Leo Tolstoy
From Philosopedia
Tolstoy, Leo (Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoi)]] [Count] (28 August 1828 - 7 November 1910)
Tolstoy, a major Russian novelist and philosopher, wished for a “rationalized” Christianity. Like characters in his novels, he struggled between belief and unbelief. He liked much of what he read about William Ellery Channing and the Brahmo-Somaj movement in India, writing,
- . . . To regard Christ as God, and to pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege.
He particularly liked a pioneering work on nonviolence, Christian Non-Resistance, by Adin Ballou, a Universalist minister, whom he described as being one of America’s greatest writers. But when he satirized the Orthodox church in his Resurrection (1889–1899), he was excommunicated. He remained, however, a Christian of sorts whose relations with his God, thought Maxim Gorki, were
- very suspicious: they sometimes remind me of the relation of two bears in one den.
Joseph McCabe labeled him “a mystic theist” who enjoyed flogging “the Churches.”
Tolstoy was born in Yasnaya Polyana, a family estate in the region of Tula, Russia. His parents died when he was young, and he and his four other siblings were brought up by relatives. He studied law and Oriental languages at Kazan University, where some of his teachers found him "both unable and unwilling to learn." Because he lost money in gambling, he and his elder brother went to the Caucasus in 1851 and joined the Russian Army. He then moved from living in a dissolute society to becoming interested in non-violence and spiritual anarchy. Upon being traumatized by seeing a public execution in Paris, he wrote to his friend V. P. Botkin,
- The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens. . . . Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.
He was a brawny man who -when 34 and married - had lost most of his teeth. He married Sofya Andreyevna Behrs, daughter of the chief court physician of Czar Alexander II. Tolstoy’s mother-in-law, who with her family of three daughters lived in the Kremlin, was only two years older than he. His young bride, the middle child of the three, had been mesmerized since childhood by the writer, and Tolstoy was enamored of the young bride who was said to have had du chien, a “bite” that combined stylishness and sex appeal. Following a custom of the Czar and others at that time to exchange the reading of each other’s diaries, Tolstoy required as a condition of marriage that Sofya, whom he called Sonya, agree that the two should read each other’s diaries in order that they might never conceal secrets from each other. She agreed. Before the wedding, therefore, he read her chaste and meditative entries. However, she was shocked to learn about his past gambling, drunken orgies, whoring even at the age of fourteen, homosexual longings, venereal diseases, and an affair with a peasant woman, Axinya, who lived nearby with their illegitimate son. Just the same, she consented.
According to historian William L. Shirer’s Love and Hatred (1994), the two lived in Yasnaya Polyana for most of the next forty-eight years, during which time he gained world-wide fame, she had sixteen pregnancies, and she had thirteen childbirths. Only eight of the offspring survived into adulthood, all such details dutifully noted in their diaries.
Sonya, a devout, traditional Orthodox Christian, wrote that she had not particularly enjoyed making love to her husband almost nightly when she was not expecting a child. After her fifties when she was beyond child-bearing, however, she noted that she rather enjoyed sex. Although theirs was a stormy relationship filled with strife, she faithfully researched for her husband, made translations, and copied his difficult-to-read handwriting into legible script. Meanwhile, twenty-two years into their marriage Sonya read in her husband’s diary that “[s]he will remain a millstone around my neck . . . until I die.” Still, he assigned her all copyrights from his writings, and she acted as his literary agent and publisher, notes critic Francine du Plessix Gray.
When Tolstoy began to change his philosophy, saying he was a sinner, rejecting the Church, repudiating private property, and declaring he would no longer write “artistic” novels, Sonya at first declared the renunciation of worldly goods was a publicity ploy. Although Tolstoy was denouncing marriage and family and sex, the diaries show he continued to lust for his wife into his seventies and eighties. Sonya had become pregnant for the tenth time, in fact, the year he began to preach marital chastity.
The new villain on the scene, his biographers explain, was Vladimir Chertkov. Although not exactly a charlatan, Shirer writes, Chertkov cast a spell over Tolstoy in order to try to get control of the diaries and take the manuscripts away from Sonya. She considered Chertkov an intruder, writing to him,
- (My husband’s) diaries are the holy of holies of his life, and consequently of mine with him.
She accused him of trying to take from her “all I have lived by for forty-eight years.” Getting no support from Alexandra (Sasha), their youngest surviving child, and unable to get her husband away from Chertkov, she wrote,
- Falling for men was more in his line as a boy! And now he is absolutely at that man’s beck and call.
Her jealousy became so blinding, according to Leigh W. Rutledge, that she threatened to kill Chertkov, left the house, and was found “babbling incoherently and lying face-down in some wet grass on the estate.” Although she had thought the two men were writing love letters and were confiding secrets as they walked together in the woods, Chertkov said they had only been conversing and exchanging letters on the terms of Tolstoy’s will, which left sole control of Tolstoy’s manuscripts to Chertkov. Sonya later was successful in getting that will revoked, following her husband’s death.
Meanwhile, Sonya brandished part of a diary entry Tolstoy had written six decades earlier, when he was twenty-three: “I have never been in love with a woman,” the entry read, “but I have quite often fallen in love with a man. . . . I feel in love with a man before I knew what pederasty was. . . . Beauty has always been a powerful factor in my attractions; there is D—, for example. I shall never forget the night we left Pirogovo together, when, wrapped up in my blanket, I wanted to devour him with kisses and weep. Sexual desire was not totally absent, but it was impossible to say what role it played.”
To a friend, Tolstoy complained, “Tell her (Sonya), that if she’s trying to kill me, she’ll soon succeed.” Tolstoy did leave, writing to her that “My position in this house is becoming - has already become - intolerable.” Although she threatened suicide if he did not return, he refused. With a doctor friend and Sasha, he set out in search of some peace. In a railroad junction town, Astapovo, Tolstoy developed pneumonia, a fact reported in the newspaper. This resulted in crowds of journalists eager to record and even make photojournalistic movies of the dying author. Tolstoy, who had thought that by leaving home he could meditate further on the Meaning of Life, now found himself at the center of unwanted attention. An emissary from the Holy Synod arrived to receive, unsuccessfully, his repentance and return to the Church. Chertkov and Sasha found themselves part of the media circus. Sonya, kept from her husband for fear he would die of anger upon seeing her, was only allowed in to his bedside after he had lost consciousness. In his last three hours of life, she whispered prayers over the still excommunicated Tolstoy. Upon her husband’s death, Chertkov, also, departed from her life.
Until her own death, ten years later in 1919, Sonya Tolstoy walked daily to her husband’s burial site near their home, which after the Russian Revolution was turned into a government farm. Lenin decreed that she was to be allowed to remain there for the rest of her life.
(See James Wood has stated, “Tolstoy, for instance, could not be called a Christian in any proper use of the word, but is always banging on about God and Christ”; also, see Tolstoy syndrome)
