Black Milk - Elif Shafak [28]
She was like the moon in its phases, glowing against the starry skies. Her body changed every minute of the day, every week, and every month, filling out, rounding up to fullness, and then slimming down only to fill out again. Sophia was a moon woman.
While Tolstoy was in his room, writing by the light of an oil lamp, Sonya—the Russian diminutive for Sophia—distracted the children lest they disturb their father. Her diaries bear witness to her dedication. When Tolstoy asked Sophia not to nag him for not writing, she was so surprised she wrote down in her diary, “But how can I nag? What right do I have?” Night after night, year after year, she worked hard to make the process of writing easier for him. And in the hours that were not consumed by her kids, she acted as her husband’s secretary. Not only did she keep the notes for War and Peace, she rewrote the entire manuscript seven times over. Once when she suffered a miscarriage and fell gravely ill, she was worried that because of her illness he would not be able to write. She inspired, indulged and assisted him—a fact that is hard to remember when one sees the depth of the hatred that cropped up between them later in life.
Then he wrote the marvelous Anna Karenina—the novel that begins with one of the most quoted lines in world literature: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” One question literary historians and biographers are fond of bringing up is to what extent Tolstoy’s real life influenced the subject matter of the novel. How many of Tolstoy’s own fears, with regard to his wife and his marriage, found their way into Anna Karenina? Perhaps the famous writer, then forty-four, steered his story into the stormy waters of adultery as a warning to Sophia, who was then only twenty-eight. Perhaps by writing about the disastrous consequences that a high-society lady could suffer through infidelity, he was simply cautioning his wife.
As if a married woman’s debauchery isn’t sinful enough, when lovers live not in the high mountains in isolation but in the heart of the civilized world, it is a sin far worse. The first time Alexey Alexandrovitch has a serious talk with his wife, he makes this very clear: “I want to warn you that through thoughtlessness and lack of caution you may cause yourself to be talked about in society.” Things get out of hand not when a woman has feelings for a man other than her husband but when the knowledge of this becomes public.
It is also probable that through his novel, Tolstoy wasn’t only sending his wife a message but was also teaching his daughters of varying ages a lesson in morality. Strangely enough, the novel ended up having more impact on him than on his wife or daughters. He went through a moral torment, the first of many, which would end up paving the way for a very different sort of existential crisis—one that would strike at the very essence of his marriage.
No matter how we interpret the events that followed, this much is true: Sophia never saw Anna as a role model, positive or negative. The fictional character who wore dark lilac, who wished to be like a happy heroine in an English novel, who worked on a children’s book and who smoked opium—although similar in some ways to Sophia—was clearly not her. Despite the concerns her husband harbored, she never abandoned him or loved another man. On the contrary, she remained attached—perhaps too attached—to her husband and to her family, until it drove her over the edge. Every year a new baby came, and with every child Sophia turned a bit more irritable and their marriage took another blow.
A day would not pass without an argument erupting within the house, the husband’s and wife’s energies drained by petty squabbles no bigger than a speck of dust. In this way, the Tolstoys waded through the thick fog of marriage for several more years. Sexuality was still a way of reconnecting, but when that, too, was gone—more for him than for her—and the fog began to dissolve, Tolstoy couldn’t bear to see what it had been