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It was Chertkov who persuaded Tolstoy—after he had suffered several minor strokes which clearly affected his mind—to make him the executor of his will as well as the only one with a right to publish the writer's complete works after his death. This robbed Sophia of her position as Tolstoy's editor and publisher. Chertkov was also responsible for getting Tolstoy to leave his estate in collaboration with Tolstoy's daughter Sasha. This ill-advised adventure resulted in the author's death from pneumonia 10 days later. Nominally, Tolstoy also had named daughter Sasha as co-executor and main benefactor of the will. Eventually Chertkov pushed her aside as well, and while he prospered under the Soviets, she spent three years in a GULAG and then emigrated as did her sister Tanya.

The reputation that befell Sophia, and the humiliation she suffered at the end of her marriage, is not unique in the annals of artists' wives. Gauguin's wife, Mette-Sophie Gadd, had a similar poisonous reputation and it is only recently that the abuse she and her children suffered at his hand have come to light. When Gauguin left her, she was forced to return to her Danish family so she and the children could survive. Renoir's wife, although she had been his model before their marriage, has often been described as too bourgeois in later years, while one of the saddest fates befell Charles Dickens' wife, whom he removed from their home and the many children she bore him to lead a lonely existence while he carried on a secret affair with a much younger actress.

One can go on and on about the wives of famous men who have been either ignored or have been maligned by their husbands or by history. One always welcomes a biography, such as the one written about Sophia Tolstoy, which attempts to correct past wrongs. Thumps up to Popoff for undertaking this difficult task by unearthing archival material previously banned or ignored in Russia. Her writing style is not always smooth, perhaps because English is not her native tongue, but she makes her points well. Those who like to dispute them are obviously greatly influenced by Chertkov and his assistant, Nikolai Rodionov, ignoring Gorgky's defense of Sophia in 1924, when he was the most influential Soviet writer and public figure.

Sophia Andreevna Behrs, born August 22, 1844, married Tolstoy, a man 16 years older, at age 18. The worldly wise writer, a friend of Sophia's maternal uncle as well as her own mother, a sometime dance partner of the author in his youth, became a familiar figure in the Behrs household.

He is described as a casual guest at Sophia's parents' home during her childhood, who did gymnastics with the Behrs's children and took part in their charades. In 1854, when Sophia was 10, Tolstoy left for the Crimean War and became Russia's first war correspondent through his Sebastopol Stories. The young girl, already infatuated with him and his fame, wanted to join him at the front as a nurse. Such is childhood.

There seemed to have been an unwritten understanding that Tolstoy would eventually marry Sophia's older sister, Liza. But in 1862 he began to casually pay far more attention to the younger of the two although he did not present his proposal letter to her until September 16, a day before Sophia's and her mother's name day. She accepted him, though one wonders what attracted her to him other than his mind. Physically he had little to recommend him.

"On the name day, Sophia and Liza, dressed identically, in light mauve and white barége gowns, greeted guests. When Lyubov Alexandranova (their mother)announced her daughter's engagement, everyone assumed that Liza was the bride. Their French tutor later remarked that he was disappointed Tolstoy did not propose to Liza: she was a better student," writes Popoff.

Sophia, until then living a young girl's sheltered life, had a mere week before entering into marriage. The mad rush to arrange the small wedding at the Kremlin church was made worse when Tolstoy, a daily visitor, gave his young fiancée his diaries to read. He suffered, it seems, from an "excess of honesty", which can hardly be seen as an act of sensitivity as the diaries informed Sophia of his sexual past, his liaison with the peasant Aksinya that produced a son and who had remained on his estate. They also revealed that the young Count Tolstoy had suffered from gonorrhea at age 19, contracted from a prostitute. Tolstoy was disappointed by her reaction. He had expected understanding from a mere girl. To any astute observer this should have been a signal of how self-centered a man he was, but somehow this has never been clearly stated.

"I remember how shattered I was by these diaries," Sophia wrote her own diaries. "It was very wrong of him to do this; I wept when I saw what his past had been." She would be even more shattered on her wedding night, in which the groom forced himself on her many times while traveling in a carriage to Yasnaya Polyana, the huge Tolstoy estate. Three decades later she described his act as rape. "A Violence had been committed; this girl was not ready for marriage; female passion, recently awakened, was put back to sleep."

Sophia began a new diary when she started her new life. At Tolstoy's request she and Tolstoy read each others diaries, intended to foster complete honesty between them. Later Sophia discovered that her husband had a separate set of diaries not meant for her to see in which he sometimes described her negatively. It has to be said, however, that he asked Chertkov that all such negative thoughts be expunged from these diaries, and also in the ones he had exchanged with Sophia, upon publication after his death. Of course, Chertkov, exerting his power, ignored Tolstoy's wishes, and instead used such comments to support his own views of Sophia.

Tolstoy, already influenced by Schopenhauer's philosophy and other writers who preached pacifism, had began his own conversion to pacifism and non-violent anarchism by the time he married Sophia. Later, as he formed his own religious ideas he also preached sexual abstinence, something he failed to practice. Sophia suffered 16 pregnancies, the last at age 46. She bore 13 children, eight of whom survived to adulthood.

Her first pregnancy began within a month of her marriage and caused her to fall into depression, a state she suffered during each subsequent one. She also developed mastitis and several times suffered from puerperal fever, yet Tolstoy refused to practice birth control, and he insisted that Sophia breast feed her babies, although he had to agree to wet nurses when her mastitis made it completely impossible. Her seeming incapability to be a proper mother seemed to shatter his illusion of family life.

Despite pregnancies, illnesses, and less than comfortable lives on the dilapidated Tolstoy estate until she took over the garden, Sophia became Tolstoy's copyist, editor, eventually his publisher, while also educating their children herself. She ran,  his estate when he felt he could no longer do so under his religious philosophy. She objected to being made responsible for the latter, but to protect her large family had no other choice but to do as Tolstoy demanded.

Tolstoy alternately adored her and cursed her. She was, after all the model for the most memorable female characters in both War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He blamed her for his insatiable sexual needs. While he praised her for her boundless energy, yet also berated her for earning money to support the family, and through it, him and his various schemes, some of them naive and unworkable.