Countess Sophia Andreyevna Tolstoya (nee Behrs) (1844-1919) was the wife of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. The mother of 13 children, eight of whom survived to adulthood, Countess Tolstoya also acted as copyist to her husband. The Diary documents family events, as well as her husband's literary life."

Many Russian women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tried to find authentic religious, marital, professional, and political experiences. Some very remarkable ones found these things in varying degrees, while others sought unsuccessfully but no less desperately to transcend the generations-old restrictions imposed by church, state, village, class, and gender. Like a Slavic Downton Abbey, this book tells the stories, not just of their outward lives, but of their hearts and minds, their voices and dreams, their amazing accomplishments against overwhelming odds, and their roles as feminists and avant-gardists in shaping modern Russia and, indeed, the twentieth century in the West. In their own words and images, and each in their own unique way, these remarkable Russian women construct a fascinating tapestry of a culture at the crossroads of modernity and on the brink of catastrophe.

Dealing with the most topical questions of the time, Sofia Tolstaya’s artistic works—from parables to short stories, novellas, and memoirs—show deep insights into the social context of nineteenth-century Russia. In his lengthy review of My Life (along with other Tolstaya publications) in Canadian Slavonic Papers, the eminent Tolstoy scholar Hugh McLean (2011) laments the fact that it has taken so long (almost a century after her death) to focus academic attention on Sofia Tolstaya, and that there has been no unified publication of her works, scattered as they are among dated journals or not published at all. This book aims to help fill this lacuna by offering a critical introduction to her literary output as a writer in her own right, and presenting, for the first time, an anthology of her main artistic works, some in fresh English translation, and others never translated before.

Intercourse is a book that moves through the sexed world of dominance and submission. It moves in descending circles, not in a straight line, and as in a vortex each spiral goes down deeper. Its formal model is Dante's Inferno; its lyrical debt is to Rimbaud; the equality it envisions is rooted in the dreams of women, silent generations, pioneer voices, lone rebels, and masses who agitated, demanded, cried out, broke laws, and even begged. The begging was a substitute for retaliatory violence: doing bodily harm back to those who use or injure you. I want women to be done with begging. The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works. Men often react to women's words - speaking and writing - as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women's words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men - control, violence, insult, contempt - that no threat seems empty. Intercourse does not say, forgive me and love me. It does not say, I forgive you, I love you. For a woman writer to thrive (or, arguably, to survive) in these current hard times, forgiveness and love must be subtext. No. I say no. Intercourse is search and assertion, passion and fury; and its form - no less than its content - deserves critical scrutiny and respect.---- PREFACE.

[This book] argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women's subordination to men.-Back cover.

Tolstoy’s fame as one of the world’s greatest novelists has never been in doubt, but the importance of his views on the social, moral and religious issues of his time is not so widely recognised. This study, first published in 1973, presents an introduction to the historical and cultural background of Tolstoy’s lifetime, then going on to consider the major events of his developing personality as a writer and reformer. As well as considering the famous novels and literary criticism, Simmons treats his educational theories and practice, famine relief work, spiritual crises and religious, social and moral beliefs, as reflected in controversial writings such as What I Believe, What Then Must We Do? and The Kingdom of God Is Within You. He also investigates Tolstoy’s involvement in government, war and revolution, and the relevance of his reformist views in the contemporary world.