What did it take to be the wife of Leo Tolstoy, the Russian literary genius and fanatic who wrote the masterful novel
War and Peace? A life of drudgery so ghastly and stultifying that Sofia Behrs, who was only 18 when she married the 34-year-old novelist, found it almost unbearable right from the start up to the very end in 1910, when Tolstoy died in a railway station in Russia so far from home.
In
The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy (Harper Perennial, 607 pages; translated from the Russian and edited by Cathy Porter), Sofia describes her life with her husband Leo barely 13 months after they got married: “I am left alone morning, afternoon and night. I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture. I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think—and life is tolerable. But the moment I am alone and allow myself to think, everything seems insufferable.”
All throughout the Tolstoy couple’s life, the diaries reveal, Sofia had to put up with a genius who was also clearly a fanatic, making her “often half crazy from self-denial and the strains of living with such an intense man.” But for all of this, however, Sofia never left Leo and continued safeguarding his memory and reputation until her own death in 1919.
Michael Dirda, who reviewed
The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy in the September 30 issue of the
Washington Post, describes Sofia’s diaries as “a harrowing portrait of a marriage…so rich in acute psychological awareness and observation…They are infuriating, heartbreaking, unputdownable.”
Read Michael Dirda’s review of The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy in the Washington Post now!
