The Tolstoy Marriage Revisited—Many Times

IThe "troubled marriage" of Lev Nikolaevich (hereafter LN) and Sofia Andreevna (hereafter SA) Tolstoy has long served as a cynosure, an alluring subject, not so much for literary scholars as for professional writers with an eye for engaging reallife material, as emotion-rich as any novel. One need not even know Russian, Russia or Russian literature. The main primary sources, his diaries and her diaries, their correspondence, most of the memoirs of their children, other close relatives, secretaries, disciples, and friends have all been conveniently translated into English. It might as well be Dickens' s or Mark Twain's marriage under scrutiny. The cast of characters is alluring: a supremely great novelist turned prophet in his later years, his much younger wife, a woman of strong character and very considerable culture, a devoted companion during much of their life together, conscientious and loving mother of their thirteen (!) children, of whom only eight lived to adulthood. In the early years their relationship oscillated between passionate tenderness and very occasional sharp conflicts, but the strife greatly increased in the later, "prophetic" years, whose aims and substance SA did not share.The action is gripping and its denouement affecting, even tragic. After completing two of the world's greatest novels LN decided that novel- writing was too trivial an occupation for a man of his stature and ambitions. Writing fiction was nothing more than providing entertainments for a class of largely idle educated people, who in Russia were parasites on the backs of the huge, mostly illiterate mass of the peasantry. LN too was such a parasite, but at least he recognized the fact, and it troubled his conscience. So he sought a higher purpose to his life, indeed the highest conceivable. By the power of his pen he undertook to save mankind, to show humanity the way out of the cruel, senseless mess of their lives. His wife, SA, had hitherto fulfilled well her multiple roles - the great man's sexual partner; mother, nursemaid and tutor to their numerous offspring; manager of his household and their servants; model for some of his most entrancing female characters; and finally a tireless amanuensis who spent her evenings and sometimes nights making fair copies of the texts he had produced during the day, often revised and recopied again and again. All these roles she performed efficiently and with devotion, and until his conversion she seemed satisfied with her very full life. She loved Tolstoy the man and revered Tolstoy the artist, but the new Tolstoy, Tolstoy the prophet, was alien to her. She simply could not follow him down this path.Their marriage, up to the completion of Anna Karenina, had been a generally happy one, rewarding and satisfying for both partners. SA, to be sure, had a much more difficult task of adaptation to perform. A city girl, brought up in Moscow, she had to adjust to country life with its relative isolation and inconveniences. At eighteen, she was suddenly in the position of mistress of a substantial household and its servants. And almost immediately she became pregnant, a condition she was in for an astonishing 1 17 months - nearly ten of the next thirty years. Add to that the months of nursing and infant care and one is amazed that she had any time or energy left to nurse her husband's novels. There were, to be sure, occasional tiffs between them, even in the best of times. LN was often demanding and inconsiderate, and SA sometimes felt overpowered and bullied. For example, inveighing against Russian ladies' common practice of hiring peasant wet nurses for their babies, LN insisted that SA should feed her children at her own breast, even when a case of mastitis made that task exceedingly painful. Ideology trumped sympathy. (She was later able to nurse most of their children.) On his side, he was disappointed that she showed so little interest in his school for peasant children (abandoned after their marriage) or in their peasant neighbours. …