Then there was the difference in social backgrounds. Sergey also notes at the start of his memoirs that his father had not wanted to marry an aristocrat like himself. As the daughter of a doctor descended from a German immigrant and an illegitimate Russian noblewoman, Sonya certainly could not boast such an impressive pedigree. When she married, she took on a title as well all her husband’s views, and she liked being Countess Tolstoy. Her husband later renounced his title, but she continued to sign herself ‘Grafinya S. A. Tolstaya’ (grafinya being a Russian form of the original German Gräfin). Sonya never had the time to ruminate on the religious and philosophical ideas which inspired her husband’s radical change of lifestyle – she was too busy raising their family – so it was all the harder for her to repudiate the values he had so carefully inculcated her with during the first decades of their marriage and suddenly live another kind of life.
Sonya’s great-grandfather was Johann Bärs (or Behrs), an officer in the Horse Guards from Saxony, whose coat-of-arms depicted a bear repelling a swarm of bees, as befits a surname derived from the German word for bear.7 Ivan Bers, as he became known in his Russianised incarnation, was sent to St Petersburg by Empress Maria Theresa in the mid-eighteenth century to assist Empress Elizabeth with Russian military training. Before he was killed in action in 1758 at the Battle of Zorndorf, he married and had a son, Evstafy (Gustav), who grew up in Moscow, became a chemist and married into another Russianised German family. Evstafy Bers lost all his wealth and possessions in the great Moscow fire of 1812, but through his German connections was able to give his two sons a fine education. They both became students at Moscow university in 1822, and trained as doctors at the same time as Russia’s most famous nineteenth-century medical practitioner Nikolay Pirogov. One of the two sons was Sonya’s father Andrey, born in 1808.
Owing to its low social rank, medicine was not a highly regarded profession in early-nineteenth-century Russia, and certainly never pursued by aristocrats. At the time the Bers brothers qualified, when they were about twenty years old, the most respected doctors were still foreign, but still socially inferior. In the late 1820s Andrey Bers became family doctor to the Turgenevs (when the future writer was still a boy), and accompanied them to Paris. For the next two years he devoted himself to further study, Italian opera, and, it seems, Turgenev’s redoubtable and unhappily married mother, who bore him an illegitimate daughter, Varvara, whom she raised as her ward (which makes Sonya Turgenev’s half-sister). After he returned to Moscow, Andrey Bers started working as a doctor attached to the Senate, which was located in the kremlin, and then under Nicholas I he was appointed court physician. This entitled him to a cramped, low-ceilinged state apartment adjacent to the kremlin Palace, the Tsar’s imposing 700-room Moscow residence. This is where Sonya was born in 1844.
The family was never wealthy. They had servants in their kremlin apartment, of course, but they never owned a country estate or possessed any serfs. Working for the Russian state meant that Dr Bers entered the civil service and the Table of Ranks, thereby gaining greater social respectability. Indeed, by finally attaining the eighth rank of collegiate assessor in 1842, Andrey Estafevich was entitled to acquire hereditary nobility, but he was still considered a very unsuitable match for sixteen-year-old Lyubov Islavina, to whom he proposed after treating her as a patient. Quite apart from the fact that her family were old-world Russian aristocrats, albeit an illegitimate branch, who regarded him as little better than a tradesman, Bers was by this time already thirty-four, and a Lutheran to boot. Nevertheless, the marriage went ahead, and Andrey and Lyubov Bers had eight children. Sonya was the middle of three daughters, who were all educated at home, first by German governesses. When she was sixteen, in 1860, Sonya acquired a private teaching qualification from Moscow university. By this time she had got to know Tolstoy’s family quite well, having taken dancing lessons on Saturday afternoons one winter with his sister Masha’s three children. Masha had been her mother’s friend since childhood, and when the Bers came to visit Varya, Liza and Nikolay at home, their uncles Lev and Nikolay would sometimes be there as well.8
When Tolstoy first started to visit the Bers during his trips to Moscow, everyone assumed he was interested in the eldest daughter Elizaveta (Liza). But in the summer of 1862 he turned his attention to Sonya. It was an eventful few months. When the secret police had raided Yasnaya Polyana that summer Tolstoy had been away on the Bashkirian steppe taking his two-month koumiss cure, having been in poor health. He learned of the raid only when he visited the Bers in Moscow on his way back home back to Yasnaya Polyana at the end of July. Days later he had guests. Lyubov Alexandrovna, plus her three daughters and youngest son were on their way to spend a couple of weeks at Ivitsy, her father’s estate, which was not far away, and they decided to stay the night with Tolstoy. Lyubov had not been to Yasnaya Polyana since she was a child, and she was shocked by the patch of weeds growing in the gaping empty space where the old house had stood before being dismantled by its new owner. The wing that Tolstoy had settled in had never been intended to be a principal home, and it was quite a squash accommodating everybody. Along with the permanent residents (Tolstoy, Aunt Toinette and her companion Natalya Petrovna), his sister Masha was still staying, and now there were five extra guests. Beds were made up on the blue-and-white striped sofas downstairs for the three girls Liza, Sonya and Tanya, then twenty-seven, eighteen, and sixteen years respectively. A few months later the spartanly furnished room would be where Tolstoy sat down to write the opening chapters of War and Peace.9
After being shown around, the city-dwelling Bers children were most excited to be taken into the garden to pick raspberries. Tolstoy, meanwhile, was distracted from his preoccupation with the recent disturbing events by the charms of Lyubov Alexandrovna’s ingenuous middle daughter. No sooner had the Bers arrived at Ivitsy than ‘le Comte’, as they called him, came riding over on his white horse to visit them.10 This is when he started communicating with Sonya by spelling out the first letters of words with a piece of chalk, which he would later immortalise when describing Levin’s courtship of kitty in Anna Karenina. One can only marvel at Sonya’s ability to understand the words behind the letters ‘V. v. s. s. 1. v. n. n. i. v. s. L. Z. m. v. s. v. s. T.’, which in English would read: ‘In your family there is a false view of me and your sister Liza. You and your sister Tanya must defend me.’ A week later Tolstoy decided to accompany the Bers back to Moscow, and he then spent the next two weeks walking almost daily to visit them at their dacha five miles north of the city, and falling more and more in love with ‘S’, as he refers to her in his diaries.
During this euphoric time Tolstoy tried to concentrate on a pedagogical article he was writing, but not very successfully. He did, however, write a forceful letter to Alexander II in which he complained in the strongest terms about the search of his estate:
I consider it unworthy to assure Your Majesty that the insult I have suffered is undeserved. All my past, my contacts, my activities in serving people’s education, which are open to all, and finally the journal in which my most heartfelt convictions are expressed, could have proved to anyone interested in me, without the deployment of measures which have destroyed people’s peace and happiness, that I could not have been a conspirator, an initiator of proclamations, murders or arson. Apart from the insult, suspicion of criminal activities, apart from the opprobrium in the opinion of society and that feeling of eternal threat, under which I am obliged to live and work, as a result of this visit, I have completely plummeted in the opinion of the people, which I have cherished, which I spent years earning, and which was vital for the activity which I had chosen – the foundation of schools for the people.