Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s only remaining elder brother, Sergei, was living near Yasnaya Polyana. He lacked Leo’s literary talent and spiritual curiosity, but had a similarly wild temperament. Unlike Leo, he was handsome. For nearly fifteen years he had been living openly with a Gypsy singer, Masha Shishkina, and they had several children. When Leo introduced him to the Berses, Sergei could not hide his astonishment that his brother had chosen Sonya over Tanya. He fell in love with Tanya and managed to conquer her heart, a process that was perhaps helped by her mimetic desire to join the Tolstoy family. Sergei, however, remained hesitant and torn between his new passion and his existing family. He pleaded with Tanya not to reject him, fixed deadlines for a final choice and kept postponing them, promised to visit her for a decisive rendezvous and never appeared. Driven into a state of utter despair, Tanya tried to poison herself, but fortunately changed her mind and was saved.

Sergei Tolstoy and Tatiana Bers at the time of their romance.

The catastrophe seemed to have broken these tortured relations, but in June 1865, having met Tanya in Yasnaya Polyana, Sergei once again fell under her charms and proposed, which was accepted. Marriages between in-laws were forbidden by the Orthodox Church, so the couple planned a secret wedding that could later be legalized with the help of Leo’s connections at court. These plans collapsed in less than two weeks. In spite of his proposal, Sergei was still not sure whom he should marry. He claimed that having seen Masha’s solitary prayer, he felt unable to leave his old partner, but also complained that Masha’s parents had blackmailed him by threatening to denounce his proposed marriage to Tanya as illegal. Both versions could have been true. Indignant and humiliated, Tanya released Sergei from his vows. Finally, she became repentant about the whole affair and ashamed of her role in it. More than a year after this, her health remained precarious.

Unable to return to Yasnaya Polyana, Tanya went to recover at the estate of Dmitry Dyakov, a man who had been a model of comme il faut behaviour and an object of homoerotic veneration for Tolstoy in his younger days. Dyakov also fell under the spell of Tanya’s charm. Once, in response to her desperate self-blame, he told her that, were he free, he would have immediately proposed to her. Dyakov’s wife died shortly afterwards, and he did as he had promised. Tolstoy strongly advised his sister-in-law to accept, probably hoping to keep her within his close circle of friends and relatives or in an attempt to bring actual life closer to the plot he devised, but Tanya chose Kuzminsky, who was still waiting for his chance. They married in August 1867. According to family legend, on their way to the church they encountered Sergei and Masha, also heading to their wedding.

A year earlier Tanya had sung before Fet and his wife at the Dyakovs’. Fet knew her story, knew that doctors had advised her against singing, as it was considered damaging to her lungs, and probably had in mind the suspected suicide of his own former love, Maria Lazich, also an excellent singer. Eleven years later, having again listened to Tatiana’s singing in Yasnaya Polyana, he recalled her earlier impressions in one of the most beautiful love poems in the Russian language:

You sang until the dawn, worn out to the point of tears, Now love means you, and you alone, no other love but you, And I then longed to live, my love, that all my living years, I could love you and embrace you and shed my tears for you.⁴

Tolstoy appreciated the poem, but not the feeling behind it, ‘Why does he want to embrace our Tanya, he is a married man?’ (Kuz, pp. 400–401), he asked, characteristically failing to discriminate between life and art.

Tolstoy ignored Tanya’s plea not to make her intimate life public. He needed the details he had witnessed as well as those she had confessed to him to achieve the verisimilitude he desired. He did not even bother to rename her first admirer. Tanya’s love, impatience, despair and repentance served as a model for the story of Natasha’s relations with Anatole Kuragin and Pierre’s reaction to her shame and sorrow. When, on the eve of publication in 1868, Kuzminsky found out that the illustrator had modelled the image of Natasha on his wife, he ordered his family to leave Moscow. He also wanted to sever ties with the Tolstoys, but Tanya refused, declaring that she owed ‘everything good and holy in herself to Levochka’ (Kuz, p. 444). She knew Tolstoy had created her as a person and her brilliantly written and perceptive, if not entirely reliable, memoirs show to what extent she had internalized the image of Natasha Rostova. Unfortunately the memoirs stop around the time of her marriage, though the Kuzminskys continued visiting Yasnaya Polyana for many years.