Leo Tolstoy: Great Writer, Terrible Husband

Posted on June 2, 2009

Leo Tolstoy was a great writers it sounds like he was an awful husband. The diaries of Leo Tolstoy's wife Sofia paint a miserable picture of her life with the famous novelist.

What emerges from Sofia's diaries, which span more than 50 years and which are due to be published by Alma Books this October, is a picture of a cruel and difficult man, indifferent to his family, endlessly critical, who forced his wife to breastfeed all 13 of their children despite the agony it caused her.

"All the things that he preaches for the happiness of humanity only complicate life to the point where it becomes harder and harder for me to live," wrote Sofia - who transcribed all of Tolstoy's manuscripts, including War and Peace, in longhand - at the start of 1895. "His vegetarian diet means the complication of preparing two dinners, which means twice the expense and twice the work. His sermons on love and goodness have made him indifferent to his family, and mean the intrusion of all kinds of riff-raff into our family life. And his (purely verbal) renunciation of worldly goods has made him endlessly critical and disapproving of others."

And it only gets worse from there. The diaries were first published twenty years ago in an academic edition that nobody read. Alma Books is producing a more accessible version that it believes will round out the portrait of Russia's greatest writer. A forward from Doris Lessing blasts Leo Tolstoy as a terrible husband "who is sexually inconsiderate and a bit of a monster." So, there's that to look forward to.

---

---