The Devil

Toward the end of 1880, when Tolstoy was fifty-two, he was overcome by sexual desire for a tall, healthy, attractive young woman with a fine figure and beautiful complexion, though not otherwise particularly handsome servant girl called Domna. He had dreamed of her, followed her and at last had arranged a rendezvous with her. This temptation tormented him and he had the servant removed to another place. After the danger was over Tolstoy seldom referred to the incident unless to those who spoke to him of their own sexual difficulties, but on one occasion he wrote a full account of it to a friend. The incident resulted in his writing "The Devil" - the hero of which yields to a temptation of such as that Tolstoy had encountered. The relations of the sexes in Russian society of his day resembled that in English society today more than in English society of that period -when, both in literature and in life, repression and suppression of passion was more common. In "The Devil" he expressed the views he held, Tolstoy was consciously opposing the current of life around him, and these works also run counter to the movement of our own society today (1926). That however does not detract from the value of the work. The belief that ill-results follow from the indulgence of the sexual instincts is not an obsolete eccentricity, but a belief held by many men in many ages, and it receives sufficient confirmation from experience to make it certain that it is a view which has to be reckoned with. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Russian writer and philosopher whose great novels "War and Peace" (1864-1869) and "Anna Karenina" (1873-1876) offer extraordinary detail and profound psychological insights. His later theories of ethics and morality recommended nonparticipation in and passive resistance to evil.