Black Milk - Elif Shafak [29]
When Tolstoy peered into the soul of his wife, he saw youth, desire and ambition, and was displeased with what he found. When Sophia peered into the soul of her husband, she saw self-centeredness mixed with the seeds of altruism, and never sensed how much this would affect their lives in the future. He stared at her and wondered how she, as comfortable and well brought up as she was, could still have worldly aspirations. She stared at him and wondered how he, as pampered and respected as he was, could love anything, be it his writing or God, more than he loved her.
Like Dr. Frankenstein, who struggled to rid himself of the creature he had designed and crafted, Tolstoy made an unhappy, argumentative wife out of the young girl he had married years earlier.
For a while he tried to put up with her, but his patience rapidly ran out. In a letter written to his daughter Alexandra Lvovna, he complained of Sophia’s “perpetual spying, eavesdropping, incessant complaining, ordering him about, as her fancy takes her. . . .” In the same breath, he said he wanted freedom from her. He suddenly, abrasively and irreversibly distanced himself from his wife and from everything that was associated with her.
Then one day, he simply took off.
That afternoon, for the first time in a long while, he felt freedom by his side, not as an abstract concept or an idea to defend, but as a presence, so close, solid and tangible. He walked. He skipped and jumped. At the top of his voice, he sang songs that no one had heard before. The peasants working in the nearby fields solemnly watched the most respected novelist in Russia doing one crazy thing after another, and they spoke about it to no one. As if in return for their silent support, that same evening, Tolstoy decided to give away his possessions to the poor. The man who came from an aristocratic background, who had been sheltered all his life, was now determined to shed all the privileges of his station.
When Sophia, the matriarch, heard about this, she went berserk. Only a fool would squander his wealth like that, she was certain—only a fool with no wife or children to care for. Before long, and much to her chagrin, Tolstoy publicly declared that he had wiped his hands clean of the material world. He gave away all of his money, all of his land. Abandoning the banquets he was so fond of, he swore off eating meat, hunting and drinking, and put himself to work like a village craftsman.
Sophia watched his transformation in absolute horror. The nobleman she married, the writer she adored and the husband for whom she bore children was gone, replaced by a badly dressed, flea-ridden peasant. It was an insult that drove straight into her heart.
She called Tolstoy’s new habits “the Dark Ones,” as if speaking of a fatal illness, like a plague that had tainted their household. Her lips chapped from biting them, her mouth contorted in unhappiness and her face that of a woman older than her age, she suffered one nervous breakdown after another. One day her son Lev asked Sophia if she was happy. It took her a while to answer a question as simple and challenging as this. Finally she said yes, she was happy. Her son asked, “So why do you look like a martyress?”
The love between husband and wife, as strong as it might once have been, could not accommodate the woman and man they had grown into, generating mutual rage and resentment, like a wound bleeding inwardly.
Finally, in the fall of 1910, a few months after secretly taking his wife out of his will, and giving the publishing rights of his novels to his editor, Tolstoy fell sick with pneumonia. Fading in and out of consciousness, the way he had faded in and out of his wife’s life for decades, he died in a train station where he had fled to after yet another argument at home. It is symbolic that the writer, who had started his literary walk by claiming that true happiness lies within family life, ended his life by walking away from his family, away from her.
For a long time Sophia was seen as solely a mother and wife. Her great contribution