“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The opening sentence of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy reveals much about Tolstoy’s own unhappy family. [1]
At a snowy railway station on 20 November 1910, an old man drew his last breath in the bed of a complete stranger. That man was 82-year-old Leo Tolstoy, the celebrated Russian writer known for his novels and short stories.
As he aged, Tolstoy’s relationship with his wife, Sonya deteriorated as his beliefs became increasingly radical. This saw him seeking to reject his inherited and earned wealth. His wife opposed many of his ideas and was intensely jealous of the attention he gave his followers over her. The marriage has been described as one of the unhappiest marriages in literary history.
By the end of his life, Tolstoy had reached a breaking point and finally decided to separate from his wife. To escape with the least amount of conflict, he slipped away secretively in the middle of the night during the cold winter. After spending a day traveling by train, he collapsed at the Astapovo railway station. The station master took Tolstoy to his own apartment, calling his personal doctors to treat him, but Tolstoy died of pneumonia that day. According to some sources, Tolstoy spent the last hours of his life preaching love and non-violence to fellow passengers on the train.
Tolstoy’s funeral was a major public occasion and people came from across Russia and around the world. The police tried to limit access to his funeral procession, but thousands of peasants lined the streets.
Tolstoy’s first great novel was War and Peace, published in 1869 when he was 41, and Anna Karenina was first published in book form in 1878. Both are considered to be the greatest works of literature ever written. In his later years, Tolstoy wrote almost solely about his moral, political, and religious beliefs. He developed a firm belief that the best way to live was to strive for personal perfection by following the commandment to love God and love one’s neighbour, rather than following the rules set by any church or government on earth.
Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world’s greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic views, which he adopted after a spiritual awakening in the 1870s. From this time he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.
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