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I’ve never seen a biography of Tolstoy in the bookshops, but now that I’ve read Judith Armstrong’s War and Peace and Sonya, I think I’d probably leave it on the shelf – I feel that I know quite enough about the great Russian writer now!

Judith Armstrong is a former Melbourne academic who used to teach Russian literature and culture, so it is safe to say that this novel is impeccably researched.  Based on the diaries of Tolstoy and his wife Sofya Andreyevna Behrs, known as Sonya, it tells the other side of the story that formed the basis of The Last Station, the film that showed the sorry state of the Tolstoy marriage and depicted Sonya as a nagging wife harassing the genius about the contents of his Will,  so much so that he felt he had no option but to get away from her.

The question that arose for me, time and again as I read this engaging novel was: whose voice is this?  Ostensibly, Sonya is the narrator, looking back over her life after Tolstoy’s death, and using her diaries to substantiate what she says.  She tells us about what she reads in Tolstoy’s diaries too: sometimes they left these diaries about to be read, in lieu of direct communication about their feelings.  Sometimes Sonya consulted his diaries on the sly…

But how much can we trust Sonya’s diaries?  Was she as she tries to present herself: reasonable, loyal, forgiving and loving, but cruelly neglected, and unappreciated by her husband?  She says she was the unacknowledged editor – not just a copyist – of Tolstoy’s great works.   Was she yet another woman whose contribution to the arts has been subsumed by a dominant male, or was she self-aggrandizing her role?    And, are the interpretations of Tolstoy’s behaviour and attitudes as presented in the novel Sonya’s view of things (from her diaries) or Armstrong’s?  For there are two writers behind this novel: Judith Armstrong the author fictionalising Tolstoy’s wife; and the original diarist, Sonya.   Whose voice is this narrator?

There are all sorts of interesting little snippets that made my view of Tolstoy and Sonya vacillate: was she paranoid when she interpreted Anna Karenina the character as an idealised rival for Tolstoy’s love?  Was she loving and caring when she wished for Tolstoy to become ill so love could be rekindled as she nursed him back to health? Was he a spiteful brute when he dissected their marriage for all to see in The Kreutzer Sonata? Was he barmy when he planned to give away all his worldly goods for the dream of a simple life, or was he an idealistic seer who saw a revolution coming and tried to redress the inequity of peasant life in the only way he could? Was she loyal when she went to the Tsar to plead for censorship restrictions to be lifted, or was she interfering?

Often Sonya the character tells us more than she means to, and comes across as untruthful, histrionic, bad-tempered, and irrational.  She picks fights with Tolstoy, and the timing of her ‘guiltless’ friendship with Taneev is bad.  When thwarted, she flings herself out into the snow or a handy lake, shrieking that she would rather die than be treated as she is.   She tells us this because she wants us to empathise, but I was taken aback by this sort of hysterical behaviour from a woman of mature years.  Sonya is also much too conscious of how she will be viewed when her writing is made public, which provoked my suspicion.  She wants to have the last word, and despite her protestations, she sometimes sanitizes her own behaviour.  But if what she says about Tolstoy’s autocratic ways is true, as a 19th century woman in male-dominated Russia, she had few options.  She did have a lot to put up with, as those living with idealistic genius often do.

One of my favourite memories of an elderly friend who was very wealthy, took place one day in her mansion in Balwyn.  Talking politics, she told me that she always voted Labor because she was all in favour of redistributing wealth.  Unless, she said, with a twinkle in her eye, if it meant redistributing hers.  Idealism is a fine thing, she seemed to be saying, but sometimes its practical application can be a bit tiresome.  Sonya, having made an impetuous marriage at seventeen without really considering what it would be like to be marooned in the countryside with nothing much to do except make babies and live vicariously through her husband, eventually found herself in conflict with Tolstoy’s idealism…

As he aged, Tolstoy’s idealization of peasant life became increasingly radical.  Although it well suited him to offload all his  responsibilities to others, he wanted his family to live a ‘simple’ life, and he didn’t just mean becoming vegetarian.  Sonya, already responsible for copying successive versions of his work and managing the Yasnaya estate,  was aghast to read his plans in his diaries:

I also learned that he intended as soon as possible to distribute income from his Samara estates amongst the poor, give the Nikolskoe land to the peasants, and drastically reduce the amount of money available for his own family to live on.  He was going to train us to live without servants, and persuade us all to radical new domestic arrangements – the males living in one room and the women and girls in another.
‘Sell or give away everything superfluous’, he had added. ‘The piano, the furniture, the carriages.’
The piano was, oddly, the worst shock of all.  Playing or listening to music had always been one of the few pleasures we loved to share.  Even the children enjoyed music, especially Seryozha and Tanya, whose squabbles ceased the minute they sat down to play duets.  Had my husband no heart? No concern for his own family’s innocent enjoyment? (p180)

The irony was that as Tolstoy was preaching celibacy in his religious tracts and pamphlets, he was well able to set aside their marital disharmony to father 13 children, (eight of whom survived early childhood).

Sonya wasn’t as well-educated as The Great Man, and she knew her intellectual deficiencies, but in Armstrong’s story she was not only smart enough to teach herself to analyse a literary text, she also knew enough about Mr Freud in Vienna to interpret some of her husband’s apparently subconscious ideas and psychoanalyse both the man and his literary output.  She recognises that he is always conflicted by his sensual proclivities and his notions of purity, but she also had the children to worry about and she was determined not to see their inheritance vanish in support of her husband’s somewhat unusual philosophical notions.  (This made me think about Bill Gates giving away his millions to vaccination programs in Africa.  What if his wife had tried to sabotage that?)

Tolstoy’s conflicted ideas about the ideal woman caused Sonya intense hurt.  Apparently he’d read the feminist novels of George Sand but despised them, and he used his fictional creations, notably Natasha in War and Peace, to slyly let Sonya know what sort of wife he’d like her to be.  Any 21st century woman reading War and Peace today is likely to have to breathe a deep patience-gathering breath at Natasha’s transformation from lively young woman to placid matron absorbed only in children and family, but it was more than insulting to Sonya, who spent hours of her time as his amanuensis, transcribing his untidy writing to make it fit for submission to publishers, and archiving the countless drafts that are so valuable for scholars today.

I enjoyed this book, but I’d be interested to hear from readers who haven’t first read Anna Karenina or War and Peace.  I think it would be quite a different experience, though not necessarily a limitation.  Certainly, when I got to the chapter where Sonya reads with dismay The Kreutzer Sonata I couldn’t resist picking up Tolstoy’s story to read first.  In the light of what had gone before in Armstrong’s book, I read it with a kind of appalled fascination: it’s based so closely on the Tolstoy marriage that Sonya could not have failed to recognise it.  It’s a diatribe about 19th century Russian marriage as a sham that enslaves women as a mere instrument of pleasure and compromises men so that they have no escape but violence.  Sonya was devastated by the personal hurt and the embarrassment of being identified in it.

War and Peace and Sonya is a must-read for anyone interested in Tolstoy and his books – and those narrative voice issues raise all sorts of interesting questions for discussion.   A splendid choice for well-read book groups.

© Lisa Hill

Michael McGirr reviewed it at SMH.

Author: Judith Armstrong
Title: War and Peace and Sonya, a Novel
Publisher: Pier 9 (Murdoch), 2011
ISBN: 9781742665405
Source: Review copy courtesy of the author

Availability:
Fishpond: War and Peace and Sonya