Leo: "What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility."
Source: Quotations.D106
William Shirer: "Day after day, year after year, they put down their innermost and increasingly bitter thoughts about the other. And for years they left what they wrote for the other to read -- it was a perverse form of communication between them."
Source: William L.
Shirer. Love and Hatred: The Troubled Marriage of Leo & Sonja Tolstoy. 1994. pg. 3.
"From the outset the newlyweds have a tempestuous relationship, full of loving -- and angry -- passion. Each writes in a diary and shows the entries to the other, adding a layer of complexity and danger to the marriage."
Source: "Leo Tolstoy: Married Life and Children." TolstoyCentennial.com.
Gary Saul Morson: "His wife especially resented the constant presence of disciples, led by the dogmatic V.G. Chertkov, at Yasnaya Polyana. Their once happy life had turned into one of the most famous bad marriages in literary history. The story of his dogmatism and her penchant for scenes has excited numerous biographers to take one side or the other."
Source: Gary Saul Morson. "Leo Tolstoy Biography." Biography.com.
"The more of a saint he became in the eyes of the world, the more of a devil he seemed to his wife. He wanted to give his wealth away, but she would not hear of it. An unhappy compromise was reached in 1884, when Tolstoy assigned to his wife the copyright to all his works before 1881."
Source: "Leo Tolstoy." NotableBiographies.com.
"Even after he [Leo] decides he wants to marry in his late 20s and starts to seriously consider women that he meets or hears about from family and friends, he constantly struggles to decide whether he is in love with a particularly woman or just with the idea of marriage."
Source: "Leo Tolstoy: Women." TolstoyCentennial.com.
William Shirer: "... leading to a marital life of utter misery ultimately for both partners, and finally, after forty-eight years, to his sad end when, in desperation, he ran away from it."
Source: William L. Shirer. Love and Hatred: The Troubled Marriage of Leo & Sonja Tolstoy. 1994. pg. 22.