Which is the true Tolstoy?

Tolstoy and his wife Sonya at a family meal in 1905 (public domain)

No surprise that different critics present Tolstoy in different ways, but sometimes the difference is enormous. Here are two very different accounts of how Tolstoy chose his bride. The first is by Anthony Briggs, in his Brief Lives: Leo Tolstoy (Hesperus, 2010):

He got married, in September 1862. His attractive young wife was not easily acquired, and not immediately satisfied, or satisfying, when she was his. To begin with, even when he settled on a suitable household with interesting girls (the Bers family), there were three of them … Liza was the obvious choice, first in line for marriage at the age of nineteen .. but no. He flouted both convention and paternal opposition by choosing the second girl. It was the best decision he ever made. Sofya turned out to be the most wonderfully made literary spouse. If he is one of the great men of world culture, she is the traditional feminine force behind him … Sofia was eighteen when Leo proposed, scarcely into full womanhood, overwhelmed by this big, mature man (he was thirty-four) … but he knew quality when he saw it.

Sounds a bit like shopping in the butcher’s: “acquiring” a wife, and knowing quality when he sees it. And it’s the first time I’ve seen the word “mature” applied to Tolstoy.

The second is by Tim Parks (a review in the London Review of Books, April 2018), telling a very different kind of story:

On 17 September 1862, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, aged 34, gave his diaries of the last 15 years to Sophia Andreevna Behrs, who had just turned 18 … Three days earlier, on 14 September, Lev had proposed to Sonya by hand-delivered letter, when her parents had been expecting him to propose to their eldest, Liza, who was twenty. Lev and Sonya had met only at family gatherings and had never been alone together for more than a few moments. On 16 September, Sonya accepted and Lev persuaded her parents to arrange the wedding as soon as possible, on the 23rd. This was extraordinary hast, as if the groom were afraid he might change his mind. Certainly, the gift of the diaries looked like an invitation to Sonya to change hers. The bride-to-be read the notebooks at once, and discovered that Lev had actually been more attracted to her younger sister, Tanya …

How to account for the difference between the two accounts? There is only ten years between the two versions, yet there is a generation or more in difference of attitude. Briggs is the traditional literary scholar: whatever my hero Tolstoy does is likely to be right. Briggs doesn’t even contemplate that the woman might have a choice. Parks, by contrast, points out the unconventional nature of Tolstoy’s approach, and why it was by no means a foregone conclusion that Sonya would accept him. For Briggs, Sonya’s role is to be the “literary spouse” behind “one of the great men of world culture” (and Briggs keeps emphasising this throughout his biography, as if that justifies all his other actions). For Parks, Sonya carries out her role as one might imagine for a 19th-century wife:

When you’re around I feel like a queen, without you I’m superfluous.

Surely the role of the present-day critic is not just to sing the praises of his or her subject, particularly if that subject happens to be one of the most tortured souls on the planet, but to place the subject in context so that the very strangeness of Tolstoy’s actions, then and now, is made clear to us today?