Leo Tolstoy

On 31 October they caught the first morning train and bought tickets to the southern city of Rostov-on-Don. There they would be able to choose their next destination. Tolstoy wrote letters to his sister, apologizing for his sudden departure, and to Chertkov, informing him that he was probably going to the Caucasus. By the middle of the day, however, he became seriously ill. Very soon his companions saw that he was unable to travel and had to get off the train at Astapovo station. The station did not have an inn, but the stationmaster, who happened to be a Tolstoyan himself, offered them the two best rooms in his house. The last letter he started to dictate was addressed to his English translator, Aylmer Maude, on 3 November: ‘On my way to the place where I wished to be alone I was taken ill’ (Ls, II, p. 717); he was too weak to continue.

To be alone was his only wish. In a telegram sent from Astapovo to Chertkov he said that he was ‘afraid of publicity’, but publicity was inevitable. News about his escape appeared in the newspapers the morning he left Shamordino; in the train he was recognized by other passengers, who rushed to his coach to satisfy their curiosity. Within a day the little railway station became the main provider of breaking news to the whole world from Japan to Argentina. Reporters, photographers, cameramen, government officials, police agents, admirers and gawpers started swarming to Astapovo. Tolstoy’s flight brought him further into the limelight. Trying to evade the advance of modernity, he had contributed to its triumph by creating one of the first global media events.

Wanting to return to nature, he ordered that his body be buried in an unmarked grave near the place where as a child he had searched for the mythical green stick. His wish was granted, but his grave became a major global tourist attraction. The absence of a name plaque eloquently shows that none was necessary. Who needs a plaque on the Holy Sepulchre?

Arguably Tolstoy was not able to imagine the scale of the sensation he had caused, but he had some idea of what was happening. During the first days of his stay at Astapovo, he asked for the newspapers to be read to him, leaving out news about himself. The attention he received was burdensome for him; after one medical intervention he exclaimed, ‘And the peasants, the peasants, how they die’. The day before he died he reproached those around him for ‘concerning themselves with Lev alone’, when ‘there are a great many people in the world besides Lev Tolstoy’ (AT, II, pp. 404–5).

Tolstoy’s grave in Yasnaya Polyana.

The selected pool of visitors allowed to approach his bedside also kept growing. Chertkov arrived on 2 November, calm, confident and decisive as usual. Goldenveizer and Tolstoy’s publisher, Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov, arrived the next day. Tolstoy criticized Goldenveizer for having cancelled a concert: ‘Peasants do not leave the field even if their father is dying, and the concert is your field.’⁶ He told Gorbunov-Posadov that he was unable to look at the proofs of the new instalments of The Way of Life he had brought to Astapovo.

Sofia and the children, with the exception of Sergei, who had arrived earlier, came on 4 November and stayed in the specially chartered railway carriage that had brought them. Sofia, however, was not allowed to see her dying husband. The unanimous view of Tolstoy’s followers and his children was that such a meeting would be fatal for him. Sofia wandered around the outside of the stationmaster’s house, peeping through the window and giving interviews to journalists about her 48 years of happy family life. Her every step was recorded, photographed and filmed. She was summoned to give Lev a final kiss and to ask him for final forgiveness only a few hours before his death, when he was unconscious or already seemed to be.