Tolstoy

Tolstoy was embarking on the happiest years of his life, but there was no question of husband and wife ever being equal partners in this marriage. At thirty-four, Tolstoy was acutely conscious of his bride being a child, and he even refers to her as such in his diaries.⁴ He was also only two years younger than his mother-in-law, Lyubov Alexandrovna Bers, whom he had known since childhood, their fathers having been good friends. Indeed, his youngest brother-in-law, Vyacheslav, was just one year old when Tolstoy married his sister Sonya. Nevertheless, it suited Tolstoy to have a young girl as his bride. As their son Sergey would later comment, his father was deeply in love with his mother when he married her, but he also wanted someone he could educate and mould according to his own tastes.⁵ Sonya, happily, accepted her husband’s moral authority from the beginning, and even directly referred to herself in letters to him in the early years of their marriage as his ‘eldest daughter’. In one letter she reassures her husband that she has not forgotten his ‘parental advice’.⁶

Then there was the difference in social backgrounds. Sergey also notes at the start of his memoirs that his father had not wanted to marry an aristocrat like himself. As the daughter of a doctor descended from a German immigrant and an illegitimate Russian noblewoman, Sonya certainly could not boast such an impressive pedigree. When she married, she took on a title as well all her husband’s views, and she liked being Countess Tolstoy. Her husband later renounced his title, but she continued to sign herself ‘Grafinya S. A. Tolstaya’ (grafinya being a Russian form of the original German Gräfin). Sonya never had the time to ruminate on the religious and philosophical ideas which inspired her husband’s radical change of lifestyle – she was too busy raising their family – so it was all the harder for her to repudiate the values he had so carefully inculcated her with during the first decades of their marriage and suddenly live another kind of life.

Sonya’s great-grandfather was Johann Bärs (or Behrs), an officer in the Horse Guards from Saxony, whose coat-of-arms depicted a bear repelling a swarm of bees, as befits a surname derived from the German word for bear.⁷ Ivan Bers, as he became known in his Russianised incarnation, was sent to St Petersburg by Empress Maria Theresa in the mid-eighteenth century to assist Empress Elizabeth with Russian military training. Before he was killed in action in 1758 at the Battle of Zorndorf, he married and had a son, Evstafy (Gustav), who grew up in Moscow, became a chemist and married into another Russianised German family. Evstafy Bers lost all his wealth and possessions in the great Moscow fire of 1812, but through his German connections was able to give his two sons a fine education. They both became students at Moscow university in 1822, and trained as doctors at the same time as Russia’s most famous nineteenth-century medical practitioner Nikolay Pirogov. One of the two sons was Sonya’s father Andrey, born in 1808.

Owing to its low social rank, medicine was not a highly regarded profession in early-nineteenth-century Russia, and certainly never pursued by aristocrats. At the time the Bers brothers qualified, when they were about twenty years old, the most respected doctors were still foreign, but still socially inferior. In the late 1820s Andrey Bers became family doctor to the Turgenevs (when the future writer was still a boy), and accompanied them to Paris. For the next two years he devoted himself to further study, Italian opera, and, it seems, Turgenev’s redoubtable and unhappily married mother, who bore him an illegitimate daughter, Varvara, whom she raised as her ward (which makes Sonya Turgenev’s half-sister). After he returned to Moscow, Andrey Bers started working as a doctor attached to the Senate, which was located in the kremlin, and then under Nicholas I he was appointed court physician. This entitled him to a cramped, low-ceilinged state apartment adjacent to the kremlin Palace, the Tsar’s imposing 700-room Moscow residence. This is where Sonya was born in 1844.