Sofya Andreevna began photographing in her youth, at her parents’ home. A friend of her father, a Greek named Kukuli, taught her the process and gave her his camera. “Photography was complicated then,” Sofya Andreevna later recalled. “One had to coat the glass with collodion, then place it in a silver bath, fix it with mercuric chloride, dry it… I was passionately absorbed in photography all summer… I took several portraits… and then abandoned it when I began writing my first novella.” None of these early photographs have survived.

Nearly thirty years later, Sofya Andreevna returned to photography and mastered a new camera and technology. This was a period of rapid development in amateur photography in Russia, when the complex wet collodion process was gradually replaced by the simpler dry plate method using gelatin silver plates. 

Sofya Andreevna’s earliest surviving photographs date from 1887. It was that year that she purchased a Kodak camera, as recorded in her diary entries of July 2 and 3, 1887: “…Today we spoke about photography, because I brought a camera and will be practicing photography, taking views and photographing our whole family…”

However, her engagement with photography remained irregular until 1895. Her large family, the children, their illnesses, and the many responsibilities associated with their upbringing and education, as well as other duties, often distracted her from photographing. After the death of her youngest son, Vanechka, in 1895, Sofya Andreevna began to practice photography systematically. “To save myself from myself, I turned to photography…” she wrote to her sister.

The exhibition features photographs by Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya, which may be grouped into several thematic categories: Leo Tolstoy among family and friends; guests at Yasnaya Polyana; Tolstoy and sports; wedding anniversary photographs; portraits of Leo Tolstoy; nature and estate life; self-portraits; the countess’s personal interests; and Tolstoy with prominent cultural figures, including Ilya Repin, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Wanda Landowska, and others.

Beginning in 1895, on nearly every wedding anniversary, Sofya Andreevna took a joint photograph of herself and Leo Nikolaevich. On the last of these photographs, she wrote the inscription: “Cannot hold him back.”

Sofya Andreevna also greatly enjoyed photographing her favorite places in Yasnaya Polyana. “I took my camera and ran everywhere, photographing nature, my grandchildren, Leo Nikolaevich with his sister, the forest, the bathing path—and all the dear landscapes of Yasnaya Polyana,” she wrote in her diary on September 1, 1898.

After her husband’s death, Sofya Andreevna photographed very little, focusing mainly on her children and grandchildren when they visited her at Yasnaya Polyana, as well as on Leo Tolstoy’s grave.

In 1911, Sofya Andreevna published the album From the Life of Leo Tolstoy. Photographs Exclusively by Countess S. A. Tolstaya, which included 120 photographs. The album was issued to raise funds for peasants in the Yasnaya Polyana area who had suffered from fires.

Sofya Andreevna made her prints on printing-out paper, which produces a characteristic brown tone. She did not have a dedicated darkroom. Recalling her grandmother, Tolstoy’s eldest granddaughter Anna Ilyinichna wrote: “She developed her photographs in a small dark closet with access to the attic; she would run about in a large calico apron, and her fingernails were always black from toning and fixing.”

Sofya Andreevna worked with a field camera using only natural daylight, without additional lighting. She would set up her camera in advance on a tripod in one of the bright rooms of the house or in a well-lit area of the park. She positioned her subjects in the center of the frame and at a sufficient distance from the lens, thus avoiding distortion of faces and objects. She rarely cropped her images, doing so only to remove blurred figures. She photographed on glass plate negatives measuring 13 × 18 cm. Sofya Andreevna valued the advantages of this format and remained faithful to her heavy camera, never replacing it with the more portable film cameras that appeared at the end of the nineteenth century.