At Yasnaya Polyana

Shortly after meeting her, he had gone to stay with Tolstoy, who took him out shooting. He was put in the best hide, over which snipe habitually passed. But that day, for him, the sky remained empty. Every so often, a shot would ring out from Tolstoy's hide; then another; then another. All the snipe were flying to Tolstoy's gun. It seemed typical. He himself shot a single bird, which the dogs failed to find.

Tolstoy thought him ineffectual, vacillating, unmanly, a frivolous socialiser and a despicable westerniser; embraced him, loathed him, spent a week in Dijon with him, quarrelled with him, forgave him, valued him, visited him, challenged him to a duel, embraced him, scorned him. This is how Tolstoy expressed sympathy when he lay dying in France: "The news of your illness has caused me much sorrow, especially when I was assured it was serious. I realised how much I cared for you. I felt that I should be much grieved if you were to die before me."

Tolstoy at this time despised the taste for renunciation. Later, he began railing at the lusts of the flesh and idealising a Christian peasant simplicity. His attempts at chastity failed with comic frequency. Was he a fraud, a fake renunciator; or was it more that he lacked the skills, and his flesh declined renunciation? Three decades later he died on a railway station. His last words were not, "The bell rang, and ciao, as the Italians say." Does the successful renunciator envy his unsuccessful counterpart? There are ex-smokers who decline the offered cigarette but say, "Blow the smoke in my direction."

She was travelling; she was working; she was married. He asked her to send him a plaster cast of her hand. He had kissed the real thing so many times, kissed an imagined version of the real thing in almost every letter he wrote her. Now he could lay his lips on a plaster version. Is plaster nearer to flesh than air? Or did the plaster turn his love and her flesh into a memorial? There is an irony to his request: normally it is the writer whose creative hand is cast in plaster; and normally by the time this is done he is dead.

So he proceeded deeper into old age, knowing that she was - had already been - his last love. And since form was his business, did he at this time remember his first love? He was a specialist in the matter. Did he reflect that first love fixes a life for ever? Either it impels you to repeat the same kind of love and fetishises its components; or else it is there as warning, trap, counter-example.

His own first love had taken place fifty years before. She had been a certain Princess Shakhovskaya. He was fourteen, she was in her twenties; he adored her, she treated him like a child. This puzzled him until the day he found out why. She was already his father's mistress.

The year after he shot snipe with Tolstoy, he visited Yasnaya Polyana again. It was Sonya Tolstoy's birthday, and the house was full of guests. He proposed that each of them should recount the happiest moment of their lives. When his own turn in his own game arrived, he announced, with an exalted air and a familiar melancholy smile: "The happiest moment of my life is, of course, the moment of love. It is the moment when you meet the eyes of the woman you love and sense that she loves you too. This has happened to me once, perhaps twice." Tolstoy found this answer irritating.

Later, when the young people insisted upon dancing, he demonstrated what was new in Paris. He took off his jacket, stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat and capered about, legs kicking, head waggling, white hair flopping, as the household clapped and cheered; he panted, capered, panted, capered, then fell over and collapsed into an armchair. It was a great success. Tolstoy wrote in his journal: "Turgenev - can-can. Sad."

"Once, perhaps twice." Was she the "perhaps twice"? Perhaps. In his penultimate letter, he kisses her hands. In his last letter, written in failing pencil, he does not offer kisses. He writes instead: "I do not change in my affections - and I shall keep exactly the same feeling for you until the end."

This end came six months later. The plaster cast of her hand is now in the Theatre Museum of Saint Petersburg, the city where he had first kissed the original.