It is a cruel fact, but unhappy marriages, unless they are your own, are always comic. Hence the popularity of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Hence the universal applicability of the Victorian joke about the Carlyle marriage: that it showed the kindness of God — making two people unhappy instead of four.
The marriage of Tolstoy and Sofia Behrs, neither of whom had an ounce of humour in their bodies, certainly partakes of this grand old slapstick tradition. Sofia’s diary entry for 26 August 1882 runs:
It was 20 years ago, when I was young and happy, that I started writing the story of my love for Lyovochka in these diaries: there is virtually nothing but love in them in fact. Twenty years later, here I am sitting up all night on my own reading and mourning its loss. For the first time in my life he has run off to sleep alone in the study. We were quarrelling about such silly things . . . Today he shouted at the top of his voice that his dearest wish was to leave his family.
But if you turn back 20 years, you find that the marriage began with a violent quarrel about diaries. Tolstoy idiotically showed his much younger bride the diaries of his early life and she was appalled by the disclosures of his sexual nature — the existence of an illegitimate child, the lust for peasant women and the hints of homosexuality.
The flavour of their melodramatic approach to domestic partnership is vividly given when he is only a few years short of his 80th birthday. We find his wife going into the old boy’s room to wish him a happy New Year:
‘I feel sorry for you, Sonya’, he said. ‘You are always so unhappy’. And at that he burst into tears, caressed me and started telling me how much he loved me and how happy he had been with me all his life. Then I began to cry too.
This entry, of course, is sandwiched between accounts of his coldness and bad temper with her, and her fury with him — not only because of his insufferable domestic behaviour but because of his desire to propagate dangerous anarchist views, and to give away his literary estate to a gang of cranky followers.
But, but . . . I must have read Sofya’s diaries three or four times, and I found on this reading that my sympathies were far more acutely engaged than they had ever been before. The tragi-farce of the Tolstoy marriage was, after all, played out between two people who were essentially noble spirits. I do not know if Signora Berlusconi keeps journals, but if she does, they will not resemble those of the Countess Tolstoy. The wife who acted as illegible Tolstoy’s secretary and copied out War and Peace seven times is nearly always generous to his genius. She loathed his novel Resurrection, and was bored by What Is Art? , but she copied them for him nevertheless. There is a beautiful entry in November 1900 when she opens her bedroom window at Yasnaya Polyana and sees a red cockerel on a pile of straw and hears the bell of the church, and pines for the time before Tolstoy fell out with the Church. Though she did not do so herself, I had forgotten how totally supportive she was of him when he was excommunicated for heresy.
There is no need to take sides when reading this book. Waste too much sympathy on poor old Sofia and her menopausal travails, and you will overlook the obvious fact that she is battling with one of the greatest writer-prophets in the history of humanity. (A psychiatrist, visiting Yasnaya Polyana towards the end, diagnosed hysteria and paranoia — the reader of these diaries reaches this conclusion many years earlier.) Taneev, the composer on whom Sofia had a painfully platonic crush, wrote to her on Tolstoy’s 70th birthday, ‘that one does not have to be a follower of L.N. to be stirred by his works, for his ideas imperceptibly enter one’s mind and remain there’. There is a very touching (touching because so much of the diary concerns the novelist’s furious jealousy of the composer) account of Tolstoy going up to congratulate Taneev on his playing.
One of the reasons why this translation of the journals, by Cathy Porter, reads so much better in 2009 than when first read in 1985 is that I am a sadder, wiser man, even more in awe of Tolstoy’s stupendous genius, and even more self-reproachful that I do not follow his teachings. But it is also because the brilliant Elisabetta Minervini, the best young publisher in London, has cut 1,000 pages, making an elegant, readable volume of more or less half the length. Almost all modern biographies and novels are too long. Looking at these unappetising lumps on the tables at Hatchards, I think how much they would all profit from the neat surgery of La Minervini’s scalpel.
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