The marriage suffers

The interdependency between Leo Tolstoy and his wife Sophia during the creation of War and Peace and Anna Karenina makes their marriage strong. But 20 years into the relationship, it starts to falter. When the family spends the winters in Moscow for the sake of the children’s education, Tolstoy yearns to be back in the country although he enjoys the city more once they buy a house for 27,000 roubles (US$76,400) in 1882 (p448, Tolstoy, Troyat). More and more he wants to be left alone to contemplate the big philosophical questions, not devote himself to the needs of his family or literature. There are frequent quarrels and in 1884, on the eve of the birth of their twelfth child, Tolstoy escapes the household in the middle of the night with only a knapsack. He soon returns.

The biggest thorn in the side of the marriage from Sophia’s point of view is the existence of Tolstoy’s devoted disciple Vladimir Chertkov: she is enormously jealous and suspicious of his increasing influence on her husband and feels sidelined by his presence.

Tolstoy’s inability to adhere to his own principles increasingly frustrates him. Sophia gets some of the blame for this inability to control his sexual urges and for how the family lives in such comfort while surrounded by poverty. He cleans his own room, draws his own water from the well, wears peasant dress, but these are superficial actions. The real culprits are the evils of ownership and the exploitation of the underprivileged by the wealthy.

In 1890, with Tolstoy’s authority, Sophia complains to the authorities about trees being cut down and stolen. The perpetrators are fined and imprisoned rather than just getting a scare and in response Tolstoy decides to give all his land to the peasants. After some ugly scenes he reluctantly agrees to bequeath everything to his family instead so that his hands are no longer dirtied by owning property. When the agreement is finally signed the estate is valued at 580,000 roubles (US$1.64 million) (p512, Tolstoy, Troyat).

Internal warfare breaks out over the ownership of the work too. Tolstoy says it shames him to earn money from his books instead of his truths being available to all, while Sophia argues that publishers will make money and his family will starve if the work is freely available. In a compromise agreement, the family keeps the royalties of anything written before 1881 – a period that encompasses all his most lucrative writings -- and the rest is made available to all comers. Tolstoy writes a letter to this effect and it is published in the Russian newspapers in 1891.

When Tolstoy joins the famine relief effort in 1893 and Sophia supports him, relations improve between them. They badly deteriorate, however, when Sophia becomes infatuated by another man, the pianist, composer and long standing family friend Sergey Ivanovich Tanayev, who is 12 years younger than her. She is emotionally brittle because of the recent death of her last child, Vanichka, and forms a strong attachment to him. She swoons over his music and spends hours in his company. There is no evidence of sexual relations between the pair but Tolstoy is disgusted, distressed and embarrassed by the liaison.

The essays