Feature: HAMPSTEAD AND HIGHGATE FESTIVAL - the life and times of the Tolstoys

Published: 30 September, 2010
by PIERS PLOWRIGHT

I ONCE saw the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and his much-put-upon wife Sofia Andreevna on the Northern Line. At least it looked exactly like them: flowing beard and smock for him, rolled-up hair and shawl for her. But they got off at Belsize Park and were speaking perfect Home Counties English. 

As far I can discover, the great man never visited Hampstead, though he may have dropped in on an anarchist meeting in Highgate and certainly encouraged Chelsea schoolboys to write about “their day” during his London visit of 1861. 

Sofia, I’m quite sure, never came near the place. But the truth is, I wanted to see them. I fell in love with Tolstoy’s work – well, with War and Peace. The short stories, memoirs, Anna Karenina and Resurrection came later – when I was a teenager and had this fantasy that one day I would meet him and perhaps her. 

I’d seen the grainy black and white home movies of his last days and the infinitely sad shots of Sofia peering into the station-master’s house at Astapovo, trying to see her dying husband. I’d read how the door of his country estate at Yasnaya Polyana was always open to visitors and how he rarely sent anyone away. 

And that, of course, would include me. Of all the writers I’d read and admired, he was the only one I felt I could ask for advice about the Art of Living. 

When I got married, I found my wife had the same feeling about him and we were both so in love with Natasha in War and Peace we called our first child after her. 

Now that I know the paradoxes and contradictions in Leo’s character, the dreadful dance he led Sofia, and the unhappiness of their last years together, I find myself even more interested in him. So I’m rather pleased that, 100 years on from that tragic-comic death, in flight from his family and the world, but surrounded by the world’s press, they will both be making an appearance in NW3 this week at the Hampstead and Highgate Festival – though not together. 

Leo gets in first with a visit to the Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage, at 8pm tonight (Thursday) in the company of novelist and critic Zinovy Zinik and musicians Mary Hofman and Anya Fadina. 

On Saturday at 1pm, Sofia will be in the charming and more domestic setting of Keats House, when Cathy Porter, the editor and translator of a wonderful new edition of her diaries, will be bringing them alive with writer and psychotherapist Liane Aukin.

For two brief moments, as Leo Tolstoy might have written, in one of his sunnier moments, though not about north London, “the air of Yasnaya Polyana will fill our lungs”.

• Tickets the Festival can be booked by telephone on 020 7722 9301, online at www.hamandhighfest.co.uk or at Hampstead Theatre, Eton Avenue, Swiss Cottage. Keats House is in Keats Grove NW3 and the Embassy Theatre is part of the Central School of Speech and Drama, 64 Eton Avenue, NW3