My Life

Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya, Andrew Donskov, John Woodsworth, Arkadi Klioutchanski

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780776619217
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Biografías de ciencias sociales

The Modern Language Association (MLA) awarded the Lois Roth Award to John Woodsworth and Arkadi Klioutchanski of the University of Ottawa's Slavic Research Group for their translation of Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya's My Life memoirs.

My Life was selected among the top 100 non-fiction works of 2010 by The Globe and Mail.
It has also won an honourable mention in the Biography and Autobiography category of the 2010 American Publishers Awards for the Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) awards.
And, finally, it made it into the Association of American University Presses' 2011 Book, Jacket and Journal Show.

One hundred years after his death, Leo Tolstoy continues to be regarded as one of the world's most accomplished writers. Historically, little attention has been paid to his wife Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya. Acting in the capacity of literary assistant, translator, transcriber, and editor, she played an important role in the development of her husband's career. Her memoirs – which she titled My Life – lay dormant for almost a century. Now their first-time-ever appearance in Russia is complemented by an unabridged and annotated English translation.

Tolstaya's story takes us from her childhood through the early years of her marriage, the writing of War and Peace and Anna Karenina and into the first year of the twentieth century. She paints an intimate and honest portrait of her husband's character, providing new details about his life to which she alone was privy. She offers a better understanding of Tolstoy's character, his qualities and failings as a husband and a father, and forms a picture of the quintessential Tolstoyan character which underlies his fiction.

My Life also reveals that Tolstaya was an accomplished author in her own right—as well as a translator, amateur artist, musician, photographer, and businesswoman—a rarity in the largely male-dominated world of the time. She was actively involved in the relief efforts for the 1891–92 famine and the emigration of the Doukhobors in 1899. She was a prolific correspondent, in touch with many prominent figures in Russian and Western society. Guests in her home ranged from peasants to princes, from anarchists to artists, from composers to philosophers. Her descriptions of these personalities read as a chronicle of the times, affording a unique portrait of late-19th- and early-20th-century Russian society, ranging from peasants to the Tsar himself.

My Life is the most important primary document about Tolstoy to be published in many years and a unique and intimate portrait of one of the greatest literary minds of all time.

PART I

1840s to 1862

1840s-1850s

I.1 BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD

I was born on 22 August 1844 in the village of Pokrovskoe Glebovo-Streshnevo,¹ twelve versts² from Moscow, where my parents had their dacha.³ My father, Andrej Evstaf’evich Bers,⁴ was a court doctor, Physician-in-Chief to the Senate at the Court Office. He was born in Moscow and finished university there. He was a Lutheran, and at thirty-four years of age married my mother, a sixteen-year-old patient of his named Ljubov’ Aleksandrovna Islavina,⁵ whom he had fallen in love with. The wedding took place 23 August 1842.

My mother was the illegitimate daughter of Aleksandr Mikhajlovich Islen’ev⁶ and Princess Sof’ja Petrovna Kozlovskaja, née Countess Zavadovskaja,⁷ the daughter of Count Pëtr Vasil’evich Zavadovskij, Minister of Education under Empress Catherine the Great.⁸ My grandmother, Sof’ja Petrovna, was forced to marry the drunken Prince Kozlovskij, by whom she had a son, Nikolaj. She was obliged to leave her husband after their first year together.

She afterward lived with my grandfather, A. M. Islen’ev, in the village of Krasnoe in Tula Gubernia. They lived the life of a married couple and had many children, of which the youngest daughter, Ljubov’ Aleksandrovna, was my mother.

All the children of my grandfather Islen’ev and grandmother Sof’ja Petrovna, née Countess Zavadovskaja, were given the surname of Islavin and were illegitimate. My grandmother asked Prince Kozlovskij to give the children his name, but he asked 100,000 roubles for each child. At that point my grandmother decided it would be better to leave that kind of money for the children and not to give them her husband’s name.

I was my parents’ second daughter. My mother tried breast-feeding me, but she was obliged to stop after three or four months because of exhaustion and a persistent cough. After that I was fed cow’s milk from a bottle. I still remember the black cow which was pointed out to me in childhood as our milk-provider.

My earliest recollection goes back to the time when we were living at our dacha in Pokrovskoe. Our old coachman Fëdor Afanas’evich was carrying me in his arms, and I remember being struck at the sight of his face, especially the deep pockmarks which had been left behind by smallpox. After that, I can recollect that in the room where the servant-girls slept there was a door leading to a dark attic. This seemed very frightening, since we children had been taught to fear some kind of [witch called] Khavroshka, who would punish us when we were naughty, and we had been told that this Khavroshka lived in our attic and might come after us children.

Another memory is journeying with my father and mother to Petersburg when I was four, to see Uncle Aleksandr Evstaf’evich Bers.⁹ We travelled by mail-coach, and the conductor sitting up front blew on his horn and carried me in his arms from the coach into the station.

I remember how in Petersburg they dressed me up in some kind of colourful old rags and had me sit or stand in some kind of ‘living scenes’. After that my cousin Ljuba¹⁰ and I crawled or rolled around the parquet floor of a large salon at tremendous speed.

My first tutor was a Russian nanny, and I really cried when she left. Then there was a German named Matil’da Karlovna Zarnov,¹¹ who lived with us a long time, and we really liked her. My first foreign language was German, while Mother taught us French. I can still see the notebook with the French words written in her hand, beginning with the words: “God — Dieu, father — le père, mother — la mère,” etc. Clearest of all, I can see my mother teaching us, or lying on a short quilted satin, cherry-coloured sofa with little buttons, book in hand, asking us about the lesson of the day. I remember how sorry I felt for her when her skin was pale and she looked at me out of those big, dark, weary eyes, while eating a lump of coal. This was probably during one of her pregnancies. There were thirteen of us children, five of whom died when they were little.¹² I would fetch these lumps of coal for her from the stove, which I could fit my whole little body into. It was with great curiosity that I examined the walls and passages of the stove’s interior.¹³

We spent our winters in Moscow, in the Kremlin,¹⁴ in a building next to the Commandant’s quarters, which in old times was known as the Poteshnyj dvorets.¹⁵ Right from my birth up to the time I got married and even afterward, our family would spend summers at the same dacha at the village of Pokrovskoe Glebovo-Streshnevo.

This dear, kind Fëdor Petrovich Glebov-Streshnev, the last of his kind, was a paralysed, pale and sickly fellow, who loved our family exceedingly. We were allowed to do anything: to eat cherries from the hothouse, and pick flowers in the garden of the manor house, and run everywhere, and gather mushrooms, which was our favourite pastime. We gathered huge baskets of podoreshiny,¹⁶ and our old respectable cook Stepanida Trifovna¹⁷ would stand there in the courtyard in her white chef’s cap, washing the mushrooms and salting them right off. I recall one time when the three of us, three sisters,¹⁸ went hunting for mushrooms in the forest, and my youngest sister Tanja¹⁹ got lost. We went home without her, and set out for the forest again with fearful weeping to look for her. To our horror, our brothers’ nanny said that there were runaway soldiers roaming the forest, who might harm Tanja or even carry her off. An hour later she came running home on her own, tearful and tired.

My childhood recollections of this Pokrovskoe forest also include the day our dear, kind and meek brother Sasha²⁰ left. At the age of ten he was enrolled in Cadet Corps N° 2. They took him away in August, and this day was one of the saddest in my life. I went off into our birch grove in tears, wandering about until I practically fell from exhaustion. I had near-sighted vision, and I can remember the first time I saw the ground up close, and the tiny little bugs scurrying about, and the strong leaves of wild cabbage²¹ and other herbs.

Up until 1855 Grandmother Elisaveta Ivanovna,²² my father’s mother (née Vul’fert), lived with us. We loved her very much, she was a cheerful, excellent housekeeper and spoilt us children. On Sunday mornings, after reading liturgical prayers in Mother’s room, or attending mass in the royal Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Church,²³ we would play dolls in Grandmother’s room, on a floor which was covered in green cloth. These dolls were marvellous. Grandmother had brought them from Petersburg. All the furnishings, amenities and wardrobes for the dolls had been specially ordered, and my sister Liza²⁴ and I were supposed to play with them every Sunday, which often I didn’t feel like doing at all. Most of all, I liked making my own toys, especially ones producing some kind of sound. I would collect shards of glass that could be arranged to ring in a scale, and make barrel-organs out of sleigh-bells, small church bells and shards of glass. Or sometimes I would create whole landscapes using moss, paper, little mirrors and fir branches. Or I would use egg-shells to create baskets and vases, or dinner sets from acorns, or paper dolls and animals, etc., etc.

I.2 STUDY

I was a poor pupil as a child, and I was often punished for my failure to learn lessons. It was difficult for me to study on an equal footing with my sister Liza, who was a year older; she was smart, industrious and conscientious, while I kept getting distracted by something and didn’t get around to my lessons in time. This difficult recollection has remained with me my whole life, thanks to the punishment I was subjected to on the complaint of my French teacher, Madame Bess. She would assign me, a nine- or ten-year-old girl, to memorise whole chapîtres from the story of Lamé Fleury, and I could never sit there and study a chapître all the way through.

After a second complaint from the teacher, my mother took me to the room of my grandmother, who had gone off to Petersburg. She had brought along a cane and ordered me to undress. I undressed and crossed myself. My mother grasped hold of me by my bare arm, squeezed it hard above the elbow and began to flog me with the cane. I jumped, wept and trembled with cold. Later my mother was very distraught that she had flogged me and my brother Sasha, saying how her stepmother had drilled into her from childhood that children cannot be raised without canings, but how over the years she had come to look upon this practice as unthinkable.

I was not on very good terms with my sister Liza, even though we shared the same room, dressed alike and received our upbringing and education together. I remember one time when her hair grew long and needed cutting, they decided to cut my hair too, so that we would look alike. Monsieur Charles, the best coiffeur in town at the time, was summoned to cut our braids. When it came my turn, he lifted my braid to feel the weight and, turning to my mother, said: “Madame, ayez donc pitié de cette belle tresse”. But Mother still ordered him to cut this “belle tresse”, which never grew in so thick again as before.

Our parents were very concerned about our training, both physical and mental. We were clothed and shod by a Monsieur Pironet, who showed up in a dress coat and, standing on his knees, made a sketch of our feet and took measurements, after which his shoes fitted easily and beautifully.

We did our physical exercises in the palace. In the summer we had swings, a maypole, calisthenics and gymnastic bars, and everything necessary for the development of strength and agility.

My sister and I studied dance at Baron Lev L’vovich Bodé’s, together with his children, Ol’ga and Jasha [= Jakov]. This Ol’ga later became a nun.

I danced the cachucha and tarantella, along with Russian and all sorts of other dances. One time my father got interested in the theories of a Pole named Korzeniewski, who said that people’s health depended on correct body posture. For this he developed special corsets and clogs with oblique high heels and recommended sleeping with a pillow not under one’s head, but under one’s back. Father dressed us all in torturesome corsets with two hard steel plates in front, along with high-heeled boots which made us fall down. He also tortured us by making us sleep on our backs without pillows. This practice lasted a long time and was very challenging for all of us.

Our native Russian teachers were mostly medical students. After Mother’s instruction, we were taught French by governesses or visiting teachers, including Mme Bess. After Mme Bess they brought in for us a Monsieur Tunot, a Frenchman of short stature with grey ringlets on his temples. He made us recite Corneille and Racine²⁵ while he made comic gesticulations with his hands, which we mimicked to a T, but even more as a caricature. I knew by heart “Songe d’Athalie”,²⁶ “Rome, l’unique objet de mon ressentiment”,²⁷ “À peine nous sortions des portes de Trézène”²⁸ and so forth. I loved the pathos of these lines — and the marvellous French language.

Our last French instructor was a Moscow University lecturer by the name of Monsieur Pascault, a grey-haired Frenchman with extremely refined manners who, in addition to giving French lessons, also lectured in physics in French for noble young ladies in the salon of the Samarins’ house; they let him use it free of charge. We attended these lectures too. M. Pascault himself compiled résumés of his lectures for us, and we were supposed to do presentations on these lectures for him, which I found difficult and boring.

German I studied in my early childhood, and knew it extremely well.

I.3 ACTIVITIES AND DUTIES

Apart from our lessons, we two sisters were supposed to sew and mend our own undergarments, do embroidery, and read aloud for our mother not less than thirty pages at a time each evening. Housekeeping duties, too, fell partly into the hands of my sister Liza and me. Right from the age of eleven, we were supposed to get up early and make coffee for our father. Then we would fetch provisions from the larder for the cook, after which we all prepared for our nine-o’clock class.

My sister Liza and I took turns at housekeeping...