Tolstoy

Russian society had begun to change rapidly in the 1860s, but the patriarchal structures enshrined in law by the state remained in place. Tolstoy struck a chord with thousands of female readers suffering unhappy marriages when he wrote Anna Karenina. Even though few had the bravery of Anna Arkadyevna, they identified with her. The paradox of Tolstoy writing with such sympathy about Anna while at the same time writing a novel which clearly condemns adultery is partly explained by the fate of his sister Masha, whose unhappy experience of marriage was one of the many life stories which served as the raw material for his ‘family’ novel. It is as almost as if Masha read her brother’s mind, as in the letter she sent him in March 1876, she also spoke of the bitter life lessons she had learned, and directly identified herself with his heroine. ‘If all those Anna kareninas knew what awaited them,’ she wrote, ‘how they would run from ephemeral pleasures, which are never, and cannot be pleasures, because nothing that is unlawful can ever constitute happiness.’ This, of course, was Tolstoy’s own view.

Until the publication of Tolstoy’s correspondence with his siblings in 1990, Masha was a somewhat shadowy figure in Tolstoy’s biography,⁹⁸ but she was an important person in his life, and they remained close (his letters to her are some of the most touching he ever wrote). Masha had lived to regret her marriage to Valerian Petrovich Tolstoy and buried her sorrows in foreign travel, travelling with her children to spas where she could treat the various illnesses she believed she was suffering from. It was in Aix-les-Bains in 1861 that she met the handsome Swedish Viscount Hector Victor de kleen, with whom she spent the next two winters in Algiers. Her brothers learned they were living together when she made a trip back to Russia in the summer of 1862, just when Tolstoy was about to get married. The following autumn, fearing their censure, she wrote from Geneva to tell them she had given birth to a little girl. Both Tolstoy and his brother Sergey had fathered illegitimate children themselves, and were sympathetic. Tolstoy hastened to reassure Masha of their support, and resolved to try to help her.⁹⁹ In January 1864 he and Sergey met with Valerian Petrovich, who acknowledged his responsibility in the breakdown of the marriage and agreed to a divorce. Tolstoy obtained the necessary permission from the bishop, and then sent the documents for Masha to sign and return. She was scared to set things in motion, however, as Valerian Petrovich sent her a threatening letter, telling her a divorce would ‘harm his position and bring him a great deal of unpleasantness’. In a letter to Toinette she asked pitifully if she had the right to go through with it, even though he had made her suffer so much.¹⁰⁰

Masha was understandably hesitant about going through with divorce. It was extremely rare in Russia, and the risk of social disgrace was very real. In 1857, the year in which divorce first become possible in an English court of civil law, the sanctity of marriage as a religious institution in Russia was upheld by the publication of the third edition of the Imperial Law Code. A divorce in Russia could only be obtained through the Church, which viewed marriage as a holy sacrament which could not be dissolved,¹⁰¹ and accorded illegitimate children no legal rights. Article 103 of Chapter 1 in Volume One of the Law Code specifically forbade married couples from living apart, except in cases of exile to Siberia, while articles 106 and 108 upheld male authority within wedlock:

A husband shall love his wife as his own body and live with her in harmony; he shall respect and protect her, forgive her shortcomings, and ease her infirmities. He shall provide his wife nourishment and support to the best of his ability… A wife shall obey her husband as the head of the family, abide with him in love, respect and unlimited obedience and render him every satisfaction and affection as the mistress of the house…¹⁰²

Female subjugation was not exclusive to Russia, of course, but the state had a vested interest in supporting patriarchal structures, as it equated domestic stability with political stability. Tolstoy could have picked no better way of portraying the disintegration of late imperial Russian society than to decide to write a novel with the theme of the ‘family’.