Leo Tolstoy

Such compromises were not in Tolstoy’s nature: he wrote a letter to Strakhov, fully supporting his main argument but insisting that there are no ‘sexless’ women, ‘just as there are no four-legged people’ (Ls, I, p. 227). Those not fortunate enough to have their own families could help bring up other women’s children. Tolstoy went so far as to repeat Schopenhauer’s assertion that prostitutes helping to channel away the excesses of male sexuality are more socially beneficial than the women working in offices. Probably unwilling to scandalize his correspondent, whom he had not yet met personally, Tolstoy decided against sending the letter.

For an old bachelor like Strakhov, the questions raised by Mill were an intellectual problem; for Tolstoy they were of existential importance. He had married believing that marriage could redeem sexuality. After seven years of family life, he concluded that sexuality itself undermined and corrupted marriage. In 1872, in a letter to his spinster aunt Alexandra Tolstoy, Lev compared the forthcoming wedding of his favourite niece Varvara to a ‘sacrifice, an immolation on the altar of some terrible and cynical deity’ (Ls, I, p. 241). No doubt he was thinking about the eighteen-year-old virgin ‘sacrificed’ in the carriage after his wedding. He blamed his premarital past, when he had irreversibly debauched himself and could not help debauching his wife by awakening her sexual desires. Shortly before the marriage of Tanya and Kuzminsky, Tolstoy told Sofia that he was afraid of and disliked the sensuality he noticed in the couple. Later, in a letter to Tanya, Tolstoy wrote about his joy at the news of her pregnancy and the ‘unpleasant feeling’ he had during the long interval after the previous one. A trace of male jealousy, perhaps, but no doubt Tolstoy was expressing his deeply held beliefs.

Schopenhauer taught that love was the most powerful illusion in the human heart, necessary to veil the drive to procreate: ‘Marriages from love are contracted in the interest of the species, not of individuals. It is true that persons concerned imagine they are advancing their own happiness; but their actual aim is one that is foreign to themselves, since it lies in the production of an individual.’⁹ The Tolstoys procreated successfully. To Sofia’s dismay, Leo was indifferent to babies, but started loving children when they became toddlers. Sofia was a good and caring mother but marital relations, with all the jealousy, ‘scenes’ and reconciliations, remained fragile and too dependent on the ebbs and flows of Leo’s erotic desires. Scared at first by her husband’s ardent sexuality, Sofia gradually learned to share his passion, as she confesses in her memoirs. For many years she probably remained a reasonably good bedmate for her insatiable husband. Unfortunately this did not make their life any easier.

Sofia in 1866.

In February 1871 Sofia gave birth to her fifth child, named Maria after Leo’s mother. Both her pregnancy and delivery were extremely difficult and the doctors thought that another pregnancy could be life-threatening. Tolstoy adamantly refused even to consider any contraceptive measures that were for him abomination worse than death. In Anna Karenina the final degradation of the heroine happens not when she betrays her husband, or even when she leaves him and their son for a lover, but when she reverts to contraception in order to stay sexually attractive to Vronsky. The rejection of motherhood turns Anna into a drug addict and a psychopath. In the middle of the novel she had been on the verge of dying. Retrospectively, the reader is prompted to conclude that this would have been a better outcome for Anna. Sofia went on to deliver eight more children, but three babies born after Maria died early; Tolstoy’s decision caused fissures that never healed completely.