Body language speaks louder than words in Leah Bendavid-Val's new book of photographs from the album of Leo Tolstoy's wife.
What Mrs. Tolstoy Saw
By Katherine Shonk
Published: December 14, 2007
http://www.themoscowtimes.comIn 1887, in her early 40s, Leo Tolstoy's wife, Sophia, took up the relatively new art form of photography. She adopted the hobby with relish and was often seen rushing about the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana in an apron, her fingernails blackened by developing chemicals. Her husband hated to be photographed. Yet every year on their wedding anniversary, Sophia put on her finest clothes and lured the famous writer into the frame for a commemorative photograph.
What Mrs. Tolstoy Saw
These anniversary pictures, now printed together for the first time in "Song Without Words," a collection of Sophia's photographs and diary excerpts, are a study in body language. Husband and wife stand side by side. Sophia smiles anxiously, leaning toward Leo, embracing him or grasping his arm. Leo stands stiffly, facing the camera rather than Sophia, his expression gruff, his hands jammed into the belt of his peasant costume.
Sophia, who married Leo when she was 18 and he was 34, is often portrayed by historians as a jealous hysteric. Indeed, her anxiety comes through in the anniversary photos -- but so does Leo's unwillingness to indulge his wife's harmless romantic tendencies. For 48 years, the Tolstoys tormented each other with love and hate. Until now, we have heard only one side of the story -- the writer's. In "Song Without Words," the long-suffering wife finally gets to share her side.
What Mrs. Tolstoy Saw
Leah Bendavid-Val, director of photography publishing at National Geographic Books, gained access to Sophia's photographs at the Leo Tolstoy Museum in Moscow after hearing about them from a colleague. Her discovery is an embarrassment of riches -- an embarrassment because these photographs should have been collected sooner. They offer a fascinating view of a legendary marriage, life on a pre-Revolutionary Russian estate and Tolstoy himself.
What Mrs. Tolstoy Saw
Sophia experimented with photography in her youth and embraced it with gusto many years later, ultimately leaving behind about 1,000 pictures. She composed shots of herself, her family and the peasants at Yasnaya Polyana with care and skill. Most show her subjects in context, at a slight distance: A painting of Leo looms above Sophia's bemused face, Tolstoy appears on a tennis court with a racket in his hand, a praying granddaughter is surrounded by praying dollies.
Bendavid-Val wisely organizes "Song Without Words" by theme -- "Self-Portraits," "The Family," "Estate Life" and so on -- a decision that lends structure to what might otherwise have been a monotonous biography of an unhappy marriage. Quotes from both Sophia's and Leo's diaries illuminate the emotions behind her slight smile and his customary scowl in the photos. They married out of love, but widening differences about religion, society and sex drove them both to despair. They complained bitterly about each other in their diaries, which they sometimes shared with each other.
Between 1863 and 1888, Sophia gave birth to 13 children, only eight of whom lived to adulthood. Exhausted by pregnancy and motherhood, she tried to sell Tolstoy on the idea of birth control, but he refused. At her wit's end, Sophia tried unsuccessfully to abort her 12th pregnancy. Yet once her children were born, she loved them all deeply. In one of the most poignant photos in the book, she leans against the shrine she built in memory of Vanechka, her youngest child, who died of scarlet fever at the age of 6.
Sophia adored her husband's fiction and devoted herself to serving his genius, but when she felt wronged by him, she fought back tooth and nail. In 1882, Tolstoy sought to relinquish the rights to his books, due to his conviction that owning private property was immoral. They argued over the issue for nearly 10 years, until Sophia convinced Lev to let her have the rights to "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." "One thing that I do find intolerably unjust," she wrote, "is the idea that one should have to renounce one's personal life in the name of universal love."
With her husband increasingly focused on life beyond Yasnaya Polyana, Sophia turned outward as well. In the mid-1880s, she developed a "platonic love affair," as Bendavid-Val describes it, with a pianist named Sergei Taneyev. The special friendship made Tolstoy miserable, but Sophia refused to break off the relationship. Their brief, chaste affair is made all the more poignant by Sophia's photographs of Taneyev: He is no lothario, but a portly man with self-conscious posture and a shy gaze.
"Song Without Words" is an embarrassment of riches, yet one is left wishing for more -- namely, that Sophia had taken up photography earlier in her marriage. It would have been a treat to see the Tolstoys in those heady, loving years, before they were worn down emotionally and physically by their demanding lives and by each other.
On the back of a September 1910 photo marked "The Last Wedding Anniversary," Sophia wrote, "There is no holding him!" A month later, Leo walked out on her forever, leaving a note saying that life at home had become "unbearable" and that he wanted to spend his final days in peace. As is well known, he died soon after in a train station, with sycophants keeping Sophia at bay. Her husband's death left Sophia tortured by guilt, but Bendavid-Val reports that she "no longer showed signs of her former hysteria." She survived her husband by nine years, living at Yasnaya Polyana through the Bolshevik Revolution in relative peace.
Katherine Shonk is the author of "The Red Passport," a collection of short stories set in contemporary Russia.
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