The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

by Cathy Porter

  10th March. I went out for my first walk today and was astonished to see spring was here. The grass is like the grass at home in Russia in May. Various coloured primulas are in flower, and there are dandelions and dead-nettles all over the place. The sun is bright, the sea and sky are blue and the birds, sweet creatures, are singing.

  Lev Nikolaevich has made a marked improvement in this fine weather—his temperature was 35.9 today and his pulse was 88. He has a huge appetite, drinks kefir day and night with great relish and reads the papers and letters. But he doesn’t seem very cheerful.

  11th March. He is getting better. I went to Yalta. It was a lovely day, the sea and sky were blue, the birds were singing, the grass was springing up everywhere.

  We rubbed him all over with spirit and warm water, and at ten we put him to bed.

  12th March. He is slowly but surely improving. Today he read the Herald of Europe and the newspapers, and took an interest in the latest Moscow news.

  13th March. It is warmer, 13 degrees in the shade, and there was a warm rain. He continues to recover. I am still sitting with him until 5 in the morning. Sasha took my place yesterday, and Tanya will do so today.

  Late yesterday evening I read a translation of an essay by Emerson. It was all said long ago and much better by the ancient philosophers—that every genius is more closely connected to the dead philosophers than to the living members of his family circle. It is rather a naive conclusion.

  For a genius one has to create a peaceful, cheerful, comfortable home. A genius must be fed, washed and dressed, must have his works copied out innumerable times, must be loved and spared all cause for jealousy, so he can be calm. Then one must feed and educate the innumerable children fathered by this genius, whom he cannot be bothered to care for himself, as he has to commune with all the Epictetuses, Socrateses and Buddhas, and aspire to be like them himself.

  I have served a genius for almost forty years. Hundreds of times I have felt my intellectual energy stir within me, and all sorts of desires—a longing for education, a love of music and the arts…And time and again I have crushed and smothered these longings, and now and to the end of my life I shall somehow continue to serve my genius.

  Everyone asks: “But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual, artistic life?” To this I can only reply: “I don’t know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune.” However much one loves this man who people regard as a genius, to do nothing but bear and feed his children, sew, order dinner, apply compresses and enemas and silently sit there dully awaiting his demands for one’s services, is torture. And there is never anything in return for it either, not even simple gratitude, and there’s always such a lot to grumble about instead. I have borne this burden for too long, and I am worn out.

  This tirade about the way geniuses are misunderstood by their families was provoked by my anger at Emerson and all those who have written and spoken about this question since the days of Socrates and Xantippe.

  15th March. He was awake all last night with terrible pains in his legs and stomach. It’s a little warmer, the parks are slightly green, but it’s just the same old rocks, the same crooked trees, lifeless earth and tossing sea.

  I did a lot of sewing today.

  19th March. Life here is so monotonous, there’s nothing to write about. His illness has almost run its course.

  Whenever I come into his room he is intently counting his pulse. Today he was looking through the window at the sun, poor man, and begged me to open the door of the terrace for a moment.

  5th April. A lot of time has passed and little has happened. Tanya left on 30th March with her family and Andryusha arrived on the 24th. L.N.’s various treatments continue—he has been having arsenic injections since 2nd April, and today they gave him electrical treatment for his stomach. He was taking nux vomica but is now taking magnesium, and at night he has bismuth with codeine and ether-valerian drops. His nights are very disturbed, and his legs and stomach ache, so his legs have to be massaged, which I find very tiring: my back aches, the blood rushes to my head and I feel quite hysterical. He rejected all such things, of course, when his health was good, but with the onset of his first serious illness every conceivable treatment is set in motion. Three doctors visit practically every day; nursing him is extremely hard work, there are a lot of us here, we are all tired and overworked, and our personal lives have been completely eaten up by his illness. Lev Nikolaevich is first and foremost a writer and expounder of ideas: in reality and in his life he is a weak man, much weaker than us simple mortals. I couldn’t endure the thought of writing and saying one thing and living and acting another, but it doesn’t seem to bother him, just so long as he doesn’t suffer, so long as he lives and gets better…What a lot of attention he devotes to himself these days, taking his medicines and having his compresses changed, and what a lot of effort he takes to feed himself, sleep and lessen the pain.

  13th April. Saturday, the evening before Easter Sunday, and my God, the depression is unbearable! I am sitting on my own upstairs in the bedroom, with my granddaughter Sonyushka sleeping beside me, while downstairs in the dining room there is the most vile heathen commotion going on. They are all playing vint, they have wheeled Lev Nikolaevich’s armchair in, and he is enthusiastically following Sasha’s game.

  I am feeling very lonely. My children are even more despotic, rude and demanding than their father. Day and night, hour after hour, he attends to and cares for his body, and I can detect no spiritual feelings in him whatsoever. With me he is rude and demanding, and if I do something careless out of sheer exhaustion he shouts at me peevishly.

  11th May. I am ashamed of the unkind things I wrote in my diary last time about Lyovochka and my family. I was angry about their attitude to Holy Week, and instead of being mindful of my own sinfulness I transferred my anger to my nearest and dearest. “Grant me to see my own sins and not judge my brother…”

  What a long time has passed since then, and what a ghastly time we are going through once again!

  He was at last beginning to recover from the pneumonia; he was walking about the house with a stick, eating well and digesting his food. Masha then suggested that I attend to my urgent business in Yasnaya and Moscow, and on the morning of 22nd April I set off.

  My trip was very pleasant and successful. I spent a day at Yasnaya Polyana, where Andryusha joined me. The weather was delightful; I adore the early spring, with its soft green hues and fresh hopes for a new and better life…I busied myself with the accounts and bills, toured the apple orchards, inspected the cattle and walked over to Chepyzh as the sun was setting. The lungwort and violets were blooming, the birds were singing, the sun was setting over the felled forest, and this pure natural beauty, free of all human cares, filled me with joy.

  In Moscow I was delighted by the way people treated me. Everyone was so friendly and cheerful, as though they were all my friends. Even people in the shops and banks welcomed me back warmly after my long absence.

  I dealt successfully with my business, visited the Wanderers’ Exhibition* and the exhibition of St Petersburg artists, went to an examination performance of Mozart’s cheerful opera Così Fan Tutte and saw a lot of friends, and on Sunday invited a group of my closest friends to the house—Marusya, the Maklakovs, Uncle Kostya, Misha Sukhotin and Sergei Ivanovich, who played me some of Arensky’s lesser-known pieces, a Schumann sonata and his own charming symphony, which gave me more pleasure than anything.

  Soothed and satisfied, I set off for Gaspra, assuming from the daily telegrams that everything there was in order. But on my return I discovered that L.N. had had a fever for the past two or three evenings, and eventually typhoid fever was diagnosed. These past days and nights have been agony and terror for all of us. At two in the morning I called on Doctor Nikitin, who is staying here with us, and he administered some strophanthus, stayed a while, then went off to bed.

  Lev Nikolaevich is now lying quietly in the large gloomy Gas
pra drawing room and I am writing at the table. The house is silent and ominous.

  13th May. He is better, thank God. His temperature is falling steadily and his pulse has improved. Seryozha is being insufferable and keeps finding new reasons for being angry with me.

  I live only for today, it’s enough for me if everything is all right. I played the piano alone for two hours in the wing while L.N. slept.

  15th May. This unpleasantness with Seryozha has taken its toll. Yesterday I had such terrible pains all over my body that I thought I was dying. I am better today. L.N.’s typhus is passing; his temperature was 36.5 after his bed-bath this evening, and his pulse was 80; his maximum temperature today was 37.3. But he is weak and terribly wretched. I was told not to go downstairs but couldn’t resist visiting him. It is cold, 11 degrees.

  16th May. He is much better and his temperature is down to 37, not even that. He is very bored, poor man. I should think so too! He has been ill for almost 5 months now.

  He is dictating ideas about the unequal distribution of the land and the injustice of land ownership; this is his major preoccupation at the moment.* I feel I am about to break. If only I could leave!

  22nd May. Lev Nikolaevich is gradually recovering: his temperature is back to normal, no higher than 36.5, and his pulse is 80. He is upstairs at present, as the downstairs rooms are being cleaned and aired. The weather is cool and rainy. Everyone in the house has become terribly homesick all of a sudden, and even L.N. is in low spirits, despite his recovery. We are all longing to be back in Yasnaya. Tanya is missing her husband, and Ilyusha his family. To be perfectly frank, all of us are feeling the need for some sort of personal life again, now that the danger is past. Poor Sasha, it’s quite reasonable for her to want this at her age.

  Yesterday and today I played the piano on my own in the wing. I am practising the very difficult Chopin Scherzo (the second, in five flats). What a lovely piece it is, and how it harmonizes with my present mood! Then I sight-read the Mozart rondo (the second, the minor), such an elegant, graceful work.

  I was lying in bed today wondering why a husband and wife so often find estrangement creeping into their relations, and I realized it was because married couples know every aspect of each other, and as they grow older they become wiser, and see everything more clearly. We don’t like people to see our bad side, we carefully conceal our flaws from others and show ourselves off to our best advantage, and the cleverer a person is the more able he is to present his best qualities. With a husband or wife though, this isn’t possible. One can see all the lies and the masks—and it’s not at all pleasant.

  I am reading Fielding’s The Soul of a People, translated from the English. It is quite delightful. How much better Buddhism is than our Orthodoxy, and what marvellous people these Burmese are.

  29th May. I haven’t written for a whole week. On Saturday the 25th Tanya went home to Kochety. On the 26th Lev Nikolaevich was carried downstairs and taken outside to the terrace, where he sat in his armchair. Yesterday he even took a spin in the carriage with Ilyusha. Professor Lamansky was here yesterday, and some peculiar fellow who talked about the low cultural level of the peasants and the necessity to do something about it. He kept saying “pardon” in French, and deliberately didn’t pronounce his “r”s. Lev Nikolaevich got very angry with him, but when I sent him away to take his pulse—which was 94 per minute—he angrily shouted at me in the presence of Lamansky: “Oh, I’m so tired of you!” which hurt me deeply.

  The lovely white magnolias and lilies have come into flower.

  5th June. Still in the Crimea. It is very pleasant here at the moment; the days are hot and fine and the moonlit nights are beautiful; I am sitting upstairs, admiring the reflection of the moon in the sea. Lev Nikolaevich is walking about with a stick now and seems well, although he is very thin and weak. He only lost his temper once with me yesterday, when I cut and washed his hair. He writes every morning—a proclamation to the working people, I think, and also something about the ownership of the land.

  11th June. Today he went for a drive with Doctor Volkov to the Yusupovs’ Park in Ai-Todor, which he enjoyed very much. Altschuler’s wife visited, as well as Sonya Tatarinova, the Volkov family and Elpatevsky with his son. A large crowd of strangers came and peered through the window at Lev Nikolaevich.

  Sofia Tolstoy in 1863

  Sofia Behrs and her younger sister Tatyana, photographed some time in the early 1860s

  Yasnaya Polyana, the general view of the Tolstoys’ estate, 1897

  Sofia Tolstoy, Lev Tolstoy, Sofia’s younger brother Stepan Behrs, Sofia’s daughter Maria and Maria Petrovna Behrs, Stepan’s wife, 1887

  Peasant women gathering apples in the Tolstoys’ orchard at Yasnaya Polyana, 1888

  Sofia Tolstoy with her children Tatyana and Sergei, 1866 (above left), Ivan Tolstoy (Vanechka), the Tolstoys’ youngest child, photographed in 1893 in Moscow by the firm of Scherer and Nabholz (above right)

  Sofia Tolstoy with her younger children: left to right, Mikhail (Misha), Andrei (Andryusha), Alexandra (Sasha) and Ivan (Vanechka)

  Lev and Sofia Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, with eight of their children, 1887 (Sofia’s photograph)

  Lev Tolstoy and Sofia in his study

  Sofia Tolstoy copying a portrait by Repin, 1904

  Maria Tolstaya (Masha) haymaking at Yasnaya Polyana, 1895 (photograph by P.I. Biryukov)

  Yasnaya Polyana, 1896 (Sofia Tolstoy’s photograph)

  The house in Dolgokhamovnichesky Lane, Moscow

  Moscow, 1896: at the back, Sofia Tolstoy and Sergei Taneev; at the front, from left to right, Maria Tolstaya, Tatiana Tolstaya, Konstantin Nikolaevich Igumnov

  Vladimir Chertkov with colleagues at the Free Word publishing house in Christchurch, England, c.1901

  Gaspra, Crimea, 1901: left to right, Anton Chekhov, Sofia Tolstoy, Lev Tolstoy and their daughter Maria

  Tula schoolchildren visiting Lev Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, 1907

  Sofia and Lev Tolstoy during his illness at Gaspra, 1901

  Gaspra, May 1902: Tolstoy recovering from typhoid fever, with his daughter Tatyana (Sofia’s photograph)

  Sofia Tolstoy in the park at Yasnaya Polyana, 1903 (Sofia’s photograph)

  Yasnaya Polyana, 1904: the Tolstoys’ eldest sons: left to right, Lev, Ilya, Sergei, Andrei and Mikhail (Sofia’s photograph)

  Sofia Tolstoy at the window of the stationmaster’s house at Astapovo station, where Tolstoy was dying, November 1910

  Tolstoy’s sons carrying his coffin, 8th November 1910, at Astapovo station

  Sofia Tolstoy by Tolstoy’s grave at Yasnaya Polyana, 1912

  Sofia Tolstoy and her granddaughter Tanya, 1917

  We have been enjoying life here, the weather is fine and L.N.’s convalescence is progressing well. I went riding twice, once to Orianda with Klassen and once to Alupka with him and Sasha. It was most enjoyable. I play the piano, sew and take photographs. Lev Nikolaevich is writing an appeal to the working people, ‘On the Ownership of the Land’, in which he says much the same thing as he wrote to the Tsar. We are planning to leave on the 13th.

  13th June. Yet again it looks as though we won’t be leaving Gaspra for a while. In Russia it’s damp, raining and very cold—only 12 degrees—and Lev Nikolaevich has an upset stomach.

  He is still writing his proclamation to the workers. I copied the whole thing for him today. Much of it is illogical, impractical and unclear. The fact that the land is owned by the rich, and the great suffering this imposes on the peasants, is indeed a crying injustice. But this matter will not be resolved in a hurry.

  17th June. Arguments about the Bashkirs.* Numerous visitors milling around all day.

  26th June. Yesterday we finally left Gaspra. I thank God He has granted us to take Lev Nikolaevich home once more! I pray he never has to leave again!

  27th June (Yasnaya Polyana). Today we returned home from the Crimea. We rode to Yalta on horseback, with Lev Nikolaevich and Sasha, travelling in the Yusupo
vs’ rubber-tyred carriage. There were Lev Nikolaevich, Sasha and I, my son Seryozha, Boulanger, Yulia Igumnova and Doctor Nikitin in our party. In Yalta we boarded the steamer Alexei. Ladies, bouquets, crowds of people waving farewell…On the steamer L.N. sat on deck, ate in the public dining room and felt extremely well…In Sevastopol we disembarked onto a skiff and sailed round the harbour to the station; the sun was bright and it was very beautiful. A specially large, comfortable carriage with a saloon had been set aside for L.N. Sasha was ill and miserable and had an upset stomach. At Kharkov station, people—mostly women—welcomed him with ovations. At Kursk there were crowds of people who had just been to an exhibition on popular education. The police pushed them back, and deputations of men and women teachers and students boarded the train—Misha Stakhovich, Dolgorukov, Gorbunov and Lodyzhensky, among others.