Why did Leo Tolstoy run away from home?

This “escape” was something he had been thinking about for a long time. The elderly Tolstoy lived as he had never wanted to live. He wanted to live simply and quietly, somewhere in silence, on the outskirts, among ordinary people, to earn his bread by labor, to have quiet conversations and not be a burden to anyone. But, being an aristocrat by birth and a writer by vocation, plus being the head of a huge family and the owner of the estate, he lived not by choice, but by the inertia of circumstances.

A victim of publicity

And these circumstances turned the old Leo into the first proper, all-Russian celebrity in the current, most unfortunate sense of the word. Every sneeze was monitored by reporters, beggars and uninvited guests gathering around his house. Admirers besieged him and packs of letters arrived from different parts of the country. And, worst of all, the inner circle of relatives and friends, like-minded people and helpers regularly tore him to pieces.

Tolstoy was the first martyr and hostage to status, forced to live under the watchful eye of millions of eyes. Whether he had spiritual drama, bodily infirmity, conflict with his wife, everything became the property of correspondents; friends and relatives wrote diaries about his private life, read them out to each other, passed them on, discussed them and spread them around the world.

Tolstoy, who suffered greatly at the sight of any social injustice, refused the property of his estate and the income from the books published after 1881 as early as in 1894, the year when he revised his worldview. 

He himself explained his departure by this social intolerability of his existence in his Yasnaya Polyana estate 12 km southwest of the city of Tula, by the intolerability of his position as a landlord and nobleman: “Poverty all around and here I am in a manor house and a footman serves at dinner.”

“Counting Tolstoy before he hatched”

But, Tolstoy was depressed much more by the cruel and senseless struggle between his wife and associates over the fate of his creative legacy.

His family and friends, with few exceptions, behaved as if he was already dead: they fought for a place in his memoirs, fought over the original diaries and drafts, cleaned up and edited his diaries, divided his inheritance and legacy. The two poles of this drama were his wife Sophia Andreyevna and Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy's friend and secretary. 

A soft, courteous, reflective Tolstoy firstly leaned to one side and, at the insistence of his wife, did not meet with his friend Chertkov. But then, Tolstoy switched to another side and, at the insistence of his friend, wrote a will secretly from his wife. And then, he suffered and accused himself of being wrong and then his wife suffered and his friend suffered and everyone suffered.

Wife's offense

Can one blame Sofia Andreyevna for what happened to her sanity in her old age? Nineteen pregnancies and, out of thirteen children, six died before becoming toddlers. And it is still necessary to live next to the genius, to match his incredibly high requirements, to forgive offenses, to manage the household.

At the same time, the quiet family tragedy of a cornered old man turned into a huge news story for the press.

When a man of 82, in need of help and care, runs away from home on a dark fall night, almost without money, secretly, having arranged with loyal people that even his letters will be signed ‘T. Nikolaev’ – it must be he felt very bad. Everything he wanted was to hide in a quiet place and in solitude to clarify his complex relationship with life and with God, to prepare for death, the most important upcoming thing of life. But, he could not find solitude anywhere.

Running away to die quietly

As soon as he left Yasnaya Polyana, he began to be recognized by passers-by, barmaids, railway clerks; his route soon became clear; reporters began to follow his trail. He stayed a short time in the Shamordino Monastery, where his sister was a nun. He rested his soul a little and he hoped to meet the elder monk Joseph in the Optina Pustyn monastery nearby. But, it did not work out. Nor was it possible to remain living in Shamordino, as he wanted.

And the restless count, driven by longing, set off again. Tolstoy has caught a cold and, being sick, he no longer knew exactly where to go. Dr. Makovitsky, the only devotee who had accompanied Tolstoy, later said that they even thought of going to Odessa and, from there, to Constantinople (now Istanbul). But, when they arrived at the small railway station Astapovo, Tolstoy was already very sick and had such a fever that the stationmaster let him stay in his house. And he lay down in bed, dying. 

The newspapers trumpeted the great departure of a great man and the symbolic meaning of these events. All of Russia followed this news with a huge interest, while Tolstoy's grief-stricken wife and children were frantic at home without knowing what to think or to do. 

He only asked to be left alone, not to shove medicine into him, not to inject him with morphine, just to let him go. Tolstoy died at that remote station, under the lens of cameras. And he didn't let his wife say goodbye.

This is a fragment of an article published in the ‘Russky Mir’ magazine. The full version in Russian is available here.