The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (12 page)

That same summer, Sophia joined her mother and sisters on a visit to their grandfather’s estate, Ivitsy, neighboring Yasnaya Polyana. Liza expected Tolstoy to propose to her, but the trip decided Sophia’s fate. “I am a firm believer in destiny,” she would write. “It was this same destiny which threw me into the life of Lev Nikolaevich.”
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Their first intimate conversation was at her grandfather’s estate where Tolstoy turned up unexpectedly during a dance. When guests were leaving, he asked Sophia to stay with him on the terrace, picked up a piece of chalk, and began writing on a card table. Tolstoy only initialed the words of his long sentences, which she deciphered, on the spur of the moment: “We were both very serious and excited. I followed his big red hand, and could feel all my powers of concentration and feeling focus on that bit of chalk and the hand that held it.”
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He told her that her family was wrong about his intention to marry Liza and although this was not where Tolstoy proposed to her, Sophia felt that something significant had occurred, “something we were unable to stop.”
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Those last days of my girlhood were extraordinarily intense, lit by a dazzling brightness and a sudden awakening of the soul.… “Mad nights!” Lev Nikolaevich would say as we sat on the balcony or strolled about the garden. There were no
romantic scenes or confessions. We had known each other for so long. Our friendship was so simple and easy. And I was in a hurry to end my wonderful, free, serene, uncomplicated girlhood.
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When Sophia’s family returned to Moscow, Tolstoy continued to visit, but now carried a proposal letter in his pocket. He submitted it to her on September 16, the day before Sophia’s and her mother’s name day, celebrated together. In that letter, he pleaded that if she had even a shadow of doubt, she must not accept. Sophia skimmed his letter to the words, “Tell me
honestly
, do you want to be my wife?” (A more intricate variation of this proposal Tolstoy showed her later contained the words: “I make terrible, impossible demands on marriage. I demand that I be loved the way I am capable of loving. But that is impossible.”
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) Tolstoy nervously awaited her reply in her mother’s bedroom. “I went up to him and he seized both my hands. ‘Well, what’s the answer?’ he asked. ‘Yes—of course,’ I replied.”
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Tolstoy insisted on having the wedding as soon as possible, so the engagement lasted only a week. In
Anna Karenina
, he would change it to a month to make it more credible.

During that frantic week of their betrothal, Tolstoy gave Sophia his bachelor diaries, to inform her of his sexual past and his liaison with the peasant Aksinya Bazykina, by whom he had a son. The first diary opened with an entry at nineteen while he took treatment for gonorrhea, contracted from a prostitute. “I remember how shattered I was by these diaries.… I wept when I saw what his past had been.”
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Sophia believed it was wrong of him to give her the diaries, especially on the eve of their wedding. She experienced disillusionment with the man who had inspired her girlhood ideals. Only a few years earlier, Tolstoy read Turgenev’s novella
First Love
to their family and she remembered his comment that the feeling of the sixteen-year-old youth was pure and genuine, while his father’s physical passion was “an abomination and a perversion.”
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She was appalled by an obvious incongruity between Tolstoy’s words and actions.

After the ceremony on September 23, Tolstoy “was impatient to be off” to Yasnaya Polyana, while Sophia now dreaded their intimacy. They drove in a large sleeper carriage Tolstoy had bought especially for the journey, and this is where “the torment began, which every bride must go through.”

How painful, dreadfully humiliating! And what sudden new passion, unconscious, irresistible, was awakened, dormant until then in a young girl. Mercifully, it was dark in the carriage, so that we couldn’t see each other’s face.… Conquered by his power and intensity, I was obedient and loving, although crushed by the agonizing physical pain and unbearable humiliation.
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Three decades later, in her novella
Who is to Blame?
she would describe their first night as a rape. “Violence had been committed; this girl was not ready for marriage; female passion, recently awakened, was put back to sleep.…”
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A new diary, begun upon her marriage, shows her confusion and disappointment. “I always dreamed of the man I would love as a complete whole, new,
pure
person.”
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She had worshiped Tolstoy as a writer, but was yet to separate the man from his works.

Despite their differences—in age, intellect, and life experience—Sophia was determined to make her marriage a success. Tolstoy expected her to quickly adapt to his way of life on the estate and to assist him in his projects. He was then passionately interested in farming, and Sophia began to help by managing the office and recording butter production. She soon wrote sister Tanya of her new responsibilities: “We have become quite the farmers: we are buying cattle, fowl, piglets, and calves. We are purchasing bees.…”
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But she was far more interested in his literature and in late October wrote Tanya that she was copying Tolstoy’s novella
Polikushka
to send to a literary magazine. Tolstoy welcomed her involvement, allowing her to stay in his study when he wrote; he also encouraged her to read his letters and diaries, leaving them open on his desk.

As a young man outlining his family ideal, Tolstoy wrote that his wife will take interest in his work, as well as his hobbies, and give up her love of entertainment. Upon reading this at nineteen, Sophia remarked, “Poor man, he was still too young to realize that happiness can never be planned in advance, and you will inevitably be unhappy if you try to do so. But what noble splendid dreams these were nevertheless.”
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And yet, she would soon share his family ideal and work hard to achieve it.

In the spring of 1863, Sophia wrote her sister that Tolstoy had settled down to write a new novel; this was the first mention of
War and Peace
. Tolstoy made many drafts of the novel’s opening; he wrote slowly, “with difficulty,” perfecting his prose, and Sophia had to keep copying his revisions. The novel was a vast world, which she had not had a chance to experience, and she invested her entire soul to understand what she was writing. She loved copying
War and Peace
, work she did for seven years, remarking, “The idea of serving a genius and great man has given me strength to do anything.”
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Used to a more boisterous life, Sophia had to learn to endure solitude: they lived in the country uninterruptedly, only traveling to Moscow when Tolstoy needed to do research.

Their family life supplied “peaceful scenes” for the novel. The couple’s first son, Sergei, was born on June 28, 1863, and Tolstoy would describe the event and the commotion that followed and discuss the advantages of breastfeeding and “the unnaturalness and harmfulness of wet nurses.”
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Sophia’s nursing did not go well: she developed mastitis, and a wet nurse had to be engaged. Tolstoy could not hide his disappointment and avoided the nursery with an expression of “morose animosity” on his face. Sophia felt that he blamed her for failing to live up to his Rousseauian ideal of a healthy mother and wife. That summer, she noted in her diary, “I am in agonizing pain. Lyova is murderous.… He wants to wipe me from the face of the earth because I am suffering and am not doing my duty, I want not to see him at all because he is not suffering but just goes on writing.”
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In the fall, the Tula gentry held a ball to honor heir Nikolai Alexandrovich. Sophia dreamed of attending, but it was decided
that Tolstoy would escort her younger sister Tanya, then visiting Yasnaya. As Sophia confided to Tanya, she could not go because Tolstoy disapproved of married women wearing low-cut evening dresses and, besides, was jealous of her. “When Lev Nikolaevich put on his dress coat, he and Tanya left for Tula and the ball; I started to cry bitterly and wept all evening. We were living a monotonous, secluded, dull life, and suddenly such an opportunity comes up and I (just nineteen) am deprived of it.”
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His expedition with Tanya would inspire Natasha Rostova’s first ball in
War and Peace
.

Tolstoy “mixed” Sophia with her sister to create his Natasha. Tanya was the model for the heroine’s youth and Sophia, who never had a chance to be carefree, was used for her motherhood. Tanya went snipe shooting with Tolstoy, trips he would describe in an enchanting chapter about the Rostovs. Sophia accepted his pursuit of inspiration when Tolstoy read the chapter to her, “after he had just written it, and together we laughed and were happy.”
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Sophia was a perceptive listener, and their conversations and readings gave Tolstoy a spark. In the novel, making his Natasha a keen listener, he endowed her with an ability to bring out her husband’s best.

Later that year, making progress with the novel, Tolstoy admitted to many people that he considered himself extremely fortunate. As he wrote his relative Alexandrine, “I am a husband and a father, who is fully satisfied with his situation … I only
feel
my family circumstances, and don’t think about them. This condition gives me an awful lot of intellectual scope.”
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In another letter, he explained that his marriage had transformed him, allowing greater productivity: “I imagine myself an apple tree, which used to grow with watersprouts in every direction, and which became pruned in the course of life; now, that it’s trimmed, tied, and supported, its trunk and roots can grow without hindrance. And that’s how I grow.…”
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When during
War and Peace
Vladimir Sollogub, a man of letters, visited Yasnaya, he became impressed with Sophia, who arranged Tolstoy’s life to the minute and was always ready to assist him. Sollogub remarked that she was “the perfect wife for a writer”
and “a nursemaid” of her husband’s talent. Pleased with his praise, Sophia vowed in her diary to become “an even better nursemaid of Lyovochka’s talent from now on.”
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In October 1864, days before she gave birth to their first daughter, whom they named Tanya, Tolstoy had an accident while hunting. He broke his arm and dislocated his shoulder. The following month, still unable to use his right arm, Tolstoy went to Moscow to consult doctors whom Sophia’s father had engaged. He had asked Sophia to copy the first installment of the novel, which he wanted to offer to
The Russian Herald
. As he was leaving for Moscow, Tolstoy told her: “You are my helper.” Sophia responded that she would be happy to help him and copy for him “from morning till night.”
209

In the meantime, he had to undergo surgery on his arm. It was performed at his in-laws’ apartment on November 28, with Sophia’s mother and sister Tanya present in the operating room. Tolstoy’s arm was rebroken and reset under chloroform. After the surgery, he became depressed and, soon after receiving the chapters Sophia sent, he wrote her that his talent “disappointed” him. He continued in another letter that a great misfortune had befallen him and he was “beginning to cool off to his novel.”
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Away from home, he lost his mental balance and confidence: “I lose my
‘équilibre’
without you.…”
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The new chapters he had dictated to her sisters in Moscow were flat and unexciting, “and without emotion a writer’s work cannot flow.”
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His despair growing, he continued in another letter: “As a good wife, you think about your husband as you do about yourself, and I remember your saying to me that all the military and historical side over which I’m taking such pains will turn out badly, but the rest—the family life, the characters, the psychology—will be good. That couldn’t be more true.”
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Sophia knew that he occasionally doubted his powers and denied his talent and wrote to reassure:

Remember, how many joys your novel gave you, how well you were thinking it over, and now you don’t like it! No,
Lyovochka, it’s wrong. Just come back and instead of the dirty, stone Kremlin house you will see our Chepyzh
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shining in the bright sun … you will remember our happy life here … and again, with a happy face, you will share your writing plans with me.… And you will dictate to me me.…
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Sophia’s letters raised Tolstoy’s spirits. “My dear heart,” he replied. “Only love me as I love you, and nothing else counts for me, and everything is fine.”
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Recalling the elation of their reunion in Yasnaya, Sophia would write: “A woman cannot possibly love stronger than I loved Leo Nikolaevich. He was neither handsome nor young, with only four bad teeth in his mouth. But the joy that would rise in me when I met him … that joy illuminated my life for a long, long time.”
217

The years when he wrote
War and Peace
and three of their children were born were the happiest in their marriage. Sophia recalls: “I lived with the characters of
War and Peace
, loved them, watched the life of each of them unfold as if they were living beings. Our life was so full and extraordinarily happy with our mutual love, with our children, and, mainly, with the work on a great masterpiece, first loved by me and later by the entire world.…”
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The work on the novel united them: the bond established then would prove enduring. When in 1866 Tolstoy traveled to conduct research in Moscow, he wrote Sophia daily of his progress with the novel and of his love for her: “I am not remembering you, but I am always aware of you. This is not just a phrase.…”
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Sophia was sending him a new installment of the manuscript she had copied to take to the magazine, and, referring to the novel’s publication, wrote Tolstoy, “I am beginning to feel that this is your child and so it is mine, and sending this batch of sheets to Moscow I feel like I’m letting the child go out into the world, afraid someone might hurt him.…”
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