The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (18 page)

Tolstoy, who was initially against the surgery, dropped his objections when it was explained that Sophia would die without it. He was crying when he left Sophia’s bedroom where she confessed, took communion, and bid her farewells. On September 2, he noted in his diary, “They operated today. They say it’s been successful. But it was very hard for her.”
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The tumor in Sophia’s uterus was the size of a child’s head and it ruptured while being removed. Sophia suffered “endless pain” and was given morphine injections to assuage it.

As in the past, her health and vitality pulled her through: four weeks later, she was able to walk with a cane and, by the end of October, resumed her activities: she practiced the piano, painted landscapes, sewed, and played with her beloved granddaughter, Tanechka. In November, there was yet another blow: daughter Masha came down with pneumonia and developed pleurisy. Tolstoy was at Masha’s bedside when she died on November 27 at thirty-six. On the day of the funeral, Sophia followed Masha’s coffin to the Yasnaya Polyana stone gate. “Did I survive to bury my children?”
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As usual, she drowned her depression in work, running the household and teaching herself to type on a Remington. In the New Year, she worked energetically on her memoir and traveled to Moscow to research it at the Historical Museum, where she had deposited Tolstoy’s archive. It included Tolstoy’s manuscripts of the literary period, the priceless drafts to
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina
, which Sophia had collected and preserved. Tolstoy did not care what would become of his papers, nor did the children at the
time. Daughter Sasha recalls her mother’s story of how she saved a portion of Tolstoy’s manuscripts from destruction. When someone tidied up their storage room in Yasnaya, a bundle of papers was discarded. Sophia went to check what it was: “I couldn’t believe my eyes—these were drafts for
War and Peace
. They would have perished without me.”
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Sophia’s most daunting task was managing Yasnaya. During prerevolutionary years, estate affairs had become entangled and chaotic, reflecting growing tensions between peasants and landowners—a small minority, which possessed most of the land. Even Yasnaya, where peasants had always been treated well, was not exempt. Tolstoy admitted that he sensed the peasant hostility directed at him personally.
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The estate’s orchard was raided at night; crops were collected and carted away. Burglars broke into the guest wing and stole property. Peasants raided the woods: 133 oaks were felled and sold in Tula. Sophia hired armed Cossacks to guard their estate, for which she was criticized by Tolstoy and his followers. In September of 1907, after a shooting incident in the woods, she asked the authorities to send armed guards, realizing this would put her in serious conflict with Tolstoy, as police presence could not but upset the man who preached non-violence. But as long as he remained in Yasnaya, she felt she had to ensure his safety. They lived in a time of unparalleled hostility: beginning in 1905, hundreds of police and officials were killed by revolutionary terrorists and estates were robbed and set afire.

A new trial for Sophia began in 1908, with Chertkov’s return from England, to where, a decade earlier, he had been exiled for his participation in Tolstoy’s causes. On a previous visit to Russia, Chertkov had bought land in Telyatinki, within walking distance of Yasnaya, and built a two-story mansion, along with workshops and stables. By winter, it housed a colony of Tolstoyans to whom Chertkov paid salaries for listening to him preach about the evils of money and property. Sophia, hearing some of his sermons, was struck with his hypocrisy, knowing that Chertkov owned luxurious properties in Russia and in England. But she was more troubled with Chertkov’s influence over Tolstoy. The disciple visited Yasnaya daily,
arriving with a throng of secretaries and an English photographer, who took portraits of Tolstoy and of Chertkov in Tolstoy’s study.

By then, Tolstoy had made Chertkov his sole representative abroad. Chertkov handled Tolstoy’s negotiations with foreign publishers and eventually alone decided who should translate and publish his work, even disregarding the writer’s wishes. Mikhail Sukhotin, daughter Tanya’s husband, was appalled that Chertkov treated Tolstoy’s writings as his own. Later, describing the relationship between the two men, Sukhotin wrote that Tolstoy loved Chertkov “with special tenderness … blindly; this love drove L.N. to become completely subordinated to Chertkov’s will.”
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Sophia felt that Chertkov was angling for Tolstoy’s literary estate. Back in 1904, while still in England, he had sent Tolstoy a questionnaire, to probe whom he wanted to appoint as his literary heir. The questions suggested he should name none other than Chertkov, to which Tolstoy at first responded by accusing his friend of coercion and entrapment. Chertkov demanded an apology, which he received. Over the years, the disciple continued to pursue this goal with his usual tenacity and, upon his return to Russia, doubled his pressure on Tolstoy. Eventually he persuaded the ailing Tolstoy to make a secret will and appoint him executor. With Tolstoy’s fame, it was enough to make a statement in his diary, which he had already done, having written in 1908, “I would be glad if my heirs would make all my writings public property.…”
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Because Tolstoy did not recognize government institutions, he did not want a formal will. To persuade him to make it, Chertkov maligned Sophia and the children. He persuaded Tolstoy that his family had “mercenary intentions” and could not be trusted to carry out his requests. Chertkov would later write his own account of these events, making it appear as if he had merely executed Tolstoy’s wishes.

Beginning in 1909, Tolstoy signed several redactions of the secret will, which Chertkov and his Moscow attorney had drafted. Daughter Sasha, then twenty-five, was drawn into the conspiracy, believing that Chertkov was her father’s genuine friend who wanted
to deliver the posthumous copyright to the people. In reality, Chertkov struggled to establish his own authority over Tolstoy’s legacy and needed Sasha to cover up his intentions. She was designated as a nominal heiress in the will, with the understanding that this formality would be later dropped.

On July 22, 1910, in a forest near the village of Grumont, Tolstoy signed a final redaction of the secret will. Days later, he regretted the conspiracy, writing in his diary: “Chertkov has involved me in a struggle, and this struggle is both very depressing and very repugnant to me.”
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The will stripped from Sophia the posthumous copyright to Tolstoy’s literary works, which she had helped him produce and which he had handed over to her for publication.

Tolstoy’s biographer and disciple Paul Biryukov disapproved of the secret will: when he found out, he told Tolstoy it would be better if he announced his wishes openly. Immediately after, Tolstoy wrote Chertkov: “It was bad that I acted secretly, assuming bad things about my heirs.…”
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But as Tolstoy’s exchange with Chertkov reveals, the disciple was in full control of the situation.

Chertkov’s private meetings with Tolstoy and secret correspondence led Sophia to suspect that the two men had a liaison. When she discussed the matter with Tolstoy, he denied it and “flew into a terrible rage such as I have not seen for a long, long time.”
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As if to confirm Sophia’s suspicions, Tolstoy told her in 1910, “Chertkov is the person who is closest to me.…”
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Tolstoy’s words and his relationship with the man of deeply flawed character, devious, despotic, and self-righteous, mystified his contemporaries and remain unexplained to this day.

During Tolstoy’s final months, Chertkov collided with Sophia over her husband’s diaries. He taunted her by saying that he could publish Tolstoy’s negative entries and drag her “through mud.” At the end of her marriage with the genius, Sophia was nervously ill and suffering: she would become hysterical at the mere mention of Chertkov’s name. Allienated from her husband, to whom she had dedicated her life, and betrayed by her daughter, she was driven to despair and made suicidal threats. When, on September
23, the couple’s forty-eighth wedding anniversary, Tolstoy posed for a photograph with Sophia, he received an admonishing letter from Chertkov. In his
Diary for Myself Alone
, Tolstoy wrote: “A letter from Chertkov with accusations. They are tearing me to pieces. I sometimes think that I should go away from them all.”
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In that last picture of Tolstoy, taken one month before he fled the estate, Sophia is holding on to his arm, turned toward him with a pleading smile; he looks ahead morosely. During these final months, she lived in fear that Tolstoy would make good on his threat to leave home.

Tolstoy’s departure was not as spontaneous as it is believed: he had discussed it with Chertkov and Sasha days earlier. It seems that even the date, October 28, had been decided: Tolstoy believed this number providential for him. And yet, describing the events in his diary, he held Sophia responsible. He accused her of spying on him, searching his papers the night before, which prompted his decision to flee.

In his farewell letter to her, Tolstoy stated that he was fleeing the “conditions of luxury” to spend his remaining days in solitude. His flight would give rise to numerous speculations and legends. Sophia made her own interpretation of his leaving, in a note to Tolstoy’s biographers: “The most probable version is that he became ill, sensed intuitively he was dying, and fled to die.… Accusations to his wife, his words about luxury, and his wish to stay alone, all this was false, invented.”
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At eighty-two, after several strokes and suffering from heart and lung problems, Tolstoy was in a fragile state. His life could be only prolonged at the estate, in his habitual environment. It was obvious that his flight would only hasten his death.

And yet, upon learning about Tolstoy’s departure, Chertkov congratulated him in a telegram: “I cannot express in words the joy I felt in hearing that you have gone away.” Within days of his leaving home, Tolstoy was dying of pneumonia in a small railway station at Astapovo. Fans and reporters from all over the world, filming and photographing, besieged the place. Sophia was photographed on the platform as she peeked at her husband through a shuttered
window. Tolstoy died in the presence of his disciples and daughter Sasha, while Sophia was not allowed to bid farewell. It was decided that seeing her would devastate Tolstoy, but nobody even told him that she was in Astapovo. Sophia was finally admitted when he had slipped into a coma. For the rest of her life she suffered from the agonizing thought that Tolstoy had died in her absence and the two of them had not made peace.

The events in Astapovo shocked many. Anna Dostoevsky was among the first to express sympathy to Sophia and write of her outrage that strangers had separated her from her dying husband. “How much grief you endured during these mournful final days! I cried when I read how you were unable to attend to Lev Nikolaevich, to whom you have been a good genius throughout his life.”
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On November 9, 1910, the prominent lawyer and family friend Anatoly Koni expressed condolences and his deep gratitude to Sophia for having nursed Tolstoy’s artistic talent. A week later, she received a letter signed by twelve academicians of fine arts who recognized her contribution to Tolstoy and her importance to Russian culture. Sophia would only read these letters to her visitors. She was not able to publish them because Chertkov soon started a defamation campaign against her in the press, accusing her, among other things, of driving Tolstoy out of their home. Chertkov and people close to him would now control everything written about Tolstoy in Russia, so positive information about Sophia could not come out until the end of the twentieth century.

As a widow, Sophia remained in Yasnaya, preserving the estate and Tolstoy’s study the way he had left it in 1910. The candles on his desk were never lit after he extinguished them on the fateful night of his departure. The book he read that night was Dostoevskys’
The Brothers Karamazov
, and it would remain opened on his desk. As she wrote in her autobiography, “I live in Yasnaya Polyana and preserve the house with the furnishings just as they were during Lev Nikolaevich’s time, and care for his grave.”
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Sophia did not allow Yasnaya to be sold into private hands, as her sons had wanted, and prevented them from challenging Tolstoy’s will.

In 1912, the wealthy publisher Sytin bought first rights to three volumes of Tolstoy’s unpublished works from daughter Sasha. The money helped resolve the question of how to dispose of Yasnaya. Sasha purchased two thirds of the land from her brothers and transferred it to the peasants to fulfill Tolstoy’s wish. Sophia bought the remaining land from her sons to establish the museum. From the land distribution, she reserved 170 acres with the house, grounds, orchard, and forest, which she and Tolstoy had planted “with so much love to improve our estate.”

In summer 1918, writer Tikhon Polner visited Sophia in Yasnaya. In his book
Lev Tolstoy and His Wife
, he describes their meeting: “Calm and weary, she met me with dignity. She was then seventy-four. Tall, slightly stooped, very thin, she moved through the rooms like a shadow; it seemed that a gust of wind could take her away.… Sophia Andreevna talked willingly but without a smile.… With obvious pleasure, she read her memoir of the happy days in Yasnaya Polyana.… Of Chertkov she spoke without anger but with cold animosity. Her remarks about the last ten years of her life with her genius husband were not always kind. After falling silent for a moment, she would say, ‘Yes, I lived with Lev Nikolaevich for forty-eight years but I never really learned what kind of a man he was.’”
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She lived through the First World War, the Revolution, and the Civil War, events that entirely transformed her country. Preserving the isle of culture, she catalogued Tolstoy’s library in Yasnaya, copied his fiction, notebooks, and letters, and toured hundreds of visitors through the estate. Her final letters were to Tolstoy’s biographers. To one, she gave information about his early story
Polikushka
, the one she had copied out at eighteen. To another, she explained his attitude to the law. Sophia died on November 4,1919, at seventy-five, three days before the anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, also from pneumonia, and was buried in the family cemetery Kochety, next to her children.