Death

In 1902 he catches pneumonia and is expected to die but recovers. He yearns for peace and quiet, and once and for all wants to close the chasm between how he lives and what he preaches. He says universal love is the answer but is at war with his wife, for example, and advocates a simple life but lives in luxury while most Russians live in poverty.

Worried that the constant bickering with Sophia will be the death of him, Tolstoy flees Yasnaya Polyana by coach in the wee hours of October 28, 1910. He leaves her a farewell letter that is conciliatory and forgiving. A few days later, however, in a letter to his daughter Sasha, he says he wants to free himself from her lying, hypocrisy and malice. There is no real plan beyond getting on a train and renting a peasant house somewhere. Tolstoy, with Dr Makovitsky alongside him, visits his 80-year-old sister Marya, who is living as a nun, and stays the first night away from home in a monastery. Sasha arrives with letters written after a family conference and the news that his distraught wife has thrown herself into the pond. But she urges him to travel on rather than being forced back against his wishes. He doesn’t get far and is taken off the train at the tiny railway town of Astapovo after falling ill with pneumonia. The stationmaster offers his home.

Chertkov is sent for. Over the next week, as Tolstoy’s condition deteriorates, hundreds of family, friends, admirers, workers, peasants, journalists and curious onlookers flood into town. Among them are government representatives worried that the death of the scribe of the people will spark a revolution and church officials hoping he will repent. Sophia hires a special train to bring her and the family from Tula but he is unaware of her presence and by the time she is allowed in to see him, he has lost the capacity to converse.

He dies just after 6am on November 7, 1910. By 8.30am people are allowed to file past the body and Sophia sitting beside it. Every newspaper in Russia carries the news and the whole country goes into mourning. On the next day the body is taken by train back to Yasnaya Polyana where thousands more stream past the coffin to pay their last respects. That afternoon he is buried, on the edge of a ravine in a forest.

Sophia falls ill immediately after her husband’s death, stays in bed for two weeks, but recovers. She continues to live at Yasnaya Polyana -- the land is given to the peasants to meet Tolstoy’s wishes but the family home is not — with a pension paid for by the Tsar. She visits the grave every day, and writes an autobiography. She dies on November 4, 1919, and is buried beside her daughter Masha in a church cemetery.

In the last year of his life Tolstoy was in correspondence with a young Johannesburg lawyer called Mahatma Gandhi. He strongly advised him not to resist evil with violence in his fight for equality.