Part 2

In the year 1874 Sonia took the degree of doctor at Göttingen, as the result of three mathematical treatises, of which one especially, her thesis “On the Theory of Partial Differential Equations,” is reckoned one of her most prominent works. Immediately after this, the whole family assembled on the old estate of Palibino. Sonia was completely worn out, and it was a long time before she was able to resume any severe brain work. Her holiday was cut short by her father’s death a few months later, and the following winter was spent with her family at St. Petersburg. Until now Sonia’s brain was the only part of her which was thoroughly awakened. She had been entirely absorbed in her studies, and had worked with the obstinate tenacity of auto-suggestion, more commonly found in women, especially girls, than in men. Marie Bashkirtseff had done the same, year in, year out; she had worked breathlessly, feverishly, with an incomprehensible, unwearied power of production,--while failing health was announcing the approach of death in her frail young body. Suddenly the end came.

Thousands of girls in middle-class families work themselves to death in the same way. Badly paid to begin with, they lower the prices still more by competing with one another. Others, placed in better circumstances, work with the same insistency at useless handicrafts, while a large number of women of the poorer classes work because they are driven to it by dire necessity. The result is the same in all cases; they lose the power of enjoyment, and forget what happiness means.

Sonia’s stay in St. Petersburg was the occasion of the first great change which took place in her, to be followed later on by many like changes. Mathematics were thrust aside; she did not want to hear any more about them, she wanted to forget them.

Mind and body were undergoing a healing process, struggling to attain an even balance in her fresh young nature. She felt the need of change, she required companionship, and she threw herself into the midst of all social and intellectual pursuits. It was then that the woman awoke in her.

During the period of nervous excitement and sorrow which followed after the death of her beloved father, she had become the wife of her husband, after having been nominally married for nearly seven years. Since then they had drawn closer to one another; and now that her fortune, as long as her mother lived, was not sufficient for her support, she and Valdemar invested their money in various speculations. With true Russian enthusiasm they set to work building houses, establishing watering-places, and starting newspapers, besides lending their aid to every imaginable kind of new invention. The first year all went well, and in 1878 a daughter was born. After that came the crash. Kovalevsky was bitten with the rage for speculation, and although he was nominated Professor of Paleontology at Moscow in 1880, and in spite of all that his wife could do to dissuade him, he took shares in a company connected with petroleum springs in the south of Russia. The company was a swindle, the undertaking proved a failure, and he shot himself.

Sonia had left him some time before. She knew what was coming, having been warned by bad dreams and presentiments, and as she had lost her influence over him, and was anxious to provide for her own and her child’s future, she left him and went to Paris. Just as she was recovering from the nervous fever to which she succumbed on hearing the news of her husband’s sudden death, she received the summons to go to Stockholm.

The invitation had been sent by the representatives of a Woman’s Rights movement which was then in full swing. It was an exceedingly narrow society of the genuine _bourgeois_ kind, and as it was to them that she owed her appointment, they were anxious to bind her firmly to their cause. Sonia soon won their hearts by the sociability of her Russian nature, but as one term after the other passed by, she grew more and more weary of it, and whenever her course of lectures was over she hurried away as quickly as possible to Russia, Italy, France, England,--no matter where, if only she could escape out of Sweden into a freer atmosphere. She never looked upon her stay there as anything more than an episode in her life, and she longed to be back in Paris; but the years passed by, and she received no other appointment.

Her lectures at the university began to pall upon her; it gave her no pleasure to be forever teaching the students the same thing in a dreary routine. She needed an incentive in the shape of some highly gifted individual whom she could respect, and whose presence would call forth her highest faculties; but even the esteem in which she held some few people was not of long duration.

Her friendship with Fru Edgren-Leffler dates from this period. It was this lady’s renown as an authoress which roused Sonia’s talent for writing, for her life had been rich in experiences, and never wanting in variety until now, when, in a period of comparative leisure, she allowed her thoughts to dwell upon the past. She began by persuading Fru Edgren-Leffler to dramatize the sketches which she gave her, and “The Struggle for Happiness” was the first result of this collaboration. But Sonia soon realized that the honest, simple-minded Swede was not in sympathy with this department of literature; so she wrote a story on her own account, entitled “The Sisters Rajevsky,” which was a sketch of her own youth, followed by an excellent novel called “Vera Barantzova;” after which she began another novel called “Vae Victis,” which was never finished.

III

Up till now we have followed this remarkable woman’s life along a clear, though somewhat agitated course; but from henceforward there is something uncomfortable, something strange and distorted about it. It is very difficult for us to ascertain the cause of her increasing distraction of mind, and early death, and the difficulty is intensified by the fact that the material contributed by Fru Leffler is poor and contradictory, and also because her work is disfigured by the peculiar inferences which she draws.

I have seen four portraits of Sonia Kovalevsky, and they are all so entirely different that no one would imagine that they were intended to represent the same person. She had none of the fascinating, though irregular beauty of Marie Bashkirtseff, who carried on an artistic cult with her own person. Sonia’s powerful head, with the short hair, massive forehead, and short-sighted eyes of the color of “green gooseberries in syrup,” was placed on a delicate child-like body. Her chief charm lay in her extraordinary liveliness and habit of giving herself up entirely to the interest of the moment; but she was completely unversed in the art of dress, and did not know how to appear at her best; she never gave any thought to the subject at all until she was thirty; and although she paid more attention to it then, she never learned the secret. She aged early, and a celebrated poet has described her to me as being a withered little old woman at the age of thirty. These external circumstances stood more in her way in Sweden, among a tall, fair people, than would have been possible either in Russia or in Paris. Between herself and the Swedish type there was a wide gulf fixed, which allowed no encouragement to the finer erotic emotions to which she was very strongly disposed; she felt crushed, and her impressionable, unattractive nature suffered acutely from being so unlike the ordinary victorious type of beauty. The picture of her when she was eighteen bears a strong resemblance to the late King Louis II. of Bavaria; not only are her features like his, but also the expression in the eyes and the curve of the lips. The second picture dates from the year 1887. It has something wearied and disillusioned about it, and she seems to be making an effort to appear amiable. It was taken at the time when she was struggling to accustom herself to the stiff, prudish, and somewhat pretentious ways of Stockholm society. The third portrait was taken at the time when she won the _Prix Bordin_ in Paris, and it is a regular Russian face, with a much more cheerful expression than the former ones. But in the last picture, taken in the year 1890, which was, to a certain extent, official and very much touched up, how ill she looks; how disappointed and how weary! These four portraits are, to my mind, four different women; they show us what Sonia was once, and what she became after living for several years in an uncongenial atmosphere.

Sonia Kovalevsky was a true Russian genius, with an elastic nature. She was lavish and careless in her ways, and she thrived best upon a torn sofa in an atmosphere of tea, cigarettes, and profusion of all kinds,--intellectual, spiritual, and pecuniary; she needed to be surrounded by people like herself, who were in sympathy with her, and the inhabitants of Stockholm were never that. She had been torn away from the Russian surroundings in which she had lived in Berlin. She, who never could endure solitude, found herself alone among strangers, who forced themselves upon her,--hard, angular, women’s rights women, who expected her to be their leader, and to fulfil a mission. She seldom rebelled against the duties which were constantly held before her eyes, partly because her vanity was flattered by the public position which she occupied, and also because her livelihood depended upon it, now that her private means were not sufficient for her support, and for the numerous journeys which she undertook.

A great deal of her time was spent in travelling to and fro between Stockholm and St. Petersburg, where she went to visit Anjuta, whose marriage had turned out most unhappily, and who was suffering from a severe illness, of which she afterwards died. After her sister’s death Sonia took a great interest in the study of Northern literature, which was then just beginning to attract attention. She also wrote books, and solved some mathematical problems. Every time that she returned to Stockholm, after spending her holidays in Russia or the South, she had almost entirely forgotten her Swedish, and every year that passed by called forth fresh lamentations over her exile. The tone of society in Stockholm was unendurable to her; but she was of too disciplined a character, and too gentle, too submissive in her loneliness, to rebel against it. Her life became monotonous, which it had never been before, and her courage began to give way. She yearned for sympathy, for excitement, for her native land,--for everything, in fact, which was denied her.

She also longed for something else, which was the very thing that she could not have. She was seized with an eager, nervous longing to be loved. She wanted to be a woman, to possess a woman’s charm. She had lived like a widow for years during her husband’s lifetime, and for years after his death as well. As long as her mathematical studies produced a tension in her mind, she asked for nothing better, but buried herself in her work, and was perfectly contented. When she started being an authoress, a change came over her character. The development of the imagination created a need for love, and because this devouring need could not be satisfied, she became exacting, discontented, and mistrustful of the amount of affection which was accorded her. In her younger days she had asked for nothing more than that curious kind of mystic love, known only to Russians, which had run its course in mutual enthusiasm of a purely intellectual and spiritual character. It was otherwise now. She lamented her lost youth, and the time wasted in study; she regretted the unfortunate talent which had deprived her womanhood of its attractiveness. She wanted to be a woman, and to enjoy life as a woman.

She had also another wish, just as passionate in its way and as difficult of fulfilment as the former one, and this was her wish to receive an appointment in Paris. It was to a certain extent fulfilled when she was awarded the _Prix Bordin_ on Christmas Eve, 1888, on the occasion of a solemn session of the French Academy of Science, in an assembly which was largely composed of learned men. It was the highest scientific distinction which had ever been accorded to a woman, and from henceforth she was an European celebrity, with a place in history. But it gave her no pleasure. She was as completely knocked up as she had been after receiving her doctor’s degree. She had worked day and night for days beforehand, and during the weeks that followed she took part in the social functions which were given in her honor. She left no pleasure untasted, and yet she was not satisfied, for by this time her yearning for love had reached its highest pitch.

A short time before, Sonia had made the acquaintance of a cousin of her late husband’s, “fat M.,” as she called him. The companionship of a sympathetic fellow-countryman put her in the height of good humor, and she soon found it so indispensable that she wanted to have him always at her side, and was never happy except when he was there. M. K. did not return this strong affection; he was, however, quite willing to marry her, and the result was that a most unfortunate relationship sprang up between them. Sonia could not exist without him, so they travelled from Stockholm to Russia, and from Russia to Paris or Italy, in order to spend a few weeks together, and then separated, because by that time they were mutually tired of each other. It was on one of these journeys, when Sonia had come out of the sunshine of Italy into the winter of Sweden, that she caught cold, and no sooner had she arrived at Stockholm than she did everything to make her condition worse. In a desperate mood of indifference she immediately commenced her lectures, and went to all the social entertainments that were given. Dark presentiments and dreams, in which she always believed, had foretold that this year would be fatal to her. Longing for death, yet fearing it, she died suddenly in the beginning of the year 1891.

IV

Those who know something about Russian women, without having any very detailed knowledge, divide them into two types, and a superficial observer would class Sonia Kovalevsky as belonging to one or the other of these. The first type consists of luxurious, languishing, idle, fascinating women, with passionate black eyes, or playful gray ones, a soft skin, and a delicate mouth, which is admirably adapted for laughing and eating. These women have a most seductive charm; their movements suggest that they are wont to recline on soft pillows, dressed _en négligé_, and their power of chattering is unlimited, and varies in tone from the most enchanting flattery to the worst temper imaginable. They are, in fact, the most womanly of women, as little to be depended upon in their amiability as in their anger; they are quick to fall in love, and men are as quickly enthralled by them. But Sonia Kovalevsky was not one of these.

The women of the second type present the greatest contrast that it is possible to imagine. They are honest and straightforward, and essentially what is called “a good fellow,” plain, sensible, brave, energetic, as strong in soul as in body,--thinking heads, flat figures; they have none of that grace of form which is peculiar to a large number of Russian women. Their faces are generally sallow, and their skin is clammy, but thoroughly Russian in spite of it. There is something lacking in them, which for want of a better expression I shall call a want of sweetness. There is a curious neutrality about them; it takes one some time to realize that they are women. And they themselves are but dimly conscious of it, and then only on rare occasions. They are generally people with a mission,--working people, people with ideas.

It is these women who have furnished the largest contingent to the ranks of the Nihilists. It is they who chose to lead the lives of hunted wild beasts, and who found ample compensation in mental excitement for all that they had renounced as women and as persons of refinement. But although this last is a genuine Russian type, it is by no means confined to Russia. It is a type peculiar to the age. The class of women who become Nihilists in Russia are the champions for women’s rights in Sweden, and it is they who agitate for women’s franchise in England, who start women’s clubs in America, and become governesses in Germany.

The type is universal, but it is left to circumstances to decide which special form of mania it is to take,--a form of mania which calls itself “a vocation in life.” In Russia the woman, in whom sex lay dormant, felt it her calling to become a murderess, and that merely from a general desire to promote the popular welfare; in Germany this philanthropic spirit took the form of wishing to prune little human plants in the Kindergarten. But this is a long chapter, which I cannot pursue any further at present, and which, like many others on the characteristics of the woman of to-day, I shall keep for a separate book. We must include Sonia Kovalevsky in this latter type: she considered herself as belonging to it, and the whole course of her life is in itself sufficient to prove that she was one of them. The nature of her friendships with men furnishes us with yet another proof. She had a large circle of acquaintances, amongst whom were some of the best known and most talented men of Russia, Scandinavia, England, Germany, France, and Italy,--all of whom enjoyed her society, although not one of them fell in love with her, and not one among those thousands said to her, “I cannot exist without you.”

She belonged to the class of women with brains, and she was numbered amongst them. She was their triumphant banner, the emblem of their greatest victory, and their appointed Professor. “She did not need the lower pleasures; her science was her chief delight.” She stood on the platform and taught men, and believed it to be her vocation. Was it not for this that she had toiled during long years of overwork and study, whilst concealing her real purpose under the threadbare cloak of a feigned marriage?

She was a woman of genius with a man’s brain, who had come into the world as an example and a leader of all sister brains.

She was, and she was not! Sometimes she felt that she was, and then again she did not. In her latter years she disclaimed the whole of her former life, and silence reigned among the aggrieved sisterhood whenever her name was mentioned; if these latter years had never been, they would have sent the hat round in order to erect a monument in her memory. But that became impossible; silence was best.

She was a woman. She was a woman in spite of all--in spite of a feigned marriage which lasted nearly ten years, in spite of a widowhood which lasted just as long, in spite of her Doctor’s degree and the Professorship of Mathematics and the _Prix Bordin_--she was a woman still; not merely a lady, but an unhappy, injured little woman, running through the woods with a wailing cry for her husband.

She was far more of a woman than those luxurious, prattling, sweatmeat-eating young ladies whose languid movements lead us to suppose that they have only just got out of bed; she was more of a woman than the great majority of wives, whose sole occupation it is to increase the world, and to obliterate themselves in so doing.

She, who never charmed any man, was more of a woman than the charmers who turn love into a vocation. She was a new kind of woman, understood by no one, because she was new; she did not even understand herself, and made mistakes for which she was less to blame than the spirit of the age, by whose lash she was driven. And when she became free at last, it was too late to map out a future of her own.

Who knows whether it would have been better for her had she been free from the first? A woman has no destiny of her own; she cannot have one, because she cannot exist alone. Neither can she become a destiny, except indirectly, and through the man. The more womanly she is, and the more richly endowed, all the more surely will her destiny be shaped by the man who takes her to be his wife. If then, even in the case of the average woman, everything depends upon the man whom she marries, how much more true must this be in the case of the woman of genius, in whom not only her womanhood, but also her genius, needs calling to life by the embrace of a man. And if even the average woman cannot attain to the full consciousness of her womanhood without man, how much less can the woman of genius, in whom sex is the actual root of her being, and the source from whence she derives her talent and her _ego_. If her womanhood remains unawakened, then however promising the beginning may be, her life will be nothing more than a gradual decay, and the stronger her vitality, the more terrible will the death-struggle be.

That was Sonia’s life. No man took her in his arms and awoke the whole harmony of her being. She became a mother and also a wife, but she never learned what it is to love and be loved again.

V

As I write, the air is filled with a sweet penetrating fragrance, which comes from a tuberose, placed near me on the window-sill. The narrow stalk seems scarcely strong enough to support its thick, knob-like head with the withered buds and sickly, onion-shaped leaves. A tuberose is a poor unshapely thing at the best of times, but this plant is unhealthy because it has lived too long as an ornament in a dark corner of the room under the chandeliers, among albums and photographs. It was dying visibly, decaying at the roots, and there was no help for it. Of course it was a rare flower, but it grew uglier from day to day.

They put it on the window-sill, where there was just room for one plant more, and a pot of mignonette was fetched out of the kitchen garden, attired in an artistic ruffle of green silk paper, and placed under the chandelier in its stead. It fulfilled its duty well, and seemed to thrive admirably among the albums, visiting-cards, and photographs. Nobody looked after the tuberose on the window-sill until it suddenly reminded them of its existence by a strong smell, and even then they only cast a hasty glance and noticed how sickly it looked. When I examined it more closely, I discovered three blossoms in full flower, and quite healthy; the stem was bent forward, and the blossoms were pressing against the window-pane, doing their best to catch the rays of the sun as long as the short autumn day lasted. It thrust forth its dying blossoms and renewed itself now that the great warmer of life was shining on, and embracing it.

To me this flower is an emblem of Sonia Kovalevsky.

She was a rare, strange being in this world of mignonette pots and trivialities. Everything about her was out of proportion, from her thin little body, with its large head, to the sweet fragrance of her genius. She, too, stood in the place of honor under the chandelier, among fashionable poets and thinkers who wrote and thought in accordance with the spirit of the age; and she, too, sickened, as though she desired something better, and the nervous blossoms which her mind thrust forth grew more and more withered, and the thin stem which carried her stretched more and more towards the greater warmer of life, which shines upon and embraces the just and the unjust,--only not her, only not her!

What was the reason? Why did she get none of that love which is rained down upon the most insignificant women in so lavish a manner by impetuous mankind?

“She was not in the least pretty, that is it,” reply her several women admirers.