Recent scholarship has witnessed an outcry over the dispersal, among a multitude of sources, of the Tolstoy/Tolstaya couple’s previously published letters to one another. To make this particularly valuable source more accessible and suited for study by scholars and researchers around the world, there has been a strong push to have their entire correspondence published in chronological order. One particular benefit of such a project would be a corrective to inappropriate mislabelling of their complementary roles. For example, in his essay on the Russian version of Sofia Tolstaya’s memoir My Life, the former director of the L. N. Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, Vitalij Remizov noted the following:1
The notion has taken hold in the popular consciousness that Lev Tolstoy, albeit a genius, was pretty much a cantankerous fellow, difficult to get along with, and therefore his wife, Sofia Andreevna, is entitled to every kind of sympathy and justification. All the published diaries, narratives, excerpts from My Life, incline the reader to this very opinion. What to do? True, Tolstoy wrote thirteen volumes of diaries, but he showed himself reluctant to include in them the history of his relations with Sofia Andreevna. The whole complexity of their relationship is no doubt detailed in the couple’s exchange of letters, but this has never been published as correspondence. To search through Tolstoy’s letters to his wife in the 90 volume edition of his works1 is an exhausting task, while the collection of Sofia Andreevna’s letters to her husband came out in the pre-war years and is not accessible to the general public.2
And so the modern reader is left with only one aspect of the problem: the life of the family seen through the eyes of [one] spouse.
Our current edition may be seen as a first step in offering a remedy on a global scale: covering 239 of the couple’s letters, it is presented chronologically in a translation annotated specifically for English-speaking readers. In fact, it is part of a much larger project3 — the publication of the entire Tolstoy/Tolstaya correspondence in its original Russian, containing more than 1,500 letters, in addition to some 500 postscripts attached to the letters of others. I shall be carrying out this project jointly over the next few years with the L. N. Tolstoy Museum in Moscow. The four-volume publication will also feature 201 letters by Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya never published before in any language, save the eleven samples appearing for the very first time in this English edition. A fifth volume will comprise a comprehensive critical study in English of the correspondents’ personal (family and acquaintances) and, in particular, professional relationships, based primarily on their letters and postscripts, as well as other archival sources recently made available.
While the publication of just the new letters and postscripts by Tolstaya would represent a noteworthy achievement in itself, it would still lack the dimension of being seen in the context of the larger whole, and would simply add to the dispersal syndrome hinted at in the Remizov reference above.
It is precisely the combination of an integrated, chronological presentation and extensive annotations, many based on archival sources, which lends significance to this English edition and its projected multi-volume Russian counterpart. By illuminating, for example, the points and questions that each were responding to in their respective letters, they will afford the reader the opportunity to study the entire, complex relationship between husband and wife in previously unseen detail. The correspondence is a track record of the whole history of their marital life, from the very beginning of their falling in love to their very last “Forgive me” and “Farewell”. Here one may trace the consecutive stages of their expanding circle of love and family life, the potholes and pitfalls in their often stormy journey, not only through time and the trial of raising their many children, but through the ever-changing ethical norms and mores of nineteenth-century Russian society.
The social and political struggle between the traditional lifestyle of the privileged upper class and the poverty of the peasants and other underprivileged segments of the populace — a struggle which was accelerating toward revolution — was aptly mirrored in this husband-and-wife conflict. While Tolstoy was constantly obsessed with his ideals of social justice for the masses, Tolstaya failed to understand why he could not bring himself to put his own family first. While Tolstoy, for better or for worse, missed the Revolution, which occurred just a few years after his death in 1910 (and just two years before his wife’s passing in 1919), the social and political events over the fifty-or-so years preceding it are echoed in their own family struggles and well documented in the couple’s correspondence. Moreover, the letters include frequent references to friends and acquaintances at all levels of the social spectrum, ranging from local peasants and children’s governesses to artistic and literary celebrities (who were often guests in their home), and representatives of the nobility (including the Tsar and his entourage), some of whom they counted among their own relatives.
The significance of the opportunity to study personal correspondence (in contrast with diaries, autobiographies and other narratives) cannot be overestimated. For one thing, many of these letters were written during periods when their authors did not keep diaries. More importantly, it is the dialogue of personal letters which may offer the sincerest portrayal of their innermost thoughts and convictions, often expressed in response to specific themes and ideas raised by their partner just a day or two (or even hours) before. It should be remembered that while the nineteenth-century Russian postal service could not equal the speed of today’s emails, it was considerably quicker than many of its twenty-first century counterparts: a letter posted by Tolstaya in Moscow in the evening would usually reach her husband’s hands in Yasnaya Polyana by the following morning, and it was not unheard of to have a letter posted in the morning to arrive at its destination later the same day. Hence the interval between sending and receiving was short enough to keep the exchange fresh and right up to date, yet long enough to allow a bit of a pause for thought before the next exchange (in comparison with the spur-of-the-moment interchange of an oral conversation). And the benefits of being able to study a dialogue that was originally written on paper well over a century ago go without saying.
I am sure the readers of this translated volume will agree that the selection contained herein offers rich opportunity for insight into the thoughts and feelings behind the statements found in the already published accounts of both correspondents. These include Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya’s comprehensive memoir My Life, published in English by the University of Ottawa Press in 2010. Not only that, but we are also afforded a rare glimpse into the extensive everyday life of two kindred but independently minded thinkers. We learn of causes on which they were united in their efforts, for example, in helping provide famine relief during the drought of 1891–92 through a fund-raising campaign organised by Tolstaya, and her husband’s setting up of soup-kitchens in the worst-hit areas. There were also issues on which they were sharply divided. These included religion, where Tolstaya’s traditional views in line with Russian Orthodoxy were opposed to Tolstoy’s belief (shared by many Russian religious dissidents, especially the Doukhobors) that church organisation mattered little by comparison with each individual finding God within their heart and practising their beliefs in their daily life.
Beyond major issues like these, we also learn of the many people, places and day-to-day events that informed their lives, their thinking and their collective literary output (bear in mind that Tolstaya was a literary author in her own right), and, perhaps most importantly, their relationships with their children. While each marriage partner saw their children as a sounding-board for their own understanding of family values, it was their children, in fact, who put their sets of ideals to the test of real life and showed how each measured up in practice. These are but a few of the considerations worth bearing in mind as one wades through the lifetime of experiences and adventures described in the present book.
It should be pointed out that, like Sofia Tolstaya’s extensive autobiographical memoir My Life, the concept of the present book draws significantly on my previous research on Tolstoy extending over a period of four decades. Most recently, this has included a collection of eleven books (either authored or edited) known as the “Tolstoy Series”, published by the University of Ottawa’s Slavic Research Group, of which I served as Founding Director (1998–2012). All of my work on Tolstoy and his circle of family and associates over the past several decades has been generously supported by Canada’s national Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, for which I am most grateful.
A perusal of any or all of my previous works on Tolstoy will enhance the reader’s understanding and appreciation of the significance of the publication of this volume; for a partial listing, see my entries in the Bibliography. At this point I should just like to mention three books in particular which are probably unfamiliar to most readers of the Tolstoys’ correspondence, where I have taken the liberty of drawing upon my own introductions in preparing the following essay. These are: (a) L. N. Tolstoj i S. A. Tolstaja: Perepiska s N. N. Strakhovym / The Tolstoys’ Correspondence with N. N. Strakhov (Tolstoy Series 3, 2000); (b) Edinenie ljudej v tvorchestve L. N. Tolstogo / The Unity of People in Leo Tolstoy’s Works (Tolstoy Series 5, 2002); (c) Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya: Literary Works (Tolstoy Series 9, 2011).
As a general rule, the annotations to the English edition speak for themselves. However, in view of not only the linguistic but terminological and cultural differences between nineteenth-century Russia and the modern Anglophone world, a few additional practical notes are in order, as applied to the text of the correspondence.
It may be noted that the letters (at least those that history has preserved) are not distributed equally by year, either in our translated selection (see Chronological List of Letters below) or, for that matter, taking the whole of the writers’ correspondence into account. For example, no known letters passed between them in the year 1873, and only one letter by Tolstoy is extant for 1875 (with no response from Tolstaya).
The bulk of the correspondence dates from the 1880s and 1890s — that is, in the two decades following Tolstoy’s spiritual crisis, when his new philosophical views began driving a wedge in their marital relationship. Tolstoy’s busiest year was 1885, when he wrote 59 letters to his wife (in comparison to her 22 letters in return), while Tolstaya’s letter-writing peaked in 1893, when she penned 47 (to his 32), mostly dealing with her work on the Russian famine.
The lengthiest periods of their correspondence occurred during Tolstoy’s trips to Samara and the Crimea, for health reasons, and over the winter months in the 1880s and 1890s, which Tolstaya spent in Moscow with the children during their school years while Tolstoy preferred the solitude of Yasnaya Polyana. After 1900, the frequency of the correspondence diminished considerably; over the whole decade we know only of 89 letters from Tolstoy and 101 from Tolstaya (of which 32 remain unpublished).4
As to the criteria we used for the selection of letters to be included in the translated edition, we decided that the chosen letters should
•be a representative sampling of the whole correspondence in terms of both chronology and subject-matter;
•convey the element of dialogue by presenting (in many cases) specific responses to questions and comments one of the spouses had just received from the other;
•feature the correspondents’ commentaries both on important events in their own lives and on events of historical significance in Russian society as a whole; and
•highlight key episodes in their interaction with their family, as well as in their joint efforts to get Tolstoy’s manuscripts from their first rough draft to their final publication.
* * *
GLOSSARY OF TERMS AND ACRONYMS
ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISIONS. The nineteenth-century Russian state was divided into units called a gubernia [Russian form: gubernija], presided over by a gubernator (governor). Each gubernia, in turn, was made up of a number of smaller administrative units known as an uezd (pron. ‘oo-yezd’). The closest English equivalents would be province and county, respectively. They were called after the name of their administrative centre. For example, Tula Gubernia (where Yasnaya Polyana was located) was named after its central city, Tula, while Krapivna Uezd took its name from its major town, Krapivna (see List of Russian Geographical Names). In the Russian language, in combination with Gubernia or Uezd the adjectival variant of the city name was used (Tul’skaja Gubernia, Krapivenskij Uezd), but this modification is not reproduced in the English version. Less populated areas were sometimes designated a kraj (pron. ‘cry’). Cities were divided into districts, each of which was called a rajon (pron. ‘rayon’).
AREA. Land area in nineteenth-century Russia was commonly measured by a unit known as the desjatina, equal to 1.09 hectares. This term has been retained in the text.
CALENDAR DATES. Before February 1918, Russia operated on the old-style (O. S.) Julian calendar; by that time most Western countries had adopted the new-style (N. S.) Gregorian calendar proclaimed in 1582, designed to reflect more accurately the actual solar year by abolishing the date of 29 February (leap year) for those centenary years not exactly divisible by 400. As a result, by the nineteenth century the old-style calendar was 12 days behind the new-style (13 days in the twentieth century).
For example, Christmas Day (25 December) 1898 in the old-style (O. S.) calendar came on 6 January 1899 according to Western calendars, while on New Years’ Day (1 January) 1899 in Russia, it was already 13 January new-style (N. S.) in the West.
In the year 1900, however, another day’s discrepancy was added, since the day of 29 February, omitted that year from the Western calendar, continued to be observed in Russia according to the old Julian calendar. Hence New Year’s Day 1901 old-style fell on 14 January new-style.
The Bolshevik October Revolution was named from its O. S. date of 25 October 1917, now celebrated on 7 November (N. S.). A few months later, at the beginning of 1918, the new Bolshevik government brought Russia into line with the rest of the world by officially switching the country to the new-style Gregorian calendar. The old Julian calendar, however, continues to be used in the Russian Orthodox Church even to this day.
Unless otherwise noted, the dates in the text of the letters, the accompanying footnotes and the chronology are cited according to the Julian (O. S.) calendar.
AUTHOR ABBREVIATIONS. Throughout the footnotes and supplementary texts, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy is abbreviated as LNT, while Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya is designated by her initials SAT.
CURRENCY. The Imperial Russian rouble (rubl’) in 1899 was either a paper note or silver coin worth approximately one-tenth of a pound sterling, or about 50 cents (Canadian or American), at the time. A kopek coin (Russian: kopejka) was a hundredth part of a rouble. The grivennik was worth ten kopeks (i.e., one-tenth of a rouble), while the term pjatak (or pjatachok) referred to a five-kopek copper (or, occasionally, silver) coin. No monetary equivalents are given in the translation — beyond the writers’ own notations on the subject. However, to facilitate a better comprehension, we might mention a few typical average salaries at the beginning of the twentieth century: a gubernia (provincial) governor might have made as much as 10,000 roubles per year, a university professor — 2,400 and a police chief — 1,500, all in addition to a food-and-lodging allowance.
DISTANCE. The most common unit of distance measurement in Imperial Russia was the verstá, known in English as the verst, roughly the equivalent of 1.07 km. Smaller units of measurement were the sazhen’, equal to 2.1 m, the arshin, equal to 0.71 m and the vershok = 4.45 cm (retained in the text with a metric equivalent).
HONOURARY TITLES. The Russian aristocracy had a hierarchy roughly parallel with those of Western European countries. Tolstoy was officially a Count (Russian: graf, a term borrowed from German), and his wife a Countess (grafinja) — a title she jealously guarded until her death. The honorary title was frequently added either to the surname (Count Tolstoy) or the first-name-plus-patronymic combination (Count Lev Nikolaevich) as a special mark of respect or politeness. Titles, at times hereditary, were originally bestowed for a particular service to the Tsar, who was also referred to as ‘Emperor of all the Russias’. In the nineteenth century, the terms Tsar (Russian: tsar’, derived from Latin Cæsar) and Emperor (imperator) were more or less interchangeable in reference to Russia’s supreme ruler, while their wives were called either tsaritsa or imperatritsa. On occasion the Empress herself might serve as the supreme ruler, as in the case of Empress Catherine the Great (Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaja) in the second half of the eighteenth century.
One of the highest titles the Tsar could bestow was knjaz’, most often translated as ‘Prince’, although it was actually more the equivalent of ‘Duke’. (A prince’s wife was known as knjaginja, translatable either as ‘Princess’ or ‘Duchess’, while a princess by birth was known as knjazhna before marriage.) Members of the Tsar’s own family, including heirs to the throne, were honoured with the title Velikij knjaz’ (Grand Prince) or Velikaja knjaginja (Grand Duchess).
Apart from honorary titles, the system of both civil and military ranks was extremely important. It was based on the so-called Table of Ranks (Tabel’ o rangakh) promulgated by Tsar Peter the Great in 1722, which set forth a hierarchy of fourteen ranks through which worthy individuals might advance — and achieve nobility (even hereditary) status — in both the military and civil services. This system continued in force right up to the overthrow of the monarchy in 1917.
LETTER HEADINGS. Readers will note that the letter headings (with date and place of writing) are different for the two authors: LNT’s headings are in italics, while SAT’s are in Roman type with editorial additions in brackets. Here we have simply reproduced the style of headings we received from the original Russian editors of the correspondence, reflecting the fact that LNT’s and SAT’s letters have always been published separately, never as a joint dialogue. The designation TTC stands for ‘Tolstoy-Tolstaya Correspondence’. PSS = Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij (LNT’s Complete Collected Works). LSA = Letters of Sofia Andreevna.
PARAGRAPH DIVISIONS. In a manner characteristic of informal letter writing of the period, both correspondents made relatively infrequent use of paragraph divisions. As a result, some of the paragraphs in the letters translated here are rather long and rambling, with many unmarked changes of subject within a single paragraph. It has been decided to leave this format intact in the translation, rather than artificially introduce paragraph divisions that are not in the original letters.
RUSSIAN NAMES. Most Russian surnames have both a masculine and feminine variant — a distinction we decided to maintain in the translation. (In Russian this is further complicated by the existence of a separate plural form; indeed, all three of these variants — masculine, feminine and plural — may change according to the function of the word in the sentence, i.e., the grammatical case, of which there are six variations. In addition, many surnames, including Tolstoj/Tolstaja, are derived from adjectives rather than nouns, which gives them an entirely different set of case endings.)
The surname (familija) comprises the third of three parts of every Russian person’s name (although in official documents the surname is placed first). As in most cultures, it is traditionally passed down through the male lineage from generation to generation. The first part (imja, or so-called Christian name) is the only one chosen by the parents (or godparents) at the birth of their offspring, and even this (in the pre-Soviet era) was frequently taken from the name of the saint on whose day the birth took place. The middle part, known as the patronymic (otchestvo) is invariably derived from the first name of the baby’s father, with an ending ovna (or evna) for female progeny and ovich (or evich) for males. Hence the patronymic Andreevna in Tolstaya’s name is derived from her father’s name Andrej, while the corresponding Nikolaevich in Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy is taken from his father’s name Nikolaj.
In addition, almost every Russian Christian name (imja), in its standard form (the form used on birth certificates), gives rise to a host of diminutive (or endearing) forms, both primary (often used by one’s colleagues, friends and childhood acquaintances, as well as family) and secondary (generally restricted to use by family members and especially close friends). The standard form Tat’jana, for example, yields the primary diminutive Tanja and the secondary Tanechka (along with Tanjusha, Tanjukh, Tanjushen’ka and dozens of other possible variants). From Lev come Lëva, Lëlja, Lëvochka, etc. These variants may be used to distinguish members of a family having the same Christian name. Lev Nikolaevich was often called Lëvochka by his wife and a few others close to him, while his son Lev L’vovich was mostly referred to simply as Lëva (or, sometimes, Lëlja). Lev L’vovich’s own baby son, Lev L’vovich Jr, was dubbed Lëvushka. Note that the letter ë in Russian represents a sound similar to yo in English, and is always stressed, while the apostrophe indicates a softening of the preceding consonant before another consonant or at the end of a word, and is represented by a separate letter of the Russian alphabet (ь).
It is important to realise that the combination of the first name (in its standard form) and patronymic together constitutes the most common polite form of address among adults acquainted with each other (in preference to the Russian equivalents of Mr. and Ms., which tend to be used only on official occasions). Tolstaya would be known in public as Sofia Andreevna, her husband as Lev Nikolaevich, and this is how they would feel comfortable being addressed by any acquaintance or stranger (but never as Sofia or Lev alone). In her writings (including her letters) Tolstaya often calls her husband by his diminutive name Lëvochka.
TRANSLITERATION OF RUSSIAN WORDS. This follows a modified academic system (for example, using ju and ja for the last two letters of the Russian alphabet, j for the Russian letter й, but sh, ch and zh in place of the variants with diacritics). An exception is made in the case of names and terms already possessing a well-established English spelling — for example, Tolstoy (rather than Tolstoj) for LNT, Yasnaya Polyana (Jasnaja Poljana), Dostoevsky (Dostoevskij), Tchaikovsky (Chajkovskij), balalaika (balalajka). Particularly notable among these exceptions is the name of Tolstaya herself, which for a combination of reasons we have rendered throughout as Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya (rather than the normative transliteration Sof’ja Andreevna Tolstaja). However, for all other male and female persons sharing their surnames, we have used Tolstoj and Tolstaja, respectively.
WEIGHT. A standard unit of measurement for foodstuffs in Imperial Russia was the funt, which at 409.5 g was slightly less than a pound (453.6 g). Larger quantities were measured in a unit known as a pood; 1 pood = 40 Russian funts, or 16.38 kg.
WORD-USAGE AND ORTHOGRAPHY. Given the essentially European character of the work — bear in mind that Tolstaya was brought up speaking both French and German (her father’s native tongue) as well as Russian, while Tolstoy had a strong exposure to French as a child; both later acquired a very good knowledge of English — word-usage and orthography have been conformed, in the main, to early twentieth-century (British) English. Spelling throughout the text follows the Oxford English Dictionary, except for material quoted from a published English-language source, where the original orthography has naturally been retained.
ACRONYMS
LNT Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy
LSA Letters of Sofia Andreevna
N.S. new-style Gregorian calendar
O.S. old-style Julian calendar
PSS Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij (Complete Collected Works)
SAT Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya
1 The 90-volume Jubilee Edition of Tolstoy’s works (Moscow: Gosizdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoj literatury, 1928–58) includes his letters to Sofia Andreevna (in Vols. 83 & 84), but none of her letters to him (except the occasional excerpt in a footnote). The formal Russian title of the Jubilee Edition is Polnoe sobranie sochinenij [Complete Collected Works], and will be designated throughout the footnotes by its Russian abbreviation: PSS.
2 Pis’ma k L. N. Tolstomu 1862–1910 [Letters to L. N. Tolstoy. 1862–1910]. Ed. A. I. Tolstaja & P. S. Popov. Intro. P. S. Popov. Moscow & Leningrad: Academia, 1936.
3 Funded by a grant from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada.
4 These statistics are based on LNT’s Complete Collected Works [PSS] and on the 1936 volume Pis’ma k L. N. Tolstomu 1862–1910 [Letters to L. N. Tolstoy 1862–1910], edited by A. I. Tolstaja and P. S. Popov (see Bibliography).