War, peace and dark desires: A moving extract from the diary of Leo Tolstoy's wife Sofia
Last updated at 8:01 PM on 17th October 2009
Throughout the 48 years of her marriage to the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, his wife Sofia kept a diary. Although she loved him deeply, she was also tortured by his volatile behaviour. This exclusive extract from the first complete English translation strips bare their tumultuous relationship
Leo Tolstoy and wife Sofia in 1907, three years before Leo's death
Leo Tolstoy was 34 when he married 18-year-old Sofia Behrs in 1862. He was the master of Yasnaya Polyana, a 4,000-acre estate with 300 serfs, 130 miles south of Moscow, who dreamed of social equality, but enjoyed his aristocratic privileges and spent much of his early adulthood drinking and gambling. She was the cultured, vivacious daughter of a Moscow doctor.
Friends since childhood, Leo, known as Lyova, and Sofia were both impetuous, romantic, high-minded and passionate. Both also idealised family life, yet before they married, she discovered that his youthful promiscuity had included a liaison with a peasant woman who had given birth to his son and who still worked on his estate. Sofia went on to bear her husband 13 children (five of whom died in childhood). She managed his estate and idolised him as a writer, copying his manuscripts and acting as his agent, reader and critic.
Yet she could never entirely forget his past, and her diaries – written against a background of turbulent history – describe an emotional life as dark and complex as that of his novels. Their story is also being made into a film, The Last Station, starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer, due for release next year.
17 January 1863
I have been feeling angry that he loves everything and everyone, when I want him to love only me. Now that I am alone in my room I realise I was just being wilful again;
it is his kindness and the wealth of his feelings that make him good. The cause of all my whims and miseries is this wretched egotism of mine, which makes me want to possess his life, his thoughts, his love, everything he has. I absolutely must learn to love something else as he loves his work, so that I turn to it when he grows cold to me. These times will become increasingly frequent. I see this clearly now.
I ask myself what I really want. The answer is gaiety, smart clothes, chatter. I want people to admire me and say how pretty I am
31 July 1863
Why should he be so angry? He has become so unpleasant that I try all day to avoid him. When he says, ‘I’m going to bed’ or, ‘I’m going to have a bath’ I think, thank God. We were at least blessed with a happy past. I have loved him so much. I have been reading his diary. ‘These past nine months have been practically the worst in my life,’ he wrote. How often he must secretly have asked himself why he married. And how often he has said aloud to me, ‘What has become of my old self?’
Sofia aged 19 in 1863; Leo, aged 27, in 1855
12 November 1866
We were having such a good time in the first three weeks of September that I instinctively repressed all bad thoughts. When I do not open my diary for a long time I always think what a pity it is I do not record the happy times. I now spend most of my time copying out Lyova’s novel [War And Peace], which I am reading for the first time. It gives me great pleasure. Nothing touches me so deeply as his ideas, his genius. This has only been so recently. Whether it is because I have changed or because this novel is extraordinarily good, I do not know. I write quickly, so I can follow the story and catch the mood, but slowly enough to be able to stop, reflect upon each idea and discuss it with him later. He and I often talk about the novel together, and for some reason he listens to what I have to say (which makes me very proud) and trusts my opinions.
31 July 1868
It makes me laugh to read my diary. What a lot of contradictions – I always write when we quarrel. I have been married for six years now, but I love him more and more. He often says it isn’t really love, but we have grown so used to one another we cannot be separated. But I still love him with the same poetic, fevered, jealous love, and his composure occasionally irritates me.
Why should he be so angry? He has become so unpleasant that I try all day to avoid him
13 February 1873
Lyova has gone to Moscow and all day I have been sitting alone here wretchedly staring into space, a prey to sickening anxieties. I sometimes search my heart and ask myself what I really want. And to my horror, the answer is that I want gaiety, smart clothes and chatter. I want people to admire me and say how pretty I am and I want Lyova to see and hear them too; I long for him occasionally to emerge from his
rapt inner existence which demands so much of him; I wish he could briefly lead a normal life with me.
Helen Mirren as Sofia in The Last Station
23 October 1878
After drinking his morning coffee with me, Lyova took the borzois off to hunt. I gave Masha a Russian lesson, Liza a French lesson and little Lyovachka a German lesson. Lyova was back for dinner with three hares and afterwards Seryozha played a Haydn sonata – quite well – with Aleksandr Grigorevich accompanying him on the violin. I embroidered Andryusha’s white cashmere robe in red silk while enjoying the music. The weather is windy and unpleasant. Lyova was just saying he had read his fill of historical material and was going to start on Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit for a rest. I happen to know, however, that when Lyova turns to English novels he is about to start writing himself.
26 August 1882
It was 20 years ago, when I was young and happy, that I started writing the story of my love for Lyova in this book: there is nothing but love in it, in fact. Twenty years later here I am sitting up all night on my own, reading and mourning its loss. For the first time in my life Lyova has run off to sleep alone in the study. We were quarrelling about such silly things – I accused him of taking no interest in the children. Today he shouted at the top of his voice that his dearest wish was to leave his family. I shall carry the memory of that heartfelt, heartrending cry to my grave. I pray for death, for without his love I cannot survive; I knew this the moment his love for me died. I cannot prove to him how deeply I love him, for this love oppresses me and irritates him. He
is filled with Christian notions of self perfection and I envy him…
Ilyusha has typhus and is lying in the drawing room with a fever. I have to make sure he is given his quinine at the prescribed intervals, which are very short, so I worry in case I miss a dose. I cannot sleep in the bed my husband has abandoned. I long to take my life, my thoughts are so confused. The clock is striking four. I have decided that if he doesn’t come in to see me it must mean he loves another woman. He has not come. I used to know what my duty was – but what now? It was the next day before we made up. We both cried, and I realised to my joy that his love for me, which I had mourned all through that terrible night, was not dead.
25 October 1886
Everybody in this house – especially Lyova, whom the children follow like a herd of sheep – has foisted on me the role of scourge. They’ve loaded on me all the responsibility for the children and their education, the finances, the estate, the housekeeping, indeed the entire material side of life – from which they derive a great deal more benefit than I do; the children then have the nerve to come up to me with a cold, calculating, hypocritical expression, masked in virtue and beseech me to give a peasant a horse, some money, a bit of flour and heaven knows what else.
Today he shouted at the top of his voice that his dearest wish was to leave his family. I shall carry the memory of that to my grave
21 July 1891
Just before dinner today Lyova told me he was sending his letter to various newspapers to renounce the copyright on his latest works. The last time he mentioned doing this I decided to endure it meekly. This time I was simply not prepared and my immediate feeling was of outrage; I felt how terribly unfair he was being to his family, and I realised too for the first time that this protest of his was merely another way of publicising his dissatisfaction with his wife and family. It was this more than anything else that upset me. We said a great many unpleasant things to each other. I accused him of being vain and greedy for fame; he shouted at me saying I only wanted the money and that he had never met such a stupid, greedy woman. I told him he had humiliated me all my life; he told me I would only spoil the children with the money. It ended with him shouting, ‘Get out! Get out!’ So I went out and wandered about the garden not knowing what to do.
Yasnaya Polyana today
Sofia and Leo with eight of their children, 1887
4 September 1897
Lyova is forever writing and preaching about universal love and about serving God and the people. He lives his entire life, from morning to night, without any sort of contact with others. He gets up in the morning, goes for a walk or a swim, then sits down to write; later he goes for a bicycle ride or another swim; it’s only after supper that he comes and sits with us for a while, reading newspapers or looking through the illustrated magazines. And so this ordered, selfish life goes on, day after day, without love, without any interest in his family or in any of the joys and griefs of those closest to him. His coldness is a torture to me, and I have started to seek other things to fill my inner life, and have learnt to love music. But not only is music disapproved of in this house, I am bitterly criticised for it, so once again I feel that my life has no purpose, and bowing my back I copy out some boring article by Lyova on art for the tenth time, trying to find some consolation in doing my duty, but my lively nature resents it and I long for a life of my own.
2 October 1897
The best, the most painful and the most powerful thing in the world is love, and love alone; it guides and determines everything. In my case the most powerful, unselfish love of my whole life was for my little Vanechka [her youngest child, Ivan, who died in February 1895]. Of all my children I loved him the best: he was all soul, such a tiny, disembodied child, so sensitive, tender and loving. May God help me to leave behind this physical life and with a purified heart to pass over into that world where my Vanechka is now.
For such a long time my soul has yearned for this – a deep and serious recognition of our closeness over the 39 years
3 July 1901
Something frightful is drawing near, and it is death. Lyova fell ill on the night of 27 June. Yesterday morning I was putting a hot compress on his stomach when
he gazed at me intently and began to weep, saying, ‘Thank you. You mustn’t imagine I’m not grateful to you or don’t love you…’ his voice broke with emotion and
I kissed his dear, familiar hands, telling him what pleasure it gave me to look after him, and how guilty I felt when I could not make him completely happy. Then we both wept and embraced. For such a long time my soul has yearned for this – a deep and serious recognition of our closeness over the 39 years we have lived together…
Now my Lyova is sleeping. He is still alive, I can see him, hear him, speak, look after him… What will happen next? My God, what unendurable grief, what horror to live without him, without his love, his encouragement, his intelligence, his enthusiasm for
the finest things in life.
On 28 October 1910, aged 82, Leo left Sofia after a series of furious arguments over the possession of his diaries and the copyright to his works. Leo’s most unscrupulous disciple, Vladimir Chertkov, had recently returned to Russia and persuaded Leo to alter his will in his favour. When she found him gone, Sofia threw herself into the pond at Yasnaya, but was dragged out and for several days lay semi-delirious in bed, refusing to eat.
Eventually, she heard that her husband was lying ill at the station at Astapovo, 80 miles south of their estate. She managed to see him for just ten minutes before he died on the morning of 7 November. Such was the popularity of Tolstoy that his death sparked student riots in many towns. Sofia devoted herself almost exclusively to honouring his memory until she died in 1919. Their last surviving child, Aleksandra, died in the US in 1980 aged 95.
This is an edited extract from The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy, translated by Cathy Porter (Alma, £20). To order a copy for £17 with free p&p, call the YOU Bookshop on 0845 155 0711, or visit you-bookshop.co.uk
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