And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing.Β
βI am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think [β¦].β
She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.
A few years later, when she was 25 or so:
βI am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally β¦ Now I am well again and not pregnantβit terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant βI can achieve anythingβ. For me [β¦] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself [β¦].β
During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.Β And at one point while reading her husbandβs diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence βThere is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.β In her own diary she wrote βThey ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cryβ¦β
A few years before her husbandβs death, she published a cycle of prose poems titledΒ βGroansβ, under the pseudonymΒ βA Tired Womanβ.
the most depressing quote from her diaries:
βI have served a genius for almost forty years. Hundreds of times I have felt my intellectual energy stir within me and all sorts of desires - a longing for education, a love of music and the artsβ¦ And time and again I have crushed and smothered these longingsβ¦ Everyone asks, βBut why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual or artistic life?β To this question I can only reply: βI donβt know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune.β
