The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (13 page)

Tolstoy worked with great intensity, hoping to complete the novel by the end of 1867. The pressure increased when, on top of the magazine deal, he signed a contract to publish the book.
Rarely pleased with his work, he put in long hours to perfect it. At times when he read chapters to Sophia, his nerves were so strained that he broke into tears. Sophia had to share the tension, remarking, “Lyovochka has been writing all winter, irritable and excited, often with tears in his eyes. I feel this novel of his will be superb. All the parts he has read to me have moved me almost to tears too.…”
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By then, she understood the novel on a new level, admiring both the war and the peace parts.

In winter, Sophia nursed their children through scarlet fever, a bacterial infection for which there was practically no cure. Little Tanya was unconscious for several days and Sophia was afraid of losing her. Although drained by worry and sleeplessness, she continued to copy for Tolstoy. Regardless of how tired or unwell, she never considered this work a burden. Her involvement in Tolstoy’s writing was a source of pride; at his request, she also recorded her experiences in a separate diary.

Despite his deadlines, Tolstoy insisted on several sets of proofs and Sophia kept copying his revisions. Only infrequently, when proofs had been dispatched and the children were asleep, would the two have an evening of recreation. They would stay up late, playing duets. “Lev Nikolaevich was particularly fond of Haydn’s and Mozart’s symphonies. At that time I played rather badly, but I tried very hard to improve.”
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In February 1868, the first volumes of
War and Peace
came out and were swept from bookshelves despite their steep price—ten silver rubles—and colossal size. The novel enjoyed unprecedented success even before completion: Turgenev foretold that it would live as long as the Russian language. Tolstoy was soon proclaimed “a veritable literary lion” and “a giant among his fellow writers.”

When, the following May, Sophia bore their fourth child, named Lev after his father, Tolstoy wrote her from Moscow, “Except for the needs of the mind there is nothing on earth which could interest me even the slightest, or could distract me from the thought of you and of home.”
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Sophia is reflected many times in the novel, especially in its epilogue where she is recognizable in Natasha Rostova
and in Princess Marya, both of whom inspire their husbands’ best aspirations. The two harmonious marriages project Tolstoy’s family ideal, which Sophia helped implement in life.

With the publication of
War and Peace
, Tolstoy established himself as the greatest living writer, but the couple did not enjoy his success. After completing his great epic at forty-one, Tolstoy became severely depressed; he frequently spoke of death. As Sophia remarked in her diary, “Sometimes (but only when he is away from his home and his family) he imagines that he is going mad, and so great is his fear of madness that I am terrified whenever he talks about it.”
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In September of 1869, writing Sophia from Arzamas where he had traveled to buy more land, Tolstoy described a dreadful night in a hotel where he was suddenly overcome “by despair, fear and terror.”
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Tolstoy had suffered bouts of despair since childhood and had to be “constantly busy” to cope with them; without the novel to absorb his energies, he entered a period of mental inactivity and doubt.
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Lying in bed in Yasnaya and staring emptily at one spot, he would growl at Sophia if she disturbed him: “Leave me alone, you can’t let me even die in peace.”
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During this transitional time, Tolstoy occupied himself with diverse projects, from studying Greek to reforming public education. He wrote his own curriculum and primers, believing that “two generations of
all
Russian children, from tsars’ to peasants’, will study with the aid of this primer alone.…”
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Sophia contributed her original stories for his
Russian Reader
, and helped Tolstoy to copy and proofread his primers, which he kept revising as many times as he had his great novel.

In the winter of 1872, Tolstoy opened a school for peasant children in their house, engaging the family and even their guests to teach. While he taught a large group of boys in his study, Sophia instructed a group of girls in another room. As she wrote her sister, there was a “crying need” to teach these children who worked “with such enjoyment and enthusiasm.”
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The school lasted until summer; but Tolstoy’s interest in public education was enduring, so over the years, Sophia accommodated teachers’ conferences in Yasnaya.

As Tolstoy searched for new themes to inspire him, she recorded his pronouncements in her journal. He considered writing a comedy, a new historical novel from the epoch of Peter the Great, and eventually contemplated a contemporary novel “about a married woman of noble birth who ruined herself.”
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The idea for
Anna Karenina
was prompted by a woman’s suicide in their neighborhood, an event that deeply impressed Tolstoy. In 1872, a common-law wife of their neighbor, Anna Pirogova, threw herself under a passing train in a fit of jealousy. Tolstoy, who attended the post-mortem and saw her mutilated body, would later revive the tragic incident in
Anna Karenina
.

In 1873, Tolstoy wrote the novel’s opening and read to Sophia the celebrated lines about happy and unhappy families and the confusion in the Oblonsky household. She entered the date in her diary: March 19. As soon as he began writing the novel, she resumed her “responsibilities of copying and keenly sympathizing with his work.”
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The novel would take five years to complete, but unlike
War and Peace
, Tolstoy wrote it with long and frequent interruptions.

During his work on
Anna Karenina
, the family was going through “a patch of grief.” From June 1873 till November 1875, Sophia gave birth to three more children, all of whom died in early infancy. Tolstoy’s two aunts, who lived with the family, also died during this period. The events deepened Tolstoy’s depression. As he wrote Sophia, his depression was “the most painful thing,”
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dulling his senses. To help him cope, Sophia agreed to travel to the Samara prairies, where he bought a farm. For several summers in a row, she would have to move their entire household to the arid steppe, traveling the long distance with their small children. These annual trips to Samara invigorated Tolstoy and provided material for the novel, where several chapters depict grand spectacles of collective work in the field. Sophia was able to quickly adjust to their Spartan life and even to find poetry in it. Writing to her sister from their Samara estate, she described the oxen plowing land, the infinite spaces, and the inescapable sun.

The steppe lost most of its beauty because of drought, but at night there is something lovely and alien in the upturned bowl of the heavens and in the limitless expanse of land; sometimes you hear men playing their pipes in the distance or oxen tinkling their bells. Ten oxen pull a plough here; everything is so unfamiliar and gigantic, with those plowmen, mowers, and other laborers staying in the field for the night with lights you can see here and there.…
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In summer of 1873, crops at the Tolstoys’ farm were meager, but elsewhere fields stood bare because of drought. “Here there was no rain since the Holy week, so we’ve been living for a month and watching the infinite space gradually wither before our eyes and horror descending on the local people who struggle for the third year in a row to feed themselves and to sow again.”
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The Tolstoys employed several hundred laborers, costing them more than their land yielded, and hired local cooks to bake bread and make porridge to feed this multitude. While everyone talked about crop failure and the looming famine, the authorities refused to recognize the crisis. Sophia wrote an article about the Samara famine, with an appeal for help, and showed it to Tolstoy. He read it: “But who will believe you without facts?”
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He promptly set out to survey the province and assess one in every ten households and, upon return, wrote a report about the famine, publishing it in
The Moscow Gazette
. As her article remained unpublished, Sophia would refer to “our article.”
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Aid began to pour in and many benefited; as Sophia remarks in her memoir, “It was not in vain that God sent us that year to live in the Samara steppes; our presence may have saved many people from starvation.”
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Two decades later, during a widespread famine in the 1890s, the Tolstoys would organize another relief operation on a much larger scale.

After the summer break, the family returned to Yasnaya, and Tolstoy resumed writing
Anna Karenina
. At this time, the famous painter Ivan Kramskoy arrived: he had been commissioned by the Tretyakov Gallery to paint prominent Russians and persuaded Tolstoy to sit for
a portrait. Sophia was able to observe two creative giants at work. “I remember entering the small drawing room, observing both artists: one is painting Tolstoy’s portrait, the other writing his novel
Anna Karenina
. Both serious and absorbed, both genuine artists of great magnitude; I felt admiration for them.”
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She asked Kramskoy to make a copy of that portrait, but he replied that it was easier to paint another original, so he painted two portraits simultaneously.

Kramskoy’s painting captured the magnetic power of Tolstoy’s gaze. In 1904, when Sophia became obsessed with painting, she copied Tolstoy’s portraits by various artists, including Kramskoy’s. She executed this task with surprising boldness, given that she had never studied art. But Kramskoy’s technique was beyond her and she could not capture that all-penetrating gaze. Instead, she depicted the expression in Tolstoy’s eyes she knew and loved, “smiling and kind, and excited.”
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In November of 1873, the couple’s youngest son, baby Petya, died of a throat infection. Sophia was devastated: “I had fed him for fourteen and a half months. What a bright, happy little boy—I loved my darling too much and now there is nothing. He was buried yesterday. I cannot reconcile the two Petyas, the living and the dead; they are both precious to me, but what does the living Petya, so bright and affectionate, have in common with the dead one, so cold and still and serious…?”
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Petya was buried in the Kochaki family cemetery, near the ancient Nikolsky church, behind the tomb of Tolstoy’s parents. Sophia was stunned when she saw him exposed to snow and frost, lying in an open coffin in a white dress: “I nursed him … I shielded him from drafts, I dressed him warmly … now he is frozen solid.…”
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Tolstoy would use her experiences to depict a mother’s grief at the loss of her child in
Anna Karenina:

And again there came to her imagination the cruel memory, eternally gnawing at her mother’s heart, of the death of her last infant boy, who had died of croup, his funeral, the universal indifference before that small, pink coffin, and
her own heart-rending, lonely pain before the pale little forehead with curls at the temples, before the opened, surprised little mouth she had glimpsed in the coffin just as it was covered by the pink lid with the lace cross.
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Sophia’s way out of grief was getting on with what needs to be done, forgetting herself in work. “I gave lessons to the children in turns.… I copied in the evenings for Lev Nikolaevich, cut and sewed the children’s clothes before the holidays.…”
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She was already coping with a new, difficult pregnancy, having conceived when she was emotionally unprepared to nurture new life. “People who never experienced this maternal, utterly physiological life, cannot imagine what a difficult, unbearable toil this is.…”
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Tolstoy depicts her incessant motherhood in
Anna Karenina
where he also makes a reference to contraception. While he was the first Russian writer to raise the issue, practicing contraception was against his beliefs. And yet, each new pregnancy postponed Sophia’s dream for a more spiritual life embracing art, music, and literature. She would only begin to explore her talents when the children grew up, by then realizing it was too late for achievement.

Having completed the first part of
Anna Karenina
, Tolstoy was preparing it for publication. “You will like Lyovochka’s new novel,” Sophia reported to Tanya in December, “it will be very good, as to when he finishes it—God knows.”
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Tolstoy was making continual revisions; she was copying with no end in sight. As in the blissful days of
War and Peace
, the couple would occasionally stay up late playing duets. They would sit until one o’clock, talking and reading, and have a late supper, which Sophia warmed up on a spirit-lamp.
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After that, utterly exhausted, she would read English novels by Henry Wood, falling asleep at three o’clock.

In 1874, having lost interest in the novel, Tolstoy did not resume it after the summer break, as he normally would. Instead, he became preoccupied with elementary education, passionately advocating his particular method of teaching literacy. He opened schools in their district and dreamed of organizing colleges to train peasant
teachers. While touring the new schools, he was struck by the sight of “ragged, dirty, skinny children with their bright eyes” whom he wanted to save from drowning in darkness. Real people interested him more than the imaginary ones. He told Sophia that the novel was repulsive to him and he wanted to give it up.

When he put aside
Anna Karenina
, the family was under financial strain. There was another crop failure in Samara where, at Tolstoy’s estimate, the family lost 20,000 rubles in two years. In the meantime, they were “swamped with letters from editors offering ten thousand in advances and five hundred silver rubles per printer’s page.”
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But Tolstoy refused to even discuss the matter. Sophia, now unable to sympathize with his passion for elementary education, confided her troubles to sister Tanya: