How did Leo Tolstoy look for his love?

Tolstoy began to dream about family life from the age of 15. He did not have a carefree childhood. He did not remember his mother at all – she died before Leo had even turned two years of age. His father died when he was nine – hence this constant desire to revive, to recreate the magical world of childhood and family, which he loved so much and lacked his entire life. 

On his way to the Caucasus in 1852, he wrote to his aunt Tatiana Yergolskaya, who had replaced the Tolstoy children's mother: “I will also allow myself to dream of someone else. I am married. My wife is kind, gentle, loving and she loves you as much as I do. Our children call you 'Grandmother'… You take the role of grandmother, I take the role of father, my wife the role of mother and our children are our roles.” 

From the very beginning, Tolstoy ascribed the role of mother to his future chosen one. And he idolized his mother, although, not having a single portrait of her, he imagined only her spiritual image: “Everything I know about her,” he wrote, “all is wonderful.” So, the future wife was required to be just as wonderful.  

Having returned to St. Petersburg from the Caucasus and Sevastopol, he made several approaches to young brides, but did not find the ideal he was striving for. In Moscow, Tolstoy also visited the house of the Behrs, his old acquaintances: in fact, Lyubov Alexandrovna, Sophia Andreyevna's mother, was a childhood friend of his. She had married Alexander Behrs, a Moscow court physician. The family raised three daughters – Elizabeth, Sophia and Tatiana. Tolstoy fell deeply in love with this family and told his sister Maria that if he ever married, he would definitely do it in the Behrs family. In fact, he was not interested in the older sister, who was already of marriageable age, but in 17-year-old Sonechka Behrs. He even wrote in his diary, without naming her: “A child! Seems to be!” It appears to be a genuine feeling of love.

In August 1862, the Behrs arrived at the Ivitsa Estate and Tolstoy literally rushed from his Yasnaya Polyana Estate after them. And there, on the card table, he wrote a phrase for Sonechka in initial letters: “v. m. and p. s. s. s. g. n. m. m. m. s. and n. s.” Sophia Andreyevna deciphered this inscription: “Your youth and need for happiness remind me too vividly of my old age and the impossibility of happiness.” He finally fell in love, writing in his diary: “I am crazy, I will shoot myself if it continues like this. I did not sleep until three o'clock in the morning, dreaming and agonizing like a 16-year-old boy." In the end, he wrote a letter to Sophia Andreyevna, carried it in his pocket for two days, rubbed it out, crumpled it up and only on the third day, seizing the moment, gave it to the girl: “Tell me, as an honest man, do you want to be my wife? Only if you can say 'yes' from the bottom of your heart, otherwise it is better to say 'no', if there is a shadow of doubt in you. For God's sake, ask yourself well.” Sophia Andreevna, having read the letter in her mother's room, went down to Tolstoy and replied: “Of course, yes.”

When she answered with consent, he gathered all his resolve and insisted that the wedding be held immediately, in a week. The wedding took place on September 23 in the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin in the Moscow Kremlin. Tolstoy, however, managed to be late, because he was looking for and could not find a clean white shirt – this anecdote also later ended up in his novel ‘Anna Karenina’.

And, after the wedding, he immediately picked up his wife and, sitting in a cart, took her to Yasnaya Polyana, the estate that he inherited. Tolstoy wrote in his diary: “Incredible happiness! It can't be that it all simply ends with life!”

This is a fragment of a conversation between a correspondent of the ‘Russkiy Mir’ magazine and Olga Golovanova, head of the ‘Tolstoy Center on Pyatnitskaya 12’ department of the Leo Tolstoy State Museum. The full text in Russian is here.