The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

by Cathy Porter

  He was unable to give her any advice as to how she might adapt to his change of course. And when he finally renounced property, sexuality and worldly affairs, his publishers, his children and the estate, he merely made her take responsibility for it all. She was at first genuinely puzzled by his change of heart, and demanded guidance as to how far she should simplify the housekeeping and limit expenses. What about the children’s education? And the servants? And his copyright money? But he gave her no clear answers, merely demanding repeatedly that she follow his example, give away his money and abandon material concerns. His disregard for her feelings threw her into despair: “I have been discarded like a useless object. Impossible, undefined sacrifices are demanded of me, in my life and in my family, and I am expected to renounce everything…”

  But perhaps the greatest blow was when he renounced the creative writing she had so loved, and turned instead to moral tracts, pamphlets and articles attacking the hypocrisy of the Church and preaching against those who lived in luxury off the labour of the peasants. In the late 1870s, as revolutionaries urged the peasants to rise against their masters, Tolstoy was claimed as their spokesman, and several of his more outspoken works, banned by the Tsar and circulated underground, aroused enormous interest. Increasing numbers of his visitors were uncompromising opponents of tsarist society—Yuriev, a left-wing slavophile, Fyodorov, an ascetic and mystic, Syutaev, a self-educated peasant who refused to pay his taxes, and many, many more. Bohemians, pacifists and revolutionaries, visionaries, students and eccentrics, peasants, artisans and factory workers, the disaffected and the disinherited, they arrived in their hundreds to meet the great writer and prophet; and they stayed and stayed. Sofia hated these “dark ones”, as she called them, who took him away from her and filled the house day and night, creating extra work and worries for her; they had to be entertained, reassured, paid or thrown out; they surrounded Tolstoy with an unpleasantly worshipful atmosphere; and they brought the whole family to the unwelcome attention of the police. She was outraged, shocked to her conservative soul and deeply frightened.

  But mainly she hated what she saw as the hypocrisy of this conversion of her husband’s. He now rose early, tidied his own room, pumped his own water from the well and took it home in a barrel; he chopped wood, made his own boots and worked in the fields with the peasants. But for all his proclamations of universal love and brotherhood, she had to endure his calculated slights and insults. He refused to help her with the education of their children or the management of the estate (at which she was no more successful than he was, being opposed to any sort of technical innovation in farming, and unable to tell a good steward from a bad one). And when he gave up hunting, drinking and eating meat, this merely involved her in preparing two menus every day.

  Her diaries are merciless; again and again she refers unforgivingly to his old diaries, accusing him of merely seeking fame and fortune under another name: “He would like the eyes of the world to see him on the pedestal he took such pains to erect for himself. But his diaries cast him into the filth in which he once lived, and that infuriates him.”

  When terrorists assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, Tolstoy wrote to his heir begging him not to hang them. She was distraught, terrified that the whole family would be thrown into jail. We read her diaries now with an increasing sense that the social order supporting her hasn’t long to run, and at this point she appears so tragically blind, yet so powerfully sympathetic that we long to step in, alter the course of history and save her.

  In the years that followed, the discord between the two became more acute. He wrote in his diaries (which of course she read) about his loneliness in his family and his domineering wife, with her sharp tongue and her hostility to his changed philosophy of life. Sofia, tired, bewildered and pregnant yet again, retorted in hers that she could no longer do both a man’s and a woman’s work. After nineteen years in the country she was also beginning to chafe at her solitary life, and longed to visit Moscow, to be with Sergei during his first term at the university and Tanya, who was about to start an art course in the capital and had to be introduced to the social life, as well as Ilya and Lyova, now aged fifteen and twelve, who were old enough to go to secondary school. But she also wanted to enjoy herself a little, meet friends and attend some concerts. All this would cost money. And there were also now new children to consider—Andrei (born in 1877), Mikhail (in 1879) and Alexei (in 1881). And so in the autumn of 1881 a house was bought in Moscow, and thereafter the family spent the winters there.

  This was the source of yet more bitter arguments. There existed for Tolstoy three types of woman: “femme du temple”, “femme du foyer” and “femme de la rue”. His wife had moved swiftly through the first two categories, and her outrageous worldly desires now clearly placed her in the third. The girl he had married had been an angel of modesty and obedience. Now that she was beginning to assert herself against him and claim her own needs, for privacy, music, her own friends—even her own sexual needs, for she was now apparently discovering some of the tormenting desires of the flesh—he turned her into the devil, everything he hated in himself, and withdrew from her, devoting himself more and more to the endless visitors who came to see him in Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow with all their religious, personal and political problems. It was to them that he complained of his tyrannical wife. But it was in his story, The Kreutzer Sonata, that these complaints were spelt out with their greatest cruelty and clarity, for all the world to read. Yet when the story was banned as obscene, it was Sofia who went in person to the Tsar and pleaded successfully for the ban to be revoked.

  When in 1884, at the age of forty, she became pregnant for the fifteenth time, in spite of all Tolstoy’s vows of chastity, her shame was so intense she tried to have the baby aborted. (The abortionist refused in horror to proceed on learning who she was.) And when she finally went into labour with the unfortunate Alexandra (Sasha), Tolstoy packed his bag after a petty quarrel and announced he was off to make a new life in America. (He returned to finish the quarrel shortly before the baby was born.) One more child followed in 1888.

  Sofia was exhausted. Her diaries record her endless labours: managing the estate and the family’s increasingly complicated financial affairs, copying all Tolstoy’s voluminous writings, worrying constantly about his every little cough and always fearing the worst, tending him tirelessly through his frequent illnesses (she never allowed anyone else to care for him when he was ill, and only then did she forget her bitterness).

  Endless domestic tasks and suffocating confinement breed a boredom as vast as the steppes, a narcotic depression for which there is no cure or release but the madness which gradually and terrifyingly comes over her.

  From 1891 there is more and more talk in her diaries of nervous troubles—headaches, sleeplessness, “evil spirits”. She is prey to physical symptoms—neuralgia, eye strain, stomach aches, fevers and asthma attacks. Quickened pulse-rates and heightened temperatures are obsessively recorded. And these problems are complicated by the onset of the menopause, with its hot flushes and unspecified “gynaecological problems”, for which she consults specialists. She talks of suicide, and makes numerous attempts to kill herself—throwing herself in the pond, poisoning herself with opium, lying in the snow to freeze, refusing to eat.

  She writes constantly in her diaries now of Tolstoy’s ill-treatment of her. He writes of her too in his diaries, with some anger, but also with pity and despair, and long periods of estrangement between them alternate bewilderingly with periods of passion. Now, in her fifties, with the fear of pregnancy behind her, her physical passion awakens. Yet it is all so late, and makes her feel sad, incomplete and unworthy. “His passion dominates me too but…my whole moral being cried out against it…All my life I have dreamt spiritual dreams, aspired to a perfect union, a spiritual communion, not that.”

  There was still some tenderness and friendship left too, and during the disastrous harvest of 1891 the two worked together in the co
untryside opening canteens for the peasant victims of the famine. Yet amid the last flickerings of their love there is always the sensation of fast approaching death. Indeed fears of illness and death are always present in an atmosphere almost completely ignorant of “scientific” medicine. Her daughter Maria has seven babies die before birth, her beloved eldest daughter Tanya gives birth to three dead babies, and four of her own infants die before the age of seven. These children are frail, spiritual creatures, cherished intensely and mourned inconsolably. It is when her adored youngest son Vanechka dies in 1895 just before his seventh birthday that her spirit is finally broken and, dazed by despair, she longs only to join her dead children in the other world.

  Music becomes the focus of her life. It is with its help that she regains her sanity, and through her friendship with the composer Sergei Taneev that she finds peace of mind and the strength to survive. All her thoughts and feelings become focused on her dead Vanechka and the gentle undemanding bachelor Taneev (“the man…at the centre of my disgraceful untimely madness”). Yet the relationship could never conceivably be consummated: “How much spent passion, how many tragic feelings of love pass between decent people and are never expressed! And these feelings are the most important of all!” Tolstoy tries furiously and helplessly to intervene against Taneev, as do her friends and her children, but she refuses to be ruled. She visits Moscow to attend concerts and meet him and his friends, she invites musicians back to the house to play, and spends hours herself at the piano.

  Away from music and Taneev, despair breaks through. Her diaries, fragmented, confused, charged with emotion, turn now into a sad catalogue of female complaints—of loneliness and powerlessness, jealousy and self-pity, love rejected and work unappreciated, fears of confinement, illness and madness. Endless outpourings of emotions, moods, descriptions and reflections are all jumbled up, the poetic and the prosaic flung recklessly together with a breathless and desperate incoherence, often without so much as an “and” or “but” to help us interpret them.

  While Tolstoy soars above the world she remains chained to earth by all the problems he leaves there for her to deal with—and thus she comes to represent to him everything he is trying to rid himself of: “If he is protesting against humanity as a whole, the entire existing social order, he can hardly be expected not to protest against me, a mere weak woman.”

  The old Tolstoy had died in 1881, he explained, leaving his property to his wife and children, and a new Tolstoy had been born. He had hoped that his family would change with him then—that was why he stayed with them—but they hadn’t. So all he asked now was that the copyright on all his post-1881 works be given away. She refused. She had the estate to run and nine children to support, and no wish to line the pockets of his publishers merely for the privilege of finding work as a laundress. Yet his words always carried so much more weight than hers. (“If one were to say which of us caused the other more pain, it would be him: his weapons are so much more powerful and authoritative.”)

  Her diaries melt into self-pity at every turn. Her labours for him, once performed so gladly, now turn into drudgery. “Everything wears out in the end, even a mother’s love.” Her endless responsibilities bring her no freedom, and the lack of it becomes increasingly oppressive to her: “I am not free to think as I please, to love whom I choose, to come and go according to my own interests and intellectual pleasures…to pursue my music…” Meanwhile Tolstoy is writing in his diary: “A woman can be free only if she is a Christian. An emancipated woman who is not a Christian is a wild beast.” Again, to his son Lyova, he warns: “A sound healthy woman is a wild beast.” And to all three of his elder sons: “The most intelligent woman is less intelligent than the most stupid man.”

  Meanwhile Sofia muses on her wasted talents: “I was wondering today why there were no women writers, artists or composers of genius,” she writes in 1898. “It’s because all the passion…of an energetic woman is consumed by her family, love, her husband—and especially her children…When she has finished bearing and educating her children, her artistic needs awaken, but by then it’s too late, for by then it’s impossible to develop anything.” She does not mention the main obstacle to her self-fulfilment—perhaps because even at the age of fifty-four, she still admits to feeling afraid of her husband. But Tolstoy’s views on women are all too painfully familiar to her—and all too typical in tsarist Russia: “He announced…that he was against women’s emancipation and so-called ‘equal rights’, and…that no matter what a woman did—teaching, medicine, art—she had only one real purpose in life, and that was sexual love. So whatever she might strive to achieve, all her strivings will merely crumble to ashes.” Women shouldn’t raise the issue of their own emancipation, he goes on, this would be unwomanly and impertinent. They shouldn’t talk of women’s inequality at all, in fact, but of people’s inequality in general. Sofia agrees: “It’s not freedom we women need, but help…mainly in educating our sons.”

  Her cries for help become more frequent, but are unheard. She is bitterly angry about his cynical views on women, which have made her suffer, and which she feels he has come by simply because he hadn’t met a decent woman until he married her. And in her powerlessness she clings to Taneev.

  Tolstoy’s disciples all dislike her—particularly Vladimir Chertkov, the most persistent, unimaginative and dogmatic of them all. And it is while the conflict between the couple is at its most intense that Chertkov enters their lives again to set them against each other in earnest. His purpose is to gain Tolstoy’s confidence, his copyright and his soul, and he is utterly unscrupulous. Humourless, uninventive and rude, pathologically attached to Tolstoy and pathologically hostile to his wife, his purpose has always been to divide them. As long ago as 1887 Sofia read a letter he wrote to Tolstoy “describing in joyful tones his deep spiritual communion with his wife, and commiserating with L.N. for being deprived of this joy”. While Tolstoy enjoins Chertkov: “Let everyone try not to marry, and if he does, to live with his wife as brother and sister…You will object that this would mean the end of the human race?…What a great misfortune! The antediluvian animals are gone from the earth, human animals will disappear too…I have no more pity for these two-footed beasts than for the ichthyosaurus.”

  Chertkov manages to wheedle his diaries out of the old man, which have until then belonged unquestioningly to Sofia. Then he prevails on him to alter his will in his favour. From 1910 onwards her diaries are dominated by Chertkov’s evil genius. (The more normal everyday events of her life for this year are reserved for her Daily Diaries.) Her condition worsens with every moment. Sleepless nights are followed by days blurred by opium and anxious depression, and her obsessional prying and spying drives Tolstoy yet further from her. While he weeps and suffers and rails against her, Chertkov seizes on this discord to exacerbate it: “The shadow of this crazy woman, mad with greed and wrath, hovers over our friendship,” he writes to a friend. “Lev Nikolaevich has merely proved by his fortitude that it is possible to carry in one’s heart a truly indestructible love: he evidently needs a cruel and ruthless warder to bind him hand and foot.”

  Chertkov does all he can to encourage Tolstoy to leave his wife and make a new life for himself elsewhere. And in 1910, at the age of eighty-two, this is what he does: on 28th October he leaves Yasnaya Polyana with his doctor and his youngest daughter Sasha, and boards a train heading south. When she finds him gone, Sofia throws herself into the pond. She is dragged out and taken to her bed, where she lies semi-delirious, refusing to eat. By the time she learns he is lying ill at the stationmaster’s hut at the station of Astapovo, it is too late. She manages to see him only ten minutes before he dies, and there is no time for them to speak.

  She lies for many months after his death in a fever, and when she resumes her Daily Diaries the entries are short and matter-of-fact. With Tolstoy’s death she regains her clarity, but loses all her old wild, mad energy. She works hard to the end, copying his writings, dashing off endless a
rticles, supervising the estate, tending and visiting the grave, entertaining the hordes of visitors who come to pay their respects to Tolstoy’s widow. And to the end she resents this household drudgery, which takes her from her real work—of the intellect and the spirit.

  In the last nine years of her life she sees the outbreak of world war, two revolutions and a civil war. Yet her life and her preoccupations remain much as before. She greets the revolution of 1917 with bewilderment, but is grateful to the Bolsheviks for providing her with everything she needs and not expropriating the estate. And when Bolshevik soldiers and commissars are billeted in the village during the Civil War, she finds them unexpectedly sympathetic. She remains as indomitable as ever into her seventies, making little of her own discomforts and going off to the fields to pick potatoes when the shops empty. As her strength declines her diary entries dwindle, and she leaves us in October 1919 with the unforgettable image of civil-war refugees trailing down the highway on their way from Oryol to Tula.

  Sofia Tolstoy was a complex woman, a human dynamo with an iron constitution and a poetic soul. The “dark ones” who fill her house see her as a tedious, self-centred, complaining woman, who threatens to drag her husband down with her. And this is the judgement that has been passed down to us. True, one’s sympathies are often strained by her exasperating snobbishness, her anti-Semitism, her sentimentality and her conservatism. But her diaries reveal her as someone of immense subtlety, intelligence, dignity and courage. She refuses to be resigned when all are against her, refuses to accept decisions taken over her head, refuses to be mocked, exploited or silenced. Her diaries are the writings of a confused psyche, battered but indomitable, clinging desperately to her self-esteem and the better things of life. She longs to improve herself (though she dreads change), and her writing is informed by her search for clarity, balance and goodness, through love, pain and, increasingly, death.