The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

by Cathy Porter

  “But why aren’t you dancing?” I asked him.

  “Oh, I’m too old for that,” he said.

  Some ladies and old men had been playing cards at two tables, and these were left open after all the visitors had left. The candles were burning down but we didn’t go to bed, and Lev Nikolaevich kept us up with his lively talk. Then Maman said it was time for us to go to bed and firmly ordered us upstairs. We dared not disobey. But just as I was going out of the door, Lev Nikolaevich called to me:

  “Wait a moment, Sofia Andreevna!”

  “What is it?”

  “Will you read what I’m going to write?”

  “Very well.”

  “I’m only going to write the initials—you must guess the words.”

  “How can I do that—it’s impossible! Oh well, go on!”

  He brushed the games scores off the card table, took a piece of chalk and began writing. We were both very serious and excited. I followed his big red hand, and could feel all my powers of concentration and feeling focus on that bit of chalk and the hand that held it. We said nothing.

  What the Chalk Wrote

  “Y.y.&.n.f.h.t.v.r.m.o.m.a.&.i.f.h.”

  “Your youth and need for happiness too vividly remind me of my age and incapacity for happiness,” I read out.

  My heart was pounding, my temples were throbbing, my face was flushed—I was beyond all sense of time and reality; at that moment I felt capable of anything, of understanding everything, imagining the unimaginable.

  “Well, let’s go on,” said Lev Nikolaevich and began to write once more:

  “Y.f.h.t.w.i.a.m.&.y.s.L.Y.&.y.s.T.m.p.m.”

  “Your family has the wrong idea about me and your sister Liza. You and your sister Tanechka must protect me.” I read the initials rapidly, without a second’s hesitation.

  Lev Nikolaevich wasn’t even surprised; it all seemed quite natural somehow. Our elation was such that we soared high above the world and nothing could possibly surprise us.

  Then we heard Maman crossly summoning me to bed. We hurriedly said goodnight, extinguished the candles and went out. Behind my cupboard upstairs I lit the stump of a candle, sat down on the floor, put my notebook on the wooden chair and began to write my diary. I wrote down the words to which Lev Nikolaevich had given me the initials, and grew vaguely aware that something of great significance had occurred between us—something we were now unable to stop. But for various reasons I curbed my thoughts and dreams, as though I was locking up everything that had taken place that evening, keeping back things that weren’t yet ready to see the light.

  When we left Ivitsy we called in at Yasnaya Polyana for the day. But we didn’t have such fun this time. Maria Nikolaevna was leaving with us for Moscow, and from there she was going abroad, where she had left her children, and Aunt Tatyana, who adored her, was sad and silent. Maman seemed worried about something too, and Tanya and little Volodya were tired of travelling and longed to get home.

  The Journey in the Annensky Coach

  We ordered the Annensky coach from Tula, with its two seats at the back, rather like those of a covered cab, and four seats inside. We older girls were sorry to be leaving Yasnaya. We said goodbye to Aunt and her companion Natalya Petrovna, and looked for Lev Nikolaevich to say goodbye to him.

  “I’m coming with you,” he said cheerfully. “How could I stay in Yasnaya now? It will be so dull and miserable.”

  I didn’t ask myself why I felt so happy, why everything was suddenly shining with joy. I ran off to announce the news to my mother and sisters, and it was decided that Lev Nikolaevich would travel the whole way on one of the outside seats at the back, and my sister Liza and I would take turns on the other; she would sit outside until the first stop, then I would take her place, and so on to Moscow.

  We drove and drove…Towards evening I remember I began to get terribly sleepy. I was cold and wrapped myself up, blissfully happy to be sitting next to this old family friend whom I had loved all my life, the beloved author of Childhood, who was being so nice to me and whom I now liked even better. He told me wonderful long stories about the Caucasus, of his life there, the beautiful mountains, the wild scenery and his exploits. I loved listening to his steady voice, full of tender emotion and somewhat hoarse, as though coming from somewhere far away. I would nod off to sleep for a moment and wake to the sound of the same voice telling me his lovely poetic Caucasian tales. I felt ashamed of being sleepy, but I was still so young, and although I regretted missing some of his stories I couldn’t help dozing off sometimes. We travelled all night. Everyone in the coach was asleep, although occasionally Maman and Maria Nikolaevna would talk together or little Volodya would squeak in his sleep.

  At last we were approaching Moscow. At the final staging post it was again my turn to take my place on the back seat with Lev Nikolaevich. When we stopped, Liza came up to me and begged me to let her sit outside.

  “Sonya, would you mind letting me sit outside? It’s so stuffy in the coach!” she said.

  We came out of the station and everyone took their seats. I climbed inside.

  “Sofia Andreevna!” cried Lev Nikolaevich. “It’s your turn to sit at the back!”

  “I know, but I’m cold,” I said evasively. And the carriage door slammed shut behind me.

  Lev Nikolaevich stood and pondered for a moment, then climbed onto the box.

  The next day Maria Nikolaevna went abroad and we left Moscow for our dacha in Pokrovskoe, where my father and brothers were waiting for us.

  The Last Days of Girlhood and the Story

  My entire life was different now. The surroundings were the same, the people were the same, I was the same—superficially. But I seemed to have lost all sense of who I was—I was still in the grip of those feelings that overwhelmed me at Yasnaya Polyana. My personal “I” was consumed in a limitless sense of space—free, all-powerful and unchecked. Those last days of my girlhood were extraordinarily intense, lit by a dazzling brightness and a sudden awakening of the soul. I have had this same sense of spiritual elation on two other occasions in my life, and it was these rare and extraordinary awakenings of the soul that have done more than anything else to convince me that it has an independent life of its own—that it is immortal, and it is when the body dies and it is liberated that it finds its freedom.

  Having driven with us from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow, Lev Nikolaevich rented rooms in the house of a German shoemaker and moved in there. At that time he was very involved with his school work* and with a magazine called Yasnaya Polyana, an educational publication intended for use in peasant schools. It lasted only one year.

  Lev Nikolaevich visited us nearly every day in Pokrovskoe. Sometimes he would be driven back by my father, who often went to Moscow in connection with his work as a doctor. I remember Lev Nikolaevich once telling us he had visited the Petrovsky Park and called in at the royal palace, where he handed the aide-de-camp on duty a letter to Tsar Alexander II complaining about the insult he had suffered from the police, who had made a completely unwarranted search of Yasnaya Polyana.*

  Lev Nikolaevich and I had long walks and talks together, and he once asked me if I kept a diary. I told him I had kept one for a long time, ever since I was eleven, and that last summer when I was sixteen I had also written a long story.

  “Let me read your diaries,” Lev Nikolaevich said.

  “No, I couldn’t do that.”

  “Well, let me see your story then.”

  So I gave him the story. The following morning I asked him if he had read it. He replied casually that he had glanced through it. But later I read in his diary the following entry: “She gave me her story to read. What a powerful sense of truth and simplicity!”* He also told me later that he hadn’t slept all night, and had been disturbed by my verdict on the main character, Prince Dublitsky, in whom he had recognized himself, and of whom I had written: “The Prince was extraordinarily unattractive in appearance, and was always changing his opinions.”

 
I remember we were once feeling very happy and playful, and I kept repeating: “When I am Tsarina I’ll do such and such,” or “When I am Tsarina I’ll order such and such.” Beneath the balcony stood my father’s cabriolet, from which the grey horse had been unharnessed. I hopped inside and shouted, “When I am Tsarina I’ll drive around in a cabriolet like this!” Lev Nikolaevich immediately stepped into the horse’s place, seized the shafts and pulled me along at a brisk trot. “And I’m going to take my Tsarina for a drive!” he said.

  “Do stop, please! It’s much too heavy for you!” I cried, but I was loving it, and delighted to see how strong he was as he pulled me around.

  What heavenly moonlit evenings and nights there were that year! I can still see the little glade at Pokrovskoe bathed in moonlight and the moon reflected in the nearby pond. There was something steely, fresh and bracing about those August nights…“Mad nights!” Lev Nikolaevich would say as we all sat on the balcony or strolled about the garden. There were no romantic scenes or confessions. We had known each other for so long. Our friendship was so simple and easy. And I was not in a hurry to end my free, serene, uncomplicated girlhood. Everything was wonderfully simple, I had no ambitions, no desires for the future.

  Lev Nikolaevich kept coming to visit us. Sometimes when he stayed late my parents would make him spend the night with us. Once at the beginning of September we went to see him off, and when it was time to say goodbye my sister Liza asked me to invite him to her name-day party on 5th September. “Why does it have to be the 5th?” he said, and I didn’t dare tell him, as I had been told not to mention the name day.

  But Lev Nikolaevich promised to come, and to our great joy he kept his word. Things were always so jolly and interesting when he was there.

  At first I didn’t think his visits had anything to do with me. But gradually I began to realize that my feelings for him were growing serious. I remember I once ran upstairs in a state of great agitation to our bedroom, with its French window overlooking the pond and beyond it the church and all the things I had known and loved all my life (for I was born at Pokrovskoe). And as I stood at the window, my heart pounding, my sister Tanya came in and saw how agitated I was.

  “What is it, Sonya?” she asked solicitously.

  “Je crains d’aimer le comte,”* I said abruptly.

  “Really?” Tanya was astonished, for she had had no suspicion of my feelings. She was even a little sad too, for she knew my character. For me “aimer” never meant playing with feelings. Both then and later it was something closer to suffering.

  In Moscow

  In September our whole family moved back to our apartment in Moscow in the Kremlin. As usual Moscow at first felt cramped, dull and stuffy to me after our country dacha, and this had a depressing effect on me. Before we left Pokrovskoe we always used to say goodbye to our favourite places and pay a brief visit to as many of them as possible. But that autumn I was really saying goodbye for the last time to Pokrovskoe, and to my girlhood as well.

  In Moscow Lev Nikolaevich started his almost daily visits again. One evening I tiptoed into my mother’s bedroom and slipped round the screen to her bed. Whenever we came home from a party or theatre, Maman would always cheerfully ask us, “Well, dear, what happened?” And I would give her a detailed account of everything or act out what I had seen at the theatre. But this time we were both rather glum.

  “What is it, Sonya?” Maman asked.

  “Well you see, Maman, everyone thinks Lev Nikolaevich will marry someone else, not me, but I’m sure it’s me he loves,” I said shyly.

  For some reason Maman was furious and scolded me roundly.

  “She’s always thinking people are in love with her!” she raged. “Be off with you and stop thinking a lot of nonsense!”

  My mother’s response to my candid confession hurt me deeply, and I never mentioned Lev Nikolaevich again. My father was angry too that Lev Nikolaevich should visit us so often without proposing to his eldest daughter, as Russian tradition demanded, and he was cold to him and unkind to me. The atmosphere in our house became strained and awkward, especially for me.

  On 14th September, Lev Nikolaevich said he had something very important to tell me, but couldn’t manage to say it. It wasn’t hard to guess what it was. He spoke to me that evening. I was playing the piano in the drawing room while he leant against the stove crying, “Go on playing! Go on playing!” the moment I stopped. The music prevented others from hearing what he said, and my hands trembled with excitement and my fingers stumbled over the keys as I played for practically the tenth time the same waltz, ‘Il Bacio’, which I had learnt by heart to accompany Tanya’s singing.

  Lev Nikolaevich didn’t actually propose then, and I don’t remember exactly what he said. The gist of it though was that he loved me and wanted to marry me. It was all hints and allusions. But in his diary he wrote:

  12th September 1862. I love her as I never thought it possible to love anyone. I’m mad, I’ll shoot myself if it goes on much longer. They had a party. She is enchanting…

  13th September. The minute I get up tomorrow I’ll go there and tell her everything. Otherwise I’ll shoot myself. It’s almost 4 a.m. I’ve written her a letter and will give it to her tomorrow, i.e. today, the 14th. My God, I’m terrified of dying! Help me!

  Another day passed, and on Saturday, 16th September, my brother Sasha and his cadet friends arrived. We had tea in the dining room and fed the hungry cadets, and Lev Nikolaevich spent the whole day with us. Then, choosing a moment when no one’s eyes were on us, he called me into my mother’s room, which was empty at the time, and said: “I wanted to say something to you, but haven’t been able to, so here is a letter I’ve been carrying around in my pocket for several days now. Please read it, and I’ll wait here for your answer.”

  The Proposal

  I seized the letter and tore downstairs to the bedroom I shared with my two sisters. This is what the letter said:

  Sofia Andreevna, I can bear it no longer. Every day for the past three weeks I’ve been saying to myself: “Today I’ll tell her everything”, yet I always leave with the same feelings of sadness, fear and joy in my heart. And every night, as now, I relive what has happened and torture myself—why didn’t I speak to you? And if I had, what would I have said? I am taking this letter with me in case it’s again impossible for me to speak to you, or my courage fails me. Your family has the wrong idea about me—they imagine I am in love with your sister Liza. They are wrong. I cannot get your story out of my head, because when I read it I clearly realized that, like Prince Dublitsky, I have no business to be dreaming of happiness, that you need an exceptional, poetic kind of love. I am not jealous and shall not be jealous of the man you fall in love with. I thought I could love all of you, like children. At Ivitsy I wrote: “Your presence reminds me too vividly of my old age.” But then as now I was lying to myself. Then I might still have been able to tear myself away and return to the monastery of solitary labour and interesting work. But now I can do nothing, for I feel I have created havoc in your household and forfeited the simple straightforward feelings of friendship you once felt for me as a good and honest man. I cannot leave and I dare not stay. You are an honest person. With your hand on your heart and without hurrying (for God’s sake don’t hurry!) tell me what to do. There’s no joy without sorrow. I would have laughed myself sick a month ago if I’d been told one could suffer as I have been suffering, gladly, this past month. Tell me, as an honest person, do you want to be my wife? If you can say yes with your whole heart, boldly, then say yes. Otherwise, if you have the faintest shadow of doubt in your heart, it’s best to say no. For God’s sake think about it carefully. I am terrified of hearing a “no”, but am prepared for it and shall have the strength to endure it. What terrifies me much more is the idea that I shall not be loved as much as I love you!

  I didn’t read the letter all the way through, I merely skimmed through it to the words: “Do you want to be my wife?” I was on my way upst
airs to say yes to Lev Nikolaevich when I ran into my sister Liza in the doorway, who asked me: “Well, what happened?”

  “Le comte m’a fait la proposition,”* I answered hurriedly. Then my mother came in and realized at once what had happened. Taking me firmly by the shoulders she turned me towards the door and said: “Go to him and give him your answer.”

  I flew up the stairs on wings, tore past the dining room and drawing room and rushed into my mother’s bedroom. Lev Nikolaevich stood in the corner, leaning against the wall, waiting for me. I went to him and he seized both my hands.

  “Well, what is the answer?” he asked.

  “Yes—of course,” I replied.

  Within a few moments everyone in the house knew what had happened and was coming in to congratulate us.

  My Name Day and Engagement

  The next day, 17th September, was my name day. All our Moscow friends and relatives came to congratulate us and were told of our engagement. When the old university professor who came to teach my sisters and me French heard that I and not Liza was going to marry Lev Nikolaevich, he said naively: “C’est dommage que cela ne fût Mlle Lise; elle a si bien étudié.”*

  But little Katya Obolenskaya threw her arms around me and said: “I’m so glad you’re going to marry such a splendid man and writer.”

  My betrothal lasted only a week, from the 16th to the 23rd September. During this time I was taken round the shops, where I unenthusiastically tried on dresses, underwear and hats. Lev Nikolaevich visited every day, and one day he brought me his diaries. I remember how shattered I was by these diaries, which out of an excess of honesty he made me read before our wedding. It was very wrong of him to do this; I wept when I saw what his past had been.

  The week passed like a bad dream. For many people my wedding was a sad event, and Lev Nikolaevich was in a terrible hurry to get it over. Maman said I would have to have at least some essential garments made before the wedding, if not the whole trousseau.