My Life

"Neither Dostoevsky nor Tolstoy would be such giants without their wives. Sonya Tolstoy's voice leaps from these 1,018 pages: motherhood, the intimacies and furies of a long marriage, the agony of public life, the cooling of her husband's affections. Her closing words, 'the absence of any biased forethought (means that) everything here is true and sincere,' remind us of the living force of a diary unfolding over a lifetime, as opposed to an autobiography."

"...uOttawa scholar and world-renowned Lev Tolstoy expert, Andrew Donskov, spent years producing what is being considered one of the most scholarly and important contributions on Tolstoy. Indeed, such a success will not only affect Tolstoy fans and academics all over the world, but it will also help to bolster Slavonic studies at the University of Ottawa." 

- The Fish "uOttawa Makes History"

“... it expands our awareness of the complex internal life of the great writer. Sofia’s text will provide further stimulus for Tolstoy scholarship. Its rich real-life details provide material both for historians and literary scholars.

The book is well translated and splendidly edited. It contains a poetry appendix, 39 Russian poems cited by the author (some are her own), 110 illustrations, 4 pages of genealogical tables, a bibliography, chapter outline, index of Tolstoy’s works cited, and a footnote index.”

-Myroslav Shkandrij, Department of German and Slavic Studies, University of Manitoba

University of Toronto Quarterly Volume 82, Number 3, Summer 2013

Sofia Andreevna’s My Life is a monumental
work in many ways (…) My Life exhibits such a wealth of vivid
impressions that reading it gives one a sense of what it was like to live in
Russia in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The volume is also a
monument of exacting and thoughtful research as well as lucid, eminently
readable translation. (…) My Life is priceless for its many candid
eyewitness portraits of personages important to historians and scholars of
Russia’s arts (…) (It is v)aluable for its uniquely down- to-earth vignettes of
life in their time: fighting a house fire with buckets, worrying about the
malign moral influence of neighboring peasant boys on their sons at Yasnaya
Polyana, sleeping under the stars at Samara, playing Haydn symphonies in piano
four-hands arrangements, and most haunting of all, breastfeeding their moribund
infants. (…) My Life is also a considerable achievement in that Sofia
Andreevna vividly conveys herself as an involved, indeed feisty, woman of her
times, yet also one willing to candidly share her sensuality and fantasies of
having an affair. The Tolstoy Museum and the translators are to be thanked for
this massive and extremely complicated labor of evident love. Andrew Donskov
introduces it with a disciplined account of both her life and their painstaking
Methods. (…) It is incredible that they managed to translate, edit, and
organize this massive text with such consistency in so little time in order to
be published simultaneously with the original.

Version of Record online: 3 SEP 2012, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9434.2012.00674.x

“As the archives have opened up, the tide has turned. The Leo Tolstoy State Museum allowed Andrew Donskov, a Russian scholar at the University of Ottawa, to bring out an English translation of My Life, published in 2010 by the University of Ottawa Press, and to publish her collected literary works in Russian.”

“The demythologization is bracing; it expands our awareness of the complex internal life of the great writer. Sofia’s text will provide further stimulus for Tolstoy scholarship. Its rich real-life details provide material both for historians and literary scholars. The book is well translated and splendidly edited.”

The story of how the University of Ottawa Press
acquired this essential document of Russian literature is as interesting as the
book itself, which is considerably. Married to a literary colossus for 48
years, and herself a woman of character and great intelligence, Tolstaya
provides, in this huge work, enormous insights not only into Tolstoy and their
marriage, but into Russian life. A real find. 

"...the memoirs detail Leo Tolstory's mannerisms, talents, and strengths in the roles he fulfilled as husband, father, and writer. (...) '[My Life] offers a rich opportunity for further investigation by both young and seasoned researchers (...) This is a truly remarkable piece of literature.'"