How Leo Tolstoy lost his entire HOME playing cards
The classic writer was a serial gambler: he gambled for money playing cards, billiards and roulette. And he found it very difficult to stop. As a result, he suffered several major losses.
For example, in 1862, shortly before his wedding, the writer lost a large sum of money – 1,000 rubles to be exact – playing billiards. Mikhail Katkov, publisher of the ‘Russky Vestnik’ magazine, helped him out. He didn’t ask for repayment not in cash, but in a new work by him. Thus, Tolstoy was forced to finish his novella ‘The Cossacks’.
However, his most momentous loss occurred in Fall 1854. In his monograph ‘The Life of Leo Tolstoy’, researcher Andrei Zorin points out that Tolstoy, who was serving in the army at the time, took leave and left his regiment, never to return. Before leaving for St. Petersburg, he confessed in his diary that he had lost an unimaginable sum playing cards. To pay the debt, he had to ask his brother to sell the house in which he was born, situated on the Yasnaya Polyana Estate. The house was dismantled and transported to Pavel Gorokhov, a neighboring landowner. Tolstoy lived the remaining 55 years of his life in one of the two outbuildings of the family estate.
The house where L. Tolstoy was born
The writer's descendants, however, insist on a different version of the house's loss. They believe the three-story house was sold earlier, because Tolstoy lacked the funds for its maintenance and repairs. The 5,000 rubles in banknotes received for the house were deposited in the Public Welfare Office for safekeeping. While serving in the army at the time, Tolstoy and a group of officers conceived the idea of publishing a magazine for soldiers. However, the government banned it, so Tolstoy used the proceeds to pay off his gambling debt.
Nevertheless, the family fortune was essentially squandered at the card table.
