The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy Read Free Page B

his novels, had no apparent desire to understand his wife’s suffering. And for all his optimistic faith in the virtues of equality, simplicity and hard work, he would to the end of his days use his enormous moral authority in Russia to preach a particularly savage kind of Christian asceticism, which equated sexuality with godlessness and proclaimed that women existed merely to arouse the beast in men and frustrate it. In countless interviews, articles and plays he would make abundantly clear his view of women’s weakness, their inferiority and moral subordination to men, and would indulge in countless ironic, contemptuous or frivolous comments on the “woman question”. These anti-feminist views, many of which Sofia records in her diary, became more violently and lengthily argued as time went on, and help to explain the early tensions between the couple, which would remain remarkably constant throughout their long life together.
    On 28th June 1863, Sofia gave birth prematurely to their son Sergei, a sickly baby who had difficulty feeding. Her nipples grew inflamed and she longed to hire a wet nurse, but Tolstoy, who held advanced views on the matter, wouldn’t hear of it: not to breastfeed was disgusting and unnatural, to hire a wet nurse to do so was obscene. Besides, a woman who abandoned her maternal duties so lightly would surely have no qualms about abandoning her wifely duties. Terrified of losing his love, she struggled in agony until eventually ordered by the doctor to stop, and Fillip the coachman’s wife was asked to help out. (The woman’s son, Sergei’s “milk brother”, was to be his lifelong friend.)
    Tolstoy angrily withdrew from her and wrote a five-act comedy called The Infected Family , about a woman who couldn’t breastfeed her baby because she was an “unnatural, emancipated woman” and a “nihilist”. (Thankfully, he couldn’t persuade the Maly Theatre in Moscow to put it on, and soon dropped it.) He grew increasingly possessive towards Sofia, and obsessed by the idea of marital chastity. He was terrified by the new egalitarian attitudes to women—taken bysome to their logical conclusion of demanding for women an equal right to commit adultery. He thought of the great writer Alexander Herzen, whose wife had claimed her right to fall in love with a poet, and he concluded that Herzen’s tragedy was that he had lightheartedly betrayed his wife with housemaids and prostitutes, and the more liberated sexual attitudes of the 1860s had caught up with him.
    Tolstoy’s past too was haunting him, and he became wildly jealous. Not that he had any reason to be, of course: Sofia had dedicated her life to him, and needed him as much as he needed her to care for him and create the family he had never had. But perhaps more importantly, she represented for him a moral purity he felt he had long ago lost, or had never had, which he desperately needed for his own moral regeneration. And despite everything, relations between them began to improve. For that autumn he started writing War and Peace , and she was able to devote herself entirely to him.
    She assumed responsibility for everything that concerned his everyday life, supervising his diet, ensuring he wasn’t disturbed while he sat hour after hour in his study, gladly going without sleep or food to care for him whenever he was ill. She assumed all responsibility for the servants, the housekeeping and the accounts, and she arranged and catalogued the books in their large library.
    These were just some of her responsibilities over the next forty-five years. But the task she cherished most throughout these years (helped later by her daughters and Tolstoy’s secretaries) was copying out his voluminous writings. Every night after the baby had been put to bed, she would sit at her desk until the small hours, copying out his day’s writing in her fine hand, telepathically deciphering