a successful marriage that could provide illumination on life so as to prevent tragedy from creating despair, and bliss from creating naiveté. Tolstoy lived and wrote during a time when a new idea was pervading Europe—that marital intimacy was based on “love” (where “love” meant a romantically idealized experience in which individuality is made whole by the attachment to the other). This concept had a profound effect on Western society, and it remains the dominating paradigm of marriage today. Aspects