scandal sheet
by
MARA SIEGLER
t n u o C e h T r o F n Dow Leo Tolstoy’s tortured marriage and the escape that led to his death
I
46 | AVENUE MAGAZINE • APRIL 2012
Leo Tolstoy and wife Sophia standing in garden, circa 1910.
a goat.” Yuck! At the dinner table his family chowed down on hearty Russian fare, while he abstained and stuck to humble vegetarian meals. On the night of October 28, 1910, Leo once again heard Sophia rustling through his papers. Enough was enough! Once she was asleep he took off by train with no definite destination. But Tolstoy enjoyed his freedom for only a day. He did not throw himself on the train tracks, Anna Karenina-style,
but rather he developed pneumonia on the train and was forced to get off at an obscure station, Astapovo, where he was set up on a cot in the stationmaster’s living room. Soon, journalists from all over the world poured into the station. There, surrounded by doctors, Tolstoy complained bitterly of not being allowed to die like a peasant. On Nov. 20, 1910, when he was already past saving, Sophia was allowed to see him. He died shortly thereafter. ✦
PHOTO BY FOTOSEARCH/GETTY IMAGES
f you thought Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries had some sticky problems, listen to the tale of Count Leo Tolstoy, his wife Sophia, and their 13 (count ‘em!) children. Things got so bad the famous Russian writer left, sneaking out under the cloak of night into the cold Russian air at the age of 82! Tolstoy had become world-renowned for preaching universal love, chastity and a virtuous, peasant lifestyle—he even inspired Gandhi. But still, the scribe and his wife were more at war than peace. In keeping with his newfound oath of celibacy, the author asked his wife to sleep in a separate bed. She refused and alas, on many nights he betrayed his monk-like principles, writing guiltily in his diary: “The devil fell upon me. . . it was so loathsome as after a crime.” And later that same day, “Still, more powerfully possessed, I fell.” But too much sex was not the only problem. Sophia had taken advice from Anna Dostoevsky and had started managing Tolstoy’s literary business. She made her husband’s writing into a profitable enterprise, which irked him to no end. He went so far as to write a new will, placing his writing in the public domain. Those on Sophia’s side of the argument, all but one of the 13 children—hunted for that will every night, to destroy it perhaps. Furthermore, Count Leo had taken to dressing like a peasant and his wife went on record saying he “smells like