Tolstoy

Another oblique source for The Kreutzer Sonata were certain events in Tolstoy’s own family life which touched a raw nerve. In the autumn of 1887 his second eldest son Ilya proposed to his sweetheart Sofya Filosofova. Tolstoy was a concerned father, as the couple did not have very good prospects and were both very young: Ilya was twenty-one, Sofya was twenty. Ilya had failed to graduate from his lycée, so was ineligible for university, and he had returned from spending two years in the army without any plans for earning his living. The Tolstoys were friends with his fiancée’s family, but they were well aware she was no better off: her father worked at the Moscow art school where Tanya had trained. Tolstoy wrote Ilya several letters entreating him to consider carefully the step he was about to take, but his son’s heart was set. There were further reasons why Tolstoy should have marital relations at the forefront of his mind at this time. In September 1887 he and Sonya celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and his wife was pregnant again. Their son Ivan (Vanechka) was born on 31 March 1888, a month after Ilya’s marriage. On Christmas Eve of that year their first grandchild Anna was born.

Apart from the Tolstoys’ eldest child Sergey (who had left Moscow University and was now working for the Tula peasant bank), only Ilya lived away from home at this time.¹⁰⁸ In the spring of 1889 Tolstoy went to visit him and his family, and was appalled to find coachmen, carriages, horses and other trappings of a comfortable lifestyle which he felt they should abjure. Ilya was not the only one of his sons with whom Tolstoy seriously fell out during these years.¹⁰⁹ His third eldest son Lev, then in his last year of school, constantly argued with him. Tolstoy also seriously risked falling out with his daughter Masha, whom his follower Pavel Biryukov proposed to at the end of 1888. Sonya was not prepared for her daughter to marry a ‘Tolstoyan’, even if he was of noble background, and she blocked it. Biryukov went away to lick his wounds but reappeared in Tolstoy’s life in 1891 after sailing to Japan with the future Nicholas II on his nine-month ‘grand tour’.¹¹⁰ Masha accepted her lot meekly. Since she was Tolstoy’s favourite daughter, whom he relied upon for assistance and moral support, he was secretly glad, and he himself would later thwart Masha’s romantic dreams on more than one occasion in a selfish attempt to keep her near him. Tolstoy had little to do with his youngest children Andrey, Misha and Alexandra, eleven, nine and four respectively, who barely saw their father, let alone baby Vanechka. Unlike the elder children, whom he had personally taught, the youngest came under the care of tutors and governesses, and were essentially brought up by Sonya.

Ilya’s marriage, and the births of his son and granddaughter in quick succession, had a profound effect on Tolstoy, particularly the birth of Vanechka, which had been very difficult for Sonya. She was forty-three, he was fifty-nine, and he felt ashamed that while he had successfully been able to fight the temptation to drink wine and eat meat, he had been unable to master his physical desire for his wife, particularly knowing how reluctant she was to become pregnant again. He despised himself for his weakness, and ended up venting his self-loathing in his fiction, which Sonya perceived as barbs personally directed at her. Having exalted the sanctity of marriage in What I Believe a few years earlier, Tolstoy now regarded it as an institution to be roundly condemned. He had always taken violent exception to the idea of marriage without children, but now even procreation could not redeem its sinfulness. Not for the first time in his life the mercurial writer had changed his tune. Well might Sonya find her husband’s sudden advocacy of chastity, even within marriage, hypocritical and hard to take. According to her first Russian biographer, she became pregnant yet again in 1890, and was relieved to miscarry.¹¹¹