The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (16 page)

In the summer of 1886, while carting hay for a peasant widow, Tolstoy had injured his leg and developed an infection. Because he
refused medical help, Sophia nursed him in Yasnaya with home remedies. When his temperature rose to 40° C, she took the night train to Moscow, returning the following day with a medical celebrity. The doctor told her that had she not acted quickly, Tolstoy would most certainly have died of blood poisoning. For two months, putting aside her other duties, Sophia nursed Tolstoy back to health.

At this time, Tolstoy resumed his creative work, writing a play,
The Realm of Darkness
, a psychological drama from peasant life. Sophia, taking his dictation and copying the play, was moved by its artistic power and humbled by Tolstoy’s talent: “I must be careful and considerate with him, and save him for his work, which is so dear to my heart.”
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The couple enjoyed “a peaceful and happy winter” in Yasnaya, united by their collaboration.
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On her trips to Moscow, Sophia gave readings, inviting acquaintances, and reporting to Tolstoy that the play was making a “powerful impression.” Alexander III liked
The Realm of Darkness
and allowed the Imperial theaters to produce it. Rehearsals had just begun when, on instructions from the Holy Synod, the play was banned. (The premiere took place only in 1895 at Petersburg’s Alexandrinsky Theater.)

On March 31, 1888, the couple’s thirteenth child and their last, Vanechka, was born. A fortnight after, leaving Sophia to care for their sickly and delicate boy, Tolstoy headed for Yasnaya on foot, accompanied with his young follower, Nikolai Gay Jr. At Yasnaya Tolstoy and Gay plowed the land for a peasant widow, pursuing an activity that corresponded with their convictions. Sophia, in Moscow, juggled her responsibilities as a new mother and publisher: “Vanechka’s birth and nursing was the last drop which filled the vessel of my life to the brim.… Now it’s time to publish the edition, and so I move from one task to another, like a machine.…”
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That same year, Tolstoy wrote
The Kreutzer Sonata
, his most controversial work, in which, much to his readers’ surprise, he repudiated sexual love, proclaiming absolute chastity his ideal. Sophia felt that Tolstoy’s abstract idea of spiritual love was destroying their
genuine bond. It was better, she told him, not to have high moral principles, but to have a sense of right and wrong. Tolstoy argued it was important to strive for an ideal.
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Tolstoy now viewed her as a source of temptation and, when he succumbed, hated her for the passion she inspired. After insisting they should have sex, he would denounce it in his diary: “It was so disgusting, I felt I’d committed a crime.”
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Sophia found herself trapped by his contradictions, unable to absorb his absurd rules: “He wrote
The Kreutzer Sonata
, rejected sexual love, while in his diary in August 1889, noted: ‘Thought: what if there should be another child? How ashamed I should be, especially before the children. They will reckon up when it was, and will read what I’m writing.’”
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Readers were struck by Tolstoy’s message, finding it unfathomable that “a man who had fathered thirteen children could rise up against conjugal love and even against the continuation of the human race itself.” The only explanation they could find was that Tolstoy was old and hated his wife.
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The banned novella circulated in numerous illegal copies, read widely by educated Russians. Strakhov wrote Tolstoy that instead of saying, “How are you?” people would ask, “Have you read
The Kreutzer Sonata
?”
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The public interpreted it as a story of Tolstoy’s marriage. Once again, he used the material of his betrothal with Sophia, but unlike in
Anna Karenina
, maintained that happy marriages did not exist. Sophia commented in her diary that the story humiliated her in the eyes of the world. Told that Alexander III remarked he was sorry for Tolstoy’s poor wife, she decided to prove that she was not a victim at all. In 1890, she included the novella in the final volume of the collected works, becoming determined to achieve its publication.

Arriving in Petersburg, Sophia attained an audience with Alexander III on April 13, 1891. The Tsar allowed her to produce the novella in her limited subscription, which she recalled with a sense of achievement: “I cannot help secretly exulting in my success in overcoming all the obstacles, that I managed to obtain an interview with the Tsar, and that I, a woman, have achieved something that nobody else could have done! It was undoubtedly my own
personal influence that played a major part in this business.”
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Sophia made “an
excellent
impression” at court, but in Yasnaya the reception was cold.

Sophia’s success did not matter to Tolstoy, because he had decided to publicly renounce his copyright. When he informed her, she argued that, coming at this time, such an announcement would hinder her sales. Moreover, permission to publish his censored works had been given to her exclusively and for limited subscription; releasing them to the public would violate the agreement with the Tsar.

But Tolstoy was undaunted: on September 17, 1891, her name day, Sophia was in Moscow where she received the text of his copyright statement with instructions to publish it in the newspapers
Russian Gazette
and
New Time
. Tolstoy released his works written after 1881 to the public domain: anyone in Russia and abroad could now publish them free of royalty. In addition, he renounced copyright on the two final volumes of his collected works, which included the novellas
The Kreutzer Sonata
and
Ivan Ilyich
. Sophia sent his statement to the newspapers; but in her heart, she never believed that renouncing copyright was the right thing. She remarked it was “unfair” to deprive their large family of income. “I knew that rich publishers, like Sytin, would profit from my husband’s work.… And it seemed to me that for God, in whom I believed, it did not matter whether it was I who sold Tolstoy’s works or it was Sytin and Suvorin.”
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After Tolstoy renounced his copyright and
The Kreutzer Sonata
was brought out by underground publishers, the Tsar said Sophia had broken his trust. Sophia was still not forgiven at court in 1911: the Empress would refuse her an audience. According to Maude, Tolstoy came to regret renouncing his copyright and “often mentioned the trouble and annoyance over publication of each new book after adopting his self-denying ordinance.”
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Unlike in the past, when publishing his new works was a joy, after his repudiation it became a torment: competing publishers approached Tolstoy personally to obtain permission to be the
first to produce his new works. Actually, it was Chertkov who had pressed Tolstoy to renounce his copyright, as their exchange reveals. Later, it was also Chertkov who benefited from this decision, having prevailed on the writer, in the name of their cause and friendship, to give him exclusive right to publish his most profitable first editions. Tolstoy made other exceptions for his friend and allowed him to be unaccountable for the proceeds. But this special arrangement led to conflict with Sophia, who was quick to point out Tolstoy’s double standard.

The public also did not benefit from his repudiation, because Tolstoy abandoned even an author’s control over the published texts. During his lifetime, this led to a flurry of “inadequate and misleading versions of his works in all languages.”
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As competing publishers strove to produce his works first, quality was disregarded, to the disappointment of booksellers and public.

The copyright drama moved into the background when Tolstoy became occupied with a new cause—famine relief. In 1891, newspapers were filled with reports of looming famine. In June, half the Russian provinces were devastated by scorching heat and massive crop failure was predicted. That same summer, Sophia pledged 2,000 rubles for the starving. “I wanted to choose one district and give every starving family there so many
poods
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of flour, bread or potatoes per month.”
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This did not stop Tolstoy from renouncing the copyright. Now, when he asked her to donate money from publishing to the relief effort, she was annoyed, having to find the funds from her strained budget.

But when Tolstoy and their older daughters left to organize relief, Sophia urgently sent them 900 rubles. Their sons were also working on the famine: Sergei and Ilya became involved with the local Red Cross, and Lev left to organize relief in Samara. From her family’s letters, Sophia realized that the money she could send was indeed a drop in the ocean and that more funds were needed to satisfy the demand. During a sleepless night on November 1, 1891, she wrote an appeal for donations, which appeared two days later in the
Russian Gazette
:

My entire family has left to help the needy.… Having to stay in Moscow with our four young children, I can only help by supporting my family materially. But the need is so immense! On their own, people are powerless to satisfy such great demand.… We all, living here in luxury, cannot bear the sight of even the slightest pain inflicted on our own children; so, how can we bear the sight of exhausted mothers, whose children are dying of cold and hunger, or of old people with nothing to eat? … If each of us will feed one, two, ten, a hundred people—as many as we can, our consciences will be eased. God willing, we will never have to live through another such year! And so, I want to ask all of you who can and are willing to help, to support my family’s undertaking. Your donations will go directly to feed the children and old people in the canteens, which my husband and children are organizing.…

Her letter was reprinted by newspapers across Russia and in the West, and soon Sophia found herself in the middle of a huge undertaking: donations were coming from Russia, Europe, and the United States. According to her estimate, in two years their family collected 200,000 rubles (some 30,000 rubles were sent directly to her). What mattered was that the aid was distributed directly to the starving.

To make best use of the public money, Sophia asked Tolstoy what exactly was needed and in what quantities. She met shopkeepers and merchants, to tell them their produce would go to the hungry. They responded with good prices on rye, corn, barley, peas, and flour. Describing the mood of the day, Sophia remarked, “We all had but one thing in our mind: to help the starving people.”
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In November and December, Sophia dispatched carloads of grain and vegetables to Tolstoy; to son Lev, who had opened soup kitchens in Samara; and to the artist Nikolai Gay and his son, who dispensed relief near Petersburg. Tolstoy reported that all of her donations were very much needed. The cause had united them, and
for the first time in years he wrote to her from the heart. When she told him how she had tended to their small children with flu, while herself struggling with asthma and neuralgia, Tolstoy replied with emotion, “Every night, I dream about you, my dear friend. May God keep you healthy and calm.”
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He suggested that the daughters should return to help her, but Sophia declined. Their undertaking was “wonderful and useful,” and she was glad the girls were well occupied.
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Tolstoy also had doubts about his role in organizing such relief. Some of his followers disapproved of his involvement, pointing out that distributing aid contradicted his idea that money was evil. In November, at the height of the campaign, Tolstoy wrote apologetically to one of his followers, “My wife wrote a letter asking for donations, and without my noticing it I’ve become a distributor of other people’s vomit.…”
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While some disciples participated in the relief, others took a cautious stand. During the famine, Chertkov lived at his mother’s estate in Voronezh province, copying Tolstoy’s work,
The Kingdom of God Is Within Us
.

Sophia believed that work on the famine was beneficial for Tolstoy, since he was surrounded by “ordinary people,” not his fanatical followers.
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During the famine, she and Tolstoy had no disagreements on the copyright issue: he himself instructed her to accept the royalties for his article “A Terrible Question,” published by
The Russian Gazette
. On her own initiative, Sophia obtained royalties from the Imperial Theater in Petersburg, which staged his play
The Fruits of Enlightenment
, and sent money to the relief. That winter, she joined Tolstoy to inspect the canteens in several villages between Tula and Ryazan to see what they were accomplishing. Tolstoy participated in the relief until midsummer 1892, opening more shelters and canteens.

Sophia possessed the capacity for hard work, which women of her class could not match. She managed literary and business affairs and was adept at housework, sewing, and cooking. When in Moscow on publishing business, she lived alone, without servants, writing Tolstoy, “I clean dresses, coats, and shoes, tidy the rooms,
repair things, do the laundry, make beds, and carry water.”
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The life of luxury, of which Tolstoy accused her in his diaries, was but a myth.

She had made many attempts to understand Tolstoy’s philosophy. Upset with his non-fiction at the start, she later took pride in his religious works, remarking in 1883, “But he must do it, it’s God’s will; and they may even serve His great purpose.”
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In 1887, she translated her favorite among his philosophical works,
On Life
, into French. Later, she translated into Russian a biography of St. Francis of Assisi by Paul Sabatier, which Tolstoy regarded as an important book for his following. The story of the medieval Italian saint who established a religious order, Friars Minor, had parallels with Tolstoy’s life. St. Francis’s desire to be loved by the entire world resonated with Tolstoy’s aspiration to establish himself as a leader of his own religion. Sophia’s translation of Sabatier’s biography was produced by Intermediary, Tolstoy’s publishing venture with Chertkov, in 1895. However, Tolstoy expected her to accept all of his philosophy, having written to her, “I would give away … my fame, if only you could reconcile your soul with mine during my life, as you will reconcile it after my death.”
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