In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy
  • Caryl Emerson (bio)
The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy, foreword Doris Lessing, trans. Cathy Porter (Surrey, U.K.: Alma Books, 2009), 609 pp.

This volume reissues, with some compression, Porter’s 1985 translation of Countess Sofia Andreyevna Tolstoy’s diaries, repackaged for the centennial of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy’s death in 1910. A perfunctory foreword by Doris Lessing has replaced the original nuanced essay by the Tolstoy scholar R. F. Christian, and mention is made on the cover in gold leaf of the “major motion picture” about Tolstoy’s final year, The Last Station. It is good, though, to have the documents back in paperback. A wife of forty-eight years, who bears thirteen children while serving simultaneously as copyist and then publisher for one of the world’s most indefatigable writers, sees and feels a great deal. (Unfortunately, the cuts and censorings in the prim Soviet-era edition of the diaries, referring to details of sexuality and personal hygiene, are still respected.) But for all that the Tolstoys had agreed to read each other’s diaries to promote their notion of utopian spousal intimacy, neither the marriage nor the wife is done justice by the transcript of her side. Lev Tolstoy was an analytical, unsentimental, sensual man. Sofia Tolstoy was a romantic: deeply in love with her great and difficult husband for two decades and then, after his radical spiritual turn, deeply in love-hate with him. But she wrote when she was depressed, and she was not given to reflect on the meaning of her experience. The majority of her entries read like a day-book: “I shall go and play the piano now. He is in the bath. He is a stranger to me today” (November 23, 1862); “Heat, haymaking, I have a bad headache” (June 26, 1897). The anguish of her husband’s flight and death away from home is understandably beyond expression in words, but a month after the funeral (December 29, 1910), the widowed Sofia is back copying and correcting proofs: “I copied a very good excerpt from a work of Lev Nikolaevich’s about God. He wrote well, but what did he do?” What he did, of course, was transform others by recreating life as a psychologically compelling narrative. Among the strengths of this volume is a tiny appendix describing the death from scarlet fever of the youngest, most promising Tolstoy son, Vanechka, at age six, in February 1895. Both parents were devastated. Sofia’s account is not how the great novelist would have written it up — there is no attempt at transcendence — but therein lies its power. [End Page 197]

Caryl Emerson

Caryl Emerson is the A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Princeton. She is coauthor of Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics and has also written extensively on Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, the Russian critical tradition, and Russian music

...

pdf

Share