The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy by Cathy Porter

Author:Cathy Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

26th March. It’s a great pity I haven’t kept an accurate account of the various events and conversations that have taken place. What interested me most were all the letters, especially those from abroad, sympathizing with my letter to Pobedonostsev and the Metropolitans. None of Lev Nikolaevich’s manuscripts have reached such wide or speedy distribution as this letter of mine, and it has been translated into all the foreign languages.* I was delighted, but it did not make me conceited, thank God! I dashed it off spontaneously, passionately. It was God’s will, not mine, that I should do it.

Lev Nikolaevich has written a letter ‘To the Tsar and His Assistants’.* What will come of it! I wouldn’t want us to be exiled from Russia in our old age.

Another event was my concert in aid of the orphanage. Some very pleasant people took part, and this lent it an exceptionally elegant, respectable tone. The young ladies selling programmes all wore white dresses, and there were baskets of fresh flowers on the tables. Mikhail Stakhovich did a fine rendering of an excerpt from L.N.’s ‘Who is Right?’, and I wasn’t disgraced before all these people whose opinion I esteem. We didn’t make much for the orphanage, only 1,307 rubles.*

An unpleasant scene with Sasha on Palm Sunday. I called her to go to vespers with me and she refused, saying she had lost her faith. I told her if she wanted to follow her father’s path she must go the whole way like him: he was extremely Orthodox for many years—long after he got married too—then he renounced the Church in the name of pure Christianity, and also renounced all earthly blessings. Sasha, like so many of my children, was of course simply jumping at the easy way out—in this case not going to church. I burst into tears and she went to ask her father for advice, and he told her: “Of course you must go—you mustn’t distress your mother.”

So she came to the orphanage church with me and attended vespers, and now she will fast with me.

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