BOOKS
An end as bitter as wormwood
James Buchan
LOVE AND HATRED: THE STORMY MARRIAGE OF LEO AND SONYA TOLSTOY by William L. Shirer Aurum Press, £16.95, pp.400 Among the photographs reproduced in this book is one that shows a heavy old woman, dressed in a long fur coat and with a white Russian peasant's scarf round her hair, standing on tiptoe in the snow at the window of what looks like a railway build- ing. Her right hand is raised to the window, either ,to scrape ice from the glass or shade it so she can see in. Behind her, at the foot of the steps leading to the building's door, is a basket of what may be firewood or laundry. A man in the distance stares inquisitively.
This photograph, taken on 7 November, 1910 and preserved in the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, distills the horror and absurdity of the writer's last days. The story is well- known: his flight from Yasnaya Polyana by third-class railway carriage; the onset of pneumonia; the halt at Astapovo railway station and the slow ebbing of his life in the station-master's house, surrounded by squabbling children, disciples, journalists and newsreel photographers, plain-clothes police and priests eager for his soul; and, away in a siding, his abandoned wife raving in her railway car or trudging over the tracks to catch a glimpse of the man she'd loved, served, tolerated and tormented for 48 years.
The famous opening sentence of Anna Karenina, about happy and unhappy fami- lies, is either untrue or nonsense; but from the peculiar inferno of his own family life, one can see why Tolstoy wrote it. His grue- some marriage to Sonya Andreyevna Behrs fascinated his age and, recorded in night- mare detail in diaries, letters and the remi- niscences of his children amid the mud and apathy of provincial Russia, haunts ours. This new account, published posthumously by the well-known American correspon- dent William Shirer — his Berlin Diary and End of Berlin Diary are still worth reading — incorporates material from Sonya's diaries which were only published in full in 1985 and were not available to Anne Edwards in her Sonya: The Life of Countess Tolstoy (1981).
No doubt because Shirer began the book in his eighties, he concentrates on Tolstoy's extreme old age: more than a third of the book is devoted to the year 1910. It is an efficient, literate, cautious and unobtrusive account: Shirer knows it is unwise to dis- tribute blame within a marriage. One comes away with fresh admiration at the professionalism of American reporters of the heroic era. Shirer dedicates the book to his Russian wife and American cardiolo- gist. He died last December, at 89.
The old view of the Tolstoys' marriage, promoted by their eldest son Sergei (who was a fair observer), was that their life together was at first happy. Sonya bore 13 children out of 16 pregnancies, which can- not have been mere reproductive duty on her — or his — part. War and Peace (1867), with its fabulous heroine and cele- bration of domestic felicity, is evidence of their happiness. But Tolstoy's religious conversion in the late 1870s caused him to rebel against his old self as landowner, lover and author of two masterpieces, while his wife still clung to that man. The rest of their life was a 30-year battle — 'a struggle to the death' as Tolstoy wrote her in December, 1885 — over his desire to aban- don the estate and live modestly, disinherit his family and hand over his copyrights to the use of the public. The new Tolstoy was embodied in the disciple Vladimir Chertkov, with whom Sonya was at violent enmity.
But one can turn this picture on its head and see the source of Tolstoy's actions, including his religious conversion, in a deep and uncontrollable hostility to his wife. His insistence that she see his diaries three or four days before their marriage in 1862 may have been a tactless blunder, as Shirer `Just look at that sea view, Sarah. It's true what they say, the best things in life are free.' suggests, but it was also an act of violence to the 18-year-old Sonya; for in them, she read of his three-year affair with one of his estate workers, Axinya Bazykina, and the son she'd born him. This action doomed the marriage at its outset to suspicion and jealousy, for Sonya was terrified of meeting Axinya and her son at Yasnaya Polyana.
When Sergei was born the next year, Tolstoy bullied and tormented his wife because, under doctor's orders, she would not nurse the baby. His religious conver- sion also had a physical aspect: he grew his beard, dressed like a peasant and gave up washing. 'I shall never get used to the dirt and bad smell,' Sonya wrote in her diary about their love life. But his greatest cruel- ty, as. Shirer says, was his short novel The Kreutzer Sonata of 1889, which intersperses cranky notions of marital chastity with a general rant against women and ends with a peculiarly horrible murder of a woman who resembles Sonya: the insane intensity of the story is Dostoyevskian. Though she raged against the book in her diary, Sonya actually travelled to St Petersburg and unselfishly persuaded Alexander III to lift his ban on the story's publication. As for the copyright schemes, they were merely attempts to undermine Sonya's prosperity and demolish the domestic edifice which she had constructed with so little co- operation from her husband. In Tolstoy's relationship with Chertkov, there are homosexual overtones that are impossible to ignore.
For me, the key to Tolstoy's biography lies in the story The Devil, which was not published until after his death. It deals with the Axinya affair of 1858-61: a recently married landowner becomes obsessed with the young peasant woman who had been his mistress. It draws its power from its mixture of yearning for Axinya and deep shame at his abuse of seigneurial privilege. I suspect it was the tormented memories of the affair that helped persuade Tolstoy to will his estate to the local people.
It is not clear whether the devil of the title is the sexual urge or women's complic- ity in it, for the story has two endings. In one, the landowner shoots the Axinya figure, in the other himself. What is clear from the diaries is that his quarrels with Sonya followed on their bouts of love- making, as night follows day. He was evidently horrified by his desire for her and hated her for both arousing and satisfying him. Maxim Gorky seems to have been near the mark:
There is nothing he likes so much as to punish women . . Is it the revenge of a man who has not obtained as much happiness as he was capable of, or an enmity toward the humiliating impulses of the flesh? Whatever it is, it is hostility and very bitter.
Not that Sonya comes out of Shirer's story at all well. It seems that at least from 1895, when she lost her youngest son Vanechka, she was pretty unhinged. But her madness is not more reprehensible than his: he is not excused, in Shirer's account, by his literary genius.
In fact, it is the literary quality of the final battle that makes it so ghastly. So great was Tolstoy's fame that their posses- sive enmity had passed out of the privacy of marriage into the world of newspaper reports, obituaries, biography, history itself. The weapons were diary entries — left open or snooped at — letters and books. When Sonya dreamed of suicide, it was in terms of her husband's characters, throw- ing herself under a railway train like Anna or perishing in the snow like the character in Master and Man. Every day is preserved in thousands of words to appal the future.
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