The Tolstoys’ War By JAY PARINI
SOPHIA TOLSTOY
A Biography
By Alexandra Popoff
Illustrated. 354 pp. The Free Press. $28
Sophia Tolstoy has returned to the public eye, thanks in no small part to Helen Mirren, who recently portrayed her onscreen. In the tumultuous final months of her husband’s life, Sophia and Leo Tolstoy found themselves in perpetual conflict. In despair, Tolstoy left their country home, Yasnaya Polyana, on Oct. 28, 1910, taking to the road in the middle of the night, putting 48 years of marriage behind him. He died soon thereafter in a remote railway station, with his wife outside begging to be let in. She was turned away by Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy’s disciple and close friend, who suggested that any glimpse of her would hasten her husband’s end. Chertkov relented only when Tolstoy was in a coma, at the point of death.
As Alexandra Popoff suggests in her new biography, “Sophia Tolstoy,” the countess has been maligned by history, viewed as hysterical and insanely jealous, a shrew. These misconceptions, Popoff insists (with some exaggeration), “all have one source: Chertkov. For decades, he suppressed favorable information about Sophia and exaggerated his own role in Tolstoy’s life.”
Sophia Behrs was born in 1844, one of three daughters of an aristocratic family that entertained lavishly in its Kremlin apartment. Yet her adult life was never easy. After her marriage at 18, she became Countess Tolstoy, taking charge of Leo’s household and eventually bearing him 13 children. A vastly gifted but troubled man, he was wildly self-centered and prone to bouts of deep melancholy. Even worse, for Sophia, he came to hate his elevated status, preferring to associate with peasants. And after devising his own idiosyncratic form of Christianity, he wrote religious and political tracts that got him into dangerously hot water with both the czarist regime and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Tolstoy preached chastity and poverty, though he had a gift for neither, as his wife pointed out. And although he criticized her for their luxurious way of living, he also enjoyed the fruits of this existence. “He was so inconsistent,” she wrote in frustration, “that no one in the world could understand what he wanted.”
What separates this biography from others is Popoff’s access to a trove of unpublished material, including a memoir and countless letters that have been locked away in a vault in Moscow. The memoir, in particular, adds rich detail to what has long been known about Sophia Tolstoy from her brilliant diaries, which were translated into English in the mid-1980s. We learn, for instance, that because her father had sired several children out of wedlock, Sophia feared she herself might not be legitimate. (To prove otherwise, she forced him to produce her birth certificate.) After learning more about her early years, one suspects that in marrying Tolstoy she was reproducing some unhappy but familiar family dynamics.
The Tolstoys’ marital distress is depicted here with revealing specificity. And it soon becomes clear that his irascibility caused deep friction between them. In 1881, for example, he charged his pregnant wife with renting a house in Moscow and proceeded to set up a grueling schedule of appointments for her. But when she finally found a reasonably priced place with a large study, he deemed it “too spacious and too luxurious.” Such recollections provide a quickened sense of Sophia’s difficult circumstances in this marriage, where nothing she ever did was good enough.
“Tolstoy lived by choice,” Popoff observes, “while Sophia’s life was ruled by necessity.” In fact, Tolstoy depended heavily on his wife, not only to look after the expansive family and its property but to act as his amanuensis. She copied and recopied his manuscripts, acting as secretary and literary agent, publicist and manager. A good deal of his success can be traced back to her.
What Popoff also makes clear is that Sophia Tolstoy loved her husband intensely. And he loved her. Yet the philosophy of life he adopted proved a substantial challenge to that bond. In Tolstoy’s view, physical passion destroyed love. (He described sex as “swinish.”) Nevertheless, he continued to make love to Sophia. And yet Popoff notes that although “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which he argued for abstinence, even within marriage, “deeply offended her,” the countess “was soon promoting his work,” sending it around for people to read. She was, it seems, caught between hatred of her husband’s views and love of his status as a public figure. On some level — and Popoff seems reluctant to acknowledge this fully — Sophia was also eager to boost Leo’s royalties.
It was, after all, expensive to live in their accustomed manner. So when Tolstoy was persuaded to put the copyright to his works in the public domain, his wife felt increasingly beleaguered and frantic. How can one blame her? “I am hurt by Chertkov’s evil influence, hurt by all their endless secrets,” she wrote in her diary. She was sure that Leo’s will would “give rise to a lot of anger, arguments, judgments and newspaper gossip over the grave of an old man who enjoyed life to the full while he was alive but deprived his numerous direct descendants of everything after his death.”
Although Sophia Tolstoy was maligned by her husband’s chief disciple, this is hardly the whole story. Chertkov may have been puritanical and possessive, but he believed passionately in the vision put forward in Tolstoy’s later work and did much to promote his mentor’s reputation by editing his collected works after his death. On the other hand, Popoff’s biography vigorously presses the case for Sophia Tolstoy, deepening our view of her exceedingly complicated marriage.
Jay Parini’s novel “The Last Station” was the basis for the film of the same name. His novel about Herman Melville, “The Passages of H. M.,” will be published in November.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/books/review/Parini-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print
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