Sophia Tolstaya

Sophia Tolstaya, born Sofia Behrs, was a Russian diarist, copyist and photographer who lived through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is best known as the wife of the novelist Leo Tolstoy, but her own papers, photographs and memoirs give her a significance that goes beyond that role.

She was born in 1844 at Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo, near Moscow, the daughter of a physician at the imperial court of Baltic German descent and a Russian mother. She had known Tolstoy since childhood, since he had been a family friend when he was a young man. He was sixteen years older, and already famous for The Cossacks. They became engaged in September 1862 and married a week later. On the eve of the wedding he handed her his private diaries, which described his sexual relationships with servants and revealed that he had fathered a child by one of them. Scholars often link this episode to the courtship scenes in Anna Karenina.

The couple had thirteen children, though only eight reached adulthood. Sophia took on much of the family's financial management and the business of her husband's publications. She copied the manuscript of War and Peace by hand, several times, often by candlelight once the household had gone to bed. From 1887 she took up photography and made more than a thousand pictures of family life and of Russia in those years. She also kept a long diary, most of which only appeared decades later.

The last years of the marriage were bitter. Tolstoy wanted to give his property and copyrights to humanity rather than to his family, and the dispute ran through her writings, including the novella Whose Fault? and the unpublished Song Without Words, written in 1898 as a reply to The Kreutzer Sonata. In 1910 Tolstoy left home, and he died days later at the railway station at Astapovo. Sophia remained at Yasnaya Polyana until her death in 1919, two years after the Revolution. Her diaries, photographs and memoirs have left a record of the marriage seen from inside it.