Until the publication of Tolstoy’s correspondence with his siblings in 1990, Masha was a somewhat shadowy figure in Tolstoy’s biography,98 but she was an important person in his life, and they remained close (his letters to her are some of the most touching he ever wrote). Masha had lived to regret her marriage to Valerian Petrovich Tolstoy and buried her sorrows in foreign travel, travelling with her children to spas where she could treat the various illnesses she believed she was suffering from. It was in Aix-les-Bains in 1861 that she met the handsome Swedish Viscount Hector Victor de kleen, with whom she spent the next two winters in Algiers. Her brothers learned they were living together when she made a trip back to Russia in the summer of 1862, just when Tolstoy was about to get married. The following autumn, fearing their censure, she wrote from Geneva to tell them she had given birth to a little girl. Both Tolstoy and his brother Sergey had fathered illegitimate children themselves, and were sympathetic. Tolstoy hastened to reassure Masha of their support, and resolved to try to help her.99 In January 1864 he and Sergey met with Valerian Petrovich, who acknowledged his responsibility in the breakdown of the marriage and agreed to a divorce. Tolstoy obtained the necessary permission from the bishop, and then sent the documents for Masha to sign and return. She was scared to set things in motion, however, as Valerian Petrovich sent her a threatening letter, telling her a divorce would ‘harm his position and bring him a great deal of unpleasantness’. In a letter to Toinette she asked pitifully if she had the right to go through with it, even though he had made her suffer so much.100
Masha was understandably hesitant about going through with divorce. It was extremely rare in Russia, and the risk of social disgrace was very real. In 1857, the year in which divorce first become possible in an English court of civil law, the sanctity of marriage as a religious institution in Russia was upheld by the publication of the third edition of the Imperial Law Code. A divorce in Russia could only be obtained through the Church, which viewed marriage as a holy sacrament which could not be dissolved,101 and accorded illegitimate children no legal rights. Article 103 of Chapter 1 in Volume One of the Law Code specifically forbade married couples from living apart, except in cases of exile to Siberia, while articles 106 and 108 upheld male authority within wedlock:
A husband shall love his wife as his own body and live with her in harmony; he shall respect and protect her, forgive her shortcomings, and ease her infirmities. He shall provide his wife nourishment and support to the best of his ability… A wife shall obey her husband as the head of the family, abide with him in love, respect and unlimited obedience and render him every satisfaction and affection as the mistress of the house…102
Female subjugation was not exclusive to Russia, of course, but the state had a vested interest in supporting patriarchal structures, as it equated domestic stability with political stability. Tolstoy could have picked no better way of portraying the disintegration of late imperial Russian society than to decide to write a novel with the theme of the ‘family’.
Over the course of the nineteenth century the Orthodox Church had made marital separation more rather than less difficult. Petitions for divorce had to be made to the diocesan authorities, and entailed an expensive, bureaucratic and lengthy process, with nine separate stages. Adultery, furthermore, could only be proved with the testimony of witnesses, as Alexey Alexandrovich discovers to his horror when he goes to consult the ‘famous St Petersburg lawyer’ in Part Four of Anna Karenina. It is thus hardly surprising so few petitions were made – seventy-one in the whole of Russia in 1860, and only seven made on the grounds of adultery.103 But with the Great Reforms, urban growth and the expansion of education came new attitudes towards marriage, and pressure to simplify and update divorce, so it was a constant topic of discussion in the ecclesiastical press in the second half of the nineteenth century.104 A committee set up by reformers in 1870 proposed transferring divorce proceedings to the civil courts, thus saving the ecclesiastical authorities from having to investigate such matters, ‘which are full of descriptions of suggestive and disgusting scenes, in which the whole stench of depravity is often collected’.105 In May 1873, just when Tolstoy was starting Anna Karenina, the Holy Synod overwhelmingly rejected this proposal, as it did a proposal to introduce civil marriage (which had already been introduced elsewhere in Europe) on the grounds that it was ‘legalised fornication’. Nevertheless, the number of divorces rose steadily, from 795 in 1866 to 947 in 1875.106 Both Sonya’s elder sister Liza (the clever one Tolstoy had shrunk from marrying) and their brother Alexander obtained divorces during this period.107
Tolstoy’s research on behalf of his sister served him well when dealing with the topic of divorce in Anna Karenina, as did the experience of witnessing divorce proceedings close at hand. In 1868 his old friend Dmitry Dyakov’s sister Maria Alexeyevna divorced the stuffy, karenin-like Sergey Sukhotin, having created a scandal by abandoning him and their young children for another man, with whom she had an illegitimate child.108 In the event, his sister Masha did not need to go through with the divorce from her husband, as the weak-willed and impoverished viscount returned to Sweden to marry someone with better financial prospects, leaving Masha mired in debt. His family had been reluctant to see him marry a woman with four children who would also soon bear the stigma of divorce, and had persuaded him to leave her. Masha returned to Russia and Valerian Petrovich died the following year, but she remained deeply unhappy in her personal life, having left her daughter Elena behind in Switzerland. As she wrote in the desperate letter to her brother in 1876 in which she likened herself to Anna karenina, she knew of no single woman from their background with the ‘courage’ to admit to the existence of an illegitimate child.109
Tolstoy himself certainly contemplated divorce too on occasion, but his increasingly troubled marriage was stable and conventional when compared to the marriages of his relatives and friends. His brother Dmitry spent his last years living with a former prostitute (as Nikolay does in Anna Karenina), and his brother Sergey was married to a gypsy. While Tolstoy was trying to rescue Masha in 1864, and write War and Peace, he suddenly found himself also having to deal with the romantic crisis Sergey had become embroiled in. The previous summer, after his fourteen-year relationship with Maria Shishkina, the gypsy singer from Tula whom he had ‘bought out’ from her choir, Sergey had suddenly fallen madly in love with Sonya’s vivacious sister Tanya (with whom Tolstoy himself was also slightly enamoured, if the truth be told). Sergey proposed to Tanya, but quite apart from the fact that he was twenty years older (Tanya was a very young seventeen), he already had three children with Maria Shishkina and was expecting a fourth. In the end, his conscience got the better of him. It broke his heart to see Maria praying on her knees in front of an icon in floods of tears, and meekly submitting to fate.110 In June 1865, a month after his daughter Vera was born, he broke off the engagement.111
Both Tanya and Sergey married in 1867. Tolstoy was opposed to Tanya marrying her cousin Alexander kuzminsky, as he thought she would be a good wife for his old friend Dmitry Dyakov, who had just been widowed. There was something distinctly curmudgeonly about the distaste he expressed ten years later when Dyakov (then fifty-five) married his daughter Masha’s former governess Sofya Robertovna, who was thirty-two.112 After all, ‘Sofesh’, as she was affectionately known, was the same age as his own wife, and two years older than Tanya.113 After Sergey finally married Maria they moved to his Pirogovo estate. They were to have a total of eleven children, of whom four survived, but their marriage was not happy. Maria felt painfully aware of their different social backgrounds, and was shy and retiring in the company of her brother’s family. Tolstoy always showed Maria Mikhailovna the greatest of respect, and repeatedly invited her to accompany Sergey to Yasnaya Polyana, but she was reluctant to come, even when Sonya had the idea of asking her to become godmother to their son Andrey, born in December 1877.