“I was wondering today why there were no women writers, artists, or composers of genius,” Countess Sofia Tolstoy writes in her diaries, years after marrying a man who has heralded a reputation as one of the greatest literary figures in Russian literature, Leo Tolstoy. 

She continues, “It’s because all the passion… of an energetic woman is consumed by her family, love, her husband—and especially her children… When she has finished bearing and educating her children, her artistic needs awaken, but by then it’s too late, for by then it’s impossible to develop anything.”

Sofia Behrs got married to Leo Tolstoy when she was 18 years old, him being 34 years old. Their marriage lasted for 48 years, throughout which Sofia was able to keep up with her children’s studies, nurse them through illness, help her husband, do the accounts, and manage the household. 

Furthermore, Sofia was a photographer who took about a thousand photos of her family life. She was the copywriter and editor of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, War and Peace. 

She wrote and rewrote the manuscript from start to end, from cover to cover six times. As a publisher, Sofia fought battles with censors, lifting the ban on Tolstoy's nonfiction and novella The Kreutzer Sonata.

She did all that by the dim light of a candle after the children went to sleep and all the household responsibilities were taken care of. 

Vladimir Grigorevich Chertkov: Banning Sofia Tolstoy 

For eight decades, Sofia’s memoir was rejected and deemed as insignificant and thus remained in the dark for the longest time. And the reason for that was Vladimir Chertkov. 

Chertkov was Tolstoy’s secretary and disciple. He loathed Sofia and suppressed favorable information about her and at the same time embellished his own and only role in Tolstoy’s life. 

Chertkov became one of Leo’s closest friends and the founder of “Tolstoyanism” — the school of thought harboring Tolstoy’s religious views. 

Saying “NO” to Tolstoy's new beliefs 

Tolstoy gave up literature after his religious conversion. He renounced his former achievement and life of privilege. In his confessional, religious, and philosophical works, he made sweeping refutations, rejecting all social institutions. This led him to renounce property, creating conflicts in the family’s life and making Sofia’s relationship with him extremely difficult.

Tolstoy insisted on Sofia to follow him, to pursue his own path; but she refused. In her memoir, Sofia explains that she saw Tolstoy's ideas as impractical, especially because he “offered no guidance for the family's practical life.” 

Regardless, she continued to make it possible for Tolstoy to live and work as he chose and spared him all material responsibilities. 

The couple lived separate lives. While Tolstoy was at the “only place on earth that gave him inspiration,” Yasnaya Polyana, Sofia was in Moscow, handling children’s education and supporting the family with her publishing income.

When Tolstoy renounced property, he moved it to her to handle the burden, making her the sole breadwinner of their large family.

But the harder she worked as a mother, estate manager, and publisher, the more their life contradicted Tolstoy's new beliefs.

When Tolstoy’s charities and causes needed a cash flow, it was Sofia who helped him raise funds and handled transactions herself on his behalf. This was not all. On the side, she had her own charities and lent a hand at a Moscow orphanage. And yet, none of these facts, which reveal her gigantic contributions and achievements, were revealed.

It goes without saying that her contribution to his literature cannot be denied: Tolstoy's novels drew from their family's life. Sofia's work as a copyist and editor went into Anna Karenina. She created the best conditions for his writing, and her support was crucial for Tolstoy, who constantly struggled with depression.

"But she astonishes me... by her amazing power of love,"

Tolstoy wrote in his diary upon the death of their youngest son, Vanechka.

At these times, Tolstoy observed Sofia’s painful moments and how she healed those scars.

What about Sofia’s passion? 

Sofia was artistically gifted; she loved music, writing, and painting. But not until midlife did she have the time to explore her talents. As a photographer, she documented family life and produced an album of pictures, published during her lifetime. In her sixties, she began to study painting on her own. She was also a prolific writer, having produced several novellas, stories for children, and voluminous diaries. But she considered her memoir, "My Life," to be her major literary work: she read chapters of it to Tolstoy and had his approval. 

Sofia wasn’t there when Leo died 

Chertkov did all he can do to encourage Tolstoy to leave his wife and make a new life for himself elsewhere, yet he could only leave Yasnaya Polyana at the age of eighty-two, in 1910. 

By the time Sofia found out that her husband was lying ill at the station of Astapovo, it was too late. She managed to see him for ten minutes only before he passed away. Chertkov and other disciples surrounding Tolstoy during his final days did not allow her to bid her husband farewell.

Sofia was photographed on the platform, peeking at her husband through a window. For the rest of her life, Sofia suffered from the unbearable thought that Tolstoy had died in her absence.

Sofia and feminism 

“He announced… that he was against women’s emancipation and so-called ‘equal rights’, and… that no matter what a woman did; teaching, medicine, art—she had only one real purpose in life, and that was sexual love.” 

 

- The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

Whatever Sofia sought to achieve would burn into ashes. But despite that, her diaries reveal that she was a woman who refused to be resigned when all odds were against her; she refused to ever be silenced. 

In the last nine years of her life, she saw the outbreak of world war, two revolutions, and a civil war.

In the introduction to the book, Sofia’s diaries, the author Dahlia Lithwick makes clear that Sofia Tolstoy was typically a modern woman, in her “self-awareness, her brooding restlessness and her discontent.”

As a widow, Sofia lived at Yasnaya Polyana, preserving the estate in the same form her husband had left it back in 1910. She recorded Tolstoy's library, helped his biographers, and toured visitors through the house. She was still copying Tolstoy's fiction for the mere reason of enjoyment and for getting in touch with him, even after he was long gone.