After years of being vilified, Sophia Tolstaya has finally gotten some validation as a Kickass Woman in the last ten years or so. The wife of author Leo Tolstoy, Sophia raised children and managed an estate while serving as Leo’s editor and agent and while being an artist in her own right. Sadly, the Tolstoys started marriage as a madly-in-love couple but ended in a state of mutual frustration and misery. However, it is clear that Leo’s body of work would not have been possible without Sophia’s participation.
Sophia, the daughter of a doctor, married Leo Tolstoy in 1862. She was 18 and he was 34. On their wedding night, Leo revealed that he had slept with many women and had a child with a serf who lived on his estate. Sophia was horrified, but the next years of their marriage were largely happy ones. They read each other’s diaries and often communicated to each other in them. Sophia was pregnant sixteen times and gave birth to thirteen children, of which eight survived into adulthood.
Sophia raised and educated her children by herself and ran their estate, Yasnaya Polyana, as well. She also edited and copied Leo’s work for his publisher. She copied and edited the entire manuscript of War and Peace, by hand, mostly by candlelight, seven times. In the words of biographer Alexandra Popoff:
In 1886, she became Tolstoy’s publisher and produced eight editions of his collected works as well as individual volumes, handling all stages of the process herself. She began to collect his archive right after their marriage: the priceless drafts and manuscripts of War and Peace would not have survived without her. Generations of scholars could thank her for recording Tolstoy’s pronouncements when he intimated to her his intentions for his novels.
Sophia was also a diarist, an author (her memoir is called My Life) and a photographer. Her photographs are especially important today because they document life in Russia for people of many different classes in the last years before the Russian Revolution. She participated in fundraising, charity work, and famine relief. The daughter of a doctor, she was a midwife and nurse to everyone on the estate when a doctor could not be brought.
Leo Tolstoy was a political philosopher who was intensely interested in social justice. In 1878 he converted to Christianity. At this point Leo was 50 and Sophia was 34. This was the start of a series of awakenings for Leo, who founded a philosophical movement called Tolstoyism. It was also the start of miseries for the couple as Sophia, worried about the fate of their children, refused to join him in renouncing property. Although he vowed to be celibate, Leo had three more children with Sophia. He vowed to give up all his property but at her insistence he deeded it all to her. Tolstoy then continued to live on the estate and live off of, and give away, the money that Sophia earned from her estate management and her control of his copyrights.
During the course of all this Leo befriended Vladimir Chertkov, who became his assistant and ardent disciple. Eager to raise his own standing, Chertkov loathed Sophia and attempted to undermine her at every opportunity, while Sophia resented being vilified by the Tolstoyians while they lived on the estate she managed rent-free and ate her food and otherwise enabled their property and possession-free lifestyle. It is largely due to Chertkov’s memoirs and other writings, as well as his suppression and criticism of her diaries and memoir, that Sophia was remembered for decades after her death as a materialistic, shallow woman who ruined Tolstoy’s life. Cherktov orchestrated the famous event in which an 82-year-old Tolstoy left Sophia and died shortly after of pneumonia.
Sophia survived the Russian Revolution and died at Yasnaya Polyana in 1919. The Tolstoy marriage is famous for being one of the most unhappy marriages in all of literary history. As Sophia’s contributions have become recognized, it has also become known as the most productive.
In addition to my beloved Wikipedia and a lot of random Googling, my sources were:
Sophia Tolstoy: Not the Woman You Thought She Was
Sophia’s Diaries Pain Bleak Picture of Leo
The Road to the Stationmaster’s House
Sophia is a fascinating woman – for those looking for an interested in watching a film about her struggle with the Chertkov and the other Tolstoyists, you might want to watch The Last Station, with Dame Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer, both of whom were nominated for Oscars for portraying Sophia and Leo.
…I should have spellchecked that comment before I posted it. But yes!
Fascinating story. Thanks.