Some members of the family, including Tolstoy himself, believed Sofia was insane. In July 1910 the leading Russian psychiatrist Grigory Rossolimo concluded that she was showing symptoms of hysteria and paranoia, and predicted that the couple would not be able to go on living together. Others suspected her of feigning madness in order to manipulate her husband and pointed to her full recovery after Leo’s death. This interpretation seems unlikely even if there was method in her madness.
In one of her diary entries, Sofia recorded that she had inadvertently knocked Leo’s portrait off her table with her notebook, adding, ‘In the same way I am throwing him from his pedestal with this diary’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 400). This task was beyond her power and, in reality, she never tried to accomplish it. She needed her own place on the pedestal, and was ready to fight for it with all the means at her disposal. Tolstoy wrote on 15 September 1910, ‘Not to mention her love for me, of which not a trace remains, she does not need my love for her either, she only needs one thing: for people to think that I love her. And it’s this that is so dreadful’ (Ds, p. 464). His worldview did not allow him to see that Sofia’s aspiration to preserve for posterity her role as the wife of a genius was the only thing that made her life meaningful to her after her children had grown up. Leo had stopped loving her ‘exclusively’ and her ideal love for Taneyev had evaporated.
By now Sofia’s main and possibly only preoccupation was to archive her own version of her life story. A particular bone of contention was photographs. On 21 October 1910, after looking at a newspaper photograph of herself and Leo, she wrote: ‘Let more than a hundred thousand people see us together holding each other’s hand as we have lived all our lives’ (SAT-Ds, II, p. 222). After threatening suicide, running away from home, scandals and quarrels, she wanted others to believe in her happy family life. These stage-managed displays of family harmony were especially painful for Leo, who wrote with disgust about Sofia’s desire to be photographed as a happy couple. She objected to his photographs with Tolstoyans and made him take Chertkov’s photograph off the wall. When Leo was reproached for doing this by Alexandra and put the photograph back, Sofia tore it down again and burned it.
Last photo of Lev and Sofia as a happy couple, on the 48th anniversary of their wedding.
Sofia’s identity was restored after Tolstoy’s death. Now no one could challenge her status as a widow. She even finally accepted de facto the distribution of roles established in Tolstoy’s will. While Chertkov assumed responsibility for publishing, she took upon herself the position of guardian angel of the Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow houses. She managed to preserve both from the horrors of revolution and civil war.
It is no wonder, therefore, that Sofia was so preoccupied with Leo’s diaries and that she was especially sensitive to the way in which these represented his love for her. She once read an entry in which Lev expressed his retrospective inability to understand his own reasons for marrying: ‘I was never even in love, but I could not help getting married’ (Ds, p. 476). In reply she pointed out extracts from his earlier diaries in which, in his own words, he spoke of his passionate love. He had nothing to say. He just could not remember his feelings, as Pierre Bezukhov was unable to imagine himself being made happy by the death of his wife when talking with Natasha. Like Pierre, Tolstoy had changed beyond self-recognition.
After a sudden loss of consciousness in 1908, Tolstoy’s memory, which used to be impeccable, began to fail him. Of the things that happened to him during the last years of his life, few gave him such unmitigated pleasure: finally his mind was freeing him from its enslavement to his past. Tolstoy believed that history was retained in the present and thus could be understood and reconstructed by retrospective analysis. Documents were either redundant or, at best, could only play an auxiliary role in this process. Likewise, an individual, at any given moment of his life, was just an embodiment of his experience in its entirety. There was no need to remember specific episodes:
If I were to live in the past, or at least be conscious of and remember the past, I would not be able to live a timeless life in the present as I do now. How then is it possible not to rejoice in the loss of memory. Everything I had worked for in the past, for example the inner work expressed in my writings, is in me to live by and to use, and I cannot recall the work itself. Amazing. And I think that this joyous change happens to all old people: all your life concentrates in the present. How nice! (CW, LVIII, p. 121)
What marked the life he was now living was tension between the desire to escape and an acute consciousness of his duty to stay. In July 1910 he started keeping a diary ‘for himself only’, which he tried to hide from Sofia. ‘I am bearing up and will bear up as much as I can, and pity and love her. God help me’ (Ds, p. 477), he wrote on 8 September. Tolstoy reproached himself for unkind feelings towards his wife, reminding himself two weeks later that ‘The main thing is to remain silent and remember that she has a soul – that God is in her’ (Ds, p. 478). On 25 October he confessed to a ‘sinful desire on my part that she should give me an excuse to go away. That’s how bad I am. I think of going away and then I think of her situation, and I feel sorry and I can’t do it’ (Ds, p. 483).
The same day he spoke about his intention to leave with Alexandra. On the next day, he sought advice from Maria Schmidt, one of the very few Tolstoyans who understood the reasons he chose to stay in the family and who was friendly with Sofia. Schmidt was appalled. ‘It is a weakness, it will pass,’ she allegedly told him. ‘It is weakness’, replied Tolstoy, ‘but it won’t pass.’4 The next day, as Tolstoy recorded, ‘nothing special happened. Only my feeling of shame increased, and the need to take some step.’ On the evening of 28 October, already far away from Yasnaya Polyana, he wrote one of the most frequently quoted diary entries in literary annals:
Went to bed at 11.20. Slept until after two. Woke up, and again as on previous nights, I heard the opening of doors and footsteps . . . It was Sofia Andreyevna looking for something and probably reading. The day before she was asking and insisting that I should not lock my door. Both her doors were open, so that she could hear my slightest movement. Day and night, all my movements and words have to be known to her and to be under her control. There were footsteps again, the door opened carefully and she walked through the room. I don’t know why, but this aroused indignation and uncontrollable revulsion in me. I wanted to go back to sleep, but couldn’t. I tossed about for an hour or so, lit a candle and sat up. Sofia Andreyevna opened the door and came in asking about ‘my health’ and expressing surprise at the light, which she had seen in my room. My indignation and revulsion grew. I gasped for breath, counted my pulse: 97. I couldn’t go on lying there and suddenly I took the final decision to leave. (Ds, pp. 469–70)
Shortly before his marriage, gendarmes had raided his estate searching for clandestine publications. Nearly half a century later, his own wife was raiding his working table and his bedroom looking for papers she thought he was concealing from her. Tolstoy woke up Alexandra, her friend Varvara Feokritova and his doctor Dushan Makovitsky, who helped him to pack. Having written a farewell letter to Sofia, he left the house before six o’clock, accompanied by Makovitsky and leaving Alexandra behind to deal with the inevitable consequences.