The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

by Cathy Porter

This made me terribly indignant, and I admonished him for his perpetually cynical attitude to women, which has made me suffer so much. I told him the reason he regarded women like this was that he hadn’t known a single decent woman before he was 34. It’s precisely this lack of friendship and spiritual affinity (rather than physical intimacy), this indifference to my spiritual and emotional life, which torments me to this day. All this has become blatantly obvious to me over the years—it has spoilt my life and disillusioned me and has made me love my husband less.

  19th February. L.N. is hiding his diary somewhere. I always used to be able to guess where it was and search it out, but now I am at a loss to know where he has put it.

  22nd February. I visited L.N.’s friend Rusanov, who is sick, and we talked about L.N., vegetarianism and Chertkov, whom the Rusanovs strongly disapprove of; they said that he was an abnormal person, prone to attacks of insanity, manifested by his extreme suspiciousness, garrulousness, fussiness and despotism. There’s really very little good in him. We had a lot of people to dinner and there were blinis; I arrived home half an hour before dinner and was told that Count Olsufiev and Sergei Ivanovich Taneev were there. I was delighted, ran straight upstairs and found them sitting with Tanya, who was lying on the couch. Sergei Ivanovich has brought me The Sunrise, his work for four voices set to words by the poet Tyutchev, and he played it to me. It is beautifully written and is divided into two moods: waiting for the sun, and its final triumphant appearance.

  Tanya said a great many spiteful things to me yesterday about his visit. That’s the way to stop a good sympathetic friendship between two people!

  23rd February. The anniversary of Vanechka’s death—three years have passed since he died. The moment I got up I went to church and prayed and thought about my dead infants, parents and friends. I had a requiem service performed for me. Then we went to the maternity home to visit the cook’s wife Masha, who earlier today had given birth to a baby boy. From there I called on Zhilyaeva, the wife of a poor landowner from Kursk, to find out how she was getting on, but she wasn’t in. She has an extraordinarily musical son, a pupil of Sergei Ivanovich’s. I bought some flowers to put round Vanechka’s portrait, and some rolls and honey for Nurse.

  4th March. Bad news about What Is Art? The secular censors passed it, but there was a telegram from St Petersburg saying it must now be presented to the church censors. Which means that this essay, the second part of it anyway, is sunk for good. It’s exasperating! So now I’ve printed and corrected it all for nothing. It will just have to be published abroad.

  7th March. L.N. is listless and fractious. He cannot work and he is exhausted by all his visitors, who are often most unwelcome, and despite my pleading with him to send them away and enjoy his leisure, he stubbornly refuses to do so. He has a boundless curiosity, which makes him receive absolutely everyone who comes to see him, as well as that eternal stubbornness, and the desire to contradict and defy me all the time.

  I had a very unpleasant conversation with him this morning. He wants to make a lot of additions to On Art, but I am afraid the censors will seize on these additions and stop the book again, and I want to print 30,000 copies. One word led to another, and soon we were shouting at each other. I blamed him for depriving me of my freedom and not letting me go to St Petersburg; he blamed me for selling his books; I replied that it wasn’t me who took that money, most of it went to his children whom he had abandoned, and had neither educated nor trained to work. I also said that it was with this money that I paid for his saddle horse, his asparagus, his fruit, his charity work, his bicycles and so forth, and that I spent less on myself than on anyone else…But I wouldn’t have said all this if he hadn’t shouted at me that I had forgotten myself, that he could forbid me to sell his books. Very well, I said, forbid me, I shall be delighted to support myself by going out to work as a schoolteacher or a proofreader or some such thing. I love work, and I do not love this life, which doesn’t suit me at all, and has been organized, through sheer inertia, to suit my family—my husband and children.

  What Is Art? has apparently returned from the church censors, who have underlined one or two things, but passed it. L.N. and I didn’t argue after that—in fact we were both thoroughly ashamed and made up.

  8th March. I am battling with myself. My soul is torn between my passionate desire to go to St Petersburg for the Wagner and various other concerts, and the fear of distressing Lev Nikolaevich and having this on my conscience. I cried last night for this painful lack of freedom, which is becoming more and more oppressive. Materially of course I am free: I have money, horses, dresses—everything. I go to bed, sit down, drive around. I am free to read proofs, buy apples for L.N., make Sasha’s dresses and my husband’s shirts, take his photograph from every conceivable angle, order dinner, manage our family affairs—I am free to eat, sleep, be quiet and submit. But I am not free to think as I please, to love whom I choose, to come and go according to my own interests and intellectual pleasures; I am not free to pursue my music, I am not free to drive away all these innumerable, unwanted, dull and often extremely evil people, and instead receive people who are good, clever, gifted and interesting. We have no need of such people in our house—for one would have to take them seriously and treat them as equals, whereas he likes to enslave people and preach at them…

  And I’m not happy, my life is hard…No, that wasn’t the right word: I don’t need happiness, what I need is a life that is full and peaceful, not this difficult, anxious, pointless existence.

  9th March. The Day of the Forty Martyrs. On the morning of this day when I was a child and when my children were young, Trifonovna, our old cook in my father’s house, and Nikolai, the cook at Yasnaya Polyana, would bake delicious rich lark cakes, with blackcurrants for eyes and crisp beaks. There was something so poetic about them. And then the live larks would fly up and settle on the thawed patches of brown earth poking through the snow, before soaring into the sky with their sweet silvery song. I used to love springtime in the country. In those days spring brought all those happy, impractical hopes for the future…Now it brings nothing but sad memories and helpless, impossible longings…Ah, old age is no joy!

  This evening, to my great delight, L.N. gave me Hadji Murat, his story about the Caucasus, to copy. I copied with great enthusiasm, despite the pain in my arm, until Sergeenko came in and interrupted me. Then Dunaev and Uncle Kostya came, and my brother Sasha, and Seryozha. We had a long talk about government affairs, and this new fleet of ships it has bought for 90 million rubles. Sergeenko told us the Japanese had ordered these ships from Britain for 130 million, but the Japanese couldn’t pay on time as the money was held by the Chinese-Russian Bank, which delayed in releasing it. So the contract lapsed, and the Russian government then offered 90 million, and with that they bought an entire fleet from the British.

  14th March. I can’t remember a thing, just more long sleepless nights. One night I sat up happily copying Hadji Murat for L.N. until 4.30 in the morning. The past few days I have either stayed at home working and proofreading, or gone out shopping for summer clothes. L.N. writes endless letters, which he finds a great strain, and reads a lot. He hadn’t been so gentle and affectionate with me for a long time, then the other day his voice suddenly changed. I was terribly busy with the proofs for Volume 15. I had been working all day, and hadn’t been attentive to his mood. I went on working that evening, with short rests (I had 12 printed pages to read), and as I knew my insomnia wouldn’t let me sleep anyway, I asked my husband to go to bed without me, then got undressed, put on my dressing gown and slippers and promised to come in quietly as soon as I had finished. L.N. threw a tantrum: go to bed, he said, and let that be the end of it. Well, my work had to be done urgently—it had to be sent to the printers that morning—so I didn’t pay him any attention and went on working. An hour and a half later he came in and started shouting at me: I was torturing him, he said, he had a headache and he wanted to sleep and I wasn’t letting him. I sat there and pati
ently heard him out, then went into the bedroom (I had been sitting in the dining room, which is next to it), and went to bed without finishing the last page. But there my nerves snapped. All that hard work, that unpleasant scene, and most of all my husband’s unfairness to me, produced such feelings of despair in my suffering soul that I felt a terrible spasm in my heart and chest, and barely managed to say “I am dying” into the darkness, before I started to choke. My heart was pounding. I had spasms in my chest and a feeling of utter horror, as though my life had stopped. I have never before had such an attack. I splashed cold water on my heart and made enormous efforts to control myself, which helped me eventually to stop the attack. Lev Nikolaevich was beside himself and began to shudder and sob…We slept badly, for we were both exhausted…But why, oh why should these things happen! Lord help me care for my husband and be patient to the end…The following morning I went to him and said I was sorry about what had happened. He seemed to apologize, and the peace was restored. But will it last?

  Yesterday S.I. Taneev came, and his presence had an immediately soothing effect on me. He is such a calm, kind, even-tempered, gifted man. He played us his lovely symphony and asked Lev Nikolaevich for his opinion of it. L.N. considered the question with great seriousness and respect, then expounded his views: namely, that his symphony, as all modern music, was completely lacking in consistency, in either the melody, rhythm or harmony. The moment you began to follow the melody it stopped short, the moment you mastered one rhythm it jumped into another, so you felt constantly dissatisfied. Whereas in a genuine work of art you feel it could not be otherwise; one thing flows from another, and you think to yourself: “Why, I would have done it just like that.” Sergei Ivanovich listened attentively and respectfully to what he had to say, but was obviously mortified that L.N. hadn’t liked it. Today he is going to St Petersburg, where his symphony will be performed by an orchestra.

  Yesterday morning I got up feeling exhausted after our argument the night before. Then L.N. brought my grandson Misha in to me, and I was so pleased to see this pure, sweet, clever child. I spent the whole day with him; I took him to the Zoological Gardens, the toy shops, the cake shop and the Kremlin, and he was delighted by everything but surprised by nothing. So yesterday was God’s reward for last night’s unpleasant scene with my husband.

  17th March. Yesterday I copied Lev Nikolaevich’s letter ‘Aid to the Dukhobors’. (They are now hoping to emigrate.) L.N. thinks the St Petersburg Gazette will publish it, but I’m sure they won’t. He appeals for two kinds of aid: finding them a place to emigrate, and collecting money for this.* There are 10,000 of them—how much money will they need?

  Still the same harsh winter weather. It was 10 degrees below freezing today, and very windy and cold, despite the sun.

  18th March. Things were going well and we were on good terms. Then today I was reading the proofs of Lev Nikolaevich’s ‘Preface’ to Carpenter’s article ‘Contemporary Science’, when I suddenly realized it was all different, everything had been changed. I was astonished and hurt. When the Northern Herald took this article I begged L.N. to give me the final proofs, so I could send the final version off to be printed in Volume 15. I went to him and reproached him, quite mildly, for deceiving me, and he grew terribly angry. These arguments opened up old wounds and it was utterly unbearable. He had concealed these final proofs from me merely out of consideration for the Northern Herald’s profits, because he didn’t want to delay its publication. It would have taken him just one day to make these corrections in my edition.

  Many, many guests this evening—Belskaya and her daughter, Toliverova and her daughter, Maklakov and his sister, Varya Nagornova and Gorbunov. Toliverova, editor of the magazine The Toy, wants to publish a journal called the Woman’s Cause, and the woman question was discussed. L.N. said that instead of speaking of women’s inequality and oppression one should talk of people’s inequality in general. And he said that if a woman raises this question herself there is something immodest, unwomanly and impertinent about it. I think he is right. It’s not freedom we women want, but help. Help mainly in educating our sons, setting them on the right road to life, influencing them to be brave, independent, hard-working and honest. A mother cannot educate her sons all on her own, and the reason the younger generation is no good is because their fathers are no good. They are too lazy to educate their own sons, and would gladly throw themselves into anything that lets them avoid their most important duty—educating the future generation, which must go forward and continue humanity’s work.

  2nd April. Two weeks have passed since I last wrote my diary!

  Tomorrow is the day appointed by the anonymous letter for Lev Nikolaevich’s murder. I am worried of course, but I don’t really believe it. Two Dukhobors came to see L.N., strapping peasants, strong in body and soul. We told them to go and see Suvorin and Prince Ukhtomsky in St Petersburg, so that these two influential newspaper editors can give them advice and help. They have promised to do so, but it’s unlikely they will. These two Dukhobors are now sitting with L.N., along with a young factory worker called Bulakhov who is being sent with the petition and 300 rubles to Verigin, their exiled leader.

  I spent four days in St Petersburg. Ever since autumn I had the fixed idea of going there to hear Taneev’s symphony—which he played several times for me on the piano—performed by an orchestra. I thought it would be magnificent. I had also dreamt of hearing some Wagner, as there was a visiting German opera company performing him in St Petersburg at the time. At first L.N. refused to let me go, which resulted in depression, sleepless nights and apathy. Then he agreed to release me, but the trip was no pleasure. It rained incessantly; Taneev’s symphony was atrociously performed and conducted by Glazunov, I didn’t hear any Wagner, and life with my sister Elizaveta, who is on bad terms with her husband and servants, and is interested only in the management of Russia’s financial affairs (a strange interest indeed for a woman), was so depressing, and the whole trip was so unsuccessful that I was delighted to get back to L.N. and my life in this house, which is at least free in spirit, and I shan’t be in a hurry to leave again.

  The floor-polishers were here all day and the locks were cleaned. Noise, visitors, Dukhobors. Sulerzhitsky is here; the children are outside in the sunny garden playing muskets; Sasha is singing with the Friedman children and thumping out dance tunes on the piano; L.N. is chatting with the Dukhobors, and composing a long petition to the Tsar which I have been copying. These past few days I have been making clothes for L.N. I embroidered his handkerchiefs in satin stitch, made him a new shirt and am about to make him some trousers. When my friends asked me why I have “collapsed” and become so silent and sad, I reply: “Look at my husband, that is the reason he is so cheerful and energetic.”

  3rd April. Well, the day is almost over, it’s gone ten and there have been no attempts on L.N.’s life. This morning I cut out some trousers for him and stitched them on the machine. He then decided to go out for a walk, and I went with him so as not to stay at home worrying.

  My whole life passes in a way that’s not to my liking. L.N.’s life and interests are so particular, so personal, they just don’t concern his children. They can’t interest themselves in sectarians and Dukhobors, or the renunciation of art or ideas about non-resistance. They need their own personal life. And since they have no leader in their father, no ideals within their grasp, they create this undisciplined life, with card games, idleness and entertainments, rather than serious work or art. I have neither the strength nor the skill to make a better life for them—and I doubt it would be possible anyway, with a father who renounces everything!

  6th April, Easter Monday. I spent the whole day with the children. I went to the fair with Sasha, Verochka the maid and the Litvinov and Kolokoltsev children, and we watched the marionettes and the theatre, and went on the toboggans and merry-go-rounds. After dinner we rolled eggs. The children had a lovely day. Tanya is ill, with a fever and a swollen cheek. We had a letter from Masha
. The boys paid some calls. After dinner Varya Nagornova and I played Taneev’s quartet as a duet; the more one studies his music the more one loves it—and him, for his profound and noble soul.

  10th April. I should go mad if I had to live like Lev Nikolaevich. He writes all morning and wears himself out mentally, and all evening he talks non-stop, or rather preaches, as his listeners generally come to him for advice or instruction.

  There were thirteen people here after dinner today—two factory workers, three young schoolteachers, a lady studying the market for Russian handicrafts in England, a doctor, a correspondent for the Messenger, Sergeenko, Dunaev and various others.

  Seryozha came today and sat down at the piano to compose a piece of music. Tanya is not well: her cheek is swollen and she has a stomach ache. Andryusha left yesterday. It rained all day. I visited the sales again and bought some furnishing material. At home I attended to business—accounts, banking matters, all the bookkeeping for my trusteeship of the children, letter-writing, etc. I didn’t touch music or my story* all day.

  There were moments today when the familiar grief welled up in my soul—it is still with me, after all these years I have still not really recovered from it.

  15th April. I did various jobs in town—took things to be mended and altered, left books to be bound, etc. This evening we had a visit from young Prince Trubetskoy, a sculptor born and educated in Italy. An extraordinary young man, exceptionally talented, but utterly primitive. He hasn’t read a thing, doesn’t even know War and Peace, hasn’t studied anywhere—he is naive, rough and totally engrossed in his art. He is coming here tomorrow to start on a sculpture of Lev Nikolaevich and will dine with us.