The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

by Cathy Porter

  11th June. I had the grand piano moved into Tanya’s studio and played for three hours today and wept bitterly, overcome with a helpless desire to hear Sergei Ivanovich’s music once more. How happy those two summers* were after the death of Vanechka! To think that after such a frightful tragedy I should have been sent such a consolation! I thank the Lord for that joy.

  12th June. I was wondering today why there were no women writers, artists or composers of genius. It’s because all the passion and abilities of an energetic woman are consumed by her family, love, her husband—and especially her children. Her other abilities are not developed, they remain embryonic and atrophy. When she has finished bearing and educating her children her artistic needs awaken, but by then it’s too late, and it’s impossible to develop anything.

  Young girls often develop spiritual and artistic powers, but these powers remain isolated and cannot be carried on by subsequent generations, since girls do not create posterity. Geniuses often have older mothers, who developed their talents early in life, and Lev Nikolaevich is one of these; his mother was no longer young when she married and had him.

  14th June. I spent the day with my children. My grandson Lev was christened at 1 o’ clock. Dora was very agitated, and the Swedish grandparents were horrified by our primitive Russian christening ceremony.

  We dined very grandly in the garden, with fruit, bunches of flowers and champagne on the table, and the weather was lovely and sunny. Then everyone played tennis, including L.N. He is not flagging, and his health is completely restored, thank God. Masha and Kolya left this evening, and Ilya left with Misha, whom I was terribly sorry to part with. Yet the feeling that he isn’t mine, that loving him will bring nothing but sorrow, makes me afraid to love him, and I deliberately withdraw from him.

  18th June. Sasha’s 14th birthday. An unbearably hot day—40 degrees in the sun at 2 this afternoon. L.N. is still ill, with bad heartburn and a temperature of 38.3. This evening he improved a little and his temperature dropped to 37.5; he ate two plates of porridge and drank some coffee.

  I raced down to the Voronka with Sasha for a swim. It was a wonderful evening, and I couldn’t stop gazing at the glorious countryside, the sky and the moon.

  When I got home I found L.N. dictating a newspaper article to Tanya, which they subsequently decided not to send. Then 6 girls and boys, gymnasium pupils from Kharkov, arrived at Yasnaya with 100 rubles which they wanted to give to the needy peasants. L.N. sent them to the priest, who is the guardian of this area, and the man told them which peasants were the poorest. The girls and boys then went to Yasenki to buy flour to give to the poor peasants. But the sergeant and the district police officer appeared and strictly forbade the Yasenki merchant to supply flour to the peasants in exchange for the credit notes we had given them. It’s outrageous! Let no one in Russia give alms to the poor—the police won’t allow it! Tanya and I were deeply distressed, and would willingly have gone straight to the Tsar or his mother and warned them against the anger that may arise in the people.

  20th June. Lev Nikolaevich is still ill. He has only a slight fever, 37.8, but is burning hot and still very thin and weak. His stomach aches only when he moves or puts pressure on it. Last night I massaged it for a long time with camphor oil, then we applied spirit of camphor compresses and I gave him some bismuth with soda and morphine. He ate a plate of porridge today, some rice gruel made with half almond milk and half ordinary milk (without telling him), and Doctor Westerlund finally, after three days, managed to persuade him to eat an egg.

  The district police officer was here enquiring about the Kharkov schoolgirls and boys who came here wanting to help the peasants and work with them. They have all disappeared without trace, but two more little girls, one of whom was only 13 years old, arrived here today with the same purpose. They have all been banished from the district, and I gave the officer a piece of my mind for forbidding the merchant at to sell them flour. The priest had ordered that it should be given to the poorest inhabitants of our area, and it is already paid for.

  I read four pages of proofs. My eyes are growing weaker.

  21st June. What with all these illnesses and anxieties I have made a terrible mess of Volume 15 of the 9th expensive edition; I am very worried about it and cannot think how to extricate myself. I forgot that what stands as the appendix to Volume 13 wasn’t included in the expensive edition, and I went straight into Volume 14 without including it. Now I shall have to add it at the end, regardless of chronological sequence. I have too much to hold in my head. It’s all right so long as everything else is going well. But “even the old woman has a blunder up her sleeve”, as the saying goes, and I really have blundered this time. And it’s all because of Lev Nikolaevich being ill, and having to travel all over the place to nurse him.

  There’s an eclipse of the moon, which I can see through the window…It’s already moving away…

  22nd June. Peasant women have been at the porch all day begging for flour, money, a bit of bread to eat, a little tea, medicine, and so on. I try patiently to give them what they want, but I’m exhausted. It’s impossible to help them. I spent the whole day running up and down the stairs, looking after Lev Nikolaevich and attending to business, and by this evening I was half dead. As I massaged L.N.’s stomach I was dreaming of the sea and rocks and mountains of Norway, where we have been invited to stay with the Westerlunds, who are leaving tomorrow.

  26th June. I spent an extremely difficult afternoon yesterday. Our young neighbour Bibikov has appropriated the land we bought from his father, and we now have to defend ourselves, and the court case has started. Yesterday they had to collect all the local witnesses, but the only witnesses called were from the village of Telyatinki, which belongs to Bibikov. It was quite obvious that the witnesses, the judge and the land-surveyor had all been bribed and feasted by Bibikov yesterday, and the whole case was conducted in the most corrupt fashion. At first I was distressed, then utterly bewildered: the judge, the questioning, the oath—it was all chicanery, from beginning to end.

  I stayed out of curiosity though, sitting until late that night in the village elder’s cottage. Everyone, judge and peasants, seemed to grow rather confused and subdued towards the end of the twelve peasants’ interrogation: we were obviously in the right.*

  Afterwards I wrote a petition to the Tula court asking them to set boundaries to the estate, otherwise the peasants will simply appropriate more and more of our land each year.

  The night is still, and the moon is shining through the open window. I love being alone at night with my thoughts, in spiritual communication with my loved ones who are absent or dead.

  27th June. This thundery atmosphere is insufferable; we are quite debilitated by the heat and electricity in the air. L.N. has a stomach ache again. My God! Help me not to grumble, and to bear my responsibilities to the end with patience and dignity.

  I gave him a bath today, ran it myself and tested the water with the thermometer. I then laid tea in the drawing room and he brightened up. I very much wanted to visit Seryozha tomorrow for his birthday, but couldn’t bring myself to leave my husband. I tried to take my grandson’s photograph, but he fell asleep, and then the thunderstorm made it impossible. I practised my Bach Inventions, but only managed to play for an hour. Sick peasant women, work, business. I wrote a letter to some peasant at L.N.’s request.

  Westerlund said I spoilt my husband terribly. I was astounded today by something L.N. wrote in his notebook concerning women: “If a woman is not a Christian she is an animal.”* That means that throughout my life I have sacrificed all my personal life to him and suppressed my own desires—even a visit to my son, today—and all my husband can see is animal behaviour.

  The real animals are those men who through their own egotism consume the lives of their wives, children, friends—everyone who crosses their path.

  28th June. Misha has returned from the Caucasus in ecstasy over his trip, the magnificent scenery, the friendliness of the people and
all the parties they organized for him and Andryusha. He arrived with my brother Sasha, looking manlier and uglier than ever.

  L.N. is looking very pinched, thin and subdued.

  He regarded Doctor Westerlund as a bourgeois, dull-witted German peasant, whose medical thinking was 30 years behind the times. He didn’t see the doctor’s goodness, his self-sacrificing life in the service of humanity, his eagerness to help every peasant woman and anyone he met, his concern for his wife and daughter, his unselfishness…

  1st July. Annenkova came today and we went to Ovsyannikovo. We called first on Maria Schmidt. She has a large portrait of Lev Nikolaevich over her bed. She has a fanatical faith in his ideas and is in love with him as only a woman can be, and this gives her the strength to endure her austere, hard-working life. Without that she would have died long ago, so weak is her organism. I love her ardent nature.

  6th July. Rain, cold; Tanya is in bed with a stomach ache. I strolled round the garden and picked a lovely bunch of flowers for her. I played the piano for about two and a half hours, but badly. I corrected proofs all day. I have a lot of running about to do and a mass of petty, boring matters: sending documents to the council, paying the servants’ wages, buying mushrooms and raspberries, tending the sick, giving food to the beggars, ordering dinner and supper, keeping Dora and my grandson company, giving the servant girls their work for the day. I should do some copying for Lev Nikolaevich, but there’s a pile of proofs to do first. And I have to look after Tanya, who stubbornly refuses to take any medicine.

  12th July. I left the house to make some visits, and called first on my daughter Masha. It pierced my heart to see her, so bent, weak and nervous, tearful and thin as a skeleton. It is such an impoverished life, and the food there is disgusting.

  16th July, Kiev. A warm welcome from my sister Tanya and her family, the Kuzminskys. They have a pretty, well-appointed little dacha, her sweet boys were there, and Sasha the cordial host, and my beloved, my dear, sweet beloved sister. The sight of little Mitechka tore at my heart: he was the same age as Vanechka, his first friend, his first childhood comrade. And Mitya is already a big boy of ten—and Vanechka is gone!

  I went for a walk in the Kitaev forest, through ancient pines and old oaks, past hills and monasteries…Sasha, Vera, Mitya and little Volodka came too. We went swimming in the pool of a monastery, drank tea and rambled in the hills. It’s so pleasant being a guest, everything is new, there’s nothing to worry about.

  17th, 18th, 19th, 20th July. I have spent the past four days with the Kuzminskys. We had a picnic with some other dacha folk on an island in the river Dnieper, went to the peasant theatre in Kitaev and swam in the Dnieper. On the 20th I went to Kiev with Tanya and we visited the cathedral. The best painting there was The Raising of Lazarus, by Svedomsky. Vasnetsov’s paintings—especially the Baptism of Vladimir and the People—were beneath criticism: one was amazed by the complete lack of formal elegance. Eve’s legs, for instance, when she is being tempted by the serpent in Paradise, are frightful.

  The monument to Vladimir stands in a charming place, with a lovely view over the Dnieper below. Ancient monuments are generally so much better than the modern ones, like that hideous statue of Pirogov in Deviche Pole in Moscow.

  We also visited the caves in Kiev. I forced myself to go this time, but felt nervous as soon as we had walked a little way down that airless underground passage, illuminated only by the candles we held in our hands. It was impossible to turn back, and it suddenly came into my mind that the devil was obstructing my path. And just then the monk who was leading us said to me: “No need to be afraid, Mother! Why, people used to live here, and you’re afraid to walk through. This is a church, so pray!” I mechanically crossed myself and repeated the words of a prayer, and my fear vanished and I walked on fascinated. It was extraordinary to see those little round windows in the walled-up cave rooms where the holy men used to immure themselves. People would hand them food through the windows once a day, and there they would die, in these cells, these living coffins.

  My sister’s family made a good impression on me; I envied the fact that Sasha was so concerned about his sons and was on such good terms with them. Tanya’s and her husband’s concern for each other was also very touching.

  I persuaded her to accompany me back to Yasnaya, to my great joy.

  22nd, 23rd, 24th, 25th July. Early in the morning of the 22nd my sister Tanya and I arrived in Tula. It was cold and wet and they hadn’t sent horses for us, so we hired a cab and drove back. Then the trouble started—a whole series of unpleasant remarks from L.N. about my meeting with Sergei Ivanovich in Moscow on the way to Kiev. Yet I had asked him before I left whether he would mind, and said I wouldn’t go if he did. I had leant over him to say goodbye, kissed him while he was still half-asleep, and put it to him quite candidly. And he snapped back ironically: “Why should I mind? By all means go,” adding: “It’s your business anyway.”

  There is a huge wall painting at the threshold to the cave in Kiev, depicting the ordeals to which St Theodora is subjected. The pictures alternate: two angels, with the soul of Theodora as a young girl dressed in a white robe, followed by a group of devils in inconceivably hideous poses. And these devils, forty groups of them, portray the forty sins, which are inscribed in Old Church Slavonic beneath. I suppose L.N. is cursing me for committing all the forty sins in those three or four days.

  28th July. I took Tanya to Yasenki and she left for Kiev, apparently happy with her stay in Yasnaya. We have grown even closer, if that’s possible. I feel bereft—I have no one to cling to now.

  I walked through the forest alone, swam and wept. Late that night we resumed our discussion about jealousy, with yet more shouting, cursing and recriminations. Suddenly my nerves snapped. Some valve maintaining the equilibrium in my brain flew open. I lost all self-control and had the most terrible nervous attack. I was terrified, shaking, sobbing and raving. I don’t remember what happened to me, only that I ended up stiff with cold.

  29th, 30th July. I have been lying in bed in a darkened room for the past day and a half, without food or light, without love, hate or emotions, just the deathly gloom of the grave. They all came in to see me but I didn’t care about any of them. I just wanted to die.

  I pushed the table a moment ago and Lev Nikolaevich’s portrait fell on the floor, just as this diary of mine has pushed him off the pedestal he has spent his entire life erecting for himself.

  3rd August. I spent yesterday and the day before industriously copying L.N.’s story Father Sergei, an artistic work written in a lofty style, excellently conceived although still unfinished.* It takes from the Lives of the Saints the story of the saint who sought God and found Him in the most ordinary, lowly woman, who had sacrificed herself entirely to work and toil. In this story Father Sergei, a proud monk who has experienced all life’s vicissitudes, finds God in Pashenka, a woman no longer young, whom he has known since childhood, who leads an industrious life in her old age and lives for her family.

  There is some hypocrisy in the story though—the ending in Siberia. I hope it won’t be left like that, for it really is very well devised and constructed.

  I copied it from 1.30 to 5 a.m., by which time it was growing light and my head was spinning. But I finished the whole thing, so L.N. can start working on it the moment he gets up.

  He wants to finish Hadji Murat, Resurrection and Father Sergei together, publish the 3 stories simultaneously and sell them for as much as possible in Russia and abroad, so he can use the profits to finance the Dukhobors’ emigration scheme.*

  This is an insult to us, his family: he would do better to help Ilyusha and Masha, who are both extremely poor. And two Dukhobors came here whom I had to hide in the pavilion, which was most unpleasant.*

  Windy, dry, fine and beautiful.

  I have been keeping Dora company and getting to know my little grandson Lev. I have lost that direct, almost animal passion for small children, and in my grandchildren I love only my
dreams for the future and for the continuation of our life.

  5th August. I copied L.N.’s essay on art yesterday: the same rejection of absolutely everything, all under the pretext of Christianity—it’s pure socialism.

  This morning I went to Tula, where I had a lot of business to attend to at the bank and the council, visiting the notary, looking for a teacher for Misha and going to the shops. I was so exhausted my legs were shaking. I was longing for a rest when I got home, but a huge crowd of guests unexpectedly arrived—Sergeenko, the two Dieterichs girls, my sister Liza with her daughter and governess, Zvegintseva with her daughter, Volkhonsky, Prince Cherkassky and his boys—and they all stayed to supper. My heart sank. Goldenweiser came for the evening too and played some Chopin. The music awakened that wonderful mood of elation which I have lived for these past two years.

  A lot of noise and shouting and mindless youthful merriment. I am very tired. L.N. on the other hand is cheerful and excited; he enjoys guests and Misha Kuzminsky’s balalaika and Princess Volkhonsky’s chatter, and any sort of entertainment and diversion.

  11th August. Bad news from the censors, who have seized the last volume of the expensive edition I have just had printed. It won’t be passed unless I make a fuss. I have written to Solovyov, the chief censor, in St Petersburg.

  19th August. I have been ill with a high fever and stomach pains. I stayed in bed until yesterday, and barely managed to get up even then. The time flashed past so quickly—I have only a dim memory of it. Everyone was very kind to me, looked after me, stayed with me constantly, anticipated all my needs and comforted me. There was one day when I thought I was dying but was quite happy about it. Now I am up again, back in life’s whirlpool, with all its demands, griefs, worries and irresolvable questions that have to be resolved.