November 20, 1910--Death came for Leo Tolstoy, as it did for the title protagonist of his masterwork Anna Karenina, in a railway station. But the novelist’s occurred not in a major metropolis but a remote area of southern Russia, where he had fled, on a horribly cold night, in a last-ditch attempt to leave behind the trappings of inherited wealth--and the family that came with it--for an ethic of self-denial that he had preached for so long.
I’m sorry to say that I’ve never gotten around either to watching the Christopher Plummer-Helen Mirren film released last year about Tolstoy’s final days, The Last Station, or reading the Jay Parini novel on which it was based. But I can’t imagine more sinewy roles than that of Count Tolstoy and his long-suffering wife, Sofia.
Like many a beleaguered wife from time immemorial, Sofia Tolstoy understandably must have wondered: “What kind of lunatic did I marry?”
Think I’m exaggerating? Then turn to the extracts from her diary in Revelations: Diaries of Women, edited by Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter.
In 1862, at age 18, having just married Tolstoy—16 years her senior—Sofia noted that she had written before “whenever I felt depressed, and I am probably doing it now for the same reason.”
What could have given this still-in-love but disillusioned young woman such a sinking feeling? It might have started with a mistake made by Tolstoy: showing his wife his diaries. This gave her incontrovertible proof—right from her husband’s hands—that before their union, he’d been a hard-drinking, much-wenching soldier, given to bouts of melancholy.
Tolstoy’s anguish over the unease he caused his young bride, his existential despair, and his temporary success in attaining happiness can be glimpsed in the subplot involving Levin and Kitty in Anna Karenina. But his status as literary giant and the 13 children Sofia bore him could not long arrest their deteriorating relationship.
Six years after their wedding, Sofia was still trying to keep up a brave front, writing that her diary was “so full of contradictions, and one would think I was such an unhappy person. Yet is there a happier person than I?”
But before long, she found herself unable to look away from an impossible situation that no other woman, before or since, has ever faced.
I’m sorry to say that I’ve never gotten around either to watching the Christopher Plummer-Helen Mirren film released last year about Tolstoy’s final days, The Last Station, or reading the Jay Parini novel on which it was based. But I can’t imagine more sinewy roles than that of Count Tolstoy and his long-suffering wife, Sofia.
Like many a beleaguered wife from time immemorial, Sofia Tolstoy understandably must have wondered: “What kind of lunatic did I marry?”
Think I’m exaggerating? Then turn to the extracts from her diary in Revelations: Diaries of Women, edited by Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter.
In 1862, at age 18, having just married Tolstoy—16 years her senior—Sofia noted that she had written before “whenever I felt depressed, and I am probably doing it now for the same reason.”
What could have given this still-in-love but disillusioned young woman such a sinking feeling? It might have started with a mistake made by Tolstoy: showing his wife his diaries. This gave her incontrovertible proof—right from her husband’s hands—that before their union, he’d been a hard-drinking, much-wenching soldier, given to bouts of melancholy.
Tolstoy’s anguish over the unease he caused his young bride, his existential despair, and his temporary success in attaining happiness can be glimpsed in the subplot involving Levin and Kitty in Anna Karenina. But his status as literary giant and the 13 children Sofia bore him could not long arrest their deteriorating relationship.
Six years after their wedding, Sofia was still trying to keep up a brave front, writing that her diary was “so full of contradictions, and one would think I was such an unhappy person. Yet is there a happier person than I?”
But before long, she found herself unable to look away from an impossible situation that no other woman, before or since, has ever faced.
Sure, other husbands have saddled their spouses with raising a large family and even the details of estates as large as the count’s 4,000-acre one near Moscow.
But how many of these wives have also been married to a genius whose doorstopper novels she transcribed and on whose behalf she negotiated with agents? And this, I think, is the clincher—how many of these geniuses have also happened to be saints?
After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy plunged into what the father of Henry and William James, describing his own soul sickness, termed a “vastation.” When he emerged from this spiritual crisis, Tolstoy started a journey of faith that began with an embrace of Orthodox Christianity that soon evolved into something far more radical—pacifist Christian anarchism, marked by vegetarianism and sharing labor in the fields with his peasants.
Maybe Sofia might have thought at the start of their marriage that she would have done anything for her husband. But she never reckoned that this might include living in tents on land he had bought to be near the Bashkir, the Turkish-speaking Moslems who increasingly moved him, nor drinking koumiss (fermented mare’s milk) in said tents, nor putting up with his moodiness and complaints about how she ran things.
Twenty years to the day her husband would die, Sofia confided her depression—and barely suppressed resentment—about her transformed marriage in her diary: “In the old days it gave me joy to copy out what he wrote. Now he keeps giving it to his daughters and hiding it from me. He makes me frantic with his way of systematically excluding me from his personal life, and it is unbearably painful.”
Tired of never-ending arguments in the last year of their marriage over the estate and his manuscripts (exacerbated, some claimed, by his longtime personal secretary, Vladimir Chertkov), Tolstoy finally determined to escape south. The world media followed, recording a flight that turned into a death watch. Sofia followed, but only managed to see him for a few minutes, the encounter ending without reconciliation.
Millions of readers, myself included, have taken Anna Karenina to our hearts over the years because of Tolstoy’s infinite knowledge of the vast complications involved with marriage. In his own life, this brilliant, humane, yet humorless and impossible man was responsible for most of the complications in his own.
In light of the subsequent history of Tolstoy’s country, as well as the violent course of world history up to the present, the sterling British man of letters A.N. Wilson makes a compelling case, in a recent Financial Times commemoration of the novelist’s death, that he was “one of history’s great truth-tellers, the first of the great dissidents, and their patron saint.” But I’m far, far less inclined to join Wilson in believing that it’s “hard not to cheer the old bearded prophet and overlook any unkindness he might have displayed toward his wife.”
Charity, after all—as a reading of the Gospels would have demonstrated to the Christ-centered man he honored so eloquently—begins at home.
But how many of these wives have also been married to a genius whose doorstopper novels she transcribed and on whose behalf she negotiated with agents? And this, I think, is the clincher—how many of these geniuses have also happened to be saints?
After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy plunged into what the father of Henry and William James, describing his own soul sickness, termed a “vastation.” When he emerged from this spiritual crisis, Tolstoy started a journey of faith that began with an embrace of Orthodox Christianity that soon evolved into something far more radical—pacifist Christian anarchism, marked by vegetarianism and sharing labor in the fields with his peasants.
Maybe Sofia might have thought at the start of their marriage that she would have done anything for her husband. But she never reckoned that this might include living in tents on land he had bought to be near the Bashkir, the Turkish-speaking Moslems who increasingly moved him, nor drinking koumiss (fermented mare’s milk) in said tents, nor putting up with his moodiness and complaints about how she ran things.
Twenty years to the day her husband would die, Sofia confided her depression—and barely suppressed resentment—about her transformed marriage in her diary: “In the old days it gave me joy to copy out what he wrote. Now he keeps giving it to his daughters and hiding it from me. He makes me frantic with his way of systematically excluding me from his personal life, and it is unbearably painful.”
Tired of never-ending arguments in the last year of their marriage over the estate and his manuscripts (exacerbated, some claimed, by his longtime personal secretary, Vladimir Chertkov), Tolstoy finally determined to escape south. The world media followed, recording a flight that turned into a death watch. Sofia followed, but only managed to see him for a few minutes, the encounter ending without reconciliation.
Millions of readers, myself included, have taken Anna Karenina to our hearts over the years because of Tolstoy’s infinite knowledge of the vast complications involved with marriage. In his own life, this brilliant, humane, yet humorless and impossible man was responsible for most of the complications in his own.
In light of the subsequent history of Tolstoy’s country, as well as the violent course of world history up to the present, the sterling British man of letters A.N. Wilson makes a compelling case, in a recent Financial Times commemoration of the novelist’s death, that he was “one of history’s great truth-tellers, the first of the great dissidents, and their patron saint.” But I’m far, far less inclined to join Wilson in believing that it’s “hard not to cheer the old bearded prophet and overlook any unkindness he might have displayed toward his wife.”
Charity, after all—as a reading of the Gospels would have demonstrated to the Christ-centered man he honored so eloquently—begins at home.
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