Half awake on her bed, squinting at the clouds outside her window, Chandramathi imagines Sofia floating by, looking almost resentfully back at her. She hears Sofia complain about the way she was portrayed in her new book. Chandramathi, a writer attuned to the sensitivities of an unhappy woman, would turn back the pages and rewrite the chapter in the voice of Sofia that she heard in her dreams. On those pages of a Malayalam book, Sofia emerges from the blurry background of the world of Leo Tolstoy, from a hundred years ago.
Ozhukathe Oru Puzha (A River That Doesn’t Flow) was written in three drafts, as a fictional retelling of the life of Sofia Tolstoy, a woman once written off as the materialistic and hysterical wife of the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, and later rediscovered from her diaries as a misunderstood and perhaps abused partner. In Chandramathi’s book, Sofia had a childhood of love and laughter, she had skills tucked away for a lifetime, she had strong thoughts and opinions as she spent her decades loving Tolstoy and mothering 16 children.
The story of humans being the same everywhere rings true when Chandramathi, living on the other side of the planet and a hundred years later, brings alive the Russian woman she found most misunderstood in history. “At the time [I grew interested in Sofia] there was a debate going on about plagiarism in literature. Established writers were accused of it. I read quite a lot about it and came across the name of Tolstoy, how he allegedly took material from his wife’s diaries, their quarrels and conversations, and never credited her for it. I wanted to read more and write about it," said Chandramathi, who had also been a lecturer of English for many years.
Chandramathi or Chandrika Balan is the author of many short stories, novels and nonfiction in English and Malayalam, including her cancer memoir Njandukalude Nattil Oridavela that inspired a film by the same name.
A writer who habitually sews together mesmerising worlds of fiction in her beautiful Malayalam, Chandramathi immersed herself in the life of Sofia (fondly called Sonya) with the urgency of a kindred soul and the help of friends and family who brought her books from the world over. Her biggest contributor was her late husband Balan who gave her copies of Sofia’s diaries after a tour of Russia, and urged her to start with Tolstoy. Balan’s sudden slipping into an illness which had once put her own life in danger and his demise within nine months left the writer disconnected from the fictional worlds she created. She forgot Sofia, she forgot literature itself until dear ones prodded her back into the picture. A photograph of Balan on the wall also seemed to tell her to go on. She picked up Anna Karenina, her notes on War and Peace, other novels of Tolstoy, just as Balan had asked her to, before slipping comfortably into the many diaries of Sofia.
What must have eased her way back into Sofia’s world was perhaps the widowhood she shared with the Russian diarist, if not the many relatable stories she knew from life – women, rankholders and artists among them, leaving everything behind after marriage. “Sonya (Sofia) is the river in my title who was not allowed to flow freely. Her flow was curtailed, and she could move only within his circle.”
The early chapters described Sofia’s love for drawing, playing the piano and writing – artistic pursuits that Tolstoy had encouraged before their marriage. Their union had been tumultuous. Sofia fell for Tolstoy who was nearly double her age when her elder sister had clearly been in love with him. She was smitten by his works and Tolstoy had offered his diaries to read, so she knew what she was getting into. Shocked as she was by his revelations and relationships in the past Sofia nevertheless took his hand with frightening insecurities.
The early days of happy marriage and estate management ended as she became pregnant - a condition Sofia seemed forever to be in, as she would herself declare many times in the novel: ‘permanently pregnant’.
Chandramathi, in her attempt to recreate Sofia, did not hold back as she described the many flaws of her heroine - susceptible to quick tantrums when she feels wronged, easily losing her temper and almost stubbornly clutching onto the wealth of her husband. But every time Sofia spoke of her reasons to hold onto Tolstoy’s riches and his copyrights that he badly wanted to give away, she brought up the children who relied on them. It was not for her, she said, but for the eight offspring who survived childhood, after eight others were lost in infancy or to miscarriages.
Many pages describe Sofia’s animosity with the Tolstoyans - a group that followed his spiritual principles of simple and chaste life, of vegetarianism and philanthropy. The most hated among them was Tolstoy’s most beloved follower, Vladimir Chertkov, who played a big role in tarnishing the reputation of Sofia as the troublesome wife who stood in the ‘godlike’ author’s way.
“My aim was to portray the psyche of a woman who suffers at the hands of a famous writer. I did not intend either the glorification of Sonya or the vilification of Tolstoy. I have not put him down as a bad character, but described his good qualities and philanthropic attitude. But although he cared so much for the human beings outside, he cared little for those inside [his home]. You will find such a trait in most great people, including Gandhi. They project themselves as models for society, for the rest of the world; only the wives see the real picture,” Chandramathi said. Dostoevsky and Anna, another great Russian writer and partner who were contemporaries of the Tolstoys, are also characters in Chandramathi’s book.
While she describes Tolstoy’s many attempts to stand with the oppressed class, she also shows him to be a man of contradictions – speaking against the Church one day and embracing it the next day, preaching chastity in the day while not practising it in the night. She said it was not hard to portray a writer she had for long admired with the truth she had learned about him but worried how this story about Sofia would be taken by the admirers of Tolstoy.
The writer did not take sides in her retelling, even as she had a soft corner for the wronged woman. Tolstoy comes off as a deeply wounded man. Every time Sofia takes off into the unknown in a state of madness he runs after her to bring her back to safety. She, in turn, is hurt by his every gesture of indifference and his lack of understanding of her.
Chandramathi makes it clear that Tolstoy, a visionary man, had a misogynistic view of women. He appears to care little for the efforts Sofia took in his work - including copying his manuscripts by hand many times before they were printed. War and Peace, his masterpiece, was copied seven times by her.
He also did not care about her own writing and never knew she had penned two novellas in their lifetime but kept it unpublished for the sake of her children, who did not want it. The first of these - Whose fault - was in response to Tolstoy’s novel The Kreutzer Sonata, which she saw as an attack of her character. The second of these, Song Without Words, a novel about an extramarital affair, too would not have suited the image of the loyal wife and mother that Russian society would have liked to impose on her, Chandramathi said.
“I have read them both, and she is being true to herself. She writes about her love affairs - all of them platonic. Bodily relations do not matter to her. The first book, if it was published, in their lifetime, would have been popular because it was the wife’s response to her husband’s novel - something unheard of in Russian society back then. But Tolstoy would not have forgiven her, and her children would have forsaken her. The second book was not so harmful but it would have still tarnished her image. What happened to Madhavikutty (who famously wrote her shockingly honest autobiography My Story and became instantly controversial) would have happened to her,” Chandramathi said, least naive to the fates of outspoken women of all times.
She ends her book with a bonus chapter, a conversation between her and Sofia aka Sonya, imaginary for the reader, but real to the author. Chandramathi did not want to leave Sonya’s widowhood out of the book and makes amends in this chapter. She was a widow too, when she wrote it, and she felt Sofia’s presence in herself. For assurance, she looked at the framed picture of Balan on the wall, who seemed to tell her: write this, exactly as you see it.