“Behind every good man is a good woman” is a common saying, but when it comes to literature, the relationship between spouses is even that much more complex. F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence used their marriages for literary inspiration and material, sometime at the expense of their spouses’ sanity. Thomas Carlyle wanted his wife to assist him, but Jane Carlyle became increasingly bitter and resentful in her new role, putting additional strain on their relationship.
In Russian literary marriages, however, the wives of some of the most famous authors of all time did not resent taking a “secondary position,” although to call their position secondary does not do justice to the vital role these women played in the creation of some of the greatest literary works in history.
From Sophia Tolstoy to Vera Nabokov, Elena Bulgakov, Nadezdha Mandelstam, Anna Dostevsky, and Natalya Solzhenitsyn, these women ranged from stenographers and typists to editors, researchers, translators, and even publishers. Living under restrictive regimes, many of these women battled censorship and preserved the writers’ illicit archives, often risking their own lives to do so. They established a tradition all their own, unmatched in the West.
Many of these women were the writers’ intellectual companions and made invaluable contributions to the creative process. And their husbands knew it. Leo Tolstoy made no secret of Sofia’s involvement in War and Peace in his letters, and Vladimir Nabokov referred to Vera as his own “single shadow.”
About Alexandra Popoff
ALEXANDRA POPOFF is the author of the 2010 award-winning Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography. She wrote for Russian national newspapers and magazines in Moscow and, as an Alfred Friendly Press Fellow, published articles in The Philadelphia Inquirer and its Sunday magazine. She also contributed to Huffington Post and The Boston Globe. Popoff lives in Canada where she obtained post-graduate degrees in Russian and English literature.
The Wives: The Women Behind Russia’s Literary Giants by Alexandra Popoff
The Daily Beast – August 6, 2012
If a writer is by definition a temperamental soul, than a Russian writer represents perhaps a most temperamental soul. In The Wives, former Tolstoy biographer Alexandra Popoff delivers the stories of the women tasked with dealing with six of the major Russian writers of the last century and a half: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Mandelstam, Nabakov, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn. The overarching argument that emerges is two-fold. Firstly, that the level of support these women provided their husbands was titanic. Beyond taking dictation, editing, revising, and even typesetting their husbands’ work, they also championed the work as if it were their own. (It took 25 years of struggle for Elena Bulgakov to see her late husband’s masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, finally published.) But the second point is that the work may as well have been their own, such was their creative influence. Popoff aims to elevate our memory of these women from indentured scribes to something more like managing editors, juxtaposed with the more muse-like or even competitive nature of the relationships of their western counterparts, such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Martha Gelhorn. At the book’s beating heart, though, are the love stories, which should make any writer jealous.
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I have fought a good fight,
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