Significant Others - Countess Sophia Tolstoy

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

Leo Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. Yet, without his wife, Sophia Tolstoy, would the world have been gifted with such literary classics as War and Peace and Anna Karenina? Starring Megan Mullally as Countess Sophia Tolstoy and Nick Offerman as Leo Tolstoy.Source List:Tolstoy, A Biography by A.N. Wilson, 1988 WW Norton & CoSong Without Words: The Photographs & Diaries of Countess Sophia Tolstoy by Leah Bendavid-Val, National Geographic SocietyLeo Tolstoy, Diaries, Faber, Ed. R.F. ChristianTolstoy, Woman and Death by David Holbrook, Farleigh Dickinson University PressThe Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, Cathy Porter, Harper Collins

Welcome to Significant Others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side of history. My name is Liza Powell O'Brien. I'm a playwright, which means you've probably never heard of me, but it also means I like drama, especially between characters who know each other really well. And I've always been curious about what kind of drama might have existed around historically significant figures like famous artists or transformative scientists or even the guys on the money. What was it like to be married to Gandhi or to be the child of baby care guru Dr. Spock? And how did Abraham Lincoln fall in love with the emotionally volatile Mary Todd? I wondered about all this even before I met and married a notable person myself, and I finally collected enough of these stories to start

sharing them. So here's the first of the bunch. It's about a woman who, at 18, won the heart of a 34-year-old bachelor and a man who happened to be one of the greatest writers of his time. Their marriage was long and grueling, but it was also inextricably linked to his work, which is still considered among the best that literature has to offer. This time, on Significant Others, meet Countess Sophia Tolstoy. All happy families are alike.

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. That is one of the best-known sentences in all of literature. And the man who wrote it, Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, knew what he was talking about. The family he was born into

was hardly intact through his childhood. He lost his mother by the age of two and by 10 had lost his father as well. His siblings and servants, and the rather eccentric aunt who took them all in, comprised the crucible in which his early emotional self was formed, but even that structure dissolved early in his adolescence. By the age of 33, he was still not sold on the idea of marriage, and yet just before his death, he walked out on a marriage of 48 years. So what changed? What is the story of Tolstoy's own family and its particular unhappiness? Tolstoy's wife, the Countess Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya, who we'll just call Sofia, did not make him a genius, but she did enable him to live as one. She bore his children, ran his estate,

transcribed and preserved his papers, protected him from his own radical impulses, fed him, cared for him, and perhaps most importantly, allowed him to believe in himself as the man he wanted and needed to be, a morally correct national treasure who deserved domestic happiness and was fully forgiven for his flaws. It was not easy. This is not to say that the countess's life was difficult.

19th century Russia was, of course, a feudal society, and Tolstoy's own mother's dowry was comprised of the 800 souls, or male serfs, who worked their family land. Any one of these 800 people lived a life much more difficult than a countess, no matter how complicated and frustrating her marriage might have been. A truly difficult life in this context was one of unending physical labor and a complete lack of personal rights, a point which ultimately was not lost on Tolstoy himself. Difficult would also likely be an understatement if used to describe the lives of many of the other women in Tolstoy's romantic history, the peasants and sex workers and maids and so-called gypsies with

whom he satisfied himself during his 20 years of bachelorhood. Surely, Axinia, the peasant with whom he had a prolonged affair and who bore him an illegitimate child, has a fascinating story of her own, as does Gosha, a housemaid and mother of another of his offspring, and Katya, Dunyasha, Sasha, or any of the rest. But marriage is a particular beast, and Tolstoy drew some of the most enduring characters in all of fiction from his. Sophia knew the man who would become her husband almost her whole life. Her mother was a childhood friend of Tolstoy's, and he was literally in love with their family. He spent so much time at the Islavin home growing up that they served as a muse for his fiction. He cast them as the Rostovs in War and Peace, wove them into the story of himself in childhood,

and even immortalized a scene from his own past in which he, age 10, pushed his future mother-in-law off a balcony in order to save her from the romantic interest of other boys. The Islavan clan was the beating heart of his nostalgia. But he could not have married his old friend Lyubov herself, because by the time he was ready to start thinking about it, she had become, in his words, awful, balding, and frail. They were basically the same age when he wrote that, by the way, around 30. But Liubov was already a mother by that point, and her daughters were nearly of age themselves. So the next generation of Slavin women, now with the surname Bers, of Slavic women, now with the surname Bers, was on deck. Liza, the eldest, was eligible first. Mama Liubov was determined to marry her off to the count. But Tolstoy had other ideas, namely not to get married to Liza, and perhaps not to get married at all.

I get married this year or not at all, he wrote in his diary in 1859 and then proceeded to stay single a good while longer. So what ultimately changed his mind? It may have taken not just one bear's woman, but a combination. Everyone knew Liza was the one he was intended for, including Tolstoy himself, but he wasn't happy about it. That didn't stop him coming around. These were basically his favorite people, and they had a nice country place and threw good parties, so what, was he just going to not go over there? But he did not like the plan he knew was being hatched for him. Nor perhaps did 18-year-old Sophia. She had always had a soft spot for Tolstoy. Eight years earlier, when she was 10 and Tolstoy was headed off to the war,

she cried and swore to become a nurse so she could follow and take care of him. Now her mom was trying to marry him off to her sister? We can only imagine what she might have been thinking. But I'm the creative one. I paint and write and practice photography. I won best essay at university. I wrote a novel. That novel, by the way, would be read by Tolstoy on the eve of their marriage. He would find it forceful in its truth and simplicity, and then Sophia would burn it. Perhaps so as not to be seeming to compete with her famous husband in his own sphere. Later, she regretted having destroyed that piece of writing since she claims Tolstoy drew on it for certain details in War and Peace, including the name Natasha.

claims Tolstoy drew on it for certain details in War and Peace, including the name Natasha. But before all that, in the summer of 1862, Lyubov was leaning on Tolstoy more than ever to make things official with Liza. Tolstoy was scribbling in his diary about what a disaster that marriage would be, and Sofia had finally become eligible. What did Tolstoy think of that? She is plain and vulgar, but she interests me. That's what he wrote in his diary about her, a detail that will have even more relevance in a moment. Biographer A.N. Wilson chalks Tolstoy's interest up to sexual attraction. He essentially credits Tolstoy's libido for their getting together at all. But Sophia was hardly a passive player in their story.

It seems she deserves some credit for getting the ball rolling as well. Isn't it possible that his interest was piqued by the interest she was showing him? In other words, in the summer of 1862, when everyone knew Count Tolstoy was intended for Liza, did Sophia flirt with her sister's boyfriend? Regardless of who batted the first eyelash, ultimately what happened is that Tolstoy pulled Sophia aside at the end of a party and told her he had a secret message for her. As he later recorded the scene when he used it in Anna Karenina for the engagement of Levin and Kitty, he wrote out a series of initials and asked her to decode them.

Sophia, in her version of the story, claims that she correctly guessed at the following series of words. Your youth and need for happiness too vividly remind me of my age and incapacity for happiness. Your family has the wrong idea about me and your sister Liza. You and your sister Tanechka must protect me. All that, apparently, from initials alone. Whether or not this guessing game actually happened as it was mythologized on the page, what is clear is that the sister Lev really wanted that summer was daughter number three, the vivacious and charming Tatyana. But she was only 16 and so not yet eligible for marriage. Lucky Sophia.

Regardless of the plausibility or veracity of Sophia's account of what went on that night, perhaps the truest thing she wrote was, I grew vaguely aware that something of great significance had occurred between us, something we were now unable to stop. Not long after that night, they shared a carriage ride back to Moscow and chatted in private the entire way. In fact, when Liza asked for a turn to sit with Tolstoy, both he and Sophia denied her. Then Sophia brought out the big guns. She wrote a short story about a young woman in love with an ugly, grumpy old man and gave it to Tolstoy for his 34th birthday. Apparently, he liked it because he said it depicted him so accurately.

As for her and marriage, he wasn't sold yet. The moment Sophia found so magical between them, where she basically read his mind, landed with Tolstoy quite differently. She made me decipher the letter. I was embarrassed. So was she. So perhaps her transcription wasn't flawless after all. Or maybe this is just a classic case of, sure, I meant it in the moment, but I didn't think you would take it so, like, seriously. Either way, while Sophia was already quite sure of their being destined for each other, Tolstoy was still wondering if maybe he was more meant to be alone. For the next week or so, he dined out with other people, got drunk with a friend, tried to talk himself out of love completely, had his way with a peasant woman, and then finally decided he was in agony with his love for Sophia.

Their engagement was brief. To kick off the whirlwind week and as a birthday present for his bride, Tolstoy gave Sophia his diaries to read. You know that game people sometimes play in like sixth grade where everyone is supposed to go around the room and say what they honestly think of each other? This is like that, only way worse. Imagine you are a truly innocent 18-year-old girl newly engaged to a much older man you have long revered. Flush with happiness and a sense of victory, having scooped him from your older sister, your heart swells when you are handed his diaries as a pre-wedding offering.

He wants there to be no secrets between you. He couldn't bear to be separated by even a scrim of conventional privacy. He loves you so much he trusts you with the utmost truth of himself in his own words. What joy consumes you as you take up your reading. What hope electrifies your body as you turn the pages to learn more about the man to whom your life is being handed. And what confusion you might feel as you read entries like these. Had a Cossack girl at my place. Hardly slept all night. Had a Cossack girl at my place, hardly slept all night. Katya's songs, eyes, smiles, breasts, and tender words enchant me. The mere sight of the house surf is making me struggle violently with passion and yield to it more and more often just because I've already had her here. In all the years Sophia had been coming of age,

learning to write and paint, take photographs, and earning a degree in teaching, Tolstoy had, among other things, been having a lot of sex, and apparently regretting almost all of it. Wilson says few artists have had a more exaggerated sense of sexual guilt. Few has been more clumsy of their handling of it in private life, nor more creative in their literary use of it. Sex was often noted in Tolstoy's diary as failure and weakness of spirit. He would dream of waking up a different man only to spend the evening looking at all the girls. He lost his virginity to a sex worker at age 14 and claims to have cried afterwards.

By 19, he was undergoing the first of a series of painful treatments for gonorrhea, and at 23, he describes a sexual interlude like this. I beckoned to something pink, which in the distance seemed to be very nice, and opened the door at the back. I couldn't see her. It was vile and repulsive. I even hate her because I've broken my rules on her account. This struggle between lust and shame would haunt Tolstoy his entire life, as would his habit of blaming women for the feelings they aroused in him.

It's possible he felt marriage would solve these problems for him, as it does in Anna Karenina for his literary avatar Levin, who achieves a wholesome, pure, and morally correct union with his wife. Perhaps it appeared to him at the age of 34 that marriage might bring some kind of relief, that religiously condoned sex could be shamed free. And as for all his dirty secrets leading up to this point, well, if he confessed everything to his bride and she forgave him, then he would be absolved of all his wrongdoings. So before he proposed, he resolved to tell her everything.

There won't be any secrets for me alone, but secrets for two. She will read everything. Everything. The lust, the gambling, the peasant girls, the maids, the serfs, the whorehouses, the bathhouses, the STD, the love affair, the illegitimate children, and the constant inescapable shame. And so Sophia read Tolstoy's diaries. She was, in her own words, shattered. It was days before their wedding. Do you forgive me? Yes, but it's awful. 28 years later, she wrote in her diary. I can still remember the agonizing pangs of jealousy,

the horror of that first appalling experience of male depravity. In the moment itself, she couldn't even look at him. But still, she gave him what he wanted, forgiveness. The morally ambitious Tolstoy was, in fact, a sensualist, a drinker, a gambler, and he judged himself endlessly for all of it. But when he showed Sophia his whole self, she proceeded to love him anyway, which was the absolution he needed, no matter the cost to her. Sophia's wedding night, which took place en route to her new home, in a carriage which the impatient Tolstoy had equipped with a bed, was, in her words, painful, dreadfully humiliating. I was obedient and loving, although

crushed by the agonizing physical pain and unbearable humiliation. Her disappointment was profound. She revered her husband's talent and intellect, had loved flirting with him, probably liked holding hands if they did that kind of thing or feeling the heat of his male gaze. But she was not ready for marriage, not ready for sex, and certainly not ready for the whole truth about the man to whom her life now belonged.

But she was determined for the marriage to be a success. And for a few years, it was. They happily bonded over the mutual labors of homemaking, farming food, having children, arguing about small things, and then apologizing to each other through their diaries, and most importantly, writing. The work on War and Peace lasted seven years. Tolstoy wrote and researched.

Sophia copied his pages, including multiple drafts and revisions, often staying up until three in the morning at the end of her long day of mothering, diary keeping, and running her husband's large estate. But it brought her joy to serve him in this way. In 1863, she wrote, The idea of serving a genius and a great man has given me strength to do anything. And her husband appreciated what he had. He wrote to his cousin, I am a husband and a father who is fully satisfied with the situation. I only feel my family circumstances and don't think about them. This condition gives me an awful lot of intellectual scope.

Still, he was quick to criticize his wife for her clothes, her moods, and once for using a nursemaid when she contracted mastitis. He also took her younger sister Tatiana on adventures and to fancy balls, leaving Sophia home with the baby, saying it would make him too jealous if other men looked at her in public. At the same time, he praised her support of his work, telling her she was a good wife and that he lost his equilibrium without her. For a young woman whose prefrontal cortex was still developing, a woman whose only ambition was to be adored by her much older, nationally revered, aristocratic husband.

A young woman who was dependent in every possible way on the man to whom her life now legally belonged, and to whom she had been in thrall her entire life, his comments carried more weight for her than he could possibly imagine, if he cared to imagine it at all. The emotional whiplash she endured was severe, and on some level Tolstoy knew it. In 1863, when Sophia was pregnant with their first child, he wrote a letter to her sister Tanya, who was a close confidant of the couple throughout their marriage, and reported a dream he had had.

I heard her coming out from behind the screen and walking towards the bed. I opened my eyes and saw a Sophia made of china. I touched her hand. It was smooth, pleasant to touch, cold, and made of china. I said, are you made of china? She replied without opening her mouth. Yes, I am. I began to touch her.

She was all smooth. The paint had come off her lips in one place. I was in a terrible state. She would have been glad to help me, but what could a China creature do? She didn't look at me, but threw me at her bed. She obviously wanted to go to bed, and she kept rocking back and forth. I took hold of her and tried to carry her over to the bed. My fingers made no impression on her cold china body and what surprised me even more, she had become as light as a glass file.

And suddenly she seemed to shrink away and she grew tiny, tinier than the palm of my hand, although she still looked exactly the same. I took hold of a pillow, stood her up in one corner, pummeled another corner with my fist, and laid her down there. Then I took her nightcap, folded it into four, and covered her with it up to the chin. She lay there, looking exactly the same. Suddenly I heard her voice from the corner of the pillow. Leova, why have I become China? I didn't know what to reply. Again she said,

Does it matter that I'm China? I didn't want to upset her and said that it didn't. I felt her again in the darkness. She was still cold, still China. Yet her belly was the same as when she was alive, protruding upward like a cone and rather unnatural for a China doll. I had a strange feeling. I suddenly felt glad that she was like that,

and I ceased to be surprised. It all seemed natural to me. Tolstoy clearly had some deep-seated fear of harming his wife, especially by way of impregnating her. Not that it stopped him from doing it a dozen more times. And of course, later in their lives, this story could almost be read as wishful thinking. Sophia was no mute trinket, nor did Tolstoy treat her with the care and kindness he showed the doll in his dream. But still, as Sophia said herself,

A woman cannot possibly love stronger than I loved Lev Nikolaevich. He was neither handsome nor young, with only four bad teeth in his mouth. But the joy that would rise in me when I met him, that joy illuminated my life for a long, long time. Thirteen years into the marriage, that joy began to dim. Tolstoy became severely depressed. The couple lost three children in two years. Work on Anna Karenina, in which he again drew inspiration from Sofia, her family, and her experiences, was interrupted by illness, family tragedy, and famine.

Briefly, Tolstoy embraced Christian orthodoxy, demanding the rest of the household follow suit, and then a few months later renounced the church entirely. Of this, Sophia wrote, His renunciation of the church I could not accept. My soul could not take it. He also turned his back on writing. Having just finished Anna Karenina, he said to a fan of the novel, I assure you that this vile thing no longer exists for me. He began instead to author anti-religious screeds about which Sophia wrote to her sister. There will be hardly 10 people in Russia interested in this. She was saddened not only as a reader but also a lover. The most primal bond between them for her had always been his art. She took so much pride and pleasure in being a steward of his work, and all that was

for the time being gone. And while there were still collaborations waiting in their future, the two were fixed on ideological paths that would not converge again. So, now imagine you are the mother of eight children, ranging in age from two to twenty, and your husband, who, when you married him at the age of 18, was a titled aristocrat with a massive estate, who also happened to be a genius and one of the most popular authors of his or any generation. And now he's saying he no longer believes in the church to which you are devoted, or in owning property on which you live, or in having money with which you feed, clothe,

and care for your children, and he starts to give all of it away. Not because he wants to do good in the world, but to, in his own words, feel less guilty for having lived a life of privilege. By 1883, finances were becoming an issue for the Tolstoy family. Famine had drained them of resources, no one was bringing in any money,

and the increasingly radical Tolstoy wanted to unburden himself of the evils of ownership by giving away all his property. Sofia objected on behalf of their children, and Tolstoy gave in, saying he would give her the land instead. Annoyed, she basically said he was just trying to make her the bad guy by putting the property into her name, but continuing to live with the same privilege as if the land still belonged to him.

She wasn't wrong to point out the hypocrisy. Tolstoy had dropped his title and yelled at the servants if they used it by mistake, but was still living like a count. In the end, he gave her power of attorney over all his affairs, and soon after, she started a publishing company as a way of supporting them. But the fights kept coming, and so did the children, sometimes in the same day. As Sophia was literally giving birth

to their 12th child, the couple argued, and Tolstoy stormed out of the house swearing he was leaving forever. But he made himself return before the child was born. A diary entry from that time reads, Cohabitation with a woman,

alien in spirit, i.e. with her, is terribly vile. She will remain a millstone around my neck and around the children's until I die. But that millstone still held its appeal, apparently, as a week later he insisted she perform her marital duty. She, just weeks postpartum, mind you, refused the pleasure of his company in the marriage bed, at which point he declared she was no longer of any use to him, and once again vowed to leave her. She gave in, they had sex, and it caused a massive hemorrhage that prompted the midwife to tell them to stay away from each other for the next month. massive hemorrhage that prompted the midwife to tell them to stay away from each other for the next month. Sophia and her husband fought about everything, from tea drinking to horse owning to

the content of their daily meals. He bullied her once again for employing a wet nurse so she could sleep, even though her days were more than full with the new publishing company. She could not afford to pay anyone to proofread, and so did it all herself. When in Moscow for business, she lived alone without help and wrote to herread, and so did it all herself. When in Moscow for business, she lived alone without help and wrote to her husband, I clean dresses, coats, and shoes, tidy the rooms, repair things, do the laundry, make beds, and carry water. And then Tolstoy's inner tensions came to a breaking point. Sophia's company had saved them. He was bringing in good money, publishing his books, but this made Tolstoy feel like a fraud. He firmly believed that property is theft, and yet his texts were

being sold for money from which he profited. This was a deep and lasting struggle for him, and in the end, it was not tenable. In 1885, Tolstoy shocked Sophia by requesting a divorce. He wrote to her, A struggle unto the death is going on between us, either God's works or not God's works. They fought bitterly, and he packed off to a nearby friend's house, leaving Sophia and the children to spend Christmas without him. Ever the contradiction, Tolstoy didn't seem to mind that the friends with whom he sheltered

lived in far greater luxury than his own family. Sophia did not miss the irony, writing, Why is he not bellowing at the old Sufievs? The divorce did not transpire, but Sophia and her husband would live apart for much of the rest of their marriage. While there would still be moments of reconciliation and another child, Tolstoy's rejection of wealth would forever be at odds with Sophia's determination to provide for their family. In 1889, Tolstoy's rejection of wealth would forever be at odds with Sophia's determination to provide for their family. In 1889, Tolstoy wrote a novel that made manifest his deepest inner conflict. The Kreutzer Sonata, about a man who murders his wife,

was meant to illustrate the evil influence of both sex and marriage on human relations. What readers took from it, however, was how much Count Tolstoy hated his countess. I watched her pouring out her tea, putting the spoon in her mouth and swinging her foot, noisily sucking on the liquid, and found myself loathing her as though she were committing some hideous crime. The protagonist says it, but it reads like nonfiction. The book was banned by the Holy Synod, but underground copies proliferated. The Tolstoys were a known couple, after all, and this was hot gossip for anyone who could get their hands on it. Soon, all of Russia had come to the same conclusion, which was that Tolstoy no longer

wanted to sleep with his wife. This, of all things, rankled Sophia the most. Having serviced his prolific needs for nearly 30 years, she would not hear of her desirability being questioned. If only the people who read the Kreutzer Sonata so reverently had an inkling of the voluptuous life he leads, and realized that it was only this which made him happy and good-natured, then they would cast this deity from the pedestal where they have placed him. She even wrote her own novel as a kind of rebuttal to the Kreutzer Sonata.

In it, an innocent 18-year-old girl is raped on her wedding night by her much older husband, who later kills her with a paperweight. The novel was never published in her lifetime. Much as the speculation and chatter bothered Sophia, she still wanted to include the Kreutzer Sonata in her collection of Tolstoy's work, so she went to the Tsar to beg him to lift the ban. She leaned on the ruler's sympathies, playing up the importance of her publishing company as their only source of income. She also promised she would convince her husband to write more fiction and stay away from all the preachy anti-religious stuff.

The Tsar granted Sophia's request, a point of great pride for her, but when Tolstoy heard of the conversation, he was livid. Not long after that, he relinquished the copyright to the Kreutzer Sonata, putting it into the public domain and undercutting the value of Sophia's publications. undercutting the value of Sofia's publications. The Tsar took this as a sign that Sofia had misrepresented herself in their negotiation and effectively banned her from court for the rest of his reign. Tolstoy frequently used his copyright as both a cudgel and a gift. As soon as Sofia founded her publishing company, he took all future copyrights away from her. He made them public, he gave them to his friend Cherkov,

he willed them away, he took them back again. He handed Sofia a new story as a birthday present while simultaneously giving the copyright to a woman he met in Moscow. But as time went on, he withdrew his work from Sofia altogether. She mourned in her diary. I used to copy everything he wrote and loved doing so. Now, he carefully conceals everything from me and gives it to his daughters instead. He is systematically destroying me by driving me out of his life in this way, and it is unbearably painful. He was also, as this entry reveals, dividing the family, lining some of their children up behind him on the side of righteousness, and Sophia and her, quote, life of luxury on the other, which was unfair in a number of ways.

Sophia was a devoted mother who didn't deserve to lose her children's affection because of some ideological argument with their father, and she may have been a countess, but she was not born into luxury as Tolstoy himself had been. She clearly did not shirk labor, and her husband's austerity was earnest but hardly pure. He may have spent his days working the field alongside peasants, but in the evening at home, his dinners were served to him by waiters in white gloves. There's a natural conflation of selves that can occur in a long-term couple. I thought we came to this restaurant because you liked it. Sleeping with the windows closed was your idea,

that kind of thing. But this went to brutal extremes. Tolstoy turned Sofia into a symbol for everything he despised in the world and in himself. His view of himself was so myopic and the power imbalance between them so vast

that Sofia was ill-equipped to defend herself against it. She nagged, cried, complained, complied, and sought various creative outlets for years. But there was ultimately no tolerance for her voice in her society or her marriage. By the age of 58, the energizing effect of serving a genius had definitely waned for Sophia. A diary entry from 1902 reads, For a genius, one has to create a peaceful, cheerful, comfortable home. A genius must be fed, washed, and dressed, must have his works copied out innumerable times, must be loved and spared all cause for jealousy so that he can be calm. Then, one must feed and educate the innumerable children

fathered by this genius, whom he cannot be bothered to care for himself, as he has to commune with all of the Epictetises, Socrateses, and Buddhas, and aspire to be like them himself. And, when the members of his family circle have sacrificed their youth, beauty, everything to serve this genius, they are then blamed for not understanding the geniuses properly. pure young lives to him and atrophying all of their spiritual and intellectual capacities, which they are unable to nourish and develop due to lack of peace, leisure, and energy.

In 1910, one month after his 48th wedding anniversary, Tolstoy snuck out of his home while his wife was sleeping. The letter he wrote to her said, toy snuck out of his home while his wife was sleeping. The letter he wrote to her said, Please try to understand and do not follow me if you learn where I am. The preceding years had been rough for Sophia. Her husband had cut her out of his work and was hiding his diaries from her. She was being driven mad by paranoia and jealousy. She hardly slept, threatening suicide by day and by night, frantically searching for his notebooks, desperate to reopen the portal that had been such a profound mode of communication for them for most of her life. At the mere mention of the name Cherkov, her husband's

longtime friend and disciple, she would go nuts, once even firing a pistol at his portrait. She was convinced Cherkov and Tolstoy were plotting against her. And she was right. Alexander Cherkov had plagued Sophia since the early 80s. He entered their lives just as the marriage was suffering its first major break in 1883, and from that time forward would cause, exacerbate, and exploit its fracture for his own satisfaction. When she set up her publishing business, Cherkov quickly started his own. He urged Tolstoy to relinquish his copyrights in keeping with their anti-property ideals, but not before, it turns

out, he secured a promise to allow him, Cherkov, to print his most profitable first editions. This wasn't the action of a conman so much as the ambitious desire of a fanatical disciple. Cherkov wanted to possess as much of Tolstoy as he could, which pitted him and Sophia in direct competition. For the old man's affection, his confidence, and the right to publish his books. It was a competition Sophia would lose again and again. Tolstoy wrote to Cherkov, I would terribly like to live with you.

While his children heard him scream at Sophia, Wherever you are, the air is poisoned. Sophia was once the fawning acolyte Tolstoy craved. Now that he could hardly bear her, Cherkov was there to fill the void. He became the only person outside the Tolstoy household to know how bad things were between husband and wife, information he weaponized against his rival, cruelly taunting Sophia by threatening to use her husband's own words to publicly humiliate her, and later by doing just that.

Sophia was convinced the two men were having an affair, an accusation which infuriated her husband and caused him to threaten for the umpteenth time to leave the marriage entirely. But in fact, sex may be the one area where Cherkov could not compete with her. Tolstoy was not sexually drawn to him, and however much Tolstoy claimed to find the idea of sex with Sofia repulsive, he kept on doing it nearly into his seventies. Cherkov, like Tolstoy, was a walking paradox. He preached the evils of money

and property while maintaining luxurious estates and angling for Tolstoy's literary proceeds. He drove Tolstoy to spend much of his last years of his life scribbling out a secret will that would have cut his family out of his legacy completely. In the end, Tolstoy had second thoughts and did not proceed with it. But as far as Sophia was concerned, Cherkov ultimately got his way. Thanks to him, her voice was silenced for generations, and Tolstoy's bitter and frequent complaints about her were for decades the only record of their union. enemy to the great man of the people, a materialistic harpy who undermined her husband's higher moral calling, an impediment to his work and life, a spoiled narcissist who embodied the worst of the aristocratic class. Cherkov begged Tolstoy to leave his wife for years. When the day finally came and the ailing 82-year-old stole away from his home in the early hours of the day, Cherkov wrote to him, I cannot put into words the joy it was to me that you went away.

When Sophia learned Tolstoy was gone, she turned to her daughter Sasha and said, I am going to drown myself. Then she marched off to the same shallow pond into which she had already thrown herself multiple times. Tolstoy in turn wrote a letter to Sasha that said, If anyone should wish to drown, it is certainly not she, but I. You'd let her know that I desire only one thing, freedom from her and the hatred which fills her whole being.

Separately, he wrote to his wife, I love you and I'm sorry for you with all my soul. If what Tolstoy wanted most in his final days was to escape under a cloak of anonymity, he did a terrible job of keeping a low profile. He lectured everyone in his train compartment and announced himself by name when they made stops. This helped the policemen Sophia had dispatched to track him down, but it was the newspaper reporters calling for comment who gave her his exact location. The original plan had been to journey to his sister's country house, but he stalled out when he developed pneumonia and started to run a fever. Too sick to travel any further, Tolstoy was in a literal limbo, caught between the home he had

pledged to abandon for so many years and his's house, in which he planned to spend what little future he had left. He was taken to rest in a bed in the station master's house in Astapovo. Perhaps sensing he would not recover, he sent for Cherkov and reiterated his wish that Sofia not come near him. But Astapovo is exactly where she was headed. The station was a zoo. Reporters, followers, family members, and even a movie camera swarmed the house where Tolstoy lay dying. Barred from the room where her husband hovered on the edge of consciousness, Sophia paced back and forth and raged at anyone nearby. She begged her daughter Sasha to let her wait inside the front door. If she was not to be let into the room where Tolstoy was,

she wanted, pathetically, to at least look as if she had. Once he slipped into a coma, she was allowed to view him briefly. Then she was ushered out and stood in the freezing cold from 3.30 to 5.30 a.m., waiting for his life to end. Sophia would live for nearly nine more years. She witnessed the beginning of World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917. She spent her final years writing her memoir and copying Tolstoy's diaries, wondering who it was she had given her life to, writing, I lived with Lev Nikolaevich for 48 years, but I never really learned what kind of man he was. He was the kind of man who was forever wrestling with the truth of himself.

He spent his early decades drinking, gambling, and sleeping around, while his mind consumed itself in a quest for moral goodness. He lived a substantial life of leisure while vowing continuously to break free of the evils of privilege. And while he might have hoped that marriage would soothe the savage beast of his libido, it seems only to have inflamed it. A couples therapist once told me she suspected people got married in part to have someone to blame.

This certainly feels true here. Tolstoy's wife became the face of the privilege he regretted, though she herself was not nearly so privileged as he. She became the face of his own hypocrisy, as the collector of his profits and the manager of his land. And most tragically for her, she became the body most responsible for his lust and shame. When he was young, Tolstoy wrote, A woman is more receptive than a man, and therefore women were better than us in virtuous ages. But in the present, depraved and corrupt age, they are worse than us. He repeatedly claimed that women were at fault

for the desire they provoked in him, and in the end, his wife bore the entire brunt of that accusation. He was rather addicted to sex, and he hated himself for it. The longer he was married, that hatred bled over onto his wife, and the harshly judgmental gaze he once cast on women in general narrowed to include just the one woman who shared his bed for years. Nature was the highest good for Tolstoy, and he may once have hoped that marriage would be a way to bring his sexuality into a more natural context. He may have thought that having a wife would magically transmute his shame into pride

by allowing him to use sex to fulfill his biological imperative, forgetting for the moment the children he had fathered while single. Instead, his shame seems only to have increased with age. At 60, he wrote of sex with Sophia, It was so disgusting. I felt I'd committed a crime. And later, I do know for certain that copulation is an abomination.

Even in order to have children, you wouldn't do this to a woman you love. I'm writing this at a time when I'm possessed myself by sexual desire, against which I can't fight. The protagonist of the Kreutzer Sonata says, in describing his act of murder, I heard and I remember the momentary resistance of the corset, and of something else as well, and then the knife sinking into something soft. Could this not also be read as a metaphor for sex itself? Perhaps Tolstoy was expressing in that novel

not just the influence of sex on humanity, but the destructive force of male sexuality and the enduring psychic pain it can cause a sensitive soul trapped within its spell. Regardless, sex and conflict were unavoidably bound up together in this marriage. Time and again, they would fight. He would demand sex. She would refuse. He would threaten to leave. She would take him to bed to keep him from going. She was determined to stay sexually involved with him, even as he hurt, humiliated, and antagonized her. How to make sense of this? One way could be to say that Sophia was prideful. Her identity had formed to a large degree around the circumstance of being Tolstoy's

wife. And she liked being the only. The only one who copied his work. The only one who read his diaries and whose diaries he read in return. The only woman he allowed himself to be physically intimate with once they were married. She liked being closest to him, even if that closeness was painful. In his proposal to Sophia, Tolstoy wrote, I make terrible, impossible demands on marriage. I demand I be loved the way I am capable of loving, but that is impossible. The union of Lev and Sophia Tolstoy was undoubtedly toxic, but without it, would we have Kitty and Levin in Anna Karenina? Or Natasha Rostov in War and Peace? Would we have all of Tolstoy's drafts and papers so lovingly

preserved and copied out? We might never know. So perhaps it's best just to be grateful that we do. And to remember to widen our own gaze when we look at the giants of history. To see who else was standing by when they made it. Special thanks to our good friends Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman for breathing life into the Tolstoys. I'd also like to thank my significant other for never turning me into a tiny China doll. If you're left wondering how to make sense of this epic relationship and its many complications, check back tomorrow for my follow-up conversation with Esther Perel,

world-renowned couples therapist and host of her own podcasts, Where Shall We Begin and How's Work with Esther Perel. We'll break down exactly what Sofia Tolstoy was up against in her marriage and what that has to do with relationships in any time. Significant Others is written and read by me, Liza Powell O'Brien. I'm not a historian, and I'm greatly indebted to the work of those who are. In some cases, I use diaries or newspapers or court records as sources. But most often, I draw from biographies and autobiographies and articles,

which represent countless hours of work by people who are far more knowledgeable than I. Sources for each episode are listed in the show notes. If you hear something interesting and you want to know more, please consider ordering these books from your independent bookseller. And if you are a historian or someone who knows something about the people I'm talking about, and you'd like to take issue with an impression I've made or a conclusion I've drawn, I welcome the dialogue. If you have an episode suggestion, let us know at significantpod at gmail.com. History is filled with characters and we tend to focus only on a few of them.

And finally, if you enjoyed what you heard today, be sure to rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. Sachs and Jeff Ross. Engineering and sound design by Eduardo Perez. Music and scoring by Eduardo Perez and Hannes Brown, with additional help from Emily Prill. Research and fact-checking by Ella Morton. Talent booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista.