BOOKS

Domestic war and peace

John Stewart Corns

Sonya: The Life of Countess Tolstoy Anne Edwards (Hodder pp.512, £8.50) After he had been married some 30 years Tolstoy came into a room to overhear his wife talking to a friend in sentimental terms about marriage. He interrupted them saying — 'A man has been walking alone; suddenly two hundred pounds are tied to his shoulders, and he is supposed to enjoy it. How can there be any question? When I am walking alone I am free. When my foot is shackled to a woman's foot she will drag behind me and get in my way.'

At which point the natural question was asked — 'Then why did you marry?' Tolstoy replied 'Out of ignorance.'

Anne Edwards's Sonya provides an extraordinarily detailed account of the Tolstoy marriage and the milieu surrounding it. Tolstoy married a girl of 18 when he was 34. By that time he had created his engine, he had wound himself up. Henceforth for half a century the highly tensioned coil would unwind, driving him forward irresistibly. Sonya Behrs, the virgin of 18, was as vivacious as she was attractive, full of fun, and with an extreme sentimentality which did not preclude an intense appreciation of the material things of life. She would have made an excellent wife for a government official or politician. But it was Count Tolstoy who first entered the Behrs' household: an aristocrat, a landowner, already famous as an author, rich and likely to become more so. Anne Edwards skilfully shows with what celerity Sonya snatched him from the hands of her elder sister, Lisa, and married him.

Tolstoy, due to become a saint, had a lot of sinning to get through first. He thought he had now accomplished this. One of his worst excesses had been gambling at which he had lost a fortune. More serious was his weakness for loose women, and his boundless lust made him an easy victim. Seeing a woman on the prowl in evening attire he declared cannot help seeing something dangerous for men and illicit, and I feel like calling a policeman and asking protection against a peril, and demanding that the dangerous object be taken away and removed.'

Now all this was behind him. He could settle down with a young, pure girl and license his lust in the name of marriage. He told her of his past. She was very shocked, but decided to forgive him. He told her nothing of his spiritual life which would have frightened her more.

All married couples come in for surprises but in this case the surprises were drastic. Tolstoy was startled by the extent of the proprietary rights she claimed, as if he were real estate to be taken over and examined for evidence of dry rot, and he was disconcerted by the words 'I still find it hard to give up the idea of loving a man who will always be with me, whose slightest thought and feeling I would know. . . 'Those were the opening words of her diary written 13 days after the wedding, a diary which she kept for 48 years. It was not meant to be private, but for husband-consumption. Neither of them took to drink or drugs, but they took to diary, and did not flinch at sticking down fleeting feelings with wordpaste. Sometimes he added footnotes to what she had written. Once, having added 14 tender lines pleading forgiveness for something, he lost his temper with her later and crossed the lines out. Sonya then rewrote what he had crossed out and made comments on his comments and on the crossing out of those comments. His own diary was much shorter, and he was required to delete anything in it unfavourable to her, so he began to keep a private one which he concealed from her; one day she found it hidden in an old boot, and read it with much displeasure.

In spite of this deplorable habit of keeping a log of love's current temperature, they were quite happy for 15 years. Anne Edwards gives a thorough account of how Sonya, while giving birth to his children — 13 of them — organised the household, shielded him from noise and interruptions, studied his imperfect stomach with the minute care that some scholars give to corrupt texts, and above all made a fair copy of his manuscripts which consisted of several drafts and innumerable corrections.

But after the publication of Anna Karenina, everything went wrong from her point of view. Tolstoy turned from fiction to religious and philosophic themes, and followed this with books on the social condition of Russia, sensing with prophetic vision and proclaiming with militant ardour that unless reforms were made there would be a Russian Revolution similar to the French.

All this horrified Sonya. She loved his fiction, she detested his religious aspira tions, and she was appalled by his political views, which had become renunciations. He gave up smoking and alcohol and eating meat; hunting and shooting; theatres and concerts; his title. Finally he wished to renounce all further payment from the sale of his books. He made his estate over to his wife and children, each receiving £5,000 and gave to his wife power of attorney to republish any of his books up to 1881 (which soon brought her in f6,000). Like many biographers, Anne Edwards fails to make this clear, and thus fails to show how monstrous it was of Sonya to claim that her husband was 'robbing the family.'

For most of his life Tolstoy, though lovable, was an unpleasant character: rude, boorish, arrogant, inconsiderate, a tyrant, a bully. But he tried continuously to be a better man and to placate his domineering wife with tenderness. As he became humble she became truculent; as he weakened she increased in strength; as he strove towards peace she doubled her hostilities, making a mock of him in public, feigning suicide, and mobilising her sons against him. When she realised that at last he was resolved to leave her, she imprisoned him in Yasnaya Polyana, guarding his every movement.

One night she lowered her guard, and he was able to make his escape to the railway station and took the train which was to bear him to the scene of his death.

Anne Edwards has given us Sonya from 'the woman's point of view' very well and has revealed the sufferings she endured.

But Tolstoy is only shown as an odious husband. We get no idea of the Titan described by Thomas Mann — 'the knotted muscles of Tolstoy bearing up the full burden of morality, Atlas-like.' Miss Edwards even approves Sonya's dismissal of Tolstoy's activities with the Russian proverb universally used by women — 'Let the baby amuse itself so long as it doesn't cry.' It drew from Bernard Shaw the comment — 'If you have a baby who can speak with Tsars in the gate, who can make Europe and America stop and listen when he opens his mouth, who can smite with unerring aim straight at the sorest spots in the world's conscience, who can break through all censorships and all barriers of language, who can thunder on the gates of the most terrible prisons in the world and place his neck under the keenest and bloodiest of axes only to find that for him the gates dare not open and the axes dare not fall, then indeed you have a baby that must be nursed and coddled and petted and let go its own way.'

To get the full truth of this terrible marriage one must turn to those who witnessed it at first hand: to Aylmer Maude's The Final Struggle, and to Alexandra Tolstoy's The Tragedy of Tolstoy. But at least Anne Edwards has done justice to Sonya.