Tolstoy

In February 1871 Sonya gave birth to their second daughter and fifth child, who was christened Maria after Tolstoy’s sister, and who, like her, immediately became known to everybody as Masha. After an extremely difficult delivery, Sonya contracted puerperal fever and nearly died, which understandably made her unwilling to endure the terror and pain of another bout of life-threatening illness. She began to think it would be best for her not to become pregnant again, but her husband had different ideas. It was not just that Tolstoy could not conceive of marriage without children – he regarded a woman’s main vocation as being to bear children, breast-feed and raise them, and was therefore horrified at the thought of his wife avoiding future pregnancies. As a matter of fact, in March 1870 he had set out his ideas on this subject in an unsent letter addressed to Nikolay Strakhov, who had immediately followed up his review of War and Peace with an article on ‘The Woman Question’ in the next issue of The Dawn. Even though he never sent this letter, it is revealing that Tolstoy felt moved to respond straight away. In fact, he had begun to draft an article on the subject himself in 1868, describing men as the ‘worker bees in the hive of human society’ and women as queens who should not be distracted from their primary role to reproduce the species.²⁴ The ‘woman question’ exercised him deeply, and would indeed lie at the very heart of Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy generally did not like to read or subscribe to newspapers or journals, but there were a few exceptions. In 1870 Theodor Ries, the German from Oldenburg who had been responsible for printing War and Peace, became founding editor of the Moskauer Deutscher Zeitung. As he started publishing a German translation of War and Peace in its inaugural issue,²⁵ only one month after producing the last volume in Russian, he sent his newspaper to Tolstoy gratis. The Parisian Revue des deux mondes was for a long time the only journal the Tolstoys actively read,²⁶ but later in the 1870s, they arranged to share the cost of several subscriptions with Sergey over in Pirogovo.²⁷ Tolstoy affected never to read reviews of his work, remembering how the critics had hounded Pushkin during his lifetime.²⁸ But the truth is, he did read them, and he took criticism very personally, invariably responding to it immediately in writing, although his hurt feelings clearly often soon subsided, as he left most of his ripostes to critics unfinished.²⁹ If he made an exception for Strakhov, it was because his review was intelligent and highly positive, and also because The Dawn was also sent to him gratis – that is how he had come to read Strakhov’s article on the topic of women’s liberation.

The ‘woman question’ was a hot topic in Russia at this time, as it was all over Europe, so much so that two Russian translations of John Stuart Mill’s seminal essay The Subjection of Women were published within months of its original publication in England in 1869, and Strakhov’s article followed a few months later, in February 1870. John Stuart Mill, famous for being the first British member of parliament to call for women’s suffrage and for his advocacy of women’s rights, had plenty of followers in Russia, but as conservatives, Strakhov and Tolstoy were not amongst them. Strakhov, a quiet, scholarly, lifelong bachelor, had celebrated War and Peace for being a family chronicle, and he argued in his article that a woman’s place was within the family. Tolstoy wholeheartedly agreed, and took issue only over Strakhov’s negative view of prostitutes, arguing that they had an important role to play in preserving the institution of the family. ‘Imagine London without its 80,000 magdalenes – what would happen to families?’ he wrote.³⁰