The Death of Tolstoy: Russia on the Eve, Astapovo Station, 1910

by William Nickell

In the middle of the night of October 28, 1910, Leo Tolstoy, the most famous man in Russia, vanished. A secular saint revered for his literary genius, pacificism, and dedication to the earth and the poor, Tolstoy had left his home in secret to embark on a final journey. His disappearance immediately became a national sensation. Two days later he was located at a monastery, but was soon gone again. When he turned up next at Astapovo, a small, remote railway station, all of Russia was following the story. As he lay dying of pneumonia, he became the hero of a national narrative of immense significance.

In The Death of Tolstoy, William Nickell describes a Russia engaged in a war of words over how this story should be told. The Orthodox Church, which had excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901, first argued that he had returned to the fold and then came out against his beliefs more vehemently than ever. Police spies sent by the state tracked his every move, fearing that his death would embolden his millions of supporters among the young, the peasantry, and the intelligentsia. Representatives of the press converged on the stationhouse at Astapovo where Tolstoy lay ill, turning his death into a feverish media event that strikingly anticipated today's no-limits coverage of celebrity lives―and deaths. Drawing on newspaper accounts, personal correspondence, police reports, secret circulars, telegrams, letters, and memoirs, Nickell shows the public spectacle of Tolstoy's last days to be a vivid reflection of a fragile, anxious empire on the eve of war and revolution.

For more on Tolstoy's death, see the companion website created by the author at

Genres: Russia

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Stephanie Pounds · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book as a recommendation from LibraryThing. I haven't studied much about Tolstoy and this slim volume was interesting reading. One dark night in November 1910, Lev Tolstoy left his home in Yasnaya Polyana and never returned. The Russian people followed the story with great interest as it unfolded and after its fatal conclusion. Author William Nickell has composed five essays about this final journey and the Russian response to it. Surprisingly, much of the event seems very modern as Nickell explains how the Russians tried to decide if this was a public event of a celebrity worthy of great media coverage or the private event of a family. When are reporters reporting the story and when do they become part of the story? Russians also struggled with "the meaning" of the act. Was Tolstoy trying to make some dramatic last gesture in his life? And how should the church and state react when Tolstoy, whom they viewed as undermining some of their most basic tenets while at the same time being much beloved by the people, dies? As the book progresses it moves away from the story of the journey and how it unfolded to more philosophical realms. I enjoyed the first part of the book better and wished I had a deeper background in the philosophy that Nickell writes of so that I could have enjoyed the last essay as much as the others. Overall, a good book. Recommended!