Leo Tolstoy

Tanya (Tatiana) Bers was not beautiful, as her portraits testify. According to Ilya Tolstoy, Lev’s second son, ‘her mouth was too large, she had a slightly receding chin, and she was just the least bit squint-eyed, but all this only accentuated her extraordinary femininity and allure.’³ All Tolstoy’s children, who remembered her as a middle-aged married woman marked by deep personal drama and loss, spoke about the fire burning in her and the joy of life that captivated and infected those around her with a sense of happiness. When Tolstoy and Sofia married, Tanya was sixteen. She quickly established a personal bond with her future brother-in-law. She was on first-name terms with him before her elder sisters and then began to call him by the even more familiar diminutive Levochka.

Like many people endowed with a choleric temperament, Tolstoy was prone to wild hilarity. His youngest daughter, Alexandra, born when he was 56, remembered him laughing ‘unrestrainedly like a very young creature, interrupting his laughter with groans of exhaustion, swinging his body, blowing his nose and wiping away his tears’ (AT, I, p. 238). His laughter was also highly infectious. Tanya Bers, brimming with vitality, became for him a companion of choice. She was a frequent guest at Yasnaya Polyana and spent hours with him at his hives and on fishing and hunting trips. Shortly after the marriage, Sofia recorded in the diary ‘unpleasant feelings towards Tanya’, who she believed was ‘pushing herself too close in Levochka’s life’ (SAT-Ds, p. 73). The young countess was unconsciously replicating the reaction of her elder sister to her own romance with Tolstoy several months earlier.

Tatiana Bers in 1862.

Tanya was an accomplished singer and Lev enjoyed accompanying her on the piano. As Alexandra writes, her ‘singing and voice had the same elusive charm, harmony and contained passion as all her character’ (AT, I, p. 269). Tolstoy was receptive to this ‘contained passion’. ‘Tanya – sensuality’, he remarked in his diary three months after his marriage. Two weeks later he added: ‘Tanya – the charm of naiveté; egoism and intuition’ (Ds, pp. 151, 157). His letters to her are full of funny nonsense worthy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and of paternal advice ‘to guard her heart’ as ‘the mark on the tormented heart remains forever’:

Remember Katerina Yegorovna’s words: never add sour cream to a fancy pastry. I know that the artistic demands of your rich nature are not the same as the demands of ordinary girls of your age; but Tanya, as an experienced man, who loves you not just because we are relations, I am telling you the whole truth. Tanya, remember Mme Laborde; her legs are too fat for her body – a fact which you can easily observe with a little care when she comes on to the stage in pantaloons. (Ls, I, pp. 113–14)

‘I took Tanya, added Sonya, stirred it up and got Natasha’ (AT, I, p. 270), once said Tolstoy listing the ingredients of his most charming female character, who infuses War and Peace with an atmosphere of love and fullness of being. Sofia’s presence is evident only in the epilogue, when Natasha unexpectedly turns into a devoted, commanding, jealous wife and caring mother. In the body of the novel Tanya seems to have been the author’s only source of inspiration. However, the transformation Tolstoy imagined for Natasha never occurred to her main prototype in real life. Long after her marriage Tanya Bers retained her irrepressible, exuberant femininity.

At the time of Tolstoy’s short but passionate courtship of her elder sister, Tanya was enjoying a teenage romance with her cousin Alexander Kuzminsky. The description of Natasha’s first kiss with Boris Drubetskoy at the beginning of the novel was based on a confession made by Tanya to Tolstoy. Tanya’s subsequent amorous adventures gave Tolstoy new material for the development of his plot as he was writing. In St Petersburg in 1863 she had a brief but intense infatuation with Anatole Shostak, who had a reputation as a notorious seducer. Anatole followed Tanya to Yasnaya Polyana, where they had a scandalous rendezvous in the forest, after which Sofia and Leo drove him out of the house. In her memoirs Tanya wrote that the next time she saw Anatole was twenty years later. Yet Sofia’s letters to Leo reveal that Anatole returned to the estate when Tolstoy was absent and that his flirtation with Tanya continued even during the early stages of her next romance, one that was to have far more dramatic consequences.