Unforgiven

Leo Tolstoy’s Marriage

Leo Tolstoy thought he was getting his marriage off on the right foot when he asked his teenage fiance to read his diaries, which spelled out in lurid detail all of his sexual dalliances. He wanted to keep no secrets from Sonya, to begin marriage with a clean slate, forgiven. Instead, Tolstoy’s confession sowed the seeds for a marriage that would be held together by vines of hatred, not love. “When he kisses me I’m always thinking, ‘I’m not the first woman he has loved,’” wrote Sonya Tolstoy in her own diary. Some of his adolescent flings she could forgive, but not his affair with Axinya, a peasant woman who continued to work on the Tolstoy estate. “One of these days I shall kill myself with jealousy,” Sonya wrote after seeing the three-year-old son of the peasant woman, the spiting image of her husband. “If I could kill him [Tolstoy] and create a new person exactly the same as he is now, I would do so happily.” Another diary entry dates from January 14, 1909. “He relishes that peasant wench with her strong female body and her sunburnt legs, she allures him just as powerfully now as she did all those years ago…” Sonya wrote those words when Axinya was a shriveled crone of eighty. For half a century jealousy and unforgiveness had blinded her, in the process destroying all love for her husband.

Phillip Yancey, What’s So Amazing About Grace, Zondervan, 1997, p. 85

Wouldn’t Speak to Each Other

I once shared a meal with two scientists who had just emerged from the glass-enclosed biosphere near Tucson, Arizona. Four men and four women had volunteered for the two-year isolation experiment. All were accomplished scientists, all had undergone psychological testing and preparation, and all had entered the biosphere fully briefed on the rigors they would face while sealed off from the outside world. The scientists told me that within a matter of months the eight “bionauts” had split into two groups of four, and during the final months of the experiment these two groups refused to speak to each other. Eight people lived in a bubble split in half by an invisible wall of ungrace. Frank Reed, an American citizen held hostage in Lebanon, disclosed upon his release that he had not spoken to one of is fellow hostages for several months following some minor dispute. Most of that time, the two feuding hostages had been chained together.

Phillip Yancey, What’s So Amazing About Grace, Zondervan, 1997, p. 83