Life and times of Leo Tolstoy

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32666, 23 July 1971, Page 4

Life and times of Leo Tolstoy

One of the most extraordinary things about Alexandra Tolstoy is that, considering her father Leo Tolstoy was bom in 1828, she should still be alive. Even more extraordinary is that, as a key figure in the last tragic years of his life, this should be the first record of her story on film. She is 86, lives in America, and has the same craggy features as Tolstoy, with the penetrating and comprehending look of all the photographs of her father. A half-hour documentary on Tolstoy has been bought by the N.Z.B.C. and will be scheduled later.

Tolstoy had written most of his great novels by the time Alexandra was bom. She is his last surviving child, the twelfth of his 13 children, and grew up in an atmosphere unusually rich in both happiness and pain. She describes how she was an unwanted child, and how her relationship with her mother remained a source of bitterness and misunderstanding until some time after her father’s death.

Tolstoy as a young man had lived a life rich in every experience; he had pursued everything to its utmost, including love, gluttony and sensuality. By the time he reached his early thirties he had arrived at the conclusion that marriage was the highest state to which he could aspire, and he wedded Sonia, staking, as he later said, all at one throw. His wife was much younger and with the passing of time it became apparent that she had little understanding

of his inner needs. Although it is indisputable that they loved and remained faithful to each other, the misunderstanding between them grew. Tolstoy, who believed in nonviolence and non-attachment to material things, had married a wife who was possessive and jealous. Gradually, worn down by child-bearing and imagined threats to their livelihood, Sonia became paranoic. Alexandra tells of becoming Tolstoy’s secretary and confidante. It was she who stood in the middle of the battle between her parents, she who tried to pacify her mother and protect her father from the excesses of Sonia’s hysteria. When Tolstoy finally left home, taking the step he had contemplated for so many years, it was Alexandra who accompanied him. He was by then 82, a tired and sick old man still heroically writing, still wanting to “give something of myself that may be useful to others.”

His journey was undertaken to find peace and solitude away from the public attention that beset his every deed, and it is ironical that, falling ill on the way, he died in a station-master’s cottage in an unprecedented blaze of publicity. Alexandra sat with him during those last few days. She tells how at first his death seemed devastating. Soon after, however, she received from her father something like a message after death, which has illuminated the rest of her life.