Leben mit Tolstoi 1/3

The story of Sofya Tolstaya. Sofya Tolstaya was just 18 years old when she married the much older Count Leo Tolstoy in 1862. Romantically in love with the famous writer, she initially readily assumed the role of an admiring, subservient wife. She was his first reader and meticulous copyist, managed the large estate, took care of the finances, and bore him 13 children. The highly gifted Sofya, who had received an excellent education as the daughter of a respected physician, completely suppressed her own literary ambitions in favor of her domineering and increasingly egomaniacal husband. "My entire intellectual life is of no interest to him, and he has no use for it," Sofya Tolstaya once noted in her diary. Only when she felt publicly humiliated by Tolstoy's novel "The Kreutzer Sonata" and its extremely negative portrayal of women did she begin to write again. The novel "A Question of Guilt" was written, only recently discovered among their papers, and sheds entirely new light on this famous couple in literary history. Feature by Barbara Denscher