January 01, 2010

Lev Tolstoy's Unhappy Family

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy died almost a century ago (on November 7, 1910), at the age of eighty-two, in the home of a railway station attendant in Astapovo. Unlike Pushkin and Dostoyevsky, whose descendants are few, the Tolstoys (Sonya and Lev) were blessed with

13 children. While only eight survived to adulthood, six of them produced 31 grandchildren, and, at last count, almost 200 living direct descendants. Unfortunately, however, the couple’s 48-year marriage, which began happily, unraveled dramatically in later years, forcing the children to take sides.

Leo Tolstoy’s famous opening line from Anna Karenina (1873-77): “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” was prophetic about the family he started when he married Sonya Behrs in 1862. Despite their significant age difference (he was 34 and she 18), they spent their early married years happily. She gladly helped him with his literary work and, in the first 26 years of their marriage, bore him 13 children (only eight of whom survived beyond early childhood).

While Tolstoy was delighted with Sonya’s assistance and fecundity in what critics describe as the “vegetative period” of his life, their relationship took a sour turn after 1880. This year marked the beginning of the writer’s archetypal “mid-life crisis,” which caused him to question the meaning of human existence and to reassess his value system.

As members of the gentry, the Tolstoys were expected to provide for their children and help them attain the same elite status and material comfort that they enjoyed. Although Sonya was committed to these traditional class values and felt no need to question them, Lev began at this time to reject them. He became more concerned with society’s less fortunate and sought to help them improve their lot in life, often at the material expense of his own family. A quarrel ensued between the spouses that continued for the final 30 years of their married life. It finally precipitated the writer’s sudden departure from the family estate (Yasnaya Polyana) in 1910, at the venerable and vulnerable age of 82.

As the Tolstoy children matured, the nature of the dispute became more and more acrimonious. Both Lev and Sonya resorted to desperate actions to promote their own interests. Against her husband’s will, Sonya actively assumed the role of his agent, negotiating the most lucrative deals for his current works as well as for the earlier ones that were to be republished in Russia and the West. Since Tolstoy did not share his wife’s entrepreneurial goals, he hired Vladimir Chertkov to represent his more altruistic interests both at home and abroad.

In the meantime, Tolstoy labeled Sonya “an hysterical woman” (the so-called “Xanthippe syndrome”), because she was “irrationally” betraying his newly formulated beliefs. Sonya, on the other hand, always asserted that she was acting rationally and had only the interests of her children at heart — an argument which feminist critics have supported since their movement into the mainstream of literary criticism.

While Tolstoy scholars have devoted nearly a century of discussions to this dispute — the Soviets even produced a feature film on the topic, Lev Tolstoy (1984, directed by Sergei Gerasimov), and feminist Tolstoy scholars published Sonya’s diaries in her defense (The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, translated by Catherine Porter, Random House, l985) — the focus has usually been concentrated on the couple’s interaction. Seldom has much attention been given to the reactions of their eight children, who were forced to endure three decades of a dysfunctional home life.

Lev Jr.

Although ironically named for his father, Lev Jr. (mladshy) was least like his father and most resembled his mother with his black eyes, slight build and nervous temperament. Because he was the first sickly child in the family, Sonya nurtured him lovingly, developing a lifelong attachment to him. In turn, he repaid her with an uncompromised loyalty. In fact, his family memoir The Truth About My Father (1924) can be viewed as a thesis in defense of his mother, whom he saw as responsible for his father’s most happy moments in life as well as for the cultivation of his genius during the first fifteen years of their marriage.

As a challenge to those who argued that Sonya changed from a loving wife to an hysterical, greedy woman and therefore was responsible for the negative direction of the marriage, he censured his father for his religious crisis, which altered him from a gentleman landowner to a would-be peasant, while his mother remained “both outwardly and inwardly always the same,” never wavering from her role as an ideal wife, devoted mother to the older and younger children, and a respected woman of high society.

This is not to say that Lev Jr. was not influenced by his father’s powerful ideas. On the contrary, he was very impressed by Tolstoy’s religious ideals, such as the personal perfection of love toward one’s neighbor and non-resistance to evil, especially when coercion became its primary manifestation. However, Lev clearly had a need to challenge his father, and by age 25 he had rejected Tolstoyism in favor of the material advantages of European civilization. He experienced these temptations during his extended stays in France and Sweden, where he had traveled for treatment of a nervous malady which had acute psychosomatic effects. In Sweden, Lev married Dora Westerlund, the daughter of his doctor, recovered his health for good, and bid farewell to what he sarcastically described as “my long Tolstoyan illness.”

Lev’s rejection of his father’s philosophy was only his first of many challenges to Tolstoy’s overriding personality. In addition to this, he studied medicine — in defiance of Tolstoy’s condemnation of doctors, wrote a novel titled Chopin’s Prelude — designed to oppose his father’s most controversial work The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), and had the audacity to pen a journalistic article justifying the Russo-Japanese War, well aware of his father’s ardent pacifism.

Since Lev was the only offspring to follow a literary career, it was obvious that he presented the most formidable challenge to his father, who responded accordingly when he wrote: “Although it is wrong of me, I must say of my Son Leo, that he… has all the faults and none of the gifts needed to become a writer.”

While Lev Jr. rebelled against his father in every conceivable way, he never missed an opportunity to defend his mother. When critics argued that, as a loyal wife, she should have put her husband’s ideas into practice, he countered with the question, “Ought she to have given all her goods to the poor and left her children and her grandchildren without a roof over their heads?” Moreover, he argued that her copying of War and Peace seven times gave her the right to have a say in whether or not the novel should become public property.

When the family dispute reached a boiling point, in November 1910, as Tolstoy prepared his departure, Lev Jr. was convinced that the entire family had conspired against his mother and, in retrospect, offered this statement in her defense: “All my sympathies, and all my compassion naturally were for my mother, who was the weaker party.” To Sonya’s misfortune, Lev could not protect her against the isolation which the other children imposed on her during Tolstoy’s last hours at the Astapovo Train Station; he was en route from Paris as the tragedy unfolded.

In his memoir, Lev Jr. wrote that the tragedy of his father’s death could have been averted if Chertkov had not conspired with his younger sister Alexandra Lvovna in the writing of a secret will, which granted the publisher definitive monetary rights to the future publication of Tolstoy’s works. This will was a personal affront to Sonya, whom Lev Jr. defended not only from his father’s attacks against her (he even once wrote “I did not like him, when he was angry with my mother”), but also from those of his siblings and from society’s condemnation as a whole.

Lev Tolstoy Jr. died in 1945, at age 76. He is the head of the so-called “Swedish line” of the Tolstoy family, which in many ways lost its ties to Russian language and culture. He and his wife Dora had eight children, including Lev Tolstoy the Third, who unfortunately died in early childhood. The couple’s great-granddaughter Viktoria Tolstoy (born 1974) is an internationalist jazz vocalist based in Sweden.

Alexandra (Sasha)

As Lev Jr. suggested in his memoirs, Alexandra Lvovna was the most alienated of the Tolstoy children toward their mother and demonstrated this through her alliance with Chertkov. The author of two works on Tolstoy, (The Tragedy of Tolstoy, 1933 and A Life of My Father, 1953), Sasha undeniably placed herself in her father’s camp. Indeed, her adoration of her father was so complete that she never married, devoting her 95 years first to his life, and then to his memory, with her establishment of the Tolstoy Foundation in Valley Cottage, New York.

Alexandra Lvovna’s preference for her father can be traced to her teenage years, when Sonya rejected her with labels such as “rude, disobedient, and stupid.” It is quite clear that these remarks irreparably damaged Sasha’s self-esteem, as she noted in her own self-description in 1896: “Let us glance for a moment at 12-year-old Sasha, a naïve, undeveloped girl, not pretty, awkward, morbidly shy, with the clearly defined inferiority complex of a child left almost entirely in the care of governesses and an old nurse.”

Because Sasha demonstrated none of the social graces which her mother valued, she felt alienated from her and gravitated toward her father’s newly-found religion, which placed ethical life choices before social interaction or ritual observances. Writing in her diary on March 30, 1901, Sonya reacted strongly to Sasha’s negation of her value system, which revolved around religious life: “Things have turned out most unpleasantly with Sasha. She has not joined me in the Lenten observance; once she excused herself, another time she scraped her leg, and then she flatly refused to go. This is a fresh step in our break.”

As if this were not enough to poison relations between mother and daughter, Tolstoy now began to entrust Sasha with the copying of his works — an honor he had reserved for his wife during the happier years of their married life. Furthermore, in the last years of his life, Tolstoy saw fit to leave the rights of his works exclusively to Sasha, convinced that she was most inclined of all the children to turn them over to the public. He also suggested that, after his death, she should purchase Yasnaya Polyana from her mother and her siblings, then turn it over to the peasants. Each of these steps indicated that Tolstoy had made a conscious decision to transfer his trust from Sonya to his youngest daughter, who selflessly devoted herself to him and his legacy.

In the meantime, Sasha needed to settle a personal vendetta with her mother. She saw an opportunity to achieve this during the flight phase of her parents’ dispute. Leaving with her father in 1910 and accompanying him to the train station where he became critically ill, she made every effort to deny Sonya access to Lev Nikolayevich — her husband of almost half a century. Undoubtedly, Sasha’s hostility toward her mother was peaking at the same time as the bitter feelings between husband and wife, as she writes in her second book on her father: “How much easier it would have been for Father if we, his nearest ones, could have felt love and pity toward Mother. But I did not pity her. I was angry.”

Just like Lev Jr., who vented his feelings by holding his father accountable for the ugly final days because “he had outlived his mind,” Sasha felt vindicated when she could apply denigrating labels to her mother, who had attacked a sensitive adolescent girl in need of approval. Such labels were supplied by contemporaneous psychiatrists, who diagnosed Sonya’s personality at this stage as a combination of “paranoid and hysterical states, with a preponderance of the former.”

Subsequently, Alexandra grew less bitter toward her mother and became somewhat reconciled during the final years of Sonya’s widowhood. However, after her mother’s death in 1919, Sasha found a new enemy in the Soviet regime, and left Russia for Japan in 1930 (ostensibly on a lecture tour), never to return. Eventually, Alexandra settled in New York, where she founded a second Yasnaya Polyana and continued her father’s altruistic work.

Maria (Masha)

Alexandra Lvovna’s position as her father’s most trusted family ally might not have been realized, had it not been for two tragedies that preceded this outcome. The first was the painful death of the couple’s thirteenth child, Ivan Lvovich (known affectionately as Vanechka), who died of scarlet fever at the age of seven in 1895.

This death was by far the most difficult of the five childhood deaths that Lev and Sonya endured, because Lev was consciously counting on Ivan to become the bearer of his philosophy to the next generation. Vanechka’s passive, sweet disposition suited him for this responsibility, and his untimely death forced Tolstoy to turn to his younger daughters for preservation of the faith, since he did not see any of his sons as spiritually compatible with such a role. Vanechka’s death also struck Sonya hard, as she had just turned fifty and had become emotionally more vulnerable with the onset of menopause. In fact, some critics believe that Sonya never recovered from the shock of Vanechka’s demise, leaving her psychologically impaired until her own death a quarter of a century later.

The second tragedy was the death of the couple’s fifth child and second daughter, Maria Lvovna, who was struck down by pneumonia in 1906 at the age of 35. Like her younger sister Sasha, Masha’s physical unattractiveness repelled her mother, who — no different from her husband — was prone to the cardinal parental sin of showing preferences for certain children at the expense of others. Moreover, Sonya was further alienated from Masha because she resembled her father in both physical appearance and temperament. As Sonya wrote in her memoirs: “Masha was like her father. She had the same deep-set, intelligent, soul-piercing gray eyes, the unbecoming wide mouth. The first thought one had on seeing this thin, sickly little girl, with her pigtail… was ‘poor little thing’ — how ill-favored and colorless she is...”

And Masha, as though she sensed her mother’s disapproval, always kept to the background. In search of acceptance, she turned to her father, making herself available for such mundane tasks as fetching a book or a glass of water. However, she soon became a convert to Lev’s philosophy (she was just 9 in 1880), adopting vegetarianism and rejecting the concept of property. When Masha began to copy his manuscripts, as Sasha would later do, Sonya noted her displeasure in her diary: “Masha… is a cross sent by God to bear. From the day of her birth, she has never caused me anything but torture. In the family she is aloof, in her faith she is aloof, in her love for Biryukov (a Tolstoyan disciple) — an imaginary love, she is incomprehensible.”

Masha would have remained Tolstoy’s devoted child in the struggle against Sonya were it not for an unexpected event that occurred about a decade before her untimely death. This was her surprising desire to marry a distant cousin, Prince Nikolai (“Kolya”) Obolensky, in 1897. Such a wish threatened to place a new male figure ahead of her father in her life.

To Tolstoy’s credit, he did not openly regard Masha’s marriage as an act of betrayal, even though he was losing the child whom he once said “made up for all the rest,” and her action conflicted with some of the basic tenets of his philosophy. By marrying, Masha would sacrifice the ideal of chastity, and would be forced to acknowledge property rights and the hegemony of the official Orthodox Church.

Reluctantly, Masha rejoined the world of her mother, and Tolstoy turned to Alexandra Lvovna, who never betrayed him with thoughts of marriage. And when Masha died in 1906, Sasha became the undisputed favorite for the remaining four years of Lev’s life. Like Sasha, Masha was childless, though one child was born dead in the early years of her marriage to Obolensky.

Tatyana (Tanya)

Born 20 years before Sasha and five before Masha, Tatyana Lvovna was the Tolstoys’ second child and eldest daughter. As Tanya observed in her reminiscences titled The Tolstoy Home: Diaries (1950), she by nature was less committed to Tolstoyan virtues than the younger girls: “We three sisters are a ladder. Masha is kinder than I am, and Alexandra still kinder. She has an inborn desire always to please everybody; she always enjoys giving to beggars.”

Tanya’s inability to follow Tolstoyan philosophy was probably a consequence of the powerful role her mother played in her upbringing. Sonya did not reject this first daughter as she did the younger two. Quite the contrary, she cultivated in her those social graces of the nobility which she had known, and even insisted on the purchase of a second home in Moscow after 1880, so that Tanya could “come out” and acquire the social skills commensurate with her gentry class. These would enhance Tanya’s marriage possibilities and encourage her to pattern herself after her mother.

While Sonya and Tanya were united in their appreciation of high society, Lev felt himself isolated from them in this respect. His frustration was depicted in his famous short novel (povest) The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), where the protagonist’s daughter Liza shares much in common with the young Tatyana, especially her involvement in society’s distractions at the expense of the greater Tolstoyan issue of finding life’s purpose in the presence of death: “Their daughter (Liza) entered in full evening dress, her fresh young flesh exposed… strong, healthy, evidently in love, and impatient with illness, suffering, and death, because they interfered with her happiness.”

Even though Tanya, under her mother’s guidance, became a successful society woman, she still realized that, as the daughter of a great writer and thinker, she could not help but assimilate some of his important values. For example, Tolstoy encouraged her to pursue the arts, and she devoted herself with some success to singing, writing, and especially drawing and painting. Moreover, when heated family discussions took place, she often found herself supporting her father, as in disputes over child-rearing: “(This) subject has always interested and troubled me; it always seems to me that everybody takes it far too lightly and superficially — especially Mamma. In her eyes, so long as her children’s physical needs are well cared for, their inward life is a secondary matter. In this case, as almost always, in everything I fully agree with papa.”

When the chief issue dividing the spouses — Tolstoy’s desire to relinquish all property and Sonya’s need to preserve family security — arose in the 1880s, Tanya showed the greatest neutrality in the family, placing herself at the median position of the continuum. To her credit, she was usually able to see both sides: “I ought to say that almost always, I am more sorry for her (Mama) than for Papa in cases like this, though it is terrible and hurts and I am sorry for them both, and it’s so hard to see why they should suddenly start up so much suffering for themselves and for us all.”

Even Tolstoy appreciated Tanya’s neutrality and often sought her opinions because he knew that, unlike his other daughters, (i.e. Masha and Sasha), Tanya “did not condemn her mother but pitied her.”

Tanya married Mikhail Sukhotin (a 50-year-old widower with six children) in 1899. Together they had one daughter (Tanya). After her husband’s death and the revolution, the two Tanyas moved to France and then to Rome, where the daughter married a successful lawyer, Leonardo Albertini, initiating the Italian line of Tolstoys. The eldest Tanya died in 1950 at 86.

Sergei

Sergei Lvovich, the eldest of the 13 children and the only one to remain in Russia his entire life, was the most successful professionally. As an eminent musicologist (one of his intriguing works is titled Lev Tolstoy and Pyotr Tchaikovsky), he gave lectures at the Moscow Conservatory and set poems by Pushkin, Fet, and Tyutchev to music.

Like Lev Jr., Sergei struggled with and rebelled against the imposing image of his father. As part of his rebellion, he rejected Tolstoyan philosophy, preferring the biological sciences and the theories of Darwin. In his book Tolstoy Remembered by his Son (1961), Sergei summarized his negative reaction to the views his father introduced into the household after his conversion: “In the eighties I sympathized very little with my father’s point of view and often argued with him.... I disagreed with his desire to alter our life, and in particular my life, with his attacks on science and with his theory of non-resistance to evil.”

Sharing the same stubborn nature, father and son were at odds for many years but reconciled in 1899, when Sergei agreed to accompany the Dukhobors (a pacifist religious sect whose emigration Tolstoy financed with his novel Resurrection) to Canada, and then to visit one of Tolstoy’s disciples, Ernest Crosby, in New York. Sergei’s concessions validated his father’s ideas, demonstrating his hidden respect for the man despite their differing views.

As regards his mother, Sergei always had a soft spot for her in his heart. Being the first born, he believed that she (Sonya) was responsible “for all the good that happened in the family” and that it was not her fault that “she was unable to change with him and abandon the opinions acquired in her youth.” In later years, when family discord became unbearable, Sergei, rather than accusing one of his parents, found a better villain in Chertkov, who “abused his mother and exaggerated the nature of her illness.”

Like his sister Tanya, Sergei felt more compatible with a neutral position and subsequently demonstrated this balanced approach by presiding over the publication of both his mother’s diaries and the 91-volume jubilee edition of his father’s collected works (1928-58). Summing up his equal love for both parents, Sergei wrote: “I can’t reproach either of them. They were both right and wrong in their own ways.”

Sergei was married twice but had only one son, Sergei Jr., who became a specialist in the English language and taught at the Institute of International Relations in Moscow.

Ilya

The Tolstoys’ third child and second son, Ilya Lvovich, shared with his father the traits of brute physical strength and an unbridled sensuality. Both were equally fond of the sporting life, which included hunting, horseback riding, guns and hounds. Lev’s most memorable image of his son’s sensuality was of him lounging about in comfort, eating currant jelly and buckwheat kasha — a combination which made his lips tingle with enjoyment. As a student, Ilya always struggled and he later failed miserably at his chosen career of journalism. Nevertheless, with the publication of a few short stories (written under the pseudonym Ilya Dobrosky) and as a consultant for Hollywood’s versions of two of his father’s novels (Anna Karenina and Resurrection), he definitely showed unrealized potential as a writer.

Since Ilya was one of the early children, he was keenly aware that he had one father before the conversion and an entirely different one thereafter. In Tolstoy, My Father: Reminiscences (1914), he writes with great sensitivity about how this veritable change in personality negatively affected all the children: “We would be getting up amateur theatricals... or playing croquet, or talking about falling in love, when suddenly papa would appear in the midst of our merriment and games and with a single word, or, worse, a mere look, would ruin everything.... It was not that he wanted to spoil our fun — after all, he loved us very much — but it happened nonetheless. Even if he said nothing, he was thinking — and we all knew what he was thinking. This is what made us so uncomfortable.”

Because Ilya found so little enjoyment with this new version of his father, he fully understood why Sonya also could derive no pleasure from her husband’s new image. Thus, he sympathized with her completely and became an apologist for her behavior. Formulating a cogent and convincing defense of his mother, he presented the following points: (1) If Sonya had died at the beginning of the 1880’s, she would have been remembered by history as the ideal Russian woman; (2) No one has the right to criticize a woman who without protest was pregnant for 117 months (i.e., 10 years) during the first 13 years of their marriage; and (3) It is difficult to imagine Lev Tolstoy living to such an advanced age if he had not been the beneficiary of her loving care.

To support this last argument, Ilya provided this persuasive account in his memoirs: “Sonya had special dishes prepared for him daily and conscientiously looked after his slightest indisposition. Because ‘Lyovochka’ likes to eat a piece of fruit before going to bed, every evening there was an apple, a pear, or a peach on his night table. For ‘Lyovochka’ there always had to be a special oatmeal porridge, special mushrooms, cauliflower, and artichokes brought from town, and so that he would not refuse to eat these foods, she naïvely concealed the cost from him.”

Ilya concluded his analysis by stating that the final episode in the couple’s relationship was handled badly, and that the entire affair suffered more “from accusations than from guilt.” Had the family taken this into consideration, Sonya would not have been unjustly isolated from Lev at Astapovo.

As a newspaper writer who was proud of his interview of Teddy Roosevelt, Ilya led a life of unrealized potential. He died in abject poverty during the early years of the depression (1933). However, as a father (he was married twice), Ilya produced eight children, including Tolstoy’s first grandchild, Anna (1888-1954), and Vera (1903-1999), the last living link to Tolstoy. Invited to the U.S. by her aunt Sasha, Vera lived in New York and Washington D.C., before settling in Florida.

Andrei and Mikhail

The Tolstoys’ two younger sons, Andrei Lvovich and Mikhail Lvovich, were the family’s ninth and tenth children, respectively. They shared the disadvantage of experiencing their formative years in the 1880’s, when their father was so involved with his philosophy that he failed to function effectively as a parent. Consequently, their upbringing was undisciplined, and this impacted negatively on their development as adults.

Alexandra Lvovna perceptively summed up this worrisome situation in her reminiscences: “They [Andrei and Mikhail] were keenly affected by the discord in the family — the clash of two outlooks on life — and, since they lacked a father’s firm hand, they followed the line of least resistance, giving full reign to the ardent nature they inherited from both their parents.”

While both boys were poor students and became shy, awkward adults, it was Andrei who stood out as the black sheep in the family. Against his father’s wishes, he volunteered for service in the Russo-Japanese War, but, before seeing action, he was discharged owing to an emotional illness. Then he joined the reactionary, anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Organization, driving his parents to total despair. Andrei ultimately became a civil servant, and worked in banks in both Tambov and St. Petersburg. He died of pleurisy in the latter city in 1916, and is buried at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. Andrei had three children (Sophia, Ilya and Andrei) with his first wife and one (Maria) with his second.

Like Andrei, Mikhail also served in the military. After the revolution he moved to Constantinople, France, and finally to Morocco, where he died in 1944. He wrote songs (romansy) and played the piano and violin. Misha had eight children, including Sergei — a prominent physician in Paris, who was formerly Secretary-General of the Societe de Medicine.

As regards the family dispute, the boys were firmly entrenched in Sonya’s camp, viewing their father with almost total alienation. For instance, Andrei held Lev responsible for the revolution and once in anger was reputed to have said: “If I were not my father’s son, I would hang him.” And there were times when Sonya desperately required their unwavering support, such as to prop her up physically as the tragedy at Astapovo played itself out. Moreover, in her clash with Chertkov she once suggested that Andrei ought to “avenge his mother and kill him” (i.e. Chertkov), because he (Andrei) was the only one besides her who saw through him and understood the threat he posed to family harmony.

the three decades of discord in the Tolstoy family (1880-1910) led to diverse reactions and responses from the writer’s eight children. Gender certainly played an important role in this outcome, since the girls — Sasha, Masha, and to a lesser extent Tanya — favored their father, while the sons — Lev Jr., Andrei, Mikhail, Ilya, and to a lesser degree Sergei — supported their mother. Also, the younger children — Andryusha, Misha, and Sasha — seem to have suffered emotionally from parental neglect in contrast to the older ones, whose formative years were less affected by the constant bickering. Still, 30 years of emotional stress negatively influenced the development of all the children, and divorce became a not unusual outcome in some of the children’s lives (e.g. Sergei, Ilya and Andrei) even though dissolution of marriage was far less common than it is in today’s world. In addition, it can perhaps also be said that Tanya and Masha made ill-advised marriages and Sasha decided to remain single because of the less than favorable matrimonial model.

Some may debate whether Tolstoy’s mid-life conversion improved or degraded his creative output, yet the negative effects of the 30-year family split on its children cannot be disputed. By using the children as pawns in their bitter struggle, by forcing them to take sides, Lev and Sonya Tolstoy ensured that the family of one of Russia’s greatest writers would be uncommonly happy, and in its own special way. RL

TANYA KARENINA: In an early version of Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina, the heroine was named Tanya. And one of the titles for the novel that Tolstoy originally considered was “Two Families.”

HEALTHY BRANCHES: The Tolstoy lines not only continue a healthy existence in Russia, but also have put down roots in Italy, France, Sweden and the United States. Moreover, at least one daughter of Tolstoy’s great-great grandson Vladimir (who also heads the Tolstoy Estate Museum in Yasnaya Polyana) has relocated to the United Kingdom, indicating that the family may have found yet another place to develop its line. (For more on Tolstoy’s modern descendants, see links from this issue online.)

The Adult Children

Sergei (1863-1947)

Tatyana (1864-1950)

Ilya (1866-1933)

Lev (1869-1945)

Maria 1871-1906)

Andrei (1877-1916)

Mikhail (1879-1944)

Alexandra (1884-1979)

Childhood Mortality

Piotr (1872-73)

Nikolai (1874-75)

Varvara (1875)

Alexei (1881-86)

Ivan (l888-95)

The Tolstoy Foundation (tolstoyfoundation.org) was founded in 1939 by Alexandra Tolstoy, Sergei Rachmaninoff and others to aid refugees and to preserve Russian culture in America. It has a rustic Russian setting on a 70-acre plot some 35 miles from New York City, a classically styled “onion domed” church, and a 50,000-book library. It aided over a half-million war refugees in its early years and, among many other things, has been a residence for elderly Russians, and a summer camp for children.

TOLSTOY’S LAST DAYS: For a superb work of historical fiction about Tolstoy’s final days, see The Last Station, by Jay Parini. The book was actually made into a movie of the same name, released in December, with Helen Mirren as Sonya and Christopher Plummer as Lev.

January 01, 2010

Lev Tolstoy's Unhappy Family

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