The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy Page 2

  At their magnificent wedding in the Kremlin, she couldn’t stop weeping for the family she was leaving. She wept all the way to her new home. And she wept when, crushed and terrified by Tolstoy’s clumsy attempts to embrace her, they finally arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, where she would spend the next fifty-seven years of her life.

  Waiting for them on the steps of the large white-painted wooden house were Tolstoy’s old aunt, Tatyana Ergolskaya, holding an icon of the Holy Virgin, and his brother Sergei, bearing the traditional welcome of bread and salt. Sofia bowed to the ground, embraced her relatives and kissed the icon. (She would be guided to the end of her life by the simple rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church.) Then Aunt Tatyana handed her new mistress the keys of the house, and these she hung on her waist and carried there until the day she died.

  The house, cold, spartanly furnished and infested with rats and mice, had been Tolstoy’s home all his life. There was a large farm, with cattle, sheep, pigs and bees, and until the 1880s Tolstoy took a keen interest in its management. But he was not a successful farmer. The pigs kept dying of hunger, the sheep proved unprofitable and the cows were thin and didn’t give enough milk. The only profit came from the apple orchards, but even so the estate was always running at a loss. Yasnaya Polyana’s greatest asset was its forests (“my daughters’ dowry”, Sofia would call them), but these too were neglected. Tolstoy’s other estate, in Nikolskoe, was even more dilapidated and even more forested, and in these forests, inhabited only by wolves and birds, Tolstoy loved to hunt, for until the 1880s he was a passionate sportsman.

  Sofia was determined to like her new home and to be a good wife. She took over the accounts, organized the housekeeping and marshalled the small army of dependants and domestics living there who comprised her new family. There was Aunt Tatyana, with her personal maid and companion Natalya Petrovna; there was Maria Arbuzova, Tolstoy’s old nanny, with her two sons, one of whom was Tolstoy’s personal servant; there was Agafya Mikhailovna, who had been Tolstoy’s grandmother’s maid and was now the “dog’s governess”. There was Nikolai the cook, Pelageya the laundress, and many, many others who came and went, and lived either in the house or in the village of Yasnaya Polyana.

  Tolstoy’s young bride was a stern mistress. Tolstoy never lost his temper with the servants; she was constantly doing so, for she lacked his authority. She was also desperately worried he would resume his old passion for teaching the peasants. She thought it improper for a count to associate so closely with the common people, and feared they might take him from her. Had his diaries not revealed to her just how ruthlessly he had exercised his power over the women on his estate?

  But of course she didn’t talk to him of such things, and remained for many weeks very much in awe of her new husband, always addressing him in the formal “you”. She supervised all the domestic work. She sewed everything, including his trousers and jackets. She attended to all the peasants’ medical needs (for which she had quite a talent). She was supported, to be sure, by a large staff of servants, but her upbringing had taught her to be self-reliant, and she washed, boiled, gardened, pickled and sewed all day in the eager desire to serve her husband.

  The revelations in his diaries had badly shaken her sexual confidence. She yearned for tenderness and was shocked by his coarseness, hurt by his outbursts of passion followed by coldness and withdrawal. But she submitted uncomplainingly to his fierce embraces. Since he believed sexual intercourse should be for purely procreative purposes, they used no form of contraception. She became pregnant almost immediately, and her diary for this first year of their marriage established the regular cycle of pregnancies and births that would fill her life. (She bore thirteen children in all, of whom nine lived.) Lev Tolstoy, who held that sex during pregnancy was “both swinish and unnatural”, kept out of her way as much as possible at these times, and she grew increasingly desperate.

  Her mother, uncomplainingly bearing her eight children and tending her home, had provided her with an excellent model of the selfless role women were traditionally expected to play in marriage. Orthodox religion had for centuries endowed women with this special capacity for self-sacrifice, and Sofia would throughout her life look to the Church, with its emphasis on suffering, selflessness and humility, to give dignity to her wifely role. But by the mid-1860s attitudes to women and the family were already undergoing a profound change, and Sofia too in this first year of marriage felt the stirrings of change in her.

  Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had spelt the end of the old feudal Russia and the orthodox religious values underpinning it, and the start of a process that would affect every area of people’s lives. Thousands of women, forced to make themselves financially independent of husbands and fathers, left their families for good to find work and education in the cities. Conservative men jeered at them as “nihilists”, but among the men of the intelligentsia there was now a new and serious commitment to treat women as equals and support their desire for education and autonomy. Debates raged about women’s social role and the future of marriage and the family. More radical women would go so far as to reject love and marriage altogether, since to them marriage meant inevitably being trapped in endless domestic chores, while sexual relations, in the absence of reliable contraception, led to endless pregnancies. But even respectably married women were now claiming that husband and children were no longer enough to fill their lives, and that only through work could they find the emotional and economic independence they longed for. The “woman” question was the burning issue of the day, and for Sofia it meant the discovery of a wholly unexpected dissatisfaction with her new life. Despite her endless labours for Tolstoy, toiling in the house and caring for him body and soul, she felt she was merely his toy. “If I don’t interest him, if he sees me as a doll, merely his wife, not a human being, then I will not and cannot live like that,” she writes in her diary. “I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman.” She longed to find her own interests outside the house and, feeling increasingly inadequate, she alternately toyed with thoughts of suicide and nursed murderous feelings for Axinya and her son. Pregnant and wretched, she was even jealous of Tolstoy’s feelings for her beloved younger sister Tanya.

  But he, for all his extraordinary sensitivity to the women in his novels, had no apparent desire to understand his wife’s suffering. And for all his optimistic faith in the virtues of equality, simplicity and hard work, he would to the end of his days use his enormous moral authority in Russia to preach a particularly savage kind of Christian asceticism, which equated sexuality with godlessness and proclaimed that women existed merely to arouse the beast in men and frustrate it. In countless interviews, articles and plays he would make abundantly clear his view of women’s weakness, their inferiority and moral subordination to men, and would indulge in countless ironic, contemptuous or frivolous comments on the “woman question”. These anti-feminist views, many of which Sofia records in her diary, became more violently and lengthily argued as time went on, and help to explain the early tensions between the couple, which would remain remarkably constant throughout their long life together.

  On 28th June 1863, Sofia gave birth prematurely to their son Sergei, a sickly baby who had difficulty feeding. Her nipples grew inflamed and she longed to hire a wet nurse, but Tolstoy, who held advanced views on the matter, wouldn’t hear of it: not to breastfeed was disgusting and unnatural, to hire a wet nurse to do so was obscene. Besides, a woman who abandoned her maternal duties so lightly would surely have no qualms about abandoning her wifely duties. Terrified of losing his love, she struggled in agony until eventually ordered by the doctor to stop, and Fillip the coachman’s wife was asked to help out. (The woman’s son, Sergei’s “milk brother”, was to be his lifelong friend.)

  Tolstoy angrily withdrew from her and wrote a five-act comedy called The Infected Family, about a woman who couldn’t breastfeed her baby because she was an “unnatural, emanc
ipated woman” and a “nihilist”. (Thankfully, he couldn’t persuade the Maly Theatre in Moscow to put it on, and soon dropped it.) He grew increasingly possessive towards Sofia, and obsessed by the idea of marital chastity. He was terrified by the new egalitarian attitudes to women—taken by some to their logical conclusion of demanding for women an equal right to commit adultery. He thought of the great writer Alexander Herzen, whose wife had claimed her right to fall in love with a poet, and he concluded that Herzen’s tragedy was that he had lightheartedly betrayed his wife with housemaids and prostitutes, and the more liberated sexual attitudes of the 1860s had caught up with him.

  Tolstoy’s past too was haunting him, and he became wildly jealous. Not that he had any reason to be, of course: Sofia had dedicated her life to him, and needed him as much as he needed her to care for him and create the family he had never had. But perhaps more importantly, she represented for him a moral purity he felt he had long ago lost, or had never had, which he desperately needed for his own moral regeneration. And despite everything, relations between them began to improve. For that autumn he started writing War and Peace, and she was able to devote herself entirely to him.

  She assumed responsibility for everything that concerned his everyday life, supervising his diet, ensuring he wasn’t disturbed while he sat hour after hour in his study, gladly going without sleep or food to care for him whenever he was ill. She assumed all responsibility for the servants, the housekeeping and the accounts, and she arranged and catalogued the books in their large library.

  These were just some of her responsibilities over the next forty-five years. But the task she cherished most throughout these years (helped later by her daughters and Tolstoy’s secretaries) was copying out his voluminous writings. Every night after the baby had been put to bed, she would sit at her desk until the small hours, copying out his day’s writing in her fine hand, telepathically deciphering (sometimes with the aid of a magnifying glass) the scribble that only she could read, straining her eyes to the point of damaging her sight. Every morning she would place the fair copy, along with fresh sheets of writing paper, on Tolstoy’s desk. And back they would come to her every evening to be recopied, black with corrections, swarming with marginal notes, a chaos of crossings-out, balloons and footnotes. In the six years he was writing War and Peace she would copy some passages over and over again. (Her son Ilya later wrote that she had copied parts of it seven times.) Yet she rarely knocked at his door to ask for help, and never complained of fatigue.

  They were happy together. The quarrels between them became less frequent, her diary entries rare. She felt she was not just his secretary but his colleague and confidante, for he always asked her advice and deeply respected her judgement. Even when he was away a couple of days he would write her daily letters, and only when he was writing his fiction did he forget her. As for her, his writing captured her childhood experiences, her own thoughts and words, and as she copied she relived her past. “Nothing touches me so deeply as his ideas, his genius,” she wrote in her diary. And when their friend the writer Vladimir Sollogub praised her as the “nursemaid of [Tolstoy’s] talent”, she was humbly grateful for the compliment.

  In the spring of 1864 she became pregnant again. She was twenty years old, strong, healthy (she thought nothing of falling out of a carriage when four months pregnant), and by all accounts extremely attractive. And when her second child Tanya was born that October she was delighted to be able to feed her herself.

  Between 1866 and 1869 she gave birth to two more children: Ilya and Lyova, healthy boys, and a sickly girl called Maria (Masha) in 1871. In those years family life was very happy. Everyone commented on what an exceptionally united couple they were. “Sonya couldn’t look for greater happiness,” wrote Tolstoy’s niece Varya in her diary in 1864. “Sonya and Lyova were an exemplary couple. Such couples were rare; all one ever hears about these days is husbands leaving their wives or wives divorcing their husbands.” And Sofia’s brother Stepan wrote in his memoirs: “The mutual love and understanding between them has always been my ideal and model of marital happiness.” Their relationship was charged with passion. And although his was a passion of the flesh, while hers was a passion of the spirit, and for babies, the strength of their feelings for each other remained undiminished (though often horribly distorted) throughout their marriage.

  This was surely the source of her remarkable energy. She organized everything, often ignoring his instructions. Gardening, painting, bottling, upholstering, playing the piano, copying—she was always busy. Her son Sergei later recalled a certain lack of spontaneous gaiety about her: she had always found it hard to be happy, even as a young girl. “For me ‘aimer’ never meant playing with feelings,” she wrote before her marriage. “Both then and later on it was something closer to suffering.” And shortly after her marriage she wrote: “Love is hard—when you love it takes your breath away, you lay down your life and soul for it, and it’s with you as long as you live.” She rarely laughed or enjoyed jokes, and as a deeply religious woman she tended to see the business of loving and caring for her husband and children as bound up with inevitable sacrifice. Perhaps this explains why the children always addressed her in the formal “you”, even though she was always there to scold or reassure them, whereas their father, who was much more distant and inaccessible, was always the informal “thou”.

  She made herself responsible for their education too, teaching them Russian grammar, French, history, geography, painting and music. (There was an English governess to teach them English, while their father taught them Russian literature and arithmetic.)

  To escape from the demands on her she would withdraw into the “private inner world” of her diary. And when they quarrelled, writing it would open up for her a “peaceful, poetic existence, free of excitements and the material things of the so-called physical world; a life of prayer, holy thoughts, dreams of self-perfection, and a quiet love that has been trampled underfoot”.

  The year 1871 was not a good one. The couple’s second daughter Maria was born prematurely on 12th February, and she almost died of puerperal fever. (She never really felt much warmth for her daughter, and throughout Maria’s life there was constant tension between her and her mother.) As Sofia, weak and thin, her head shaved, struggled back to life, Tolstoy was haunted increasingly by fears of death. Two years earlier he had finished War and Peace, and after this mighty labour he felt dazed and drained. Fearing he might have consumption, he gave up all idea of writing, and in the summer of 1871 he set off south to Samara (now Kuibyshev) with Sofia’s younger brother Stepan. There they lived a simple life on the steppes in a felt Bashkiri tent, and drank health-giving fermented mare’s milk (koumiss). Tolstoy worshipped the romantic nomadic Bashkirs, he loved the vast open steppes, and he decided on impulse to buy an estate there. In the summer of 1873 he persuaded Sofia to travel south with the children to stay in their new property. First they travelled 300 miles to Nizhny Novgorod (now Gorky), then another 500 to Samara, and thence another 120 miles by carriage to their new property.

  Sofia had just given birth to her sixth child, Petya, and was still feeding him. She and the younger children settled into the main house, which was more like a large peasant hut, with a leaking roof, smoking fireplace and swarming flies, while Tolstoy and Stepan camped out in the felt tent they had bought, and the boys and their tutor lived in the shed. Tolstoy loved this primitive life, and his depression melted away, but Sofia didn’t enjoy herself, and was resentful that he had bought the estate without asking her.

  Between 1873 and 1876 she gave birth to three babies who died. In November 1873, one-year-old Petya was carried off by the croup. “The darling, I loved him too much!” wrote Sofia, wild with grief. “He was buried yesterday. What emptiness!” Tolstoy’s grief was more restrained, and his main desire seemed to be to escape from his wife and her weeping. In April 1874, the couple’s sixth baby, Nikolai, was born, but ten months later he died in agony of meningitis. In 1875, the
children all fell ill with whooping cough, and Sofia, pregnant yet again, came down with peritonitis, was prescribed quinine and gave birth prematurely in November to a baby girl called Valya, who died immediately afterwards. Her diary entries dwindle to almost nothing.

  Tolstoy had just started work on a new novel, Anna Karenina, and she was able to bury her grief in devotedly copying out his day’s writing for him again. It was in 1877, as Anna Karenina was nearing completion, that his depressions became more frequent and alarming. He was prone to violent rages against her and the world, pursued by fears of death and feelings of guilt, racked by a sense of his own worthlessness. Surrounded by poverty and wretchedness on all sides, he continued to be served and pampered by the peasants (and, of course, his wife). The only solution, he decided, was to find some link, through religion, to the peasants, to accept everything, rites, miracles and all that his reason repudiated, and humbly to abide by the Church’s teachings.

  The consequences of his long and painful “conversion” were both deeply impressive and utterly intolerable; for Sofia it was a disaster. He became increasingly doctrinaire in his religious views, railing against those who smoked, hunted and ate meat (though continuing to do so himself), and preaching the virtues of living by one’s own labour (though still waited on hand and foot by his wife and servants). His philosophy was changing—and he was requiring Sofia to change too—yet his life remained very much the same, and his inability to live by his principles made him acutely depressed, while his inability to impose these principles on his wife and children spelt tragedy to his family.