Leo Tolstoy

Traditionally the preparations for a wedding in Russian noble families would take between six and eight weeks, at the least. Tolstoy would not hear of any procrastination. For the first time in his life, he felt a strong erotic attraction to a woman of his own social standing. In his diary he recalled ‘the kiss by the piano and the appearance of Satan’ (Ds, p. 150), obviously meaning sexual arousal. Apart from that, he felt that the time to realize his family utopia had arrived. He was eager to retire to Yasnaya Polyana, enjoy marital bliss and engage in the only two activities he now found appropriate: managing the estate and writing.

His impatience notwithstanding, Tolstoy subjected Sonya’s love to two highly challenging tests. Convinced that spouses should be fully transparent to each other, he gave her his diaries to read. Sonya was shocked and dismayed by the descriptions of her fiancé’s lust and sexual exploits, and especially by the story of his infatuation with Aksinya Bazykina, with whom he had fathered a son. Then, unable to quell his ‘doubts about her love and the thought that she is deceiving herself’ (Ds, p. 150), Tolstoy breached all customs by visiting his bride on the morning of their wedding day and drove her to tears by inquiring whether she was completely certain she wanted to marry him.

The wedding took place on 23 September 1862, a week after the engagement and exactly a month after Tolstoy had, for the first time, mentioned Sonya in his diary as ‘a child’. The couple were married in the Church of the Nativity of Our Lady in the Moscow Kremlin, where Andrei Bers resided as a local doctor. The spurned Liza and the unlucky Polivanov participated in the ceremony. According to Sofia’s memoirs, the marriage was consummated in the carriage taking the newlywed couple from the church to Yasnaya Polyana. Very soon Sonya was pregnant. Their first son, Sergei, was born on 28 June 1863, followed by a daughter Tatiana in 1864, and sons Ilya and Lev in 1866 and 1869, respectively.

The Tolstoys’ honeymoon and the first years of their marriage were far from idyllic. Leo’s feelings proved to be even more fickle than Dublitsky’s opinions. During their first night at Yasnaya Polyana, he had ‘a bad dream’, which he summarized in his diary in two words: ‘Not her’ (Ds, p. 150). After a month of frenzied courtship, he suddenly started to suspect that he had married the wrong woman. The next day he recorded ‘unbelievable happiness’. A week later ‘there was a scene’ that made Tolstoy ‘sad that we behave just in the same way as other people’. He wept and told Sonya she had hurt him with regard to his feelings for her. ‘She is charming,’ he concluded in a rather unpredictable way, ‘I love her even more. But is it all genuine?’ (Ds, p. 150). Tolstoy felt there was something unnatural in their relations. In a long letter to his sister-in-law Tanya, he jokingly described a dream in which his wife had turned into a china doll (Ls, I, pp. 177–9). Was this a veiled expression of erotic dissatisfaction?

The inevitable difficulties of mutual adjustment were aggravated by jealousy. Sonya, stunned by the revelations about her husband’s past, was constantly expecting him to revert to his old ways. In one of the entries in her diary she expressed an ardent desire to murder Aksinya and to tear off her son’s head. Leo, never fully believing he deserved the love he longed for, was traumatized by every real or imaginary token of Sofia’s interest towards any young man who happened to be around. Tolstoy hardly suspected her of physical infidelity; but for him feelings mattered most and he was never completely confident about his wife’s inner world.

The diaries that both spouses kept during the early period of their marriage reflect constant clashes followed by passionate reconciliations. The intense emotional regime imposed by Tolstoy demanded that they share their diaries. Sofia and Leo felt a duty to be sincere and to confess every shade of feeling, but could not avoid anticipating each other’s reactions. Gradually the stream of entries slowed into a trickle and then nearly stopped. They were to resume fifteen years later with even greater intensity when, for Sofia, the diary became the main tool for settling scores and proving her case before her husband and posterity.