying to smile at the husband who knelt sobbing beside her, Tolstoy
must have realised that for once his prophetic intuition had been
unequal to its task. If his imagination could have conceived in
prenuptial days what depths of emotion might be wakened by fatherhood,
he would not have treated the birth of Masha's first child in "Conjugal
Happiness" as a trivial material event, in no way affecting the mutual
relations of the disillusioned pair. He would have understood that at