The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

by Cathy Porter

  8th June. Whit Sunday! Beautiful weather, the lilacs and lilies of the valley are flowering profusely. There are grass snakes and patches of dry moss on the apple trees. Sasha and my granddaughter Annochka arrived from the station, and everyone was delighted to see them. Lots of singing and dancing.

  9th. Delightful weather, magnificent lilacs, nightingales, a mass of lilies of the valley. We have everything here, and my beloved eldest children, yet a terrible sadness gnaws at my heart. I have so little love for people, I only love my own children and my little Tanechka. Annochka, another granddaughter, has come, and I am happy to see her.

  21st. Sasha came this morning, with a pedagogue called Maxin, with whom Tanya had a long talk. We all walked to the Voronka river past the grave, and it was sad to see the old forest devastated by felling.

  22nd. We had a great many visitors today and I am exhausted. Another meeting of the Tolstoy Society—all words and no action. More visitors this evening from the Rationing Committee. One of them was nothing but a dreamer.

  14th July. Rumours that the White General Denikin is marching on Tula with his troops. Unrest in Tula; people have been marching with white flags and putting them up over the post office building. What will come of it? I wrote a letter to be opened after my death, bidding farewell to my family and begging forgiveness from those I am abandoning.* My grandson Ilya came, and various gentlemen from Tula with splendid horses and carriages to inspect the site for a school.

  15th. I felt so unwell these past few days that I thought my death was near. So I summoned my two darling Tanyas, who have been living with me, and the three of us went through my few valuable possessions together. I considered it only fair to give my best things to my daughter and granddaughter. They have lived with me through the most difficult time in my life and have always been such a comfort to me. To my granddaughter I gave my gold watch and chain which Lev Nik. gave me, and a large diamond brooch that was a present from him when we were engaged; to my daughter I gave my mother’s bracelet (gold) and a ring with two diamonds and a ruby, a present from Lev Nik. for all my help and labours when he was writing Anna Karenina. (This ring was in fact called Anna Karenina.)

  19th. Rumours that Denikin is marching here with his troops to fight the “Bolsheviks”, but whether he will be any better God knows! The Bolsheviks give us everything we need and don’t insult us. Sergeenko read to us this evening from his Tolstoy Almanac. It was very interesting; I have forgotten so much, and it’s good to be reminded of it.

  20th. I gave Tanya the will I made in her favour. A worrying letter from my son Seryozha. Where are my sons and their families!!! My soul is heavy.

  14th August. Rumours that the Bolsheviks’ power is collapsing. Everyone here is rejoicing, but I am grateful to them for their help.

  1st September. More rumours that some Red Guards are being stationed in our village to fight Denikin.*

  5th. Alarming news this evening that soldiers have been quartered in the peasants’ huts with their regimental commander, and that some soldiers have been dispatched from Tula to guard our apple orchard.

  6th. They have sent us a large number of soldiers. Some are being lodged in the village to do various jobs of work, and some are guarding the orchard. How terrible to think armed people are living on the land where Tolstoy was born!

  12th. Sergeant Dehring came with some aeronautical artillerymen—in a motor car.

  29th. After lunch I visited the grave and met one or two people on the way. I sat by the grave for a long time, then wandered about talking silently to my dead Lyovochka—as he was when we loved each other.

  7th October. Something sinister and terrible is approaching. A lot of bulls and horses and 4 vans have been driven here from Kursk. Kursk has been routed, and the Jews there were slaughtered.* An agitated Volkov from the Yasnaya Polyana Society dashed in briefly to visit us this evening. He is responsible for sorting out the cattle that were driven over here (for some reason) from Kursk. I have had a bad cough and have been staying at home. I wrote a letter to Davydov in reply to his about ‘Polikushka’.* I washed the floors and took the window frames out to the veranda. Rumours that Denikin is in Mtsensk, or very near it.

  9th. A great quantity and variety of strangers here to visit Lev Nik—ch’s rooms. A certain Levitsky told me some Red Army troops had marched to Tula in the night; he said there would be a battle not far from Tula, and that they were putting up barbed-wire entanglements.

  12th. I looked through my memoirs to find some information for Denisenko, who wanted to know about the times when Lev Nik. came into collision with the legal world (refusing to take the oath, the bull that gored the cattleyard worker, and so on). This is a difficult task, but I shall attempt to do it. The weather is brighter and finer but my health is worse—I am terrified I may have paralysis of the throat, like my father. My Tanya is even more precious to me—she has grown prettier recently too.

  16th. All the soldiers of the 21st Cavalry Regiment have now left. The younger ones turned out to be good lads, and the older ones were thoroughly decent people.

  17th. My daughter Tanya’s birthday. I went into her wing to greet her and gave her a little porcelain cup—my mother’s last present to me—containing a gold 10-ruble piece. I want to give everything away before my death, which will be very soon now. My choking cough is turning into something like whooping cough—this is my 3rd attack. The weather is overcast and cold, below freezing. It’s cold in the house; the winter glazing hasn’t been put in and the stoves haven’t been mended. We’re expecting battles near Yasnaya Polyana.*

  19th. There was a meeting to decide how best to defend Yasnaya Polyana against looting.* Nothing has yet been decided. Carts, oxen and people are streaming down the highway to Tula.

  III

  Appendices

  L.N. Tolstoy’s Marriage

  Our Trip to Ivitsy and Yasnaya Polyana

  At the beginning of August 1862, when I was seventeen, Maman told me and my two sisters, to our great joy, that she had decided to drive us three little girls and our brother Volodya to the estate of her father and our grandfather, Alexander Islenev, in an Annensky coach (named after its owner and still in use at the time).

  Our grandfather (who appears in Lev Nikolaevich’s Childhood as “Papa”) lived in the Odoevsky district on his estate at Ivitsy, which was all that remained of his large fortune.

  The three daughters of his second marriage were young girls at that time, and I was very friendly with the second one.

  His estate was some 20 miles from Yasnaya Polyana, where Lev Nikolaevich’s sister Maria had been living ever since she returned from Algeria,* and as my mother and she had been close childhood friends and were naturally anxious to see each other again, my mother, who hadn’t visited Yasnaya Polyana since she was a child, decided we would call in there on our way. We were in ecstasies at the news, and my younger sister Tanya and I were especially pleased, like all young people eager for change and movement. We cheerfully prepared for the journey. Smart new dresses were made, we packed our bags and waited impatiently to leave.

  I don’t remember anything about the day we left, and my memories of the journey itself are very vague—just the stopping places, the changing of the horses, the rushed meals and the exhaustion from all the unaccustomed travelling. We went to Tula to visit my mother’s sister Nadezhda Karnovich, who was married to the Tula Marshal of the Nobility, and we took a look round Tula, which struck me as a very dull, dirty place. But we were determined not to miss anything, and to pay attention to everything on our trip.

  After dinner we drove on to Yasnaya Polyana. It was already evening by then, but the weather was magnificent. The highway through Zaseka* was very picturesque, and this wild expanse of nature was a new experience for us city girls.

  Maria Nikolaevna and Lev Nikolaevich gave us a noisy and joyful welcome, and their aunt Tatyana Ergolskaya greeted us affably in polite French, while old Natalya Petrovna, her companion, silently stroked my sh
oulder and winked in a most beguiling way at my sister Tanya, who was then just 15.

  They gave us a large vaulted room downstairs,* modestly and even poorly furnished. All round the room there were sofas that were painted white, with hard cushions at the backs and hard seats covered in blue-and-white striped ticking. There was a chaise longue too, similarly made by the local joiner. Set into the vaulted ceiling were iron rings from which gammons, saddles and so on used to hang in the days when the house belonged to Lev Nikolaevich’s grandfather, Prince Volkonsky; it was now used as a storeroom.

  The days were growing shorter, for it was already the beginning of August. After we had run round the garden, Natalya Petrovna took us to the raspberry bushes. This was the first time we had eaten raspberries straight from the bush, rather than from the little baskets that were brought to our dacha when we were making jam. There weren’t many berries left, but I loved the beauty of the red fruit against the green leaves, and enjoyed their fresh taste.

  The Night and the Chair

  When it began to grow dark, Maman sent me down to unpack the bags and make up the beds. Aunt’s maid Dunyasha* and I were getting the beds ready when Lev Nikolaevich suddenly walked in. Dunyasha told him she had made up three beds on the sofas but didn’t know where to put a fourth one.

  “What about the chair?” said Lev Nikolaevich, moving out a big armchair and pushing a broad square stool against it.

  “I’ll sleep on the chair,” I said.

  “Well, I’ll make up your bed for you,” said Lev Nikolaevich clumsily unfolding a sheet. I felt embarrassed, but there was also something lovely and intimate about making up the beds together.

  When it was all ready we went upstairs and found Tanya curled up fast asleep on a little sofa in Aunt’s room. Volodya had been put to bed too. Maman was chatting away to Maria Nikolaevna and Aunt about the old days. Liza stared at us inquisitively. I vividly remember every moment of that evening.

  In the dining room, with its large French windows, Alexei Stepanovich,* the little cross-eyed butler, was laying the table for supper with the help of the stately, rather beautiful Dunyasha (daughter of old Nikolai,* who appeared in Childhood). In the middle of one wall was a door opening into a little sitting room with an antique rosewood clavichord, and the sitting room had French windows leading out to a little balcony, which had the most lovely view. It has given me pleasure all my life, and I love it to this day.

  I took a chair and went out to the balcony alone to admire the view. I shall never forget the mood I was in—although I would never be able to describe it. I don’t know if it was the effect of nature, real, untamed nature and wide spaces, or a premonition of what would happen a month and a half later when I entered this house as its mistress. Perhaps it was simply a farewell to my girlhood freedom, perhaps it was all these things, I don’t know. But there was something so significant about my mood that evening, and I felt such happiness and an extraordinary sense of boundlessness. The others were all going in to supper and Lev Nikolaevich came out to call me.

  “No thank you, I don’t want anything,” I said. “It’s so lovely out here.”

  In the dining room I could hear Tanya showing off, joking and being naughty—everyone spoilt her and she was quite used to it. Lev Nikolaevich went back to the dining room, but returned to the balcony to see me without finishing his supper. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about, I just remember him saying: “How simple and serene you are”, which pleased me very much.

  I had a good sleep in the long chair which Lev Nikolaevich had made up for me. I tossed about a bit at first, for the arms at the side made it rather narrow and uncomfortable, but my heart was singing with joy as I remembered him arranging my bed for me, and I fell asleep with a new feeling of joy in my young soul.

  The Picnic at Yasnaya Polyana

  I felt full of joy too when I woke next morning. I longed to run everywhere, look at everything, chatter to everyone. How light and airy it was at Yasnaya! Lev Nikolaevich was determined we should enjoy ourselves, and Maria Nikolaevna helped to ensure we did. They harnessed the “katki”—a long carriage more like a wagonette—and put Baraban the chestnut in the shafts and Strelka in the traces. Then the bay Belogubka was saddled up with an old-fashioned lady’s saddle, a magnificent grey was brought out for Lev Nikolaevich, and we all got ready for our picnic.

  More guests arrived—Gromova, the wife of a Tula architect, and Sonechka Bergholz, niece of Yulia Auerbach, the headmistress of Tula high school for girls. Maria Nikolaevna was overjoyed to have her two best friends there—my mother and Gromova—and was in a playful, cheerful mood, laughing, telling jokes and keeping us all amused. Lev Nikolaevich suggested I ride Belogubka, which I was very keen to do.

  “But I can’t, I don’t have a riding habit,” I said, looking at my yellow dress with its black velvet buttons and belt.

  “It doesn’t matter,” smiled Lev Nikolaevich. “There are no dachas here, and no one but the forests to see you.” And he helped me mount Belogubka.

  I was the happiest person in the world as I galloped beside him down the road to Zaseka, our first stopping place. In those days it was all unbroken forest. Later I would drive to those places again and again, yet they never seemed quite the same. Then everything seemed magically beautiful, as it never is in everyday life, only in certain moods of spiritual elation. We rode to a little clearing where there was a haystack. Over the years we would have many picnics in that clearing in Zaseka with Tanya’s children and mine, but on that day it was a different clearing, and I saw it with different eyes.

  Maria Nikolaevna invited us all to scramble on the haystack and roll down, and it was a cheerful, noisy afternoon.

  The following morning we drove off to the village of Krasnoe, which used to belong to my grandfather Islenev.* My grandmother was buried there, and Maman was very keen to visit the place where she was born and had grown up, and to kneel at her mother’s grave at the church. They didn’t want us to leave Yasnaya, and Maman had to give her solemn word of honour that we would call in on our way back, even if only for a day.

  Krasnoe Village

  Maria Nikolaevna had lent us a carriage for the journey to Krasnoe, and we hired horses. We didn’t spend long there.

  I remember the church and the tombstone with its inscription: “Princess Sofia Petrovna Kozlovskaya, born Countess Zavadovskaya.” I vividly pictured my grandmother’s life: what misery she must have endured with her first husband Kozlovsky, a drunkard, to whom she was married against her will, then with her unlawful second husband, Alexander Islenev, my grandfather, living in this country place, bearing an endless annual succession of children,* and worrying constantly that in the grip of his gambling mania he would lose his entire fortune and be forced to leave the estate—which is exactly what happened to him at the end of his life. The old priest and Fetis the deacon both remembered Sofia Petrovna warmly and spoke of her with great affection. “I committed the sin of marrying them in secret,” the old priest told us.

  Fetis the deacon, we were told, had died and was in his coffin, and had suddenly come back to life just as they were burying him, and jumped out of his grave and walked home. To this day I can see Fetis’s withered little figure, his sparse hair plaited into a grey pigtail at the back of his head. I had never seen a deacon with a pigtail in Moscow, but nothing surprised me any longer. Everything seemed fantastic, full of beauty and magic.

  Ivitsy

  When the horses had been fed, we left Krasnoe in the same carriage and drove to my grandfather’s estate at Ivitsy. We were given a solemn and joyous reception. Grandfather moved rapidly—he seemed to slide across the floor in his soft ankle boots. He kept teasing us, and calling us “the young ladies of Moscow”, and he had a habit of pinching our cheeks with his middle and forefinger and winking when he said something funny, then screwing up his humorous little eyes. I can still see his powerful figure, the little black skullcap on his bald head, his large aquiline nose and ruddy clean-
shaven face.

  Sofia Alexandrovna, his second wife, astounded us by smoking a long pipe, her lower lip sagging; all that remained of her former beauty were her sparkling, expressive black eyes.

  Their second daughter, the lovely Olga, cool and imperturbable, took us upstairs to the room they had prepared for us. My bed was behind a cupboard, with just a plain wooden chair instead of a table.

  Our arrival created much excitement. A lot of people came over to look at us, and picnics, dances and drives were organized for us.

  The day after we arrived in Ivitsy, Lev Nikolaevich suddenly turned up on his grey horse. He had covered 20 miles and was in high spirits. My grandfather, who loved Lev Nikolaevich and the whole Tolstoy family—for he had been friends with his father, Count Nikolai Ilich—was delighted to see him and greeted him warmly.

  There were a large number of visitors that day, and the young folk had organized a dance that evening after the day’s drive. Some officers and local young landowners came, and a lot of ladies and young girls. They were all perfect strangers and we found them a little odd, but what did we care? We had great fun, that was all that mattered. Various people took turns to play dance tunes on the piano.

  “How smart you look! I wish Aunt had seen you in that dress,” said Lev Nikolaevich smiling, looking at my white-and-mauve dress with the lilac ribbons fluttering from the shoulders. (This was the current fashion, known as “suivez-moi”.)