Leo Tolstoy

On 26 September 1910, after a furious quarrel with her mother, Alexandra left and went to stay with Chertkov, swearing never to return home. A week later, on 3 October, Tolstoy suddenly fainted and experienced a total loss of memory when he came round. When he had partially recovered, Sofia asked Alexandra to forgive her and released her husband from his vow not to see Chertkov. Alexandra relented but told her mother that, had Tolstoy died from this fit, all the world would have blamed her for it. Clearly this was the only kind of argument capable of carrying any weight with Sofia.

Some members of the family, including Tolstoy himself, believed Sofia was insane. In July 1910 the leading Russian psychiatrist Grigory Rossolimo concluded that she was showing symptoms of hysteria and paranoia, and predicted that the couple would not be able to go on living together. Others suspected her of feigning madness in order to manipulate her husband and pointed to her full recovery after Leo’s death. This interpretation seems unlikely even if there was method in her madness.

In one of her diary entries, Sofia recorded that she had inadvertently knocked Leo’s portrait off her table with her notebook, adding, ‘In the same way I am throwing him from his pedestal with this diary’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 400). This task was beyond her power and, in reality, she never tried to accomplish it. She needed her own place on the pedestal, and was ready to fight for it with all the means at her disposal. Tolstoy wrote on 15 September 1910, ‘Not to mention her love for me, of which not a trace remains, she does not need my love for her either, she only needs one thing: for people to think that I love her. And it’s this that is so dreadful’ (Ds, p. 464). His worldview did not allow him to see that Sofia’s aspiration to preserve for posterity her role as the wife of a genius was the only thing that made her life meaningful to her after her children had grown up. Leo had stopped loving her ‘exclusively’ and her ideal love for Taneyev had evaporated.

By now Sofia’s main and possibly only preoccupation was to archive her own version of her life story. A particular bone of contention was photographs. On 21 October 1910, after looking at a newspaper photograph of herself and Leo, she wrote: ‘Let more than a hundred thousand people see us together holding each other’s hand as we have lived all our lives’ (SAT-Ds, II, p. 222). After threatening suicide, running away from home, scandals and quarrels, she wanted others to believe in her happy family life. These stage-managed displays of family harmony were especially painful for Leo, who wrote with disgust about Sofia’s desire to be photographed as a happy couple. She objected to his photographs with Tolstoyans and made him take Chertkov’s photograph off the wall. When Leo was reproached for doing this by Alexandra and put the photograph back, Sofia tore it down again and burned it.

Last photo of Lev and Sofia as a happy couple, on the 48th anniversary of their wedding.

Sofia’s identity was restored after Tolstoy’s death. Now no one could challenge her status as a widow. She even finally accepted de facto the distribution of roles established in Tolstoy’s will. While Chertkov assumed responsibility for publishing, she took upon herself the position of guardian angel of the Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow houses. She managed to preserve both from the horrors of revolution and civil war.

It is no wonder, therefore, that Sofia was so preoccupied with Leo’s diaries and that she was especially sensitive to the way in which these represented his love for her. She once read an entry in which Lev expressed his retrospective inability to understand his own reasons for marrying: ‘I was never even in love, but I could not help getting married’ (Ds, p. 476). In reply she pointed out extracts from his earlier diaries in which, in his own words, he spoke of his passionate love. He had nothing to say. He just could not remember his feelings, as Pierre Bezukhov was unable to imagine himself being made happy by the death of his wife when talking with Natasha. Like Pierre, Tolstoy had changed beyond self-recognition.

After a sudden loss of consciousness in 1908, Tolstoy’s memory, which used to be impeccable, began to fail him. Of the things that happened to him during the last years of his life, few gave him such unmitigated pleasure: finally his mind was freeing him from its enslavement to his past. Tolstoy believed that history was retained in the present and thus could be understood and reconstructed by retrospective analysis. Documents were either redundant or, at best, could only play an auxiliary role in this process. Likewise, an individual, at any given moment of his life, was just an embodiment of his experience in its entirety. There was no need to remember specific episodes: