The couple’s ensuing quarrels and misunderstandings soon became public, engendering divisions among Tolstoy’s admirers that are still alive today. Some blame Sofia, who refused to ‘follow’ her great husband in his spiritual quest, thus turning their lives into an everyday hell. Others exonerate her. She was responsible for the well-being of eight children (as Tolstoy’s religious convictions evolved, she had given birth to three more sons, Andrei in 1877, Mikhail in 1879 and Alexei, who later died at the age of four, in 1881) and could ill afford to accommodate the whims of the genius. In truth, however, the roots of this family tragedy went deeper.
Married at the age of eighteen, Sofia felt a sense of mission no less important than that of Leo’s. While he had renounced his previous life to become a great writer, she had done the same in order to become the wife of a great writer. Copying the manuscripts of War and Peace, she recorded her nearly religious attitude to his art:
It is great delight for me. Morally, I am experiencing the whole world of impressions and thoughts by copying the novel. Nothing affects me as strongly as his thoughts and his talent. It started to happen not long ago. Did I change myself or is the novel really so good – I can’t tell. I write quickly enough to follow the novel and slowly enough to grasp all the interest, think over, feel and discuss his every thought. We often speak about the novel and he for some reason (which makes me proud) listens to my thoughts and strongly believes in them. (SAT-Ds, p. 80)
Twenty years later, in October 1886, she reacted to his profound and intimate thoughts in a very different way:
I often wonder why Levochka puts me in the position of always being guilty without guilt. Because he wants me not to live, but to suffer all the time looking at the poverty, sickness and misfortunes of the people, and wants me to seek them if I do not meet them in my life. This is what he demands from the children as well. Is it necessary? . . . If you meet such a person in the course of your life, help him, but why search for him? (SAT-Ds, p. 112).
One can discern here not only a criticism of Tolstoy’s ethical theories, but a clear feeling that her husband’s sympathy for the poor undermined her status in his life. She belonged to the world of his novels and his rejection of prose challenged her own perception of her identity and mission of ‘a writer’s wife who takes our authorial business close to heart’ – as she once put it in a letter to her sister.4
Tolstoy’s new philosophy valued universal love for humankind above ‘exclusive love’ for the objects of personal commitment. In his translation of the Gospels he summarized the relevant lines from Luke and Matthew as ‘For those who understood my teachings neither father, nor mother, wife or children or property would have any meaning.’ Tolstoy saw the absolute embodiment of ‘exclusive love’ in sexuality. The Christian ideal demanded total chastity. Even if original sin could be partially redeemed by procreation, it remained immoral not only outside the family, but within it as well.
Until late in his life Tolstoy felt carnal desires for his wife, but always regarded them as a sign of weakness he was unable to overcome. Sofia repeatedly wrote in her diary and autobiography that after their most passionate lovemaking Lev became cold and detached. In 1908, before his eightieth birthday, he complained in the ‘secret diary’ that his multiple biographies would not discuss his ‘attitude to the seventh commandment’: ‘Although I have never once been unfaithful to my wife, I have experienced loathsome, criminal desire for her. Nothing of this will appear and ever appears in biographies. And this is very important’ (Ds, p. 423).
Tolstoy knew that after his death his diary could become available to his wife and even be made public, yet there is no reason to doubt his claim of being always faithful to his wife. He was never shy about blaming himself for actual or imaginable sins. Once, in 1879, he was close to succumbing to temptation. Heading for an encounter with a house cook, Domna, he was stopped by his son, who asked him for help with his lessons. Tolstoy was certain that divine intervention had saved him, but for a while he lost confidence in his strength to resist the Devil. He asked Vasily Alekseev, the tutor of his children, to accompany him all the time to avoid falling into the abyss. Five years later he described the same episode in detail in a repentant letter to Vladimir Chertkov.
It is notable that the maniacally jealous and suspicious Sofia never accused him of adultery in her own diaries, even though they were full of bitter and venomous reproaches. In her memoirs, written with the specific goal of settling scores with her husband and listing all his offences against her, she wrote that not a single time in her life had she experienced his infidelity. Still, she could not reconcile herself to the role of necessary evil she had to play in her husband’s moral universe. She refused to ‘follow’ Tolstoy, because she knew that he was not calling her anywhere.
Rumours about Tolstoy’s new religious beliefs spread quickly. Scores of visitors eager to discuss God, morality, life and love with the most famous Russian writer flocked to Yasnaya Polyana and Tolstoy’s Moscow house in Khamovniki. Most of them were peasants disillusioned with the official Church, persecuted sectarians, self-appointed prophets, wanderers and mystics – ‘the dark ones’, as Sofia contemptuously called them. Both Sofia and Alexandra Tolstoy wrote about Vasily Siutaev, a peasant from the Tver region, who preached in favour of fraternal relations among people, denied the division of property, condemned church rituals and educational institutions and exerted influence on the author of War and Peace.
The most important visitor Tolstoy ever received, however, came from his own social milieu. Vladimir Chertkov belonged to the cream of the Russian aristocracy and was exceptionally rich. As an officer in an elite guards regiment he had led a dissipated life, but suddenly repented and engaged himself in the education of peasants and charitable work. He had spent time in England, where he became close to the British evangelicals. When he came to see Tolstoy for the first time in 1883, Chertkov was 29: the remaining 53 years of his life, half before and half after Tolstoy’s death, were wholly dedicated to the dissemination of Tolstoy’s work and the popularization of his teachings. He became Tolstoy’s closest friend and most devoted and trusted disciple.
Vasily Siutaev (the first ‘dark one’), 1880s.
Portrait of Vladimir Chertkov by Mikhail Nesterov, 1890.
At first, Sofia was well disposed to Chertkov – at least he was not a ‘dark one’. This mild sympathy, however, soon turned into suspicious resentment and later into intense hatred. She had finally found the most appropriate object for her jealousy. She blamed Chertkov for her estrangement from her husband, even though she knew well enough that her family life had already reached breaking point before Chertkov made an appearance. Several months before Lev’s death, Sofia discovered in his diary for 1851 an entry in which he confessed that he had always loved men more than women. She openly accused her 82-year-old husband of having homosexual relations with Chertkov.
This accusation, based on a statement written nearly sixty years earlier, in which the diarist himself expressed a ‘terrible aversion’ towards homosexuality, was utterly irrational. Yet in a perverse way Sofia was perhaps on to something. The handsome, aristocratic, self-confident Chertkov matched a masculine ideal so successfully described in Tolstoy’s great novels. Vladimir could play Prince Andrei to the somewhat Bezukhovian Lev, never sure of himself, hesitant and prone to scorching self-introspection. Traumatized by the alienation of his elder sons, Tolstoy saw in Chertkov his true spiritual son and heir. At the same time, notwithstanding the difference in age, Chertkov assumed from the very beginning the role of the paternal figure Tolstoy had lacked in his teenage years. The teacher could always confess to his pupil the most intimate movements of his heart, his doubts and fears and be certain to receive clear and definite answers.