Countess Tolstoy's Marital Life Quiz

Answer:

Sophia Tolstoy, (née Sophia Behrs) (1844-1919), was from an aristocratic family and had a refined education. She was a Russian diarist, copyist, and writer, photographer, and was the wife of the Russian writer Count Leo Tolstoy, who was 16 years her senior. On the eve of the wedding, Tolstoy gave Sophia his diaries as a gift, in which he described details of his eventful sexual life (the same procedure used by Levin in "Anna Karenina"). After her marriage at 18, she became Countess Tolstoy.

Their marriage lasted almost half a century, from 1862 until 1910, when Leo Tolstoy died. At first, the marriage was relatively peaceful, it was the period in which Tolstoy's great works were published. Sophia was a talented person, on whom Tolstoy depended to look after the family, educate the children, and take care of the properties. She also copied his manuscripts countless times and acted as secretary, literary agent, and manager. But Sophia's life was not easy. Tolstoy was against any contraceptive procedures. Thus Sophia became pregnant 16 times and three of her pregnancies ended in miscarriages. Of the couple's 13 children, 8 of them lived to see adulthood. Sophia was forced by her husband to breastfeed their children, despite the discomfort this caused her. The author thought it was unnatural for a woman not to breastfeed a child.

From the 1870s onwards, Tolstoy experienced a period of great change in the way he viewed religion, and the way of life and adopted radical ideas. Among these ideas was that of disposing of his material assets and even his copyrights, aiming to make his work accessible to everyone. As Tolstoy turned to spiritual matters, it fell to Sophia to take care of the family business and prevent him from distributing his properties and giving up his copyrights. To Tolstoy's dissatisfaction, the copyright laws of the Russian Empire also prevented the fulfillment of his desire.

All these facts created a lot of friction in the marriage and unhappiness for those involved. Sophia's dissatisfaction and loneliness can be seen by reading her diaries, which cover almost six decades of her life, giving, among other things, an idea of what the couple's life together was like. The excerpts mentioned were taken from "The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy" (2010), translated from Russian by Cathy Porter, with an introduction by Doris Lessing.

In addition to the diaries, Sophia left other writings, her correspondence with prominent figures, etc. She left more than 1000 photographs, representing her world surrounded by artists, family, peasants, etc. Her writings offer a female perspective on the unhappiness of marriage, quite divergent from much of the 19th-century male literature on this topic. In 1890 and 1891, when Tolstoy published "Sonata Kreutzer", generating a great reaction, in Russia and in other countries, Sophia retaliated against her husband with two novels: "Who's to Blame?" (1892-1893) and "Song Without Words'' (1895-1900), published posthumously. The first was published in 1994, in the Russian magazine "Oktiabr", and the second was published in 2010.