Misconceptions About Sophia Tolstoy

Accounts about Sophia Tolstoy and her marriage to the great novelist are numerous and confusing.

Her voluminous Diaries were reprinted but this seems to invite too quick a reading. Here is what a reviewer writes in The Sunday Times on November 1, 2009: “Leo Tolstoy slipped out of his home” at 82 because he was “no longer able to stand living with Sofia, his wife of 48 years.” When she “heard about his flight, she jumped into the pond but was dragged out by two of her children.” She went to see him on a special train “but found the door barred.” Sounds like a farce, not a tragic finale of Tolstoy’s great life and his marriage.

My comments might come in useful because I invested six years researching and writing Sophia Tolstoy’s biography. (It will be published in spring 2010. See more on my site http://www.sophiatolstoy.com/.)

This blog is dedicated to discussing misconceptions about Sophia Tolstoy and Tolstoy’s flight almost a hundred years ago. Here are more quotes from the same review in The Sunday Times:

Reviewer: Tolstoy’s bachelor diaries “described his relationships with serfs and his homosexual yearnings.” Actually, Tolstoy’s early diaries describe his passionate relationship with Aksinia, a peasant woman at his estate; they do not describe “his relationships with serfs.” And one can only speculate about “his homosexual yearnings.”

Reviewer: “While Tolstoy plunges headlong into his novels and philosophies, Sofia wanders round and round her own inner world like a rudderless boat. She is not one of those writer’s wives who lovingly puts up with her husband’s self-obsession…” But Sophia's Diaries reveal she actively assisted Tolstoy in his writing and causes. She had no time “to wander round in her inner world,” grappling as she did with her many duties as a mother, publisher, and estate manager.

Reviewer: “ ‘It is terrible to live with him,’ she complains weeks into the marriage, referring to Tolstoy’s love of the ‘dark ones’, as she calls the lower classes…” One needs to know that the phrase the “dark ones” was coined in the family to describe Tolstoy’s religious followers. Tolstoy used it himself, referring to his followers' “dark” bearded looks, their obscure backgrounds, and fanaticism.

Reviewer: In the summer of 1910, before Tolstoy finally leaves home, “Sofia, now 66, is still repeating the refrain that ‘It’s impossible to go on living like this…’" The refrain, in fact, was used by Tolstoy himself. He repeated the phrase throughout his life.

And something else: Sophia was not pulled out of the water by two of her children. Please read her Diaries to learn how this happened.

I will update you on other inaccuracies as they pour in.