I’m almost done reading Tolstoy’s recent biography, so I promise to stop bugging everybody with posts on Tolstoy. Just bear with me for a little longer, OK?
Tolstoy never cheated on his wife Sonia in the 48 years they lived together. He was deeply religious and considered marriage to be one of life’s two most important events (the second one being death, which for a Christian is not a negative thing). This is why physical infidelity was unimaginable for Tolstoy. He did, however, have an emotional affair that made his wife suffer tortures of jealousy. She referred to her husband’s spiritual paramour as “a beautiful idol” and “family-breaker.”
“Every day I wait for your letters, I see you in my dreams, I think about you in my every waking moment. What is happening to you? Did I do anything to upset you? I keep thinking about it but have no idea what it is I might have done wrong” writes 62-year-old Tolstoy to the much younger object of his affections.
“Thank you for your recent letter,” writes Tolstoy in response to a missive where nasty insinuations were made about the writer’s wife. “You probably cannot even imagine how happy it made me feel. . . I feel joyous and I love you.”
So who was this person seen by aging Tolstoy as his only true spiritual companion and who undermined the writer’s long marriage, separating him eventually from his wife of 48 years and children?
It was Vladimir Chertkov, a young, mentally disturbed officer who became Tolstoy’s most ardent follower.
In a patriarchal society, such a chasm exists between men and women that even a marriage of 30 or 40 years cannot bridge it. Tolstoy was dying for somebody to share his intellectual, emotional and spiritual life, but it never occurred to him to turn to his wife for the fulfillment of these needs. The curious thing is that the writer’s wife was a lot better suited to the role of Tolstoy’s spiritual companion than Chertkov. She was a much better writer, she understood her husband’s work in a more profound way, and she had a much more varied sphere of intellectual interests.
Yet, no true communion between men and women is possible in patriarchal societies. Homosociality is the only option for people who have emotional and spiritual needs but cannot even imagine turning to their partners in life for the fulfillment of these needs. And this is yet another tragedy of the patriarchy.
“Women who have liberated themselves from the yoke are horrible,” wrote Tolstoy. His intense spiritual loneliness in his own family and the humiliating groveling before young men who used him were the price he paid for this belief.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’ll comment, since nobody else has, and I don’t work until this evening. If I were Sonia, I would play the game quite differently. Of course, this implies I would have read some of the right books — the kinds of books Emma Goldman might have read (although she was thirty years younger than him). Anyway, I would have pushed him even further towards his patriarchal desires and goals so that they became plainly manifest, if not in his own eyes then in the eyes of everybody else.
He should certainly have been encouraged to have a full on sexual affair with Vladimir Chertkov. Then, this fact should also have been made publicly known.
I’m all for patriarchs fulfilling completely the logic of their own patriarchy.
What I cannot stand is when they only take it half way and expect us women to “understand”.
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To do all that you’d first need to see yourself as a valid human being and not a piece of property. And that’s a huge breakthrough many women at that time (and even today) couldn’t achieve.
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I have not read the biography. However, I saw the recent movie about the last phase of Tolstoy’s life. At the time, i surmized that Tolstoy was suffering from some form of senility or old-age dementia. Clearly he was being exploited by self-seeking interest groups whose ideas he had formerly rejected. His wife was deliberately isolated from him by this group, eager to get its dirty hands on his wealthy estate.
Of course, senility cannot excuse Tolstoy’s earlier ill-treatment of his wife. In the world Tolstoy inhabited, his wife was simply unfortunate enough to have a strong constitution. For the most part, wives tended to die after the fourth or fifth pregnancy and the men simply moved on to pastures younger. Truly a dog eat dog world.
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Ah, platonic love. Sweet, wholesome, misogynistic, homoerotic, pederastic platonic love.
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And, really, in a lot of ways, this is an issue of character structure. This is where my views that I term shamanistic depart from prevalent ideas of bourgeois individuality. I think that sometimes we have the kinds of character structures that make it hard for us to be valid human beings in our own eyes. I suspect that the reason why this is the one issue that is never broached in current schools of thought is that people are fairly happy with the often antiquated character structures they have.
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