The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy Read Free Page A

husband, always addressing him in the formal “you”. She supervised all the domestic work. She sewed everything, including his trousers and jackets. She attended to all the peasants’ medical needs (for which she had quite a talent). She was supported, to be sure, by a large staff of servants, but her upbringing had taught her to be self-reliant, and she washed, boiled, gardened, pickled and sewed all day in the eager desire to serve her husband.
    The revelations in his diaries had badly shaken her sexual confidence. She yearned for tenderness and was shocked by his coarseness, hurt by his outbursts of passion followed by coldness and withdrawal. But she submitted uncomplainingly to his fierce embraces. Since he believed sexual intercourse should be for purely procreative purposes, they used no form of contraception. She became pregnant almost immediately, and her diary for this first year of their marriage established the regular cycle of pregnancies and births that would fill her life. (She bore thirteen children in all, of whom nine lived.) Lev Tolstoy, who held that sex during pregnancy was “both swinish and unnatural”, kept out of her way as much as possible at these times, and she grew increasingly desperate.
    Her mother, uncomplainingly bearing her eight children and tending her home, had provided her with an excellent model of the selfless role women were traditionally expected to play in marriage. Orthodox religion had for centuries endowed women with this special capacity for self-sacrifice, and Sofia would throughout her life look to the Church, with its emphasis on suffering, selflessness and humility, to give dignity to her wifely role. But by the mid-1860s attitudes to women and the family were already undergoing a profound change, and Sofia too in this first year of marriage felt the stirrings of change in her.
    Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had spelt the end of the old feudal Russia and the orthodox religious values underpinning it, and the start of a process that would affect every area of people’s lives. Thousands of women, forced to make themselves financially independent of husbands and fathers, left their families for good to find work and education in the cities. Conservative men jeered at them as “nihilists”, but among the men of the intelligentsia there was now a new and serious commitment to treat women as equals and support their desire for education and autonomy. Debates raged about women’s social role and the future of marriage and the family. More radical women would go so far as to reject love and marriage altogether, since to them marriage meant inevitably being trapped in endless domestic chores, while sexual relations, in the absence of reliable contraception, led to endless pregnancies. But even respectably married women were now claiming that husband and children were no longer enough to fill their lives, and that only through work could they find the emotional and economic independence they longed for. The “woman” question was the burning issue of the day, and for Sofia it meant the discovery of a wholly unexpected dissatisfaction with her new life. Despite her endless labours for Tolstoy, toiling in the house and caring for him body and soul, she felt she was merely histoy. “If I don’t interest him, if he sees me as a doll, merely his wife , not a human being, then I will not and cannot live like that,” she writes in her diary. “I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman .” She longed to find her own interests outside the house and, feeling increasingly inadequate, she alternately toyed with thoughts of suicide and nursed murderous feelings for Axinya and her son. Pregnant and wretched, she was even jealous of Tolstoy’s feelings for her beloved younger sister Tanya.
    But he, for all his extraordinary sensitivity to the women in