THE DIARIES OF SOPHIA TOLSTOY

A lively reworked translation of Sofia Tolstoy's diaries, first published in Russia in 1978 and the United Kingdom in 1985.

Sixteen years younger than the already famous Russian novelist, as well as self-consciously less educated and worldly, Sofia Behrs was 18 when they married in 1862. For most of the next five decades the couple lived at his ancestral 4,000-acre estate at Yasnaya Polyana, a perennial bane to upkeep, especially as Sofia was absorbed in the care and education of their 13 children (several died of illnesses) while her husband was engrossed in his writing and fame. In this diary she kept from 1862 until her death in 1919 (her husband died in 1910), Sofia indicated early on troubling fissures between the two that grew wider and more perilous as the years passed. There was a large rift between Tolstoy's idealized version of family life and what Sofia learned was truly the case—his emotional coldness (which he made up in sexual ardor), disregard for the care of the children and belittling of her role in his greatness. “There are times in this useless life of mine,” she wrote in 1890, “when I am overwhelmed with despair and long to kill myself, run away, fall in love with someone else—anything not to have to live with this man who for some reason I have always loved.” Despite the domestic drudgery, she insisted on copying out his corrected pages, which kept her involved in his life and immersed in his artistry. “Nothing touches me so deeply as his ideas, his genius,” she wrote in late 1866, when she was copying War and Peace. However, the bitterness continued to seep in, as well as a yearning for “some personal happiness, a private life and work of my own”—and, above all, the desire to feel needed and have her love returned.

Uneven, hauntingly revealing and gorgeously sad, these entries reveal a wife's desperate love and estrangement from her brilliant but complex and troubled husband.