My Life

Editor’s Introduction: Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya: A critical look at an insider’s perspective (first epigraph: Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya’s Preface to My Life)

xix sofia andreevna tolstaya A critical look at an insider’s perspective a. a. donskov Last year Vladimir Vasil’evich Stasov asked me to write my autobiography for a women’s calendar. I thought that too immodest of me, and I declined. But the longer I live, the more I see the accumulation of acute misunderstandings and false reports concerning my character, my life, and a great manytopicstouchinguponme.And so,inviewof thefactthat,though Imyself maybeinsignificant, the significance of my forty-two years of conjugal life with Lev Nikolaevich cannot be excluded from his life, I decided to set forth a description of my life — based, at least for the time being, solely on reminiscences. If time and opportunity permit, I shall endeavour to include several additional details and chronological data drawn from letters, diaries and other sources. I shall try to be true and sincere throughout. Anyone’s life is interesting, and perhaps there will come a time when my life will be of interest to some who wonder what kind of creature was the woman whom God and destiny found fit to place alongside the life of the genius and multifaceted Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Countess Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya’s brief preface to My Life 24 February 1904 Youareyourhusband’sbestpupil—youhavetakenfromhimeverythingyouneedfortheperfecting of your marvellous nature. Princess Marija Sergeevna Urusova to Countess Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya May 1891 WhenSofiaAndreevnaTolstayaobservedtoherlong-timefriend,thepoetAfanasijAfanas’evich Fet (real name: Shenshin, 1820–1892), that “we had nothing interesting to write about”, Fet wrote her in response: my life xx Your life is chock-full of such lively interests on a high level that no matter what segment you mightcutoutofyoureverydaylives,thatsegmentalwaysturnsouttobeextremelyinteresting and not just for your friends. (Quoted in ml, iv.118) That Fet was right, I hope the reader will discover in reading this remarkable narrative, and find that it is much more than her answer to “acute misunderstandings and false reports” — it is an engagingaccountofherlifeandthelifeofherhusbandandfamily.Itisaconfirmationofwhatshe wrote in 1904 as a Preface to My life (quoted above in its entirety), namely, that “the significance of my forty-two years of conjugal life with Lev Nikolaevich cannot be excluded from his life”. Indeed ,itissafetosaythatnoseriousaccountofTolstoy’slifecanbewrittenwithoutaclosereading of her Dnevniki [Diaries] and My life, not to mention her own considerable correspondence with prominent members of Russian society of the day. In addition to the diaries one must also take account of two other record-books she kept. One of these is entitled Ezhednevniki [Daily diaries], in which she made brief notations about each day’s events, often from the standpoint of a later date, with hindsight. The second source was her Zapisnaja knizhka [Notebook], which she used for occasional jottings. In spite of their significance for Tolstoy and Russian history studies, however, the life of Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya (known to her family and close friends as Sonja or Sonechka), along with her multi-faceted endeavours, writings and correspondence, has never been either presented or criticallystudiedinRussiaasasingle,unifiedwhole.Herlettershavebeenonlysporadicallypublished , her work My life has appeared only in a few limited fragments, and over the past century she has received little attention from scholars, either in her homeland or in the West. Many of those who made reference to her at all were either Tolstoy’s followers (‘Tolstoyans’), who rejected her for not sharing their idealised picture of her husband, or Soviet academics, who (with a few notable exceptions) dismissed her as little more than a background figure. In the past decade, however, there has been a marked rise in interest on the part of current Slavicscholars.NotableexamplesofthesearethebiographiesbyYasnayaPolyanaresearcherNina NikitinaandCanadian journalistandwriterAlexandraPopoffbothpublishedthisyear(2010)— whichIshallexamineinsomedetailinmyforthcomingcriticalstudyofSofiaAndreevna’sworks. And in 2005, the proceedings of a conference in Russia devoted to the 160th anniversary of her birth contained papers sympathetic to her plight. (See V. I. Tolstoj and Gladkova 2006) Tolstaya’s early years Sofia Andreevna Bers was born on 22 August [O. S., = 3 September N. S.] 1844 at PokrovskoeGlebovo -Streshnevo near Moscow. She was the second of three daughters in a family of eight children. Her father, Andrej Evstaf’evich Bers (1808–1868), was a doctor, eventually appointed a court physician with an apartment in the Kremlin. Her mother, Ljubov’ Aleksandrovna (née Islavina )wasbornin1826anddiedin1886.Thefamilyofhergrandfather,AleksandrMikhajlovich Islen’ev, a nobleman in Tula Gubernia, was on friendly terms with Tolstoy’s family, and Tolstoy himself was a frequent visitor to their home. Both her parents had tried to give their children a broad education, including an exposure to several languages in their early youth — French and German, and later English. This helped her in later...