This is the distress so stunningly expressed in the young countess Tolstoy's diary; she enthusiastically gave her hand to the great writer she admired; after the passionate embraces she submitted to on the wooden balcony at Yasnaya Polyana, she found herself disgusted by carnal love, far from her family, cut off from her past, at the side of a man to whom she had been engaged for one week, someone who was seventeen years her senior, with a totally foreign past and interests; everything seems empty, icy to her; her life is no more than an eternal sleep.