The Woman Behind the Writer: Sofya Tolstoy

Since  contributing an essay to the book The Who, The What and the When: 65 Artists Illustrate the Secret Sidekicks of History years ago, I’ve become fascinated by the people who prop up the person we know.

My particular essay revolved around Joyce McLennan, personal assistant to PD James, who typed up every one of her manuscripts.

James wrote her daily pages in longhand after an exhaustive outline. Joyce would transcribe those pages for editing and revision. And so a book would soon be produced.

Similarly, Sofya Tolstoya helped her husband write War and Peace, still considered an influential work in literature alongside his Anna Karenina, held in equally high praise.

Married in 1862, Leo was already 34 and his lovely wife a mere 18. Yet by age 19 she began her collaboration with him on War and Peace.

Sofya would sit beside her husband as he wrote, so she was the first set of eyes on what he produced each day.

She would make suggestions as he wrote, even changes to his plot, and it is down to her that he removed a very graphic wedding night scene of one of the main characters.

There were no typewriters yet, so this was truly a labor of love, as when he wrote in longhand, his handwriting was known to be extremely difficult to decipher. Biographer Rosamund Bartlett called it “chicken scratch.”

Sofya had the interminable task of taking that manuscript and then preparing a legible draft, which noting the length of War and Peace, was surely an interminable and weighty job to take on.

One historian noted that this Herculean task often required Tolstoy’s wife to use a magnifying glass to decipher the author’s horrid hand writing.

And then with revisions, she is said to have rewritten War and Peace—which clocked in at its first book length in 1869 at 1,225 pages—EIGHT separate times!

If that’s not love…

I understand there is a movie of their sometimes thorny marriage, filmed in 2009 and titled The Last Station. It stars Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, who both had Oscar nods for their roles. I’ll have to check that one out. If anyone’s seen it, I’d be interested to know how her role as his transcriber and helpmate was addressed.

MIss Demeanors

Author

Marni Graff is the award-winning author of The Nora Tierney English Mysteries and The Trudy Genova Manhattan Mysteries. Her story “Quiche Alain” appears in the Anthony-winning Malice Domestic Anthology, Murder Most Edible.  Managing Editor of Bridle Path Press, she’s a member of Sisters in Crime, Triangle SinC, Mavens of Mayhem SinC, the NC Writers Network, and the International Crime Writers Association.