Not content with contradicting him whenever she could, she wanted public absolution for the indignity he had inflicted upon her in The Kreutzer Sonata. By way of riposte, she wrote an autobiographical novel entitled, Who Is To Blame? Using the subject of The Kreutzer Sonata but arranging it to suit her own purposes, she described a man of the world, Prince Prozorovsky, a sensual brute who, at the age of thirty-five, marries a girl of eighteen, Anna, pure, mischievous, noble and pious. While they are still engaged, he is already casting lewd glances at her hips. After the wedding ceremony he cannot even wait to get inside the house, but takes the poor girl like an animal, in the carriage, in spite of the bumps and jolts. She is humiliated by this for the rest of her life. Later, a consumptive young painter falls in love with her—platonically—and the dreadful Prozorovsky, a violent-tempered man recking of tobacco, is unable to control his jealousy and kills the woman who had done no wrong.
Sonya was very proud of her story and read it to anyone who would listen.19 Her friends had some difficulty persuading her not to publish it. If she heeded them, it was only because more serious threats against her husband were looming on the horizon. She was ready and willing to attack him en jamille, but would not tolerate anyone else attacking him from outside, and even though she hated The Kreutzer Sonata, she was infuriated because the censor had prohibited the publication of Volume XIII of the Complete Works, which contained it. Friends in good standing in court advised her to try a personal appeal to the tsar to have the decision reversed. "If I liked The Kreutzer Sonata, if I believed Lyovochka would write any more artistic books in the
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future, I would go," she wrote.20
Two things helped her to overcome her reluctance. One was the fact that the prohibition of Volume XIII would represent a substantial fi nancial loss, and the other was the fact that by openly militating for the book she would prove to the world that there was no connection between her married life and the abominable tale recounted by the
author. "Vanity is pushing me, more than anything else," she wrote in a moment of truthfulness. When he heard what she intended to do, Tolstoy tried to dissuade her. He did not want to owe anything to the emperor. Besides, that edition of his Complete Works was nothing but a low commercial enterprise, he said, completely at odds with his theories. His opposition tipped the scales for Sonya.
She set off for St. Petersburg on March 28, 1891, went to stay with her sister Tanya, contacted a few influential persons and, 011 March 31, wrote to the emperor:
"I humbly implore Your Imperial Majesty the favor of an audience, so that I may make a request of Your Majesty concerning my husband, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy. With Your Majesty's kind permission, I shall state the conditions in which my husband might resume his former artistic and literary activities. I would also point out to Your Majesty the inaccuracy of certain allegations being made with respect to the present activities of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, which are painful to him and are undermining the creative powers of a Russian author whose health is already beginning to fail but who might yet add to his contribution to the glory of his fatherland.
I am,
Your Imperial Majesty's loyal subject, Countess Sofya Tolstoy."
Twelve days later her request for an audience was granted and, on April 13, decked out in ceremonial attire—black dress and hat with a black lace veil—she left the Kuzminsky home for the Anichkov Palace on the Nevsky Prospect. On the threshold she lost all contact with reality. All that marble, those plants, those purple azaleas, those wax-faced lackeys, those Negroes dressed in Egyptian costumes! A young messenger wearing a red uniform trimmed in gold and a plumed three- cornered hat led the caller up a wide staircase and into a little drawing room, and disappeared. She was so excited and her heart was pounding so hard that she almost fainted. "Very cautiously, so that no one should see me," she wrote, "I unlaced my corset and sat down to massage my chest." The messenger came back and announced, "His Majesty asks Her Excellency Countess Tolstoy to come this way." In a dizzy haze, she made her curtsy to the emperor. In spite of her agitated state, she observed that he was "tall, rather stout," had "hardly any hair" and that "his temples were too narrow." Some things about him reminded her of Chertkov. He received her cordially. When she had told him, without a blush, that her husband was about to give up his philosophical activities and settle down to write a book in the style of War and Peace, he exclaimed:
"Ah, how wonderful tliat would be! How he can write! How he can write! . .
She was emboldened to speak of The Kreutzer Sonata, presenting it as a highly moral work.
"The story does exaggerate," she said, "but the basic idea is that the ideal can never be attained. If total chastity is accepted as the ideal, then only in marriage can one remain pure."
This specious reasoning brought a smile to the tsar's lips. In the end he authorized the publication of the novel, but only in the Complete Works, as the relatively high price of those volumes would be a curb to their wide distribution. Then he expressed concern at the negative influence the Tolstoyans were having on the peasants, and Soma passionately defended her dear Lyovochka, and even the hated Chertkov. In order to break down the sovereign's last defenses, she asked him to be the first to judge her husband's literary productions in the future. He willingly accepted, asked after Sonya's children and invited her to pay her respects to the empress—a tiny woman with dark-brown hair plastered to her skull as though glued to it, wasp-waisted, squeezed to bursting-point inside a black woolen gown—who held out her hand, bade Sonya be seated, and spoke in a guttural voice that contrasted sharply with the affability of her remarks. Leaving the palace, glowing and relieved, Sonya could hardly keep from running.
That same day she took the train back to Yasnaya Polyana at three in the afternoon. She would have liked to be met as a conquering heroine, but Lyovochka greeted her as a defaulting ally. He reproached her for going too far, for making promises that he could not keep. Motionless, she listened to him storm, and he soon grew ashamed of his outburst. IIow could he criticize her, after letting her go? And fifteen days away! Too long! The infamous desire he denounced in The Kreutzer Sonata began to burn in his veins once again. "... I spoke to her angrily," he wrote in his diary, "but eventually it all worked out, particularly since, under the influence of a culpable impulse, I was glad to see her back."21 A few days later, fresh violation of the principle of chastity —this time, recorded by Sonya: "Lyovochka has sent Tanya to tell me that he is in bed and has put out the light. Innocent lips transmit these anything but innocent words. I know what they mean and I don't like it "22
Soon afterward, she received a ministerial letter confirming her an thorization to publish The Kreutzer Sonata and the afterword to it in the Complete Works. When she read the official document, her pride overflowed: "Deep in my heart, I exult to think that I braved them all and went to the tsar and obtained from him—I, a mere woman—what no one else could have obtained/'23 she wrote.