The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy Read Free

him for thus shattering her dreams and assaulting her innocence, and forty-seven years later she was still referring bitterly to Axinya.
    Youthful promiscuity and gambling were not in fact so uncommon amongst young Russian aristocrats, but even so Tolstoy and his family had a reputation for fast living. His brother Dmitry had bought a prostitute from a brothel and died in her arms at the age of twenty-nine. His brother Sergei lived with a gypsy woman by whom he had eleven children. And his sister Maria left her despotic husband and lived in sin with a Swedish count, by whom she had a daughter. Sofia’s family did not live this way—and Tolstoy would always apply a double standard when dealing with his wife and with the world at large (including his own family). She could never really forget his sordid, loveless past, and was deeply scarred by the episode, to which she would refer again and again in her diaries.
    At their magnificent wedding in the Kremlin, she couldn’t stop weeping for the family she was leaving. She wept all the way to her new home. And she wept when, crushed and terrified by Tolstoy’s clumsy attempts to embrace her, they finally arrived at Yasnaya Polyana, where she would spend the next fifty-seven years of her life.
    Waiting for them on the steps of the large white-painted wooden house were Tolstoy’s old aunt, Tatyana Ergolskaya, holding an icon of the Holy Virgin, and his brother Sergei, bearing the traditional welcome of bread and salt. Sofia bowed to the ground, embraced her relatives and kissed the icon. (She would be guided to the end of her life by the simple rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church.) Then Aunt Tatyana handed her new mistress the keys of the house, and these she hung on her waist and carried there until the day she died.
    The house, cold, spartanly furnished and infested with rats and mice, had been Tolstoy’s home all his life. There was a large farm,with cattle, sheep, pigs and bees, and until the 1880s Tolstoy took a keen interest in its management. But he was not a successful farmer. The pigs kept dying of hunger, the sheep proved unprofitable and the cows were thin and didn’t give enough milk. The only profit came from the apple orchards, but even so the estate was always running at a loss. Yasnaya Polyana’s greatest asset was its forests (“my daughters’ dowry”, Sofia would call them), but these too were neglected. Tolstoy’s other estate, in Nikolskoe, was even more dilapidated and even more forested, and in these forests, inhabited only by wolves and birds, Tolstoy loved to hunt, for until the 1880s he was a passionate sportsman.
    Sofia was determined to like her new home and to be a good wife. She took over the accounts, organized the housekeeping and marshalled the small army of dependants and domestics living there who comprised her new family. There was Aunt Tatyana, with her personal maid and companion Natalya Petrovna; there was Maria Arbuzova, Tolstoy’s old nanny, with her two sons, one of whom was Tolstoy’s personal servant; there was Agafya Mikhailovna, who had been Tolstoy’s grandmother’s maid and was now the “dog’s governess”. There was Nikolai the cook, Pelageya the laundress, and many, many others who came and went, and lived either in the house or in the village of Yasnaya Polyana.
    Tolstoy’s young bride was a stern mistress. Tolstoy never lost his temper with the servants; she was constantly doing so, for she lacked his authority. She was also desperately worried he would resume his old passion for teaching the peasants. She thought it improper for a count to associate so closely with the common people, and feared they might take him from her. Had his diaries not revealed to her just how ruthlessly he had exercised his power over the women on his estate?
    But of course she didn’t talk to him of such things, and remained for many weeks very much in awe of her new