Yelling, screaming, threatening suicide, and not resolving issues were part of their strained and stormy relationship throughout their many years together. Due to their diaries documenting their many quarrels and marital problems, the marriage of Leo and Sofya is considered by many to have been a very bad and tormented marriage.
"At various times over the next two years she claims she is being poisoned by her husband’s personal physician, tries to poison herself with morphine then opium, alleges that her husband and Tolstoy are having a homosexual affair, sends for a priest to exorcise Chertkov’s spirit from Tolstoy’s study and, when she reads in the paper that Chertkov is being allowed to settle back at Tula, brandishes a cap gun. At one stage she issues a media release saying that after 48 years of devoting her entire life to Tolstoy she has left home because he has fallen under the pernicious influence of 'Mr C ...' who speaks to her in crude and vulgar terms. She also admits to suffering from a nervous illness necessitating the consultation of two specialists from Moscow."
Source: "Clashes Over His Inheritance." TolstoyCentennial.com."In the last year of his life, Tolstoy writes a letter to Sophia that he says includes a true picture of their relationship and his view of her life. In part it reads: “As I loved you when I was young, so I never stopped loving you in spite of the many causes of estrangement between us, and so I love you now. Leaving aside the cessation of our conjugal relations (a fact that could but add to the sincerity of our expressions of true love), those causes were as follows: first, my increasing withdrawal from society, whereas you neither would nor could forgo it, because the principles which lead me to adopt my convictions were fundamentally opposed to yours: this is perfectly natural and I cannot hold it against you ... In recent years, you have grown more and more irritable, despotic and uncontrollable. This could not fail to inhibit any display of feeling on my part, if not the feelings themselves. That is the second point. And in the third place, the principal, fatal cause, was that of which we are both equally innocent: our totally opposite ideas of the meaning and purpose of existence. For me property is a sin, for you an essential condition of life. I forced myself to accept the painful circumstances of our life in order not to leave you, but you saw my acceptance as a concession to your views, and this only deepened the misunderstanding between us ... Your life has been such that I can have absolutely nothing to reproach you with.”
Source: "Tolstoy Outlines His View on His Relationship With His Wife." TolstoyCentennial.com.
