A proposal and a marriage

In 1862, at 34 years of age, Leo Tolstoy is a regular visitor to the home of a childhood friend and her husband, Lyubov (formerly Lyubov Alexandrovna Islavin) and Andrey Behrs. It is assumed that their eldest daughter Lisa, then aged 20, is the magnet. The family lives in an apartment at the Moscow Kremlin, where the patriarch is a physician. Lyubov is a little older than Tolstoy and more than two decades earlier had been pushed off a balcony by him, causing her to walk with a limp for a time.

Lyubov, her three daughters and a son, stay a night at Tolstoy’s country home on the pretext that they are on their way to Lyubov’s father’s house and want to visit Tolstoy’s sister Marya. There is horse riding and a picnic in the forest. Within two days of their departure, Tolstoy rides the 56 kilometres that separates his estate from Lyubov’s father’s and stays with them. One evening, alone with the middle daughter Sophia, then aged 17, he writes down a series of letters from the alphabet and asks her to decipher them. For many years she has been somewhat in awe of the writer and can recite passages from his work. With little prompting she works out that they are the first letters of a sentence that reads: “In your family a false opinion exists about me and your sister Lisa; you and Tanya should destroy it.” Tanya is the third daughter, then aged 16. The game continues with a second sentence: “Your youth and need of happiness today remind me too strongly of my age and the impossibility of happiness” (p194, Tolstoy, Crankshaw). The incident is turned into fiction for Anna Karenina.

When the family returns to Moscow, after another night at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy decides to travel with them. By now Lisa cannot hide her jealously, Sophia cannot contain her expectations and Dr Behrs is angry that the household is so unsettled. On one of Tolstoy’s daily visits to the Behrs’s country house outside Moscow, Sophia gives Tolstoy a story she has written. It features three sisters and two suitors, one a middle-aged and not very attractive man called Dublitsky who is inconsistent in his opinions, and the other a considerably younger man not unlike Mitrofan Polivanov, who is also courting Sophia and is a friend of her brother’s. Tolstoy begins calling himself Dublitsky in his increasingly agonised diary entries. He knows Sophia is the sister he prefers, that he is in love with, but should he marry her? Has she the right temperament? Is she old enough? Could she love him? Should he concentrate on being a great writer instead?

Lacking the courage to ask directly, Tolstoy eventually writes a letter containing a marriage proposal and gives it to Sophia on September 16, 1862, just before her 18th birthday – Sophia Andreyevna Behrs was born on August 22, 1844. Lisa implores her to refuse but she does not. Tolstoy insists they marry within a week and that she first read the dairies he has kept for more than 15 years. For a well-brought up and innocent teenager, she finds the entries terribly shocking on many fronts, but the wedding goes ahead.

On the morning of September 23, 1962, with the wedding scheduled for 8pm, Tolstoy goes to Sophia and asks her if she is sure she loves him. Her mother shoos him away. It is traditional for a groom to send his best man to tell the bride as soon as he gets to the church but the message is so late in coming that Sophia thinks he has changed his mind. A missing shirt caused the delay. The ceremony is held at the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin in the Kremlin. The marriage is physically consummated when an innkeeper opens up the tsar’s chambers for them, en route to Yasnaya Polyana.

Married life and children
His other family: The peasants