Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

Sofia Tolstoy

Description

When Sofia Behrs married Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of "War and Peace", husband and wife regularly exchanged diaries covering the years from 1862 to 1910. Sofia's life was not an easy one: she idealized her husband, but was tormented by him; even her many children were not an unmitigated blessing. In the background of her life was one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history: the transition from old feudal Russia to the three revolutions and three major international wars. Yet it is as Sofia Tolstoy's own life story, the study of one woman's private experience, that the diaries are most valuable and moving. They are a testament to a woman of tremendous vital energy and poetic sensibility who, in the face of provocation and suffering, continued to strive for the higher things in life and to remain indomitable. It contains a forward by Doris Lessing.

Sujets

• Diaries

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 07 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714548340
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

the diaries of s ofia tolstoy
Translated by Cathy Porter

ALMA BOOKS


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The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy originally published in Russian by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, Moscow, 1978 Copyright © The State Museum of Leo Tolstoy First published in UK by Jonathan Cape Ltd in 1985 First published in this revised and abridged edition by Alma Books in 2009 First published in this paperback edition by Alma Books in 2010. Repr. 2017 English language translation and Introduction © Cathy Porter, 1985, 2009 Cover: Portrait of Sofia Tolstoy from the archives of Tania Albertini Soukhotine Tolstoya Foreword © Doris Lessing, 2009
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isbn : 978-1-84688-102-2
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Contents
Foreword
Introduction
I Diaries 1862–1910
II Daily Diary 1906–7 and 1909–19
III Appendices
Notes




Foreword
by Doris Lessing
It makes me laugh to read my diary. What a lot of contradictions – as though I were the unhappiest of women! But who could be happier? Could any marriage be more happy and harmonious than ours? When I am alone in my room I sometimes laugh for joy and cross myself and pray to God for many, many more years of happiness. I always write my diary when we quarrel…
Sofia Tolstoy wrote the above in 1868, after six years of marriage. Many of her later diary entries also seem to have been written after quarrels.
This collection of Sofia’s diary entries is witness not only to her thoughts, but also to public events and to Lev Tolstoy’s work – in the period covered by the collection, he wrote War and Peace , Anna Karenina and many other books. At the same time, we see the hard work of Sofia: she is an involved mother, though there are nursemaids and all kinds of help. She copies, and copies again, her husband’s work.
…why am I not happy? Is it my fault? I know all the reasons for my spiritual suffering: firstly it grieves me that my children are not as happy as I would wish. And then I am actually very lonely. My husband is not my friend: he has been my passionate lover at times, especially as he grows older, but all my life I have felt lonely with him. He doesn’t go for walks with me, he prefers to ponder in solitude over his writing. He has never taken any interest in my children, for he finds this difficult and dull.
Sofia longs for new landscapes, intellectual development, art, contact with people: “To each his fate. Mine was to be the auxiliary to my husband…”
When the Tolstoys were first married, they read each other’s diaries, as a part of their plan to preserve perfect intimacy between them, but later they might easily create two diaries, one for the other to read, one to remain private.
Sofia had thirteen children with Lev. Some of them died while still babies – one little boy in particular, Vanechka, who was adored by both parents. In War and Peace Tolstoy writes painfully about the sufferings of parents who know how easily some small illness may snatch away their children.
Like most women at the time, Sofia was at the mercy of her reproductive system – the advent of the pill was still almost a century away.
There is an interesting episode in Anna Karenina relating to this predicament of nineteenth-century women. Anna is in exile from society due to her adultery, so she is staying in the country. She is visited by Dolly, her sister-in-law. Anna tells Dolly about the birth-control methods of the time. Dolly reacts to the information not with delight, as Anna had expected, but with revulsion – the idea of women refusing to bear children, their traditional role in life, is simply unacceptable to her. On her way back from Anna, Dolly hears a peasant woman giving thanks to God, who has rescued her by “taking” one of her children, leaving more food for the rest. Dolly is sorry for the peasant, but not shocked. This episode illustrates women’s views towards contraception at the time – Anna, the one person who accepts its use, is placed outside spheres of acceptable social behaviour, while Dolly, representing social norms, is shocked at the very idea; however, she is not shocked by the peasant woman’s more traditional means of birth control. In another episode in the novel, Dolly waits for a visit from her husband Stepan, which is likely to leave her pregnant, and even more worried about money than she already is. “What a scamp,” she muses about Stepan. In this, we see how accepted the burdens of childbirth were for women at the time.
Another factor in the Tolstoys’ marital circumstances which proved difficult for Sofia – as it emerges from her diaries – was Lev’s relationship with Vladimir Grigorevich Chertkov. Chertkov was Lev’s secretary. He became one of Lev’s closest friends and confidants, and the founder of “Tolstoyanism” – the school of thought of those who followed Tolstoy’s religious views. He was also a singularly unpleasant version of Lev himself. Lev became in thrall to Chertkov. Chertkov loathed Sofia, intriguing against her in every way he could.
Tolstoy once said that he had been more in love with men than he had ever been with women. The Kreutzer Sonata , which poor Sofia had to copy, though she hated it, seems to me a classic description of male homosexuality. There was a great scandal over this novel, which describes the murder of a supposed lover by the husband.
In defending this novel, which he did in another treatise, Tolstoy returned to his ways of describing real women as being like doves, pure and innocent. Had he ever met any real women? When it comes to the figure of Tolstoy himself, he is a sea of contradictions. He was an ideologue, he preached at people, he was always in the right, and yet he took his stand on a number of different and sometimes opposing platforms.
He was also a bad husband, inconsiderate sexually, and in other ways. For instance, he insisted on his poor wife breastfeeding the infants, though her nipples cracked and it was painful for her. She wanted to use wet nurses. The truth was, the great Tolstoy was a bit of a monster.
Sofia Tolstoy must have divided her later years into “before Chertkov” and “after Chertkov”. We have had plenty of opportunities to study the activities of ideologues, but Vladimir Chertkov was a newish phenomenon, and probably Sofia’s inability to cope with this man was partly because of the difficulty in categorizing him: was he religious? – oh yes, dedicated to the good, a fanatic in fact. But Chertkov wanted just one thing – to dominate Tolstoy, and in this he succeeded. And there was not only Chertkov, but all the fans who turned up from everywhere in the world, expecting to be housed, fed and advised by the Master. They turned servants out of their beds, slept in the corridors, were under everyone’s feet.
Sofia was not well: it was said then, and is still said now, that she was demented. I am not surprised if she was. Tolstoy was threatening to leave her, leave the family, which meant to be with Chertkov. Sofia rushed out, distraught, into a pond. They saved her. “I want to leave the dreadful agony of this life… I can see no hope, even if L.N. does at some point return…”
In the end the whole world watched as Tolstoy fled his home for the little house near the railway where he died. Sofia was forbidden to go to her dying husband by Chertkov until the very last moment.
Sofia Tolstoy lived for many long years as Tolstoy’s widow. She sometimes went to visit his grave, where she begged forgiveness from him for her failings.
The diary entries in these pages bear witness to a remarkable life: the life of an exceptional woman, married to one of the most exceptional men of the time, with all her passions and difficulties laid bare. This is a book which is interesting for what it says about the predicament of women in the past, and how that compares to their present circumstances. While reading it, I was so enthralled that I found myself dreaming about Sofia, about speaking to her myself, desperately wanting to reach out to her and offer her words of comfort for her pain. Perhaps, hopefully, this record of her struggles will be a comfort and inspiration to present and future generations.


Introduction
by Cathy Porter
Sofia Andreevna Tolstoy started keeping a diary at the age of sixteen. But it was two years later, in 1862, shortly before her marriage to the great writer, that she embarked in earnest on the diaries she would keep until just a month before her death in 1919, at the age of seventy-five. In this new edited version of their first complete English translation, she gives us a candid and detailed chronicle of the daily events of family life: conversations and card games, walks and picnics, musical evenings and readings aloud, birthdays and Christmases; the births, deaths, marriages, illnesses and love affairs of her thirteen children, her num