by A. N. Wilson
There was a fairly large party. Someone was playing the piano. Tolstoy was able to get snatches of conversation with Sofya. ‘Why aren’t you dancing?’ she asked. ‘Oh, I’m too old for that,’ he said. The party continued. At various tables round the rooms, elderly guests played cards, and at length got up to go. When the dancing stopped, Lyubov Alexandrovna insisted that her girls be packed off to bed. The rest should be told in Sofya Andreyevna’s own words:
Just as I was going to the door, Lev Nikolayevich called to me.
‘Wait a moment, Sofya Andreyevna.’
‘What is it?’
‘Will you read what I’m going to write?’
‘Very well.’
‘I’m only going to write the initials. You must guess the words.’
‘How can I do that? It’s impossible! Oh, well, go on.’
He brushed the games scores off the card table, took a piece of chalk and began writing. We were both very serious and excited. I followed his big red hand, and could feel all my powers of concentration and feeling focus on that bit of chalk and the hand that held it. We said nothing.
‘y.y. & n.f.h.t.v.r.m.o.m.a. & i.f.h.’
‘Your youth and need for happiness too vividly remind me of my age and incapacity for happiness,’ I read out. My heart was pounding, my temples were throbbing, my face was flushed – I was beyond all sense of time and reality; at that moment I felt capable of anything, of understanding everything, imagining the unimaginable.
‘Well, let’s go on,’ said Lev Nikolayevich and began to write once more.
‘y.f.h.t.w.i.a.m. & y.s.L.y. & y.s.T.m.p.m.’
‘Your family has the wrong idea about me and your sister Liza. You and your sister Tanechka must protect me.’ I read the initials rapidly and without a second’s hesitation.
Lev Nikolayevich wasn’t even surprised; it all seemed quite natural somehow. Our elation was such that we soared high above the world and nothing could possibly surprise us.
Then we heard Maman crossly summoning me to bed. We hurriedly said goodnight, extinguished the candles and went out. Behind my cupboard upstairs I lighted the stump of a candle, sat down on the floor, put my notebook on the wooden chair and began to write my diary. I wrote down the words to which Lev Nikolayevich had given me the initials and grew vaguely aware that something of great significance had occurred between us – something we were now unable to stop.18
If we knew all the facts in the story so far, without knowing how it continued and ended, it would still be impossible to predict what Tolstoy did next. The more we knew, the less we should be able to predict. Imagine knowing everything – not just all the evidence (which is by definition unreliable) of diaries, letters, novels – but everything. Imagine that one had a God’s eye view of all that passed through Tolstoy’s heart that summer. The next stage would still be surprising.
The incident with the chalk and the letters was profoundly important to Sofya Andreyevna. If she was half in love with him before, by now she was head over heels. She began to scribble a story about an ugly, moody, older man, completely inconsistent in all his opinions, and whom she adored. The story about the initials and the chalk – which both Tolstoy and his wife came to believe – cannot possibly be true, if you think about it. No crossword-puzzle solver or expert in cryptograms was ever so telepathic as Sofya Andreyevna claims to have been. And, as so often in her diaries, she lets us see what is going on without seeing it herself.
Tolstoy was in a tight corner. He did not want to marry Liza. He was not sure whether he wanted to marry at all. But he felt a sudden surge of interest in Sofya, such as, in the past, he had felt for at least forty women: a feeling which could liberate him from the marriage bond.
When the time came for them all to return to Moscow, Tolstoy impulsively took the coach with the Bers girls. It was the sort of coach with four seats inside and two outside. Inside the coach sat Mrs. Bers, Tolstoy’s sister Marya, Yelizaveta, and their youngest brother Volodya. Outside sat Tolstoy and Sofya, leaning against one another, and wrapped up in rugs as the coach made its slow way from Tula through the night. At the last changing post before Moscow, Yelizaveta pointedly said that she found the inside of the coach stuffy, and that she would like to join the Count outside. ‘Oh,’ he said tactlessly, ‘but it is surely Sofya Andreyevna’s turn to sit outside.’
For Sofya, this was the great point of the journey. For everyone else, the chief drama would surely have been that of Tolstoy’s sister. She had for a year now been the lover of a Swedish Viscount, Victor-Hector de Kleen. Her marriage was finished. She was about to go abroad, as she thought, for ever. This event probably weighed more heavily on the minds of her brother and her old friend Lyubov Alexandrovna than who sat next to whom on the coach.
Once back in Moscow, in the last week of August, Tolstoy found that he thought less about Sofya, and more about public affairs. He drafted, and sent, a long letter of protest to the Emperor, complaining about the police raid at Yasnaya seven weeks previously. He dined with the Katkovs (‘They’re discussing the good of Russia all the time’). Two days before his thirty-fourth birthday, he dined with the Berses and Sofya showed him her story about the fascinating ugly man. He took it away and read it on his birthday and was impressed by what an accurate picture of him it drew. That evening, he did not visit the Bers household. He spent it as he really preferred – with the Tyutchevs, eating and chatting. He was happy to think of what he and Mlle. Tyutcheva had escaped. ‘You ugly mug,’ he told himself, thinking of Sofya’s story, ‘don’t think about marriage; your vocation is different and for that you have been well endowed.’
On August 29, he travelled with Doctor Bers to their dacha at Pokrovskoye, and after dinner there with the girls, he records this cryptic entry: ‘She made me decipher the letter. I was embarrassed, so was she.’ What does this mean? ‘She’ in the context is undoubtedly Sofya Andreyevna, who was being attended by two suitors that evening – Messrs. Popov and Polivanov, neither of whom made Tolstoy jealous because he was by now so sure that she loved him. But what is this letter which needs deciphering? Surely it is more likely that this is the cryptogram, the series of initials which, in both their memories, he scribbled on a card table, and which she interpreted without fault and at once? Much more likely that Tolstoy posted her the message and that she found it incomprehensible. Her devotion to him made him feel ‘you swine’ – a bit like pity and sorrow.
Another week went past. He dined with the Tyutchevs once more. This time, he found their ‘blue-stocking’ conversation repulsive. He dined with a friend called Perfilyev, whom he had known for eight or nine years, and they got drunk together. Both in their mid-thirties, the two men felt old. They gorged themselves and lay on the floor, their faces almost touching, breathing heavily. ‘Dublitsky,’ said Tolstoy, calling himself by the name of the fascinatingly repulsive man in Sofya’s story, ‘don’t intrude where youth and poetry, love and beauty are – leave that to cadets, my friend. . . . Nonsense – monastery work, that’s your vocation, and from its height you can look down calmly and gladly at other people’s love and happiness. . . .’
But the next day he saw Sofya again, and ‘she draws me irresistibly’. He tried to cope with the passion which she aroused in him by going into the village from her dacha that afternoon and having a peasant girl called Sasha. But it was no use. For the rest of the week, he was in an agony of love with Sofya. He could not settle. He did gymnastics. He dined at his club. He was too frightened to act or speak. By September 13 he had resolved, ‘I’ll go tomorrow as soon as I get up and say everything, or I’ll shoot myself.’
The next day, he did not shoot himself. Instead, he wrote a letter to Sofya proposing marriage. He did not post it. He put it in his pocket, and remained in a state of frenzy for the next twenty-four hours. He called on the Tyutchevs. He called at the Bers apartment, thrust the letter into Sofya’s hand, but was unable to speak. Then he went home and went to bed. But he could not sleep. He got up again, a
nd spent the night talking to Perfilyev about the past. He told him all about Nikolay‘s death. He wept. In his agitation, he decided that what he most wanted in Sofya was a confidante. ‘There won’t be any secrets for me alone; but secrets for two; she will read everything.’
The next day, September 16, he called on the Berses again.
The whole household had been thrown into a flurry by his visits. Liza had been with Sofya when she read the letter. ‘What is it?’ she had asked. ‘Le Comte m’a fait la proposition,’ said Sofya. Their mother came into the room at this point. When she heard the news she asked, ‘Do you want to marry le Comte?’ ‘Yes,’ said Sofya, and together they went to tell the rest of the family.
Liza was in tears, and the parents were astonished. It was not what Lyubov Alexandrovna had intended at all. Doctor Bers’s first reaction was one of anger, but as a cynical man of the world, he gave his consent. Tolstoy asked for the marriage to take place at once. It is an extraordinary fact that Sofya’s parents agreed to this. The next day, September 17, was her nameday, and when all their friends came to the party, they learnt that she was to be married within a week. September 23 was set as the day! Why the rush? Apart from flirtatious conversations and silences in company over the last month, and one journey by coach, the bridal pair had had no time together. They were not even sufficiently well-acquainted to know whether they liked one another. Probably they never did. He found her strange and fascinating. She found him monstrous and frightening. There was a strong sexual attraction between them. On this basis, they prepared to enter upon one of the most closely documented and one of the most miserable marriages in history.
Tolstoy’s present for her nameday was to give Sofya the opportunity to read his diaries. This was commoner in nineteenth-century Russia than is sometimes realised (Nicholas II and his bride did the same). But that is not to say that it was wise. He wanted to keep nothing hidden from her. Doctor Bers’s permission was sought before the notebooks were presented to his daughter, and he gave it. What can he have been thinking of, to give his consent? Did he hope that, when she learnt of Tolstoy’s notorious (to Bers and his circle) depravity, Sofya would call the whole thing off? She was an inexperienced eighteen year old. In 1890, twenty-eight years later, she was still poring over them, making fair copies and trying to keep them from the hands of his friends and disciples. ‘I don’t think I ever recovered from the shock of reading the diaries when I was engaged to him,’ she wrote. ‘I can still remember the agonising pangs of jealousy, the horror of that first appalling experience of male depravity.’19 Here it all was, in one great dollop: the early whoring and wenching, the repeated doses of V.D., the gipsies, the Cossack girls, the quasi-homoerotic devotion to his student friends, the flirtations in drawing rooms – a whole catalogue of active sexual life going back twenty years. What was worst was the discovery that he had, until only a month or two before, been besottedly in love with his peasant mistress Aksinya. Yet, the wedding plans went ahead. In their first private interview after she had read the diaries, Sofya was in tears. ‘Does this mean that you won’t forgive me?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I forgive you, but it’s dreadful,’ she said, as she handed the books back to him. Tolstoy had aroused in her a lifelong addiction which was an essential ingredient in their relationship. They did not keep diaries all the time, but in the years when they did so, it was an irresistible game. She had to read his diaries, however hurtful or shocking they were. And, to put the record straight, she had to write her own version of events. It was as though, with a part of themselves, they did not quite exist until they had become characters on a page. On any ordinary human level, Tolstoy’s action in showing her the diaries was cruel. But Tolstoy did not live on the ordinary human level. Whatever he thought he was doing when he showed her the books, he was actually putting her to the most important test of all: not, would she forgive him? but, would she read him? She passed the test. With a profound, intuitive intelligence, which gave her no pleasure, she latched on immediately to Tolstoy’s need for absolution through the written word. It was something which bound them together very deeply, even when they felt hatred and dread of one another. She was his reader. She survived all the ups and downs of married life until this fact came to be challenged, and rival readers tried to move in and take her place. Even less than most people on their wedding day can Sofya Andreyevna have known what she was doing when she married her husband. But it is wrong to think of her as a witless victim. It hurt her very much to be in love with the monstrous hero of her own short story. But it was his monstrosity that she loved. And from the very beginning, she knew that her reading of the diaries put her in a unique position in the world. It was a position of power which she could not resist.
After an agitated week in which she and her mother bought the trousseau and made the arrangements, the day dawned. First thing in the morning, Tolstoy himself called at the Bers apartment in a state of confusion and excitement. He doubted, after all, whether they were doing the right thing. ‘I have come to say,’ he said, ‘that there is still time. . . . All this business can be put a stop to.’ Sofya started to cry. Did it mean that he was coming to cancel the wedding? ‘Yes, if you don’t love me.’ More tears. Lyubov Alexandrovna burst into the room to find Tolstoy trying to console her daughter. All three of them must in that moment have wondered whether or not he was right. It was a crazy situation. But Lyubov Alexandrovna had the reputation of her daughter to think of. All Moscow had been told. The invitations had been sent out, the church had been booked, the presents had been received, the dresses chosen. ‘You’ve chosen a fine time for upsetting her!’ said the future mother-in-law, and banished Tolstoy from the house, reminding him of the time of the wedding that evening.
We do not know how Tolstoy spent the day. Far too late, he returned to his apartments to change, and was told by a despondent servant that there was nothing to change into. All his clean clothes, and all his linen, had been packed and sent ahead with Tolstoy’s brother Sergey Nikolayevich to Yasnaya Polyana. There was not so much as a clean shirt to be found.
The wedding was scheduled for eight o’clock at night in the Kremlin Church of the Nativity of Our Lady. By seven o’clock, Sofya Andreyevna was waiting in her wedding dress. The custom was for the groomsman to come and tell the bride that the groom was waiting for her at the church. An hour later, he had still not arrived. At half-past eight, she and her family had begun to despair. Tolstoy, who had seemed in the morning so wild and uncertain, had evidently decided to do a bunk. Just then, Tolstoy’s manservant arrived to explain what had happened to the luggage and the shirts, followed not long after by the groomsman to say that a shirt had at last been found and that the groom was now awaiting the bride in church. An hour late, and in a state of great distress, Sofya Andreyevna went to greet her lord. As he led her to the altar, the choir sang ‘Come O Dove’. There were three hundred guests, who had been waiting for over an hour to witness the extended nuptial celebrations, the lighting and snuffing of candles, the chanting, the holding of crowns over the heads of the bride and groom. Sofya Andreyevna cried during most of the service.
Afterwards, when she was about to get into the carriage and be driven away by her new husband, she turned to her mother, threw herself into Lyubov’s arms, and sobbed like a child. ‘If leaving your family means such great sorrow to you, then you cannot love me very much,’ Tolstoy said to her, when the carriage was on the move.
They broke the journey at a place called Birulyevo. Tolstoy had already established in the coach that his bride knew the facts of life. The innkeeper opened up the best suite – ‘The Emperor’s chambers’ – and the young Countess sat shy on a sofa, unable to speak. A servant brought in a samovar. Still, silence and gloom, and what Tolstoy regarded as morbid timidity. ‘Well,’ he said, as they sat silently and watched the steaming samovar, ‘show that you are the mistress. Come on, pour the tea!’ She was so shy with him that she did not even dare to call her husband by name.
She had al
ready read the diaries. Had she noticed in Tolstoy how swiftly sexual gratification turned to feelings of intense ‘morbidity’ in himself? Had she noticed how self-hatred in this area so easily became hatred of the person who had first excited all these messy feelings? Or was she merely dreading becoming another name in that notebook, that sad catalogue?
The next day, after another long journey, the pair arrived at Yasnaya Polyana. It was only a couple of months since she had called there with her mother, a flirtatious schoolgirl. Now she returned as mistress of the place. Her brother-in-law Sergey Nikolayevich was waiting to greet them as the coach pulled up at the front door, and so was Tante Toinette who, Tolstoy noticed, was ‘already preparing to suffer’, now that her favourite little nephew had found himself a bride. Auntie, as the custom was, held up an icon and Sofya Andreyevna genuflected and kissed it, before greeting her new relations. Sergey stood offering them bread and salt on a tray. That night, Tolstoy had a bad dream. Whether by this he means a nightmare or a wicked dream, it is hard to tell, but two other words are added: ‘Not her.’20
Chapter Nine
Alchemy
1862 – 1864
Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you,
Drink up the monarch’s plague, this flattery?
Or whether shall I say mine eye saith true,
And that your love taught it this alchemy. . . .?
Shakespeare, Sonnet 114
An English traveller in Russia at the very end of the eighteenth century has left a memorable account of a typical provincial landowner. There is not much reason to suppose that things had greatly changed in the first sixty years of the nineteenth century.