Sophia Tolstaya

Countess Sophia Andreyevna Tolstaya (, ; – 4 November 1919), sometimes anglicised as Sofia Tolstoy, Sophia Tolstoy and Sonya Tolstoy, was a Russian diarist, and the wife of writer Count Leo Tolstoy.

Biography

Sophia Behrs was one of three daughters of a Baltic-German, Andrey Evstafievich Behrs (1808–1868), Imperial court physician, and his Russian wife, Liubov Alexandrovna Islavinа (1826–1886). Her maternal great-grandfather, Count Pyotr Zavadovsky, was the first Minister of education in Russia's history. Sophia had been acquainted with her future husband, Leo Tolstoy, from childhood; he was 16 years her senior and had befriended her mother when he was a boy. On 17 September 1862, when Sophia was 18 years old, the couple became formally engaged after Tolstoy gave Sophia a written proposal of marriage, marrying a week later in Moscow. At the time of their marriage, Leo Tolstoy was well known as a novelist following the publication of The Cossacks. On the eve of their wedding, Tolstoy gave Sophia his diaries that detailed his sexual relations with female servants. (In Anna Karenina, 34-year-old Konstantin Levin, a semi-autobiographical character, behaves similarly, asking his 19-year-old fiancée Kitty to read his diaries and learn of his past transgressions.) The diaries included the fact that Tolstoy had fathered a child by a woman who remained on the Yasnaya Polyana estate.

Tolstaya was pregnant 16 times; three of her pregnancies ended in miscarriages. The Tolstoys had 13 children, eight of whom survived childhood. With the growing interest of her husband in spiritual matters, Tolstaya took over the running of the family estate. Sophia acted as copyist of War and Peace, copying and editing the manuscript seven times from beginning to end at home at night by candlelight after the children and servants had gone to bed, using an inkwell pen and sometimes requiring a magnifying glass to read her husband's notes. She took over 1,000 photographs that documented her life and the decline of the Russian Empire. She was a diarist and recorded her life with Leo Tolstoy in a series of diaries which were published in English translation in the 1980s. Tolstaya wrote her memoirs as well, which she titled My Life.

The marriage of Tolstaya and Leo Tolstoy is considered one of the famously unhappy marriages of literary history. Their children took sides in the marital discord. Their daughter Alexandra supported her father, whereas their son Leo Junior favoured his mother. In 1910, at the age of 82, Leo Tolstoy abruptly left Sophia, accompanied by their daughter Alexandra and his doctor, Dushan Makovicki (Dušan Makovický). Leo left out of anger after he overheard Sophia searching his study for his will, which she was concerned he wanted to change. He died 10 days later in the hamlet of Astapavo.

Controversy related to Leo Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata In 1889, Leo Tolstoy published his book The Kreutzer Sonata. Although quickly banned from publication by censorship, the novel had been assumed in the Russian society to be describing the unhappy marriage of Leo Tolstoy and Tolstaya, which greatly offended Tolstaya. Tolstaya wrote two novellas as a response to The Kreutzer Sonata, which both remained unpublished until 2000. The two novellas are written between 1891 and 1894 and Song Without Words written in 1898. and Leo Tolstoy was portrayed by Christopher Plummer. Both actors were nominated for Academy Awards in their respective categories. Her life was also serialised in August 2010 by BBC's Radio 4 with the title A Simple Life. In 2022, Tolstaya was the main character of the film A Couple by Frederick Wiseman. Some of her literary work was published more than a century after she wrote it. English translation: Sophia Tolstoy's rebuttal of her husband Leo's accusations, The Edwin Mellen Press, New York 2010 Song without Words , unpublished in Russia. German Translation: Lied ohne Worte, Zürich 2010. Michael Katz (ed. and trans.), The Kreutzer Sonata Variations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). Includes Tolstaya's "Whose Fault?" and "Song Without Words" as well as excerpts from her diary and My Life. Leo Tolstoy's story "The Kreutzer Sonata," Leo and Sofia's son Lev Lvovich Tolstoy's story "Chopin's Prelude," and other related writings by Leo, Lev Lvovich, and the Tolstoys' daughter Alexandra Lvovna appear in the same volume. Cathy Porter (trans.), The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy (London: HarperCollins, 2010).