Tolstoyiana has been in vigorous production since the end of the 19th century, while its subject was still living. The most powerful general-interest literary portrait of Tolstoy was written by D.S. Mirsky in his “History of Russian Literature.” Henri Troyat’s authoritative “Tolstoy” ranks among the best of the biographies, in the orthodox sense of the word. But a minor literary classic in its own right is the Russian novelist Maxim Gorky’s “Reminiscences,” which sprang from the author’s personal association with Tolstoy. Gorky, the originator and master practitioner of a politically tempered realism in Russian novels that would make him later one of the flagship writers of the emergent socialist dictatorship, spent long days with Tolstoy, in Crimea and on Yasnaya Polyana, his country estate, and produced a short, fragmentary memoir of the man: his profundity, his irritability, his magnetic charisma, his affectations, and the philosophical sorrow that beset him toward the end of his life are all brilliantly present. One of the book’s most famous passages recounts Gorky’s observation of Tolstoy, sitting on a stone and watching waves break against a shore, and the sudden turn the moment takes:

In a moment of madness I felt, “It is possible, he will get up, wave his hand, and the sea will become solid and glassy, the stones will begin to move and cry out.” … I cannot express in words what I felt rather than thought at that moment; in my soul there was joy and fear, and then everything blended in one happy thought: “I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it.”

This epiphany is not unqualified: Gorky ends his memoir by noting of Tolstoy that “his surroundings become like a desert where everything is scorched by the sun.” Gorky’s memoir possesses an intimacy that even the very best of the countless scholarly works, appreciations, and literary studies of Tolstoy lack. This may be because Gorky, despite the naked politics of much of his literary work, possessed the psychological acuity necessary in any serious novelist.

Now, thanks to Leah Bendavid-Val, we have an opportunity to come even closer to Tolstoy. In “Song Without Words” (National Geographic, 239 pages, $35), Ms. Bendavid-Val has produced an extended essay on one of the most important parts of Leo Tolstoy’s life — his marriage to Sophia Behrs, which would serve as the model for the marriage of Konstantin Levin and Kitty Oblonsky in “Anna Karenina.” She has constructed this essay out of a large collection of primary sources — the photographs Sophia took of Tolstoy, their children, friends, and literary acquaintances, their estate at Yasnaya Polyana, and Sophia’s own diaries.

Leo Tolstoy is one of the most monumentally important figures of modern literature, and Sophia was a formidable person in her own right: She ran the Tolstoy household and managed her husband’s daily affairs, served as his copyist and amanuensis, raised his children, and devoted herself to the task of preserving his works and images for posterity. The photographs in “Song without Words” comprise a document adequate to the strengths of these two personalities.

Sophia Tolstoy was only an amateur photographer: The art was one of the many channels her boundless energy flowed into. She first began taking photographs as an adolescent; she resumed the practice during her marriage to Tolstoy, and saved them as scrupulously as she saved his manuscripts. Her efforts resulted in substantial collections residing in the Tolstoy State Museum in Moscow and the archives kept at Yasnaya Polyana, from which the photos collected in “Song Without Words” have been culled. Whatever their aesthetic shortcomings may be, they do not compromise the astonishing power these images possess.

The single most prominent subject in “Song Without Words” is the aged Tolstoy himself. He appears far more often than any other single figure: reclining on a veranda in Crimea; posing while the sculptor Pavel Trubetskoi models his bust; sitting on a bench with Anton Chekhov; standing in a meadow; and hunched over a manuscript in his study. In every image, his slightly fanatical gaze and the peasant dress he ostentatiously adopted toward the end of his life strike the eye with their mixture of majesty and bumptious self-importance. Sophia herself appears as a solemn-eyed, vigorous-looking woman; the Tolstoy family appears in various settings, from their Crimean estate to the courtyard of their Moscow house.

The photographs capture a far more revealing picture of Sophia’s life than her brutally excerpted diaries, which also feature in “Song without Words.” And Ms. Bendavid-Val’s bland, curatorial prose hardly helps explicate its subject:

Sonya’s passion for music was also shared by her husband as was her love for literature, the other arts, and her curiosity about human nature. Husband and wife engaged in volatile intellectual arguments or thoughtful conversations and they read aloud in the evenings.

It’s doubly unfortunate, then — and a reflection of Ms. Bendavid-Val’s weakness as an editor — that these two streams of text outmatch in volume the images collected in this book. Simply gathering Sophia’s photos and permitting them to speak for themselves would have proved a far more successful tactic for delineating the contours of her domestic and intellectual life.

It’s also deeply ironic that, even though Ms. Bendavid-Val makes abundant use of the most private materials of Tolstoy’s wife, who was closer to him than any other person, her book does not approach in any way the unforgiving clarity that endows Gorky’s memoir with such power. It speaks very ill of a book taking these two as its twin subject that it never manages to rise above the status of literary curio.

Mr. Munson, an editor at Commentary magazine, last wrote for these pages on Kingsley Amis.