Leo Tolstoy: Sixty Years of Diaries
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) started a diary in 1847, as an eighteen-year-old student in Kazan, and kept one, with gaps, for more than sixty years. The early diaries are lists of rules and failures: what he intended to do, and how he failed to do it. Much of what later became his novels was first tried out there as self-examination.
Before his wedding in 1862 he gave his diaries to his bride, Sophia Behrs, so that she would know his past. She was shocked by what she read, and began a diary of her own. For decades the two of them read each other’s diaries, and the pages became part of the marriage — and later part of its conflicts.
In his last year Tolstoy began a separate diary “for myself alone”, which he kept hidden. It is one of the clearest examples of what a diary is for when every other page of a life has readers.
What it teaches. A diary can be a tool for becoming someone, not only a record of who you were. And even a writer who published everything needed one place nobody else could open.
An essay by the TAEONIA editors. Quotations are limited to texts in the public domain.
Keeping a diary of your own? Guides to keeping a private diary