INTRODUCTION
Sofia Andreevna was endowed with considerable artistic talent, either by Nature or by the fact that she spent two quarters of a century living with Tolstoy.
— Ivan Alekseevich Bunin
From my own observations during the time I was acquainted with the Tolstoy family, I must say that apart from all that she might have had in common with hundreds of other women — especially women in aristocratic circles with their positive and negative traits — she was in many respects a powerful and prominent individual, on a par with Lev Nikolaevich, thanks to the critical faculties which she applied to her study of works of art and which enabled her to help him in his literary endeavours… Sofia Andreevna herself was a powerful personality.
— Leonid Osipovich Pasternak
Your life is chock-full of such lively interests on a high level that no matter what segment you might cut out of your everyday lives, that segment always turns out to be extremely interesting and not just for your friends.
— Afanasij Afanas’evich Fet
sofia andreevna bers was born 22 August 1844 at Pokrovskoe Glebovo-Streshnevo near Moscow. She received her education at home and in 1861, at the age of seventeen, passed the ‘home-teacher’ examination at Moscow University.
The following year, on 23 September 1862, she married Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, who had courted her while she was staying on her grandfather’s estate (Ivitsy) near Tula, some fifty kilometres north of Yasnaya Polyana. The wedding took place at the Birth of the Virgin Mary Church [Tserkov’ Rozhdestva Bogoroditsy] on the grounds of the Kremlin.
Sofia Andreevna quickly adapted not only to her role as Tolstoy’s wife but also to that of his copyist and literary assistant, starting soon after the wedding with Polikushka, a story of peasant life, which was published the following year. It took her significantly longer to accustom herself to the duties of household manager and mother (of what eventually turned out to be a family of eight children — plus five more who did not survive to adulthood, and not counting several miscarriages). She fulfilled all these roles with a natural ability, efficiency and devotion. She took personal charge of her children’s education during their younger years, even devising special readers and grammar books for them. Her busy home schedule left little time for leisure or travel, apart from the occasional trips to St. Petersburg, Kiev and the Crimean Peninsula. She never had the opportunity to travel outside Russia.
She was, however, quite active in community and social affairs, especially during her time in Moscow — most notably during the famine relief efforts of 1891 and 1892, when she set up and managed a campaign collecting funds for famine victims and purchasing needed food and other supplies. She also found time to develop her artistic talent for music, painting, photography and writing. Among other painting activities, she would make copies of early portraits of her husband by well-known artists of the day.
One of her greatest legacies was her ongoing support of her husband’s unique literary career. She authored the first biographical sketch of Tolstoy to appear in print. During the 1870s she wrote a series of essays on certain aspects of his life (his conflict with Turgenev, for example), as well as his career as a novelist (in particular, his work on War and peace and Anna Karenina). During the periods of her husband’s illness, she would issue press releases on the true state of his health in an effort to counteract widespread false rumours as to his ‘arrest’ or even ‘death’. She publicly defended him from malicious attacks by his opponents and did her best to protect him from undesired visits to Yasnaya Polyana either by over-zealous supporters or by those interested primarily in personal gain. And despite her personal and philosophical objections to his later writings such as The Kreutzer Sonata, she made a (successful) personal petition to the Tsar himself against their official censorship ban.
Fluent in French from childhood, and with a better-than-average knowledge of German and English, she frequently found herself translating Tolstoy’s works into French as well as translating texts of interest to him from all three of these languages into Russian.
Most importantly, particularly during the later years of their marriage, Tolstaya took an active role in the publication of her husband’s writings. This included negotiations with printers and publishers, supervising the editing and proofreading process and even maintaining a warehouse of his books in a wing of their home in the Khamovniki District in Moscow. A major turning point in this activity came in May 1883, when Tolstoy gave Tolstaya complete charge of the publication of all his writings published before 1881 (including royalties), while he himself renounced his rights to virtually all his later writings (as well as personal property). Between 1886 and 1891 she brought out eight different editions of his collected writings as well as republishing fifteen volumes of individual works.
Added to all this was her activity as archivist and documentary historian. It is in good measure thanks to Tolstaya that so many materials (including manuscripts, letters and diaries and a catalogue of her husband’s library holdings at Yasnaya Polyana) have been preserved for future generations of scholars. According to senior museum researcher Tat’jana Nikiforova, the S. A. Tolstaya archive in the Manuscript Division of the State L. N. Tolstoy Museum in Moscow numbers 22,000 items, including some 10,000 letters written by or addressed to her. Her correspondents included many prominent contemporary writers, artists, critics, philosophers, theatre people, lawyers and politicians.
Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya’s independent role as editor and publisher of Tolstoy’s works is not to be underestimated. Indeed it features prominently in the writings of Tolstoy’s biographers, who have provided a good deal of documentation on her life though sadly neglecting her own literary pursuits. She herself acknowledged the importance of this role in the 1904 preface to her extensive autobiographical memoir My Life [Moja zhizn’], remarking that “the significance of my forty-two years of conjugal life with Lev Nikolaevich cannot be excluded from his life.” Indeed, their conjugal experience served as a general catalyst for both Tolstoy’s writing career and his inner spiritual development; in addition, more specifically, it was the basis for many of the scenes in LNT’s novels.
Until recently, however, there were very few published objective portrayals of SAT’s life and professional activity. The vast majority of recorded commentary can be divided into two diametrically opposed categories: on the one hand, comments by dedicated Tolstoyans and such like, who saw her as authoritarian, intellectually limited, offensive and coarse in her dealings with people; and, on the other, comments by visitors to her home and her own regular correspondents, who by and large came to appreciate her talents, her dedication to her family and her invaluable assistance to her husband’s writing career. The latter group included many famous names, for example: artists Il’ja Repin and Leonid Pasternak, composers Sergej Taneev and Anton Arenskij, philosophers Nikolaj Grot and Pavel Bakunin, theatre directors Konstantin Stanislavskij and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, literary critic Nikolaj Strakhov and Vladimir Stasov; this group also comprised many writers and publishers — Afanasij Fet, Ivan Turgenev, Maxim Gorky, Zinaida Gippius, Nikolaj Leskov and Anna Dostoevskaja, to name but a few.
SAT’s descriptions of these personalities serve as a chronicle of the times, affording a unique portrait of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Russian society. Together with her other ventures, they also highlight her accomplishments as an author in her own right — a rarity in the largely male-dominated world of the time. Credit must be given to a number of Soviet-era and post-Soviet Russian scholars who have published some of Tolstaya’s correspondence with such people in various journals — especially, Tat’jana Komarova, Tat’jana Nikiforova, Vladimir Porudominskij and Aleksandr Shifman. Museum researchers — notably, Ol’ga Golinenko, Irina Pokrovskaja and Berta Shumova — have done some excellent editorial work in their Russian editions of SAT’s diaries and selected passages from Moja zhizn’ [My Life].
As these selected sources demonstrate, a considerable amount of documentation exists on Tolstaya. Still, to date no satisfactory comprehensive and sustained study of her life, and especially literary output, has been published. In his lengthy review of My Life and other publications on Tolstaya in the journal Canadian Slavonic Papers, Hugh McLean (2011) laments the fact that it has taken nearly century after her death to focus scholarly attention on Tolstaya, and that there has been no unified publication of her literary works, scattered as they are among dated journals or not published at all. We are indebted to Tolstoy Museum Director Vitalij Remizov for his publication in 2010 of Sofia Tolstaya’s Ch’ja vina? [Who is to blame?] (earlier published in Oktjabr’) and Pesnja bez slov [Song without words], as well as, in 2011, Moja zhizn’ [My Life] all in the original Russian. Also to be recognized is Tat’jana Komarova, Curator of the Tolstoy Yasnaya Polyana Museum Estate, for her republication of Kukolki-skelettsy [The skeleton-dolls]. SAT’s letters to her son Lev L’vovich Tolstoy, indispensable to a study of her views on art, literature and social issues, are also being prepared for publication.
It is noteworthy that there was indeed an attempt in the early 1990s to publish most of SAT’s writings in a single collection along with an introduction by Vladimir Porudominskij. However, this initiative failed amidst the general pressure of economic and political unrest connected with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Years later, Porudominskij (2005) published his preface to the originally intended collection, under the title “Prizvanie i sud’ba” [“Mission and Fate”]:
