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"One hundred years after his death in 1910. Lev Nikolaevich Leo Tolstoy continues to be regarded as one of the world's greatest writers. Historically, little attention has been paid to his wife, Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya. Acting in the capacity of literary assistant, translator, transcriber and editor, she played an important role in the development of her husband's career. Her memoirs which she entitled My Life - lay dormant for almost a century. Now the book's first-time-ever appearance in Russia is complemented by an unabridged and annotated English translation." "Tolstaya paints an intimate and honest portrait of her husband's character, setting forth new details about his life to which she alone was privy. She describes her extensive correspondence with many prominent figures in Russian and Western society, making My Life a unique account of late-19th- and early-20th-century Russia, with its cast of characters ranging from peasants to the Tsar himself. Her engaging narrative reveals not only her significant contributions to her husband's work but also her considerable talent as an author in her own right."--BOOK JACKET.
“[A] testament to a great spirit, a woman who lived in terrifying proximity to one of the greatest writers of all time, and who understood exactly the high price she would have to pay for this privilege.” —Jay Parini, author of The Last Station Translated by Cathy Porter and with an introduction by Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing, The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy chronicles in extraordinary detail the diarist’s remarkable marriage to the legendary man of letters, Count Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Set against the backdrop of Russia’s turbulent history at the turn of the 20th century, The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy offers a fascinating look at a remarkable era, a complicated artist, and the extraordinary woman who stood at his side.
As Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia Tolstoy experienced both glory and condemnation during their forty-eight-year marriage. She was admired as the muse and literary assistant to one of the world’s most celebrated novelists. But when in later years Tolstoy became a towering public figure and founded a new brand of religion, she was scorned for her disagreements with him. And it is this version of Sophia—malicious, shrill, perennially at war with Tolstoy—that has gone down in the historical record. 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.
Dealing with the most topical questions of the time, Sofia Tolstaya’s artistic works—from parables to short stories, novellas, and memoirs—show deep insights into the social context of nineteenth-century Russia. In his lengthy review of My Life (along with other Tolstaya publications) in Canadian Slavonic Papers, the eminent Tolstoy scholar Hugh McLean (2011) laments the fact that it has taken so long (almost a century after her death) to focus academic attention on Sofia Tolstaya, and that there has been no unified publication of her works, scattered as they are among dated journals or not published at all. This book aims to help fill this lacuna by offering a critical introduction to her literary output as a writer in her own right, and presenting, for the first time, an anthology of her main artistic works, some in fresh English translation, and others never translated before.
In a first-ever publishing event, the remarkable photography and writings of Countess Sophia Tolstoy reveal the unfolding of her life with her famous husband--and evocatively portray a glittering world that soon would fade away. 120 photographs.
A work unprecedented in world literature, this unique volume contains a new translation of Lev Tolstoy’s controversial novella The Kreutzer Sonata, which was initially banned by Russian censors. In addition, available to English readers for the first time is a fascinating and previously neglected constellation of counterstories written by the author’s wife and son in direct response to Tolstoy’s provocative tale, each a passionate attempt to undo the message of the original work. These radically conflicting tales, accompanied by excerpts from family letters, diaries, notes, and memoirs, provide readers with a vivid and highly revealing case study of the powerful disputes concerning sexuality and gender roles that erupted within the cultural context of late-nineteenth-century Russian, as well as European, society.
Many readers may know that such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence used their marriages for literary inspiration and material. In Russian literary marriages, these women did not resent taking a secondary position, although to call their position secondary does not do justice to the vital role these women played in the creation of some of the greatest literary works in history. From Sofia Tolstoy to Vera Nabokov and Elena Mandelshtam and Natalya Solzhenitsyn, these women ranged from stenographers and typists to editors, researchers, translators, and even publishers. Living under restrictive regimes, many of these women battled censorship and preserved the writers’ illicit archives, often risking their own lives to do so. They established a tradition all their own, unmatched in the West. Many of these women, like Vera and Sofia, were the writers’ intellectual companions and willingly contributed to the creative process—they commonly used the word “we” to describe the progress of their husbands’ work. And their husbands knew it too. Leo Tolstoy made no secret of Sofia’s involvement in War and Peace, and Vladimir Nabokov referred to Vera as his own “single shadow.”
Both Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) and his wife Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya (1844–1919) were prolific letterwriters. Lev Nikolaevich wrote approximately 10,000 letters over his lifetime — 840 of these addressed to his wife. Letters written by (or to) Sofia Andreevna over her lifetime also numbered in the thousands. When Tolstaya published Lev Nikolaevich’s letters to her, she declined to include any of her 644 letters to her husband. The absence of half their correspondence obscured the underlying significance of many of his comments to her and occasionally led the reader to wrong conclusions. The current volume, in presenting a constantly unfolding dialogue between the Tolstoy-Tolstaya couple — mostly for the first time in English translation — offers unique insights into the minds of two fascinating individuals over the 48-year period of their conjugal life. Not only do we ’peer into the souls’ of these deep-thinking correspondents by penetrating their immediate and extended family life — full of joy and sadness, bliss and tragedy but we also observe, as in a generation-spanning chronicle, a variety of scenes of Russian society, from rural peasants to lords and ladies. This hard-cover, illustrated critical edition includes a foreword by Vladimir Il’ich Tolstoy (Lev Tolstoy’s great-great-grandson), introduction, maps, genealogy, as well as eleven additional letters by Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya published here for the very first time in either Russian or English translation. It is a beautiful complement to My Life, a collection of Sofia Tolstaya’s memoirs published in English in 2010 at the University of Ottawa Press.