Sophia Tolstaya

Countess Sophia Andreyevna Tolstaya (,; – 4 November 1919), sometimes anglicised as Sofia Tolstoy, Sophia Tolstoy and Sonya Tolstoy, was a Russian diarist, and the wife of writer Count Leo Tolstoy. Biography Sophia Behrs was one of three daughters of a German physician Andrey Evstafievich Behrs (1808–1868) and his Russian wife Liubov Alexandrovna Islavinа (1826–1886). Her maternal great-grandfather, Count Pyotr Zavadovsky, was the first Minister of education in Russia's history. Sophia was first introduced to Leo Tolstoy in 1862 when she was 18 years old. At 34, Tolstoy was 16 years her senior. On 17 September 1862 the couple became formally engaged after Tolstoy gave Sophia a written proposal of marriage, marrying a week later in Moscow. At the time of their marriage, Leo Tolstoy was well known as a novelist following the publication of The Cossacks. On the eve of their wedding, Tolstoy gave Sophia his diaries that detailed his sexual relations with female servants. (In Anna Karenina, 34-year-old Konstantin Levin, a semi-autobiographical character, behaves similarly, asking his 19-year-old fiancée Kitty to read his diaries and learn of his past transgressions.) The diaries included the fact that Tolstoy had fathered a child by a woman who remained on the Yasnaya Polyana estate. Tolstoya was pregnant 16 times; three of her pregnancies ended in miscarriages. The Tolstoys had 13 children, eight of whom survived childhood. With the growing interest of her husband in spiritual matters, Tolstoya took over the running of the family estate. Sophia acted as copyist of War and Peace, copying and editing the manuscript seven times from beginning to end at home at night by candlelight after the children and servants had gone to bed, using an inkwell pen and sometimes requiring a magnifying glass to read her husband's notes.