RANDOM JOTTINGS

I have been dipping in and out of this volume since I received it a few months ago from Alma Press.  It is not a book which charms, nor does it keep a reader delighted and happy and eager to read more.  A few pages at a time is all I could take, quite frankly, as I had an overwhelming desire, as I always do with Cathy and Heathcliff, to take the two protagonists and bang their heads together.

Two more obsessive, unstable, selfish and self-pitying people it would be hard to find.  Tolstoy, madly in love with Sofia and desperate to marry her soon found he had mistaken her character of simplicity and serenity and was faced with an insecure, jealous and over emotional wife.  I gather that Tolstoy, heaven  knows why, showed Sofia his own diaries on the eve of their wedding, in which he described his relationships with his serfs and his homosexual leanings.  Not a sensible thing to do with an eighteen year old who, unsurprisingly was horrified.

"The whole of my husband's past is so ghastly that I don't think I shall ever be able to accept it …..he loves to torment me and see me weep because he doesn't trust me…..I used to love everything beautiful, my soul knew the meaning of ecstasy – now all that has died within me. No sooner am I happy than he crushes me"

and then a few days later

"Yesterday we opened our hearts and I feel much better"

This see saw of emotion, love-hate, self-hate, gets a bit tiresome after a while and if you can manage to read all of these diaries, and I admit I have now given up, then you deserve a medal.   While Sofia was tiresome and hysterical, she had a lot to put up with from her selfish obsessive husband, who becomes a cult figure surrounded by hangers on and acolytes whose adoration and admiration is much more acceptable to him than his wife's criticisms and tears. He was heavily influenced by Vladamir Chertkov who was determined to
dominate Tolstoy and succeeded, keeping him away from his wife and at the age of 82 Tolstoy left Sofia and when she heard that her husband lay dying in a railway house some 80 miles away in Astapovo, she went to him only to found the doors barred.  She spent four days waiting and was only allowed in to see him die.

4th November 1910 "I wait in agony outside the little house where he is lying.  We are sleeping in the train"

5th November 1910 "There is evidently little hope I am tormented by remorse, the painful anticipation of his end and the impossibility of seeing my beloved husband"

Even though I felt for  Sofia and thought this was a cruel and bitter way to treat her, once again she lets us know how she has suffered, how dreadfully she feels "Oh those ghastly sleepless nights, alone with my thoughts, my agonising conscience, the darkness of the winter night and the darkness in my soul!"  and so on and on and on..

What a thoroughly disagreeable pair – not sure who I dislike the most after reading these diaries, Leo or Sofia.  I was reminded of the marriage of Bronson Alcott and his wife in my recent reading of Harriet Reisen's excellent biography of Louisa May Alcott, he totally caught up in his own glory and his theories and ideas which he visited upon his family with total indifference to their plight or their welfare with no resultant writing or thought of any pith or moment.   I certainly don't think being a genius is an excuse for dreadful behaviour and selfishness, but at least Tolstoy gave us War and Peace….