Tolstoy

Over the course of the nineteenth century the Orthodox Church had made marital separation more rather than less difficult. Petitions for divorce had to be made to the diocesan authorities, and entailed an expensive, bureaucratic and lengthy process, with nine separate stages. Adultery, furthermore, could only be proved with the testimony of witnesses, as Alexey Alexandrovich discovers to his horror when he goes to consult the ‘famous St Petersburg lawyer’ in Part Four of Anna Karenina. It is thus hardly surprising so few petitions were made – seventy-one in the whole of Russia in 1860, and only seven made on the grounds of adultery.¹⁰³ But with the Great Reforms, urban growth and the expansion of education came new attitudes towards marriage, and pressure to simplify and update divorce, so it was a constant topic of discussion in the ecclesiastical press in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹⁰⁴ A committee set up by reformers in 1870 proposed transferring divorce proceedings to the civil courts, thus saving the ecclesiastical authorities from having to investigate such matters, ‘which are full of descriptions of suggestive and disgusting scenes, in which the whole stench of depravity is often collected’.¹⁰⁵ In May 1873, just when Tolstoy was starting Anna Karenina, the Holy Synod overwhelmingly rejected this proposal, as it did a proposal to introduce civil marriage (which had already been introduced elsewhere in Europe) on the grounds that it was ‘legalised fornication’. Nevertheless, the number of divorces rose steadily, from 795 in 1866 to 947 in 1875.¹⁰⁶ Both Sonya’s elder sister Liza (the clever one Tolstoy had shrunk from marrying) and their brother Alexander obtained divorces during this period.¹⁰⁷

Tolstoy’s research on behalf of his sister served him well when dealing with the topic of divorce in Anna Karenina, as did the experience of witnessing divorce proceedings close at hand. In 1868 his old friend Dmitry Dyakov’s sister Maria Alexeyevna divorced the stuffy, karenin-like Sergey Sukhotin, having created a scandal by abandoning him and their young children for another man, with whom she had an illegitimate child.¹⁰⁸ In the event, his sister Masha did not need to go through with the divorce from her husband, as the weak-willed and impoverished viscount returned to Sweden to marry someone with better financial prospects, leaving Masha mired in debt. His family had been reluctant to see him marry a woman with four children who would also soon bear the stigma of divorce, and had persuaded him to leave her. Masha returned to Russia and Valerian Petrovich died the following year, but she remained deeply unhappy in her personal life, having left her daughter Elena behind in Switzerland. As she wrote in the desperate letter to her brother in 1876 in which she likened herself to Anna karenina, she knew of no single woman from their background with the ‘courage’ to admit to the existence of an illegitimate child.¹⁰⁹

Tolstoy himself certainly contemplated divorce too on occasion, but his increasingly troubled marriage was stable and conventional when compared to the marriages of his relatives and friends. His brother Dmitry spent his last years living with a former prostitute (as Nikolay does in Anna Karenina), and his brother Sergey was married to a gypsy. While Tolstoy was trying to rescue Masha in 1864, and write War and Peace, he suddenly found himself also having to deal with the romantic crisis Sergey had become embroiled in. The previous summer, after his fourteen-year relationship with Maria Shishkina, the gypsy singer from Tula whom he had ‘bought out’ from her choir, Sergey had suddenly fallen madly in love with Sonya’s vivacious sister Tanya (with whom Tolstoy himself was also slightly enamoured, if the truth be told). Sergey proposed to Tanya, but quite apart from the fact that he was twenty years older (Tanya was a very young seventeen), he already had three children with Maria Shishkina and was expecting a fourth. In the end, his conscience got the better of him. It broke his heart to see Maria praying on her knees in front of an icon in floods of tears, and meekly submitting to fate.¹¹⁰ In June 1865, a month after his daughter Vera was born, he broke off the engagement.¹¹¹