Unhappy in her own way

It is a cruel fact, but unhappy marriages, unless they are your own, are always comic. Hence the popularity of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Hence the universal applicability of the Victorian joke about the Carlyle marriage: that it showed the kindness of God — making two people unhappy instead of four.

The marriage of Tolstoy and Sofia Behrs, neither of whom had an ounce of humour in their bodies, certainly partakes of this grand old slapstick tradition. Sofia’s diary entry for 26 August 1882 runs:

It was 20 years ago, when I was young and happy, that I started writing the story of my love for Lyovochka in these diaries: there is virtually nothing but love in them in fact. Twenty years later, here I am sitting up all night on my own reading and mourning its loss. For the first time in my life he has run off to sleep alone in the study. We were quarrelling about such silly things . . . Today he shouted at the top of his voice that his dearest wish was to leave his family.


But if you turn back 20 years, you find that the marriage began with a violent quarrel about diaries. Tolstoy idiotically showed his much younger bride the diaries of his early life and she was appalled by the disclosures of his sexual nature — the existence of an illegitimate child, the lust for peasant women and the hints of homosexuality.

The flavour of their melodramatic approach to domestic partnership is vividly given when he is only a few years short of his 80th birthday. We find his wife going into the old boy’s room to wish him a happy New Year:

‘I feel sorry for you, Sonya’, he said.