The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

by Cathy Porter

  It’s now 2 in the morning. Lyovochka has gone off to some meeting, I don’t know what about, called by Prince Dmitry Shakhovskoi.* The lamps are still burning, the servant is waiting up. I have boiled his porridge and pasted up the proofs. Meanwhile they just sit there talking. Tomorrow I shall get up at 8, take Vanechka’s temperature and give him his quinine, while he sleeps on. Then he’ll go and draw his water from the well, without even asking whether his child is better or his wife is exhausted. How little kindness he shows his family! With us he is never anything but severe and indifferent. His biographers will tell how he helped the porter by drawing his own water, but no one will know that he never once thought to give his wife a moment’s rest, or his sick child a drink of water. How in 32 years he never once sat for five minutes by his sick child’s bedside to let me have a rest, or a good night’s sleep, or go for a walk, or simply sit down for a while and recover from my labours.

  11° below freezing. Hoar frost, silence, moonlight.

  1st February. Vanya hasn’t had a temperature for 3 days, and for 4 days I have been giving him 5 or 6 drops of arsenic twice a day after dinner. I feel much happier about him now. I am still concerned about Lyova. Relations with Lyovochka are good.

  I measured him the other day, by the way. He is 6 foot 3 inches.

  5th February. Either I have a bad character or I am being perfectly reasonable. Lev Nikolaevich wrote a marvellous story called ‘Master and Man’. Now that scheming half-Jewish Gurevich woman is always buttering him up, trying to inveigle him into sending her things for her magazine, and it makes me furious.

  Once on my name day Lev Nikolaevich brought me a file containing ‘The Death of Ivan Ilich’, for the new edition. Then he took it away again and published an announcement saying he was making it public property. That made me angry and I wept bitterly. Why does he give so little thought to my feelings? How sad it all is!

  Yesterday Masha visited Professor Kozhevnikov, who was not at all reassuring about Lyova’s health. This morning I told Andryusha off for deceiving his father and me the other day and going off with Kleinmikhel and Severtsev to see the gypsies, rather than coming straight home as he had promised. Andryusha flared up and said the reason he deceived his father was that for the past year the only two words he had heard from him were “Come home!” His father never took any interest in them, he said, and never had anything to do with them or gave them any help. It made me sad to hear this—but there’s much truth in it.

  I started thinking about Turgenev, and that spring when he stayed with us in Yasnaya Polyana and we went out shooting snipe. Lyovochka was standing behind one tree and he and I were behind another, and I asked him why he didn’t write any more. And he stooped down, looked around in a rather comical way and said, “Nobody can hear us but the trees I think, my dear.” (He called everyone “my dear” as he got older.) “So I shall tell you. You see, before I write something new I need to be inflamed by love—and that’s all over now!”

  “What a shame!” I said, adding as a joke: “You can fall in love with me if you like, then you could write something!”

  “No, it’s too late!” he said.

  He was such good company. That evening he danced a Paris cancan with my daughters and the Kuzminsky girls, and argued good-naturedly with Lev Nikolaevich and the late Prince Urusov. I remember he asked me if we could have chicken soup with semolina, and beef and onion pie, saying that was something only Russian chefs knew how to make. He was gentle and affectionate with everyone and to Lev Nikolaevich he said: “What a good thing you did when you married your wife.” He was always urging him to write more fiction, and spoke passionately about his supreme talent as a writer. It’s painful to recall all this now.

  21st February. I am passing through yet another painful period, and another dreadful episode between us. It’s all my fault of course, yet how did I get dragged into it in the first place?

  As I said earlier, I was upset about his story ‘Master and Man’. But I tried to keep this to myself, and worked hard on the proofs with him. Then just as they were about to be sent off I asked him if I could take a copy for myself, so I could publish them in Volume 13 of the Complete Collected Works.

  I couldn’t bear the idea of the Northern Herald having the sole rights; I recalled the words of Storozhenko, who said that Gurevich (the editor) must have bewitched the Count, since she had got two articles out of him in one year, and I was quite determined that, come what may, I would see that my own edition was published simultaneously. We were both furious and upset. Lyovochka got so angry that he rushed upstairs, put his clothes on and said he was leaving home for ever and wouldn’t be returning.

  Since I felt my only crime was wanting to take a copy, it suddenly flashed across my mind that there must be some more serious reason why he should want to leave me, and I immediately thought of the Gurevich woman. I ran out of the house and tore off down the road in my dressing gown. He came chasing after me in his long underpants and waistcoat, without a shirt. He pleaded with me to go back, but at that point my only wish was to die, never mind how. I was sobbing and shouting: “I don’t care, let them take me away and put me in prison or the mental hospital!” Lyovochka dragged me back to the house, I kept falling in the snow and got soaked to the skin. I had only a nightdress on under my dressing gown, and nothing on my feet but a pair of slippers, and I am now ill, demented and choked, and cannot think clearly.

  Somehow we smoothed things over. Next morning I again helped him to correct the proofs for the Northern Herald. He finished them after lunch and was about to take a nap. “Well, I’ll take a copy now if I may,” I said. He was lying on the sofa, but when I said that, he leapt up, glared at me and again refused to let me do it, without giving any reason. (I still don’t know what it might be.) But I didn’t lose my temper, and merely begged him to let me copy it; I had tears in my eyes and could hardly speak. I promised I wouldn’t release the story without his permission; I was only asking him to let me copy it. He didn’t refuse in so many words, but his anger stunned me. I couldn’t understand anything. Why were Gurevich and her journal so precious to him that he wouldn’t let his story be published simultaneously in Volume 13?

  Feelings of jealousy and rage, the mortifying thought that he never did anything for me, the old grief of having loved him so much when he had never loved me—all this reduced me to a state of despair. I flung the proofs on the table, threw on a light overcoat, put on my galoshes and hat and slipped out of the house. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—Masha had noticed my distraught face and followed me, although I didn’t realize this at the time. I stumbled towards the Convent of the Virgin, intending to freeze to death in the woods on Sparrow Hills. I remember I liked the idea that Vasily Andreich froze to death in the story, and that I too would meet the same end. I didn’t regret what I was doing. I had staked my whole life on one card—my love for my husband—and now the game was lost and I had nothing to live for. I wasn’t sorry about the children either. I always feel that however much we may love them, they never love us, and I was sure they would survive quite well without me. Masha, as it turned out, hadn’t let me out of her sight and eventually managed to take me home. But my despair didn’t subside, and for two days I kept trying to leave. The following day I hailed a cab in the street and set off for the Kursk station. How my children guessed I had gone there I shall never know. But Seryozha and Masha caught up with me and once again took me home. Each time I get back I feel so foolish and ashamed of myself.

  After I had been sobbing for a long time he came in, kneeled before me on the floor and begged me to forgive him. If he could keep just a fragment of that compassion for me alive, I might still be happy with him.

  Having tortured my soul, he then called in the doctors to examine me. It was comical the way each prescribed medicine according to his own speciality. So the neurologist prescribed bromide, and the specialist in internal diseases prescribed Vichy water and drops. Then the gynaecologist Snegi
ryov was called in, referred cynically to my “critical time of life” and prescribed his particular medicine. I haven’t taken any of it. I don’t feel any better either. I’ve been running around the streets for three days and nights with barely a stitch on, in 16° of frost, frozen to the marrow and at my wits’ end—naturally I’m ill. The girls were timid with me, Misha sobbed and Andryusha went off to share his grief with Ilya. Sasha and Vanya were childishly puzzled, Lyovochka was alarmed. The nicest of all was Seryozha—gentle, affectionate and completely uncensorious. Lyovochka, Christian that you are, I saw in you more judgement than love or compassion. This whole episode was due only to my limitless love for him. He is always seeking evil in me; if only he would realize this isn’t one of my vices, although there are plenty of others to be sure. Is it my fault that God has given me such a restless, passionate temperament?

  His sister Maria Nikolaevna was also very sweet and kind and told me what I said in my frenzy was quite true, but that I’d gone too far. Yes, this frenzy is an unforgivable, incorrigible vice!*

  We have made peace again. Lyova has left for Ogranovich’s sanatorium.* He is morbidly resentful of his family and wants nothing to do with us, which may be for the best while he is in this nervous condition. A doctor arrived from there yesterday and spoke reassuringly about him. God grant that I don’t live to see any of my children die, and that I may be the first to join Him in the place where all is love and an end to suffering.

  The story has been given to both me and the Intermediary. But at what a price.

  22nd February, morning. Vanya has been ill ever since yesterday evening. He has now developed scarlet fever, a sore throat and diarrhoea.

  23rd February. My darling little Vanechka died this evening at 11 o’clock. My God and I am still alive!

  1896

  18th May—Tsar Nicholas II marks his coronation with the distribution of presents to his subjects on the Khodynka Field near Moscow. 1,300 people crushed to death in what becomes known as the “Khodynka catastrophe”. The 1890s see an unprecedented rapid growth (supported by foreign capital) of mining, metallurgical and manufacturing industries, railways and oilfields, with a corresponding growth in the working class. May to June—a huge wave of textile workers’ strikes in St Petersburg (spreading to other places in Russia) against the fifteen-hour working day. Some 260 factories hit; hundreds of strikes and revolutionaries arrested. November—large demonstration to mourn the Khodynka victims, in which over 700 people are arrested. Pobedonostsev, the Tsar’s chief adviser, exhorts him to imprison Tolstoy.

  Tolstoy working on Hadji Murat. 15th May—Lyova Tolstoy marries Dora Westerlund in Sweden. The composer Sergei Taneev spends the summer at Yasnaya; his friendship with Sofia provokes Tolstoy’s jealous rage.

  1897

  First comprehensive census in Russia. Another disastrous harvest, followed by famine.

  January—Tolstoy starts work on What Is Art? (also referred to in the text as On Art). February—Tolstoy’s disciples Biryukov and Chertkov arrested and sent into exile. Summer—Tolstoy proposed for Nobel Peace Prize. 2nd June—Masha Tolstaya marries Nikolai Obolensky (Kolya). Tolstoy refuses to allow Taneev to spend the summer at Yasnaya and threatens to leave. Sofia working on fourteenth edition of Tolstoy’s Complete Works. November—first part of What Is Art? published to storms of protest.

  1st June. It was two years ago, on 23rd February, that my little Vanechka died. Since that time I closed the last page of my diary as I closed my life, my heart, my feelings, my joy. But this utter spiritual solitude has made me want to write my diary again. Let my words give a picture of this last period of my life—particularly my married life. I shall keep strictly to the facts, and later on when I am able to I shall describe those two years of my life, so rich in emotion and significance.

  Today is Whit Sunday, bright and lovely. This morning I saw Tanya and Seryozha off to Moscow for Masha’s wedding, which is tomorrow.* Then I read the proofs for Volume 12 of the new edition I am bringing out. Lev Nikolaevich is writing his article about art,* and I see nothing of him from breakfast to dinner time. We ate at 2. At 3 he asked me to go for a ride with him. I said no, then became terribly keen to go, mainly because I hate being left alone. So the three of us set off (the third being Dunaev),* and rode through some lovely parts of Zaseka. We visited the mines, where a Belgian company is digging for ore, and the abandoned “Kingdom of the Dead”, then rode down the ravine and up again. Lev Nikolaevich was extraordinarily kind and attentive to me, and I was so grateful to him. In the past his kindness would have filled me with joy, but now that I’ve learnt from his diaries what his true attitude to me is I am merely touched by this kindness in his old age—I’ll never again abandon myself to those paroxysms of love, happiness and despair as I did before reading his diaries.

  3rd June. Masha and Kolya arrived, as husband and wife. Taneev came, and Turkin, Misha’s new tutor. All other feelings are overshadowed by the dread of scenes over Taneev’s visit. I feel sorry for Masha, and this makes me terribly fond of her, and of course I shall love her and do everything I possibly can for her. Kolya makes the same impression as before—a nice young man, but the thought of him as my daughter’s husband excludes any good feelings I might have for him. He can’t possibly be the mainstay of her life. My heart is happy and at peace at present. But it was deeply painful to see the horror on Lev Nikolaevich’s face when he heard of Taneev’s arrival. He is morbidly jealous, and his suffering is unbearable to me.

  4th June. A distressing conversation this morning with Lyovochka about Taneev. The same unbearable jealousy. I choked back the tears, bitterly reproached my suffering husband and ached with regret for the rest of the day. I read the proofs for The Power of Darkness. What a pure, whole, truthful work of art. Then I went for a swim and met Taneev, which sadly reminded me of our daily meetings last year. After dinner he played Tanya some of his songs. I love his music and I love his character, calm, noble and good.

  He played two of Mendelssohn’s ‘Songs Without Words’, which transported my soul. I copied out more of Lev Nikolaevich’s article before bedtime.

  5th June. Sergei Ivanovich left today and Lev Nikolaevich immediately became calm and cheerful again, and I am calm too. It is only because he is suffering that he makes these jealous demands that I have nothing more to do with Sergei Ivanovich. But to break off relations with him would make me suffer too. I feel so little guilt and so much calm joy in my pure, peaceful friendship with this man, that I could no more tear him from my heart than I could stop seeing, breathing or thinking. I read proofs this morning, then waited on the balcony for Sergei Ivanovich to have coffee with me. He came just when I had gone out to the garden to talk to Vanechka in the watchtower. I asked him whether there was anything wicked in my feelings for Sergei Ivanovich, and today I sensed he wanted to draw me away from him, probably out of compassion for his father; but I know he doesn’t judge me and wouldn’t want to take Sergei Ivanovich from me, for it was he who sent him to me in the first place.

  Later on Maria Vasilevna and I went for a swim. I am horrified by my strength and capacity for exercise! After dinner Lev Nikolaevich, Sergei Ivanovich, Turkin and I all went for a walk. I picked a wonderful bunch of flowers, and was amazed to hear Lev Nikolaevich expound his views on art to Sergei Ivanovich with lively enthusiasm after all his jealous scenes.

  There is very little life in the house at present; there are not many of us here, and I miss Sergei Ivanovich more than anything.*

  6th June. I couldn’t sleep last night; my head and back ached, and I felt unbearably depressed. I suppose this painful physical condition is due to my critical female time of life. I went swimming with Tanya, Vera and my sister-in-law Masha. There are no proofs to correct at present, so I spent the whole day busily copying for Lev Nikolaevich. It’s a fascinating article and has given me all sorts of new ideas.

  The others drove out to Ovsyannikovo, while Lev Nikolaevich and I stayed at home. I was just going upstairs to wr
ite and he was going to his study, when we stopped to have a talk about Masha, who has apparently given up her religious views, which once had such an influence on her life. Lev Nikolaevich commented that his life had been utterly transformed by religion. I said, his inner life maybe; externally it hadn’t changed a bit. That made him furious, and he shouted that in the past he used to hunt, farm, teach and make money, whereas now he didn’t do any of those things. And a great pity too, I said. It had been much better for his family in the past; it had been a great deal better for the district when he farmed the estate, for he had planted trees and improved the land; and it had been a great help to me when he made money and taught the children; now he bowls about on his bicycle, goes out on whichever of his horses he feels like riding, eats the large meals cooked for him, and not only refuses to bother with his children, but frequently forgets about their existence altogether. At this he exploded with rage, saying I had ruined his life.

  I haven’t experienced such spiritual anguish for a long time. I ran out of the house intending to kill myself, go away, die, anything not to have to suffer like that again. What joy it would be to live out the rest of one’s days amicably with a good quiet man and not to be tormented by more insane jealous scenes. Yet the sky is so clear, the weather is radiantly beautiful and peaceful, and nature is so rich, bright and abundant, as though to show man how insubstantial are his endless passions and griefs beside her splendour.

  Towards dusk I went for a swim in the Voronka. Lev Nikolaevich collected me in the trap and spoke to me kindly, and said it was time for us to stop loving and quarrelling so passionately. I had never expected such an offer of tender spiritual friendship from him. Later that evening I walked alone through the forest, weeping and praying for Vanechka, for the love we had had for each other, the one truly great and sacred love of my life. I shall never again know such love—now it’s merely this insane jealous physical passion which drives all other attachments out of my heart.