#sofia tolstoy

from the first chapter of Dworkin’s Intercourse

further context: The Kreutzer Sonata is about a man (a fictional version of tolstoy) murdering his wife. it was functionally a threat, which he made her transcribe over and over again, and then beg on behalf of to the czar. She also had to rewrite war and peace by hand at least 7 times. akin to forcing someone to dig their own grave if u ask me

here’s some selected quotes from her diaries:

I 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.

His coldness is a torture to me, and I have started to seek other things to fill my inner life, and have learnt to love music, to read into it and discern the complicated human emotions contained in it; but not only is music disapproved of in this house, I am bitterly criticised for it, so once again I feel that my life has no purpose, and bowing my back I copy out some boring article on art for the tenth time, trying to find some consolation in doing my duty, but my lively nature resents it and I long for a life of my own

L.N. [Leo Tolstoy] said that before one spoke about women's inequality and oppression one should first talk about people's inequality in general. And he said that if a woman raises this question herself, there is something immodest, unwomanly and impertinent about it.

I 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 arts … And time and again I have crushed and smothered these longings … Everyone asks, “But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual or artistic life?” To this question I can only reply: “I don’t know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune

Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me … 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?

tldr martial rapist and psychological (presumably also physical) abuser. but honestly those words don’t cut it at all. closer to a psychological and physical torturer of his wife

The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy translated by Cathy Porter - 5/5

This is why Jane Austen’s books never go beyond the wedding. Sofia Tolstoy lived a long, mostly miserable life, controlled and overshadowed by her husband, the more famous Leo Tolstoy. Had she not carried thirteen children (not counting the miscarriages), had she not been so occupied with editing and transcribing Leo’s work, getting it past the Tsar’s censors, and publishing it to furnish income for her family, would she be remembered as a better writer than Leo ever was? Unfortunately, much of Sofia Tolstoy’s writing aside from her diaries have been kept secret by the estate, but spending so much time with this hefty volume represents a “what could have been” of a great literary mind, lost to history.

I had read about Sofia Tolstoy’s life and her diaries in Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, which considers parallels in her life to Leo’s The Kreutzer Sonata. I was vaguely aware that they had a long and fraught marriage, but I expected at least some sort of arc. On the second page of her diary (out of almost five hundred!) she already laments, “I am terribly sad, and am withdrawing further and further into myself. My husband is ill and out of sorts and doesn’t love me.” The first year of their marriage (Sofia was 18, Leo was 34) was bad (tainted by Leo’s affairs with maids) and it only got worse for the next 48 years. By far the most disturbing episode was when Leo wrote The Kreutzer Sonata as essentially a thinly-veiled murder threat. Every time it seemed like Leo was about to die, I cheered, and when he finally did it was depressing that Sofia spent her last seven years of freedom grieving for someone who never cared for her. A literary feat in their own right, her diaries also demystify the cult of Leo Tolstoy:

“I 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 arts… And time and again I have crushed and smothered these longings… Everyone asks, “But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual or artistic life?” To this question I can only reply: “I don’t know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune".

reminded me immediately of a passage from War and Peace that I remember finding strange when I first read it:

And I don't have a screenshot right now, but it reminds me of some passages from Anna Karenina as well, I think Cathy Porter actually mentions them in another introduction.