The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (17 page)

In February 1895, the couple’s youngest son, Vanechka, died at seven from scarlet fever. Sophia had invested all her love in this boy and would never recover from the blow. Vanechka’s death brought the family together. Tolstoy wrote Alexandrine, “We have none of us felt as close to each other as we do now.…”
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Although Tolstoy was pained by the loss, his philosophy enabled him to see the event as coming from God and therefore “merciful.” But Sophia could find no peace as weeks and months went by. She spent hours beside Vanechka’s portrait, which she had enlarged, and stood long services in churches and cathedrals. It was music, she would say, that saved her from despair.

That summer, their acquaintance, composer and pianist Sergei Taneev, was looking for a dacha, and Sophia offered him a vacant wing in Yasnaya, which was empty that summer. He taught her to understand music as she had not before. (Taneev was at the center of
the Moscow music world, having succeeded Tchaikovsky as head of the Moscow Conservatory. Rachmaninov and Scriabin were among Taneev’s students.) During Taneev’s stay she became mesmerized with his performances of Chopin and Beethoven, and of his own compositions. In Moscow, Sophia attended all of Taneev’s concerts and even began to take piano lessons: “Intoxicated by music, having learned to understand it, I could no longer live without it.…”
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But her sudden onset of musical interest, which she experienced during bereavement, was viewed by her family as an obsession with the musician. Tolstoy pressed her to give up her friendship with Taneev and made scenes in front of guests, eventually driving the musician out of Yasnaya. (The situation seemed to have been scripted in
The Kreutzer Sonata
, written almost a decade earlier. In Tolstoy’s novella, Mrs. Pozdayshev becomes attracted to a musician friend, provoking her husband’s jealous rages.) In a letter to a friend Sophia described Tolstoy’s jealousy as an egotistical demand to be loved exclusively.
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As is apparent from Sophia’s novella
Song Without Words
, Taneev was homosexual. He is immediately recognizable in her story as a composer and professor at the conservatory who is intimate with his young pupil. Taneev’s lack of interest in women was widely known: at thirty-nine, he still lived with his old nanny, Pelageya Vasilievna. Tolstoy, of course, was aware of this, but remained unappeased, soon writing in his diary that Sophia had become “only more frivolous” after Vanechka’s death, a remark she read. His words not only offended her: she realized that Tolstoy’s diaries would be published along with everything he wrote. Over the years, she asked Tolstoy to remove the many disparaging entries he had made about her, but he refused. So she wrote him a letter:

Why do you always in your diaries, when you mention my name, treat me so spitefully? Why do you want future generations and our grandchildren to know me as your
frivolous, evil
wife, who makes you unhappy? Perhaps, it would add fame to you that you were
a martyr
, but how much it would
damage me! … Are you really afraid that your posthumous glory would be diminished if you did not present me as your tormentor and yourself as martyr, bearing a cross personified by your wife?… Please delete the spiteful words about me from your diaries. After all, this is only a
Christian
thing to do.… Please spare my name.…
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Upon reading her letter, Tolstoy remarked: “Never before have I felt so guilty and so full of emotion.” He deleted some of the most hurtful entries about Sophia and made a note for his biographers:
“I repudiate those angry words which I wrote about her. These words were written at moments of exasperation. I now repeat this once more for the sake of everybody who should come across these diaries
.… She was—and I can see now in what way—the wife I needed.”
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But Tolstoy never purged all criticism, so this notation had no influence on biographers. Ever contradictory, he continued to complain to Chertkov (his future biographer) and to other disciples about his marriage. After Tolstoy’s death, Chertkov would use his letters and diaries to harass Sophia.

In May 1897, Sophia visited Tolstoy in Yasnaya. When she left, he wrote that her brief stay was “one of the strongest, most joyful impressions I have ever experienced: and that at the age of 69, from a woman of 53.”
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She replied that the rise and fall of their relationship was like the tide: now on the rise.
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Tolstoy’s fiction continued to unite them. Earlier, when he had shared his idea for the story
The Master and Man
, she responded, “I cannot surrender my love of your artistic work; today I realized that’s because I had experienced it with you during my best years, my youth.…”
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Tolstoy’s last major novel,
Resurrection
, completed in 1899, two decades
after Anna Karenina
, did not measure up to his earlier fiction. Sophia believed it was a tendentious work, permeated with defiance against their social order and the Orthodox Church. She wrote Tolstoy that he was “inventing” this novel, not living it.
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Unlike before, she was excluded from Tolstoy’s creative work. When she asked Tolstoy to allow her to copy his revisions, he growled
that her copying had “always caused trouble.” She left his study in tears: “How could he forget the past?”
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Tolstoy did not need her help because his follower, Paul Biryukov, and daughter Tanya were now copying for him. Nonetheless, Sophia read the manuscript and pointed out a flaw. In the draft she read, the nobleman Dmitry Nekhlyudov atones for his sin by marrying Katyusha Maslova, a convicted prostitute in whom he recognizes the woman he has seduced. Sophia had called this denouement improbable, and Tolstoy eventually agreed and altered the ending.

Tolstoy’s ridicule of the Orthodox services and clergy in
Resurrection
antagonized the Church, already irritated by
The Kreutzer Sonata
. When in 1899 he became ill, the Holy Synod secretly instructed priests to refuse him a funeral service. The subsequent decision to excommunicate Tolstoy was designed to undermine public support for him and strengthen the prestige of the Orthodox Church. Instead, the verdict only added to Tolstoy’s fame.

The excommunication edict was published on February 24, 1901, by the
Church News
, the official organ of the Holy Synod; the following day, it appeared on the front pages of every newspaper. Sophia immediately protested the decision in an open letter to the Holy Synod and the three Metropolitans. She wrote that the Synod’s instructions were utterly incomprehensible to her, since “the religious life of a human soul is known to none but God, and mercifully it is not answerable to anyone.” Excommunication would fail to achieve its goal and instead would only inspire “great love and compassion for Lev Nikolaevich. We are already receiving expressions of this—and there will be no end to them—from all over the world.”
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Published by the
Church News
along with a reply from Metropolitan Antony, Sophia’s letter received public acclaim as an unprecedented challenge by a woman to the heads of the Orthodox Church.

On the Sunday the excommunication proclamation was published, it was read by everyone, and support for Tolstoy immediately began to pour in. He received baskets of flowers, telegrams, and letters from home and abroad. At the Wanderers’ Exhibition,
Tolstoy’s portrait by Repin, showing him at prayer in the woods, was garlanded with flowers as an icon. The portrait created so much commotion that it had to be removed.

Tolstoy’s excommunication did not affect Sophia’s faith, because it was initiated by the Holy Synod, a government institution. As Tolstoy’s publisher, she had met the head of the Holy Synod, Pobedonostsev, over censorship, and despised this official. It was unlike her attitude to the Church, which remained reverent: “I have lived amongst these things since I was a child, when my soul was first drawn to God, and I love attending mass and fasting.…”
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That summer, Tolstoy became dangerously ill with malaria, and when Countess Sophia Panina offered her estate in Gaspra on the Black Sea, it was decided to go to the Crimea to help him recuperate. Panina’s gothic palace with two towers and a view of the sea had once belonged to Prince Golitsyn, minister of education for Alexander I. Although Tolstoy’s principles stipulated austerity, he would spend almost a year at this estate, joined by the entire family and some friends.

In Gaspra, Sophia nursed Tolstoy for nine months, her husband now becoming her child. She slept next door to Tolstoy, who rang a bell when he wanted her to adjust his pillow, cover up his legs, massage his back, or simply sit beside him and hold his hand. This inspired Sophia’s remark, “Lev Nikolaevich is first and foremost a writer and expounder of ideas; in reality and in his life he is a weak man, much weaker than us simple mortals.”
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Three doctors attended Tolstoy almost daily, even refusing compensation: there was something about the genius that inspired everyone to toil for him and consider it rewarding in itself. “Nursing him is extremely hard work, there are a lot of us here, we all are tired and overworked.…”
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In Gaspra Sophia resumed photography, painted landscapes, studied Italian, and read; among the books was Giuseppe Mazzini’s
On Human Duty
. Tolstoy considered it excellent and she was also impressed: “What marvelous ideas and language—simple, concise, full of power and conviction.”
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She read in five European
languages, discovering other cultures through such books as Fielding’s
The Soul of a People
, which told about Burmese traditions and religion. She now shared Tolstoy’s fascination with Buddhism, even remarking that it was “much better … than our Orthodoxy.”
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During the hours she sat beside Tolstoy, Sophia reviewed her life: she had a “sudden vivid memory of the distant past,” of skating with her children on their pond in Yasnaya and walking home from the rink, while carrying a baby and pulling a sled with another child. “And behind us and before us were happy, laughing, red-cheeked children, and life was so full and I loved them so passionately.…”
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Three years later, she began her memoir, the work that would take years to research and write. It was time for wisdom, insights, and drawing a line:

I have served a
genius
for almost forty years. Hundreds of times I have felt my intellectual energy stir within me, and all sorts of desires—a longing for education, a love of music and the arts.… And time and again I have crushed and smothered all these longings.… Everyone asks: “But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual or artistic life?” To this question I can only reply: “I don’t know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune.”
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Sophia still yearned for a spiritual life of her own: there were many things she wanted to try and projects she had been putting off over the years. To her surprise, nothing could extinguish her “desires and aspirations for something loftier, for a more spiritual, more significant life.”
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In 1902, the family returned to Yasnaya, where Tolstoy would now live indefinitely and she would explore her intellectual and artistic interests during the sunset of her marriage.

Sophia had a great desire to study art: back in 1864–65, when Tolstoy wrote
War and Peace
, she had made two splendid drawings. These early pictures, little dogs and a family scene, display
her natural artistic talent and good eye for detail. Tolstoy sympathized with her desire to take up art and even promised to engage a teacher, but nothing was done. In 1866, when he became interested in sculpting and took art instruction in Moscow, she had observed him shape a statuette of a horse from red clay. Tolstoy also tried and failed to sculpt her bust. At fifty-eight, Sophia made her own and Tolstoy’s profiles out of plaster and sculpted his bust in red clay.

Having observed the famous portraitists Kramskoy and Repin, she was curious about painting in oils and worked to exhaustion trying to figure out the technique. She made a decent copy of Ilya Repin’s portrait of Tolstoy reading a booklet at his desk.
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And she photographed herself at work: brush in hand, she stands near both portraits, smiling. Then she moved on to copy Kramskoy’s famous painting of Tolstoy during his work on
Anna Karenina
.

In 1904,
Journal for All
published Sophia’s collection of prose poems, submitted under the pen name “A Tired Woman.” By then, she was indeed “a tired woman,” having lived through many crises: sixteen pregnancies, miscarriages, the deaths of five children, and Tolstoy’s difficult moods. That same year, she began her memoir
My Life
and read a few chapters to the family. Tolstoy, present during the reading, praised her work. Based on her correspondence with Tolstoy and family documents, it was a chronicle of their marriage, which provided insights into Tolstoy’s character and creativity. She would see only several chapters of her memoir published, as there would be no time and no opportunity to edit or to complete it. (This sizable and informative work remains unpublished in Russia, reflecting widespread prejudice against Sophia.
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)

She now lived mostly in the country, except for business trips to Moscow. In 1903, Sophia launched a new edition of
War and Peace
and began reprinting Tolstoy’s collected works in 15,000 copies, the largest circulation ever. The family still depended on her publishing income, now essential to support an ailing Tolstoy, to pay for his doctors and special diet. In 1904, Tolstoy’s Slovak follower, Dushan Makovitsky, became his personal physician and settled with the family in Yasnaya.

For a while, Sophia was unwell: pains in her uterus occasionally kept her in bed. She took her illness calmly and told Tolstoy that her condition was not likely to improve. In August 1906, at sixty-two, Sophia was “overcome by excruciating pains.” Gynecologist Vladimir Snegirev was summons to Yasnaya, concluding that her pain was related to a fibroid tumor in her uterus and urgent surgery was required to save her life. He had to perform a rare procedure outside the clinic, on the wife of a celebrity, and was understandably nervous. Snegirev would later publish a paper describing laparotomy, which involved an incision through the abdominal wall.