Sofia’s revenge

Sofia’s revenge: short stories by Leo Tolstoy’s wife and son are published with The Kreutzer Sonata

Newly translated ‘counter-stories’, released in English for the first time, reveal humiliation caused by novella about a jealous husband

A different perspective … Sofia Tolstoy with her husband Leo. Photograph: Underwood & Underwood/Corbis

“I know in my heart that this story is directed against me,” wrote Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia, of his controversial novella The Kreutzer Sonata. “It has done me a great wrong, humiliated me in the eyes of the world and destroyed the last vestiges of love between us.” Now two stories by Sofia Tolstoy herself, written in response to her husband’s tale of a man who murders his wife in a jealous rage, are due to be published in English for the first time.In The Kreutzer Sonata Variations, out next month from Yale University Press, the newly translated “counter-stories” by Sofia Tolstoy, and by Tolstoy’s son Lev Lvovich Tolstoy, will sit alongside a new translation of Tolstoy’s original work as well as the author’s extraordinary epilogue, in which he makes an argument for the ideal of chastity. First released in 1889, the book sees Tolstoy’s protagonist Pozdnyshev confess how he murdered his wife after he became jealous of her relationship with a musician. It was initially banned by Russian censors, and when it appeared in English in 1890, it also hit difficulties with distribution in the US, where it was described as of “indecent character”.Tolstoy, said the new edition’s translator and editor Michael Katz, was setting out in the novella “to excoriate society for raising boys and young men to make use of prostitutes and then search for a virgin to marry. Women were trained to attract men by their clothes and demeanour so they could be married and fulfil their husband’s desires. Tolstoy was horrified by the situation and attempted to reveal it all in his story and advocate reform; eventually he came to embrace complete chastity and abstinence,” said Katz.A professor emeritus of Russian studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, Katz said that he had been at a conference at Tolstoy’s family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, last year, when he heard that Sofia Tolstoy’s two stories Whose Fault? and Song Without Words “were finally to be published by the Tolstoy Museum after being kept secret in the family archive for 100 or so years”.“The family did not want them published because they thought it would compromise [her] reputation as Tolstoy’s faithful wife and the mother of his children,” said Katz. But there has been “a change of leadership in the family and in the direction of the Tolstoy Museum resulting in greater transparency”, as well as growing interest in the life of Sofia Tolstoy herself.The newly translated stories from Tolstoy’s wife and son are “each a passionate attempt to undo the message of the original work”, said the publisher. The book, which Yale called “a work unprecedented in world literature”, will also include extracts from family letters, diaries, notes and memoirs that provide “a vivid and highly revealing case study of the powerful disputes concerning sexuality and gender roles that erupted within the cultural context of late-19th-century Russian, as well as European, society”.Sofia’s story Whose Fault? was shared with family and close friends, but she chose not to publish it. In his introduction to The Kreutzer Sonata Variations, Katz reveals that her notebooks contain a series of alternative titles for the tale, “all emphasising the same theme of the husband’s culpability and the wife’s innocence”. They include: Is She Guilty?, Murdered, How She Was Murdered, How Husbands Murder Their Wives, and One More Murdered Woman [or Wife].

Hilton McRae as the jealous Pozdynyshev in a production of The Kreutzer SonataPhotograph: Tristram Kenton/Tristram Kenton

Whose Fault? tells of a man obsessed with writing, with a “voracious sexual appetite”, says Katz, and is “almost certainly based on the man” she lived with. Song Without Words explores a composer’s relationship with the Tolstoy family.Lev Lvovich published his own response to The Kreutzer Sonata, as 1898’s Chopin’s Prelude, which deals with the “problem of male sexual drive” by eventually advocating marriage, says Katz. His mother said of it: “He does not have a large talent, but a small one, sincere and naive”, while Tolstoy himself wrote in his diary that it was “stupid and untalented”.Extracts from Sofia’s diary in the new edition see her writing that The Kreutzer Sonata “is untrue in everything relating to a young woman’s experiences”, and, at another time, that “I do not know how or why everyone connected The Kreutzer Sonata with our own married life, but this is what has happened, and now everyone, from the tsar himself down to Lev Nikolaevich’s brother and his best friend Dyakov, feels sorry for me. And it isn’t just other people – I too know in my heart that this story is directed against me, and that it has done me a great wrong, humiliated me in the eyes of the world and destroyed the last vestiges of love between us. And all this, when not once in my whole married life have I ever wronged my husband, with so much as a gesture or glance at another man!”In August 1909, she reveals a visit from a 30-year-old Romanian, “who had castrated himself at the age of 18 after reading The Kreutzer Sonata. He then took to working on the land – just 19 acres – and was terribly disillusioned today to see that Tolstoy writes one thing but lives in luxury.” Katz notes that Tolstoy’s comment on the visitor was that he was “an exceedingly interesting man”.The academic writes in his introduction of how The Kreutzer Sonata was eventually only published in Russia in 1891, as part of Tolstoy’s collected works – and only after Sofia personally appealed to Tsar Alexander III. “He announced his decision: ‘Yes, as part of the collected works it can be permitted; not everybody can afford them; it won’t be a matter of a large circulation.’ His Excellency was wrong. As we would say now, The Kreutzer Sonata went viral.”It drew both praise and condemnation, with the French writer Emile Zola describing the novella as a “nightmare … born of a diseased imagination”. Sofia, who had “repeatedly and laboriously copied her husband’s story each time he made revisions to satisfy the Russian censors”, writes Katz, had also begged him to change the character of the heroine.“She disagreed markedly with Tolstoy’s emphases and conclusions at almost every turn; moreover, she was deeply embarrassed that the reading public had construed the story as a reflection of her own marriage to the famous writer,” writes the professor.The Kreutzer Sonata Variations will be published at the end of November.