At 5am on October 28, 1910, Leo Tolstoy slipped out of his home, Yasnaya
Polyana. He was 82 years old and no longer able to stand living with Sofia,
his wife of 48 years. When Sofia heard about his flight, she jumped into the
pond but was dragged out by two of her children. For the next five days she
ate and drank nothing. When she learnt that her husband was dying in a
railway house 80 miles away in Astapovo, she went to him in a special train
but found the door barred. For the next four days she waited outside “in
agony”, and was allowed to see him only as he drew his last breath at 6am on
November 7.
We know all this because Sofia kept a diary, which also tells us that the
reason for the final row with “Lev Nik”, as she refers to Tolstoy, was
because he was “hiding” his diary from her. “It was either the diaries or my
life,” she told him.
Diaries were the currency of the relationship between the Tolstoys, as Cathy
Porter says in her translator’s introduction; they each wrote them so the
other might read them. Their first argument, which took place on the eve of
their wedding in 1862, was because Tolstoy had insisted on showing his
18-year-old bride the diary that described his relationships with serfs and
his homosexual yearnings. Sofia, who believed he was a man “completely
whole, new, pure”, was horrified. “My husband’s past is so ghastly that I
don’t think I shall ever be able to accept it,” she wrote in her own diary.
Their marriage would be plagued by her disgust at his past life and fear of
his “complicated inner life”. “His diaries disturb me so much that I grow
confused, and cannot see things clearly,” she wrote 15 years later.
The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy, which is a compact reissue, ahead of the
centenary of Tolstoy’s death, of a rather bulky translation first published
in 1985, makes disturbing reading, too. While Tolstoy plunges headlong into
his novels and philosophies, Sofia wanders round and round her own inner
world like a rudderless boat. She is not one of those writer’s wives who
lovingly puts up with her husband’s self-obsession, nor one of those women
diarists who represses her rage and finds beauty in pain. “It is terrible to
live with him,” she complains weeks into the marriage, referring to
Tolstoy’s love of the “dark ones”, as she calls the lower classes. The
summer before he finally leaves home, Sofia, now 66, is still repeating the
refrain that “It’s impossible to go on living like this”, only this time she
means sharing the house with a fleet of Tolstoy’s “disciples” who see her as
the antichrist.
Half a million words long, her diaries cover 57 years, the birth of 13
children, the death of four of them, her intensive work on the proofs of War
and Peace, the genesis of Anna Karenina, her husband’s protracted spiritual
crisis, and the emergence of his cult-like status; but the subject she
returns to again and again is her terror of losing Lev Nik’s love. “These
fears…have remained in my heart throughout my life,” she writes. What began
as the insecurity of a young bride becomes, by 1910, their annus horribilis,
a pathological condition. Sofia’s diaries document how she brought about
the situation she most feared.
Tolstoy had initially been besotted by Sofia Behrs, the daughter of friends.
“I love her as I never thought it possible to love anyone,” he wrote in his
diary before he proposed. “I’ll shoot myself if it goes on much longer.”
Fortunately for literature they were married within weeks, at which point
Sofia, whom Tolstoy had thought “simple” and “serene”, adopted his language
of emotional extremity. Her diaries are punctuated with suicide threats.
“One of these days I think I shall kill myself with jealousy,” she declares
on discovering (again from his diaries) that a peasant woman with whom
Tolstoy has a child is living on their estate.
Sofia, who lived until 1919, did not die of jealousy but it certainly killed
her marriage. Her final rival is the odious Chertkov, Tolstoy’s acolyte and
the final recipient of the diaries Tolstoy will not allow her to see. “I
realised that…his last diaries…have all been composed for Chertkov…and now
Lev Nik never dares to write a word of love for me in them,” she writes in
1910 as she becomes increasingly unhinged. The “source” of her current
jealousy, she explains to Tolstoy, lies in the fatal diary he had shown her
before they married, “in which he writes that he has never fallen in love
with a woman but has frequently fallen in love with men”. The week before he
eventually leaves home, Sofia describes lying in a ditch outside Chertkov’s
house watching, with a pair of binoculars, for Tolstoy’s arrival. “I kept
imagining I would lie down on the bridge across the ditch and let his horse
trample over my body.”
For their family and his friends, the Tolstoys were a love-him, hate-her
couple, and until recently history has tended to concur. While Chertkov told
Sofia that if he had such a wife he would have shot himself, and Gorky
detected in her a morbidly tense desire to underline the incontestably great
part she played in her husband’s life, Rebecca West described Tolstoy as
a monster who had earned the contempt of the world. Doris Lessing, who has
provided a pallid new foreword to this much appreciated edition, takes us no
further in our understanding of the Tolstoys’ peculiar dynamic, although we
do learn that the reason for Sofia’s many pregnancies was that the advent
of the pill was still almost a century ahead. It is simplistic to see Sofia
as the victim of her husband’s genius. Her diaries show that she was a
formidable storyteller in her own right, and while she cast herself as
tragic heroine she comes across in this book as a drama queen.
Sofia’s problem, it seems, is a frequent one in relationships, of needing
more space. She inhabits a claustrophobic corner of a great Russian
landscape. While revolutionary crisis rumbles around her she records that
“Lev Nik had a bath today”; while he sinks into his “rapt inner existence”,
she wants “people to say how pretty I am”. As Tolstoy himself put it, “Man
survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and all the agonies
of the soul, but for all time his tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will
be the tragedy of the bedroom.”
The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy by Sofia Tolstoy
Alma £20 pp450
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