The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (11 page)

At the start of the Civil War and Allied intervention in 1918, Anna was trapped in the Crimea without resources. At seventy-one, she lived through the nightmare Dostoevsky had envisioned, when a single human life did not matter. After the Revolution, her pension was stopped; she wrote her son that she heard a rumor that all pensions would be abolished. “I have no money at all,” she told Fedya on January 8. “I have to pay a doctor, for my hotel, and for expensive medicine.”
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There were food shortages, and bread was rationed. As during the first year with Dostoevsky, Anna worried
about her hotel bill. She wrote Fedya that a woman librarian had lent her some money to pay it; there was even credit extended for several weeks. Anna also worried about Lyuba, who had lived abroad since 1913 but now was left without interest from the family bank account; she knew nothing about her daughter because correspondence had been severed in mid-October 1917.

On January 21, she wrote to her son about a recent battle in Yalta: revolutionary sailors fired a bomb at the city from a torpedo-boat. It exploded near her hotel, breaking neighbors’ windows. When the Bolsheviks entered the city, they held a solemn funeral in the City Gardens, burying their dead in a shallow common grave, so there was fear of disease spreading in summer. “But summer is far away. Perhaps, we will be all slaughtered by then. I am so used to the thought of dying suddenly that I fear nothing. If I should die remember me well. I always loved you both and … I love you now.”

In February, there was a week of bombardment followed by several weeks of anarchy. Anna wrote that the Yalta Revolutionary Committee demanded 20 million rubles from the city; when it failed to collect the sum, the committee forced the banks to release deposits from their current accounts. Anna did not receive the money Fedya had managed to send her: the check was held by the post office to be deposited to a bank from where, she assumed, the Bolsheviks would access it. There was a rumor that the entire bourgeoisie would be annihilated as early as mid-March, that a revolutionary committee would run her hotel; meanwhile, proletarian women wore ominous crests on their sleeves, which read: “The bourgeoisie will be ground down.” But, as Anna wrote, “I’m already prepared for death and I’m calm.”
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Her final letter was on March 29: she needed 200–300 rubles to pay for her hotel and worried that she could be evicted. She shared the terrible news that their dacha by the Black Sea had been burned down and the two old women who lived there as guards had perished; “I would meet the same fate if I would move back, as I wanted.…” Anna died on June 9, at the height of Civil War, during starvation and epidemics, and was buried in Yalta, inside
Aleutsky Church. Fedya outlived her by only three years: he died in 1921 in Moscow, from typhus. Lyuba, who became a writer and penned reminiscences about her father, died in Italy in 1926 from leukemia.

While Dostoevskys’ grave was a place of pilgrimage, Anna’s was only saved from oblivion by a handful of volunteers. Anton Chekhov’s sister Maria, a director of his museum in Yalta, looked after it in the early 1930s. Andrei Dostoevsky, Anna’s grandson, who was devoted to her memory, visited her grave. In 1932, when Aleutsky Church was demolished, along with numerous others, under Stalin, the family excavated the ruins and moved Anna’s grave. Soon after, it was damaged by robbers looking for gold. During World War II, an antiaircraft battery was stationed at the cemetery and Anna’s grave was lost, but in 1960 a local researcher detected the site.

Anna had asked to be buried next to her husband at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, without a separate monument. It took many years for Andrei Dostoevsky to persuade the bureaucracy to fulfill her wish. On the fiftieth anniversary of Anna’s death, her remains were reburied in Alexander Nevsky Monastery near the place where her life had begun.

People who met Anna during her final years remember her as a woman of great faith who felt she had realized her dreams. As she told Grossman in 1916, fate gave her, “an ordinary woman,” the infinite happiness of being married to a great writer. “But sometimes I redeemed my happiness with great suffering.”

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Sophia Tolstoy: Nursemaid of Talent

I
n 1863, the year Tolstoy began
War and Peace
and the couple’s first child was born, nineteen-year-old Sophia wrote in her diary: “My life is so mundane, and my death. But he has such a rich internal life, talent and immortality.”
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Critics would compare Tolstoy to Homer, the creator of the
Iliad
, and even to God Almighty who created the universe. Tolstoy produced a universe of his own: there are 559 characters in
War and Peace
alone. His novels, non-fiction, letters, and diaries add up to ninety volumes, an astounding amount of writing to produce in a lifetime.

Few realized what an extraordinary burden Sophia had to carry: for almost fifty years she was married to one of the most complex artists of the nineteenth century, whose name became as familiar to the world as Shakespeare’s. Over the decades, she remained the only woman in Tolstoy’s life and also the one on whom he relied for his inspiration and in all his practical affairs.

Sophia was eighteen when she married Tolstoy, who at thirty-four was already celebrated for the novels
Childhood
and
Boyhood
and for
Sebastopol Stories
, his realistic accounts from the battlefield of the Crimean War. When, in winter 1854, the twenty-six-year-old Tolstoy was leaving for the war, Sophia was ten. Struck by the news of his departure (Tolstoy was a frequent guest in her parents’ house), she had a cry and decided that she would become a nurse and join him at the front to care for him. In a sense, her juvenile fantasy came true: she was destined to take care of Tolstoy as long as he lived.

In the year Tolstoy left for the war, Sophia read his novel
Childhood
and memorized her favorite passages about the boundless need for love and the power of faith. She said that only Dickens’s
David Copperfield
had produced such a powerful impression on her. Coincidentally, this was also Tolstoy’s favorite book: “If you were to put the whole of world literature through a sieve and keep only the very best, you would be left with Dickens. If you had to do the same with Dickens, you would be left with
David Copperfield
.”
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Sophia did not remember when Tolstoy entered her life: he was a friend of her mother, Lyubov Alexandrovna Islavin. Their two families were close for generations: Sophia’s maternal grandfather, Alexander Islenev
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, was a neighbor and hunting companion of Tolstoy’s father Nicholas. Sophia’s mother danced with Tolstoy on his birthdays, and he had experienced even something of a first love toward her. At sixteen, she had married a physician, Andrei Behrs, twenty years her senior.

Sophia’s ancestors on her father’s side were German Lutherans. Her great-grandfather Ivan Behrs (Johann Bärs) was invited to Russia from Austria as a military instructor by Empress Elizabeth I. Sophia’s father and her uncle, Alexander Behrs, became medical doctors and made their careers with the government. (At the time, most prominent doctors in Moscow and Petersburg were German.) Both were music connoisseurs: Sophia’s uncle played clarinet and gave concerts in Petersburg to full houses.
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Among Uncle Alexander’s admirers was novelist Ivan Turgenev, with whom the
family had close ties. Sophia’s father had had an affair with the novelist’s mother in his youth and sired a daughter by her. Thus, Sophia’s family knew the two foremost Russian novelists, Tolstoy and Turgenev, and both writers visited her parents’ home when she was growing up.

Born on August 22, 1844, Sophia was the second of thirteen children, five of whom died in infancy. Behrs was a court physician, and the family lived in a Kremlin apartment near the entrance to Red Square. As children of a court official, they did gymnastics in the Great Kremlin Palace and worshiped at the Church of the Virgin Birth, the chapel for the Grand Dukes and Tsaritzas, and the one where Sophia would marry Tolstoy.

Though Sophia and her two sisters received a typical genteel education at home, with marriage being their goal, their Lutheran background made them feel different. The Behrs children were told they would have to earn their own living and, unlike in noble families, were assigned chores. Sophia, the middle sister, tutored her younger brothers and took turns with Liza, the eldest sister, in the kitchen. They knew how to fix simple meals and had to make coffee for their father in the mornings, tasks that in noble families were performed by servants. Liza, serious and unsociable, was a diligent student, nicknamed “professor” in the family, while Sophia, a spirited girl, did not care much for learning and was her mother’s right hand. Tanya, the youngest sister and the family’s favorite, was Sophia’s confidante and would remain her lifetime friend.

Since childhood, Sophia had been interested in art, later believing it was her Uncle Konstantin Islavin, a talented pianist and a friend of both Tolstoy and Nikolai Rubinstein
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, who influenced her most. In childhood, his stays were a delight for Sophia and her siblings: “He introduced us to all the arts and for the rest of my life I maintained … a strong desire for learning, eager to understand every type of creativity.”
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The musical evenings in their house when her uncle played Chopin and her mother sang in her high soprano were etched in Sophia’s memory.

Turgenev visited her parents whenever in Russia and would amuse them with his hunting tales at dinner, describing masterfully “the beautiful scenery, the setting of the sun, or a wise hunting dog.”
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He was very tall and Sophia, shortsighted, could only see his face when he bent over to pick her up. “He would lift us into the air with his large hands, give us a kiss, and always tell something interesting.”
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When Sophia was seven, Behrs took her and Liza to meet Turgenev’s great love, the celebrated mezzo-soprano Mme. Viardot.

Tolstoy treated the Behrs children equally and occasionally participated in their Christmas games. Once, he composed a mini-opera, in which Sophia sang along with her siblings. In summer, when the family retreated to their dacha near Moscow, Tolstoy would call in and here, Sophia tells, something of an early romance began between them:

I remember we were once feeling very happy and playful, and I kept repeating the same foolish sentence: “When I am Tsarina I’ll do such and such,” or “When I am Tsarina I’ll order such and such.” Just beneath the balcony stood my father’s cabriolet, from which the horse had been unhitched. I hopped inside and shouted, “When I am Tsarina I’ll drive around in a cabriolet like this!” Lev Nikolaevich immediately stepped into the horse’s place, seized the shafts and pulled me along at a brisk trot. “And I’m going to take my Tsarina for a drive!” he said.… “Do stop, please! It’s much too heavy for you!” I cried, but I was loving it, and was delighted to see how strong Lev Nikolaevich was, and to have him pull me around.
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She was in her teens when her family staged amateur performances and vaudevilles, which Tolstoy also came to watch. Sophia was a natural actress and, “being the most rambunctious” among her siblings, was even given masculine roles. She easily adjusted to different characters and situations, an ability that earned her
a nickname, “weathercock,” which would serve her well later on. Their family frequented the Bolshoi Theater, where Behrs (he was also a supernumerary doctor of Moscow theaters) had seats in the director’s box. Tolstoy once joined them at the Bolshoi for his favorite Mozart opera,
Don Giovanni
. During an intermission, he spoke with Sophia and Liza about his favorite themes in the opera and “we had interesting and fun time with him.”
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At sixteen, Sophia passed her external examinations at Moscow University, receiving a diploma as a home teacher. She had a flair for literature: her essay on music was judged as the best among the girls’ compositions that year. Later, when she was already married, her professor recalled her essay and on occasion told Tolstoy he was fortunate to have a wife who possessed literary sensitivity. The exams marked the end of her childhood: she was given a watch, allowed to plan her leisure, tailor a long dress, and put up her braids. During the brief interlude between her childhood and marriage, she read a great deal and tried herself at painting, music, writing, and photography, forms of creativity that fascinated her for the rest of her life.

Around this time, she had written a novella, called
Natasha
, describing her family and her sisters’ first loves. Tolstoy read it shortly before their marriage, remarking in his diary, “What force of truth and simplicity!”
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Sophia burned her novella on the eve of their wedding, later to regret it because Tolstoy was recognizable in it and because he later used the germ of her story in
War and Peace
to depict the Rostov sisters: “When Lev Nikolaevich depicted [Natasha Rostova] in
War and Peace
he drew on my novella and borrowed the name for his heroine.…”
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Watching the three Behrs sisters grow up, Tolstoy once remarked that if he were to get married, he would only marry into this family. He was orphaned early and Sophia’s family had replaced his own, as he would explain in
Anna Karenina
when depicting himself in Levin:

Strange as it may seem, Konstantin Levin was in love precisely with the house, the family, especially the female side
of it. He did not remember his own mother, and his only sister was older than he, so that in the Shcherbatsky’s house he saw for the fist time the milieu of an old, noble, educated and honorable family, of which he had been deprived by the death of his father and mother.
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In summer 1862, when Tolstoy started visiting the Behrs frequently, the parents expected him to propose to their eldest daughter Liza, as custom required. At nineteen, Liza contributed stories to Tolstoy’s educational magazine
Yasnaya Polyana
and led literary discussions with him. Tolstoy’s situation in the Behrs’ household was becoming entangled, because his real choice was Sophia: he admitted in his diary that she drew him irresistibly.
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