Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

The revival of interest in Sophia Tolstoy doesn’t begin or end with Michael Hoffman’s 2009 film The Last Station, in which Helen Mirren portrayed Leo Tolstoy’s wife and muse. A year earlier, for instance, Cathy Porter’s translation of Sophia’s voluminous diaries was published in Britain. Now, from Alexandra Popoff, a Russian-born, Saskatchewan-based writer, comes an absorbing and accessible biography based on primary documents.

Tolstoy was a count with a huge family estate. He was 34 in 1862 when he married the teenaged Sophia. During his period of greatest creativity in the 1860s and ’70s, when he produced both War and Peace and Anna Karenina, she provided inspiration and protection and kept him organised (no easy feat). But in 1888, he renounced literature for a different kind of notoriety: that of a radical Christian holy man. Through his disciples, he began giving away his land and money to the poor. Countess Tolstoy, who was prone to nervous breakdowns, was caught in the middle.

Particularly nasty were long disputes about the rights to Tolstoy’s books. Sophia had given birth to 13 children in all. Should the income from his writings be used to support strangers instead of family members? As Popoff tells the story, Tolstoy more or less looked the other way as some of his more materialistic acolytes launched a smear campaign against Sophia that has persisted to this day.

The Tolstoyeans, as they were called, would hold her responsible for the fact that Tolstoy suddenly fled the estate in 1910, only to die in a remote rural railway station at age 82. At the very least, much of the world came to believe that the couple’s marriage was “one of the unhappiest in literary history.” (But, then again, as Sophia herself put it in a diary entry: “How dare anyone judge a man and wife?”)

Popoff’s biography shows an easy mastery of the relevant Russian-language materials, and carefully identifies scenes and persons in Tolstoy’s novels drawn from his own or Sophia’s life. It also shows how a shunned woman bravely led her family, and her husband’s memory, through the revolution and civil war that followed.

Drawing on newly available archival material, including Sophia’s unpublished memoir, Alexandra Popoff presents a dramatically different and accurate portrait of the woman and the marriage. This lively, well-researched biography demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, Sophia was remarkably supportive of Tolstoy and was, in fact, key to his fame.

Gifted and versatile, Sophia assisted Tolstoy during the writing of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Having modeled his most memorable female characters on her, Tolstoy admired his wife’s boundless energy, which he called “the force of life.” Sophia’s letters, never before translated, illuminate the couple’s true relationship and provide insights into Tolstoy’s creative laboratory. Although long portrayed as an elitist and hysterical countess, Sophia was in reality a practical, independent-minded, generous, and talented woman who shared Tolstoy’s important values and his capacity for work. Mother of thirteen, she participated in Tolstoy’s causes and managed all business a airs.

Popoff describes in haunting detail the intrusion into their marriage by Tolstoy’s religious disciple Vladimir Chertkov, who controlled Tolstoy at the end of his life and led a smear campaign against Sophia, branding her evil and mad. She is still judged by Chertkov’s false accounts, which dismissed her valuable achievements and contributions.

During his later religious phase, Tolstoy renounced his property and copyright, and Sophia had to become the breadwinner. She published Tolstoy’s collected works and supported their large family. Despite the pressures of her demanding life, she realized her own talents as a writer, photographer, translator, and aspiring artist.

This vigorous, engrossing biography presents in fascinating depth and detail the many ways in which Sophia Tolstoy enriched the life and work of one of the world’s most revered authors. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.