Tolstoy, the Toxic Husband

For someone who was arguably one of the world’s greatest observers of love, emotions, and human sensitivity, Tolstoy’s record as a husband was abysmally poor. His lust and exploits before marriage led to him contracting gonorrhea and fathering a child whom he never cared for.

Paul Johnson, in Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, chronicles Tolstoy’s policy of making his wife read his diaries and forcing her to share hers with him

It was part of Tolstoy’s ‘open’ policy that each should keep diaries and each should have access to the other’s-a sure formula for mutual suspicion and misery. The physical side of the Tolstoy marriage probably never recovered from Sonya’s initial shock at learning her husband was (as she saw it) a sexual monster. Moreover, she read his diaries in ways which Tolstoy had not anticipated, noting faults he had been careful (as he thought) to conceal. She spotted, for instance, that he had failed to repay debts contracted as a result of his gambling. She observed, too, that he failed to tell women with whom he had sex that he had contracted venereal disease and might still have it. The selfishness and egotism the diaries so plainly convey to the perceptive reader-and who more perceptive than a wife?-were more apparent to her than to the author. Moreover, the Tolstoyan sex life so vividly described in his diaries was now inextricably mingled in her mind with the horrors of submitting to his demands and their ultimate consequence in painful and repeated pregnancies. She endured a dozen in twenty-two years

In his later life, the same sexually charged Tolstoy decided to become celibate and declared to his wife that henceforth they would live as brother and sister. During this phase, Tolstoy began dressing in the garb of a peasant. “His boots, his smock, his beard, and his cap became the uniform of the new Tolstoy, the world-seer.”

Sophia was also the doting wife who hand-copied the manuscript of War and Peace seven times!

Somehow, his forced celibacy and sartorial choices have an uncanny resemblance to those of another intellectual we are all familiar with—our own Mahatma.

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